Democratic Party is growing more liberal

McClatchy Washington Bureau | :

CHICAGO — The Democratic Party is growing more liberal for the first time in a generation.

It's more antiwar than at any time since 1972. Support is growing for such traditionally liberal values as using the federal government to help the poor. And 40 percent of Democrats now call themselves liberal, the highest in more than three decades and twice the low-water mark recorded as the conservative Reagan revolution swept the country in the early 1980s....

The Democrats' shift to the left carries some risk, but probably much less than it would have in years past. That's because independent voters — the ones who swing back and forth and thus decide elections — also have turned against the war and in favor of many more liberal approaches to government.

"There is greater support for the social safety net, more concern for inequality of income," said Andy Kohut, the president of the nonpartisan Pew Research Center. "More people are falling into the liberal category based on their values."

The most noteworthy shift is opposition to the war in Iraq....

How the legal left can rein in the Roberts Court

Slate Magazine: By Emily Bazelon

Let's say, though, that next term, Roberts is even more successful in wooing Kennedy than he was this term, which seems entirely plausible. What kind of 'unity' would that get us? The answer is in Sunstein's new essay (here's an early version). He argues that 1) today's court has no William Brennan or Thurgood Marshall (Ruth Bader Ginsburg is not that liberal), whereas the 1980 court had no Antonin Scalia or Clarence Thomas; 2) three of the court's supposed 'liberals'—Breyer, David Souter, and John Paul Stevens—are really moderates, akin to the old Stevens-Lewis Powell-Byron White trio; and 3) the trade-off in the center of Harry Blackmun for Anthony Kennedy is a loser for the left, too. Sunstein still believes in restraint (he calls his version of it 'minimalism'). But while he doesn't think the likes of Brennan and Marshall should run the show, he also now says that 'something has gone badly wrong if the Court has a strong right-wing without any real left.' And it's even worse that the court's moderates are being cast as left-wingers, thus belying the court's overall conservative creep.

Once Upon a Radical Time on the Lower East Side

New York Times Blog: By Sewell Chan

Clayton Patterson — ex-teacher, artist, photojournalist, documentarian, as he describes himself — is a man obsessed. His first anthology, “Captured: A Lower East Side Film/Video History,” published in 2005, took up 586 pages. His latest anthology, “Resistance: A Radical Social and Political History of the Lower East Side,” weighs in at 624 pages. ...

Radicalism on the Lower East Side has a long history — settlement house reformers, garment worker organizers, Italian socialists, native-born Trotskyites and Yiddish-speaking intellectuals among others — but the radicalism that Mr. Patterson focuses on is more recent: the tenant, artistic, leftist, antiwar, civil-rights, gay-rights activism that dominated the area’s politics in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s. ...

The Lower East Side’s reputation as a refuge for struggling newcomers, down-and-out artists and nonconformist agitators appears to be fading, perhaps for good. “What we knew here before will never be here again,” Mr. Patterson said wistfully. Others were not so pessimistic. Mr. Rosen described local efforts to promote zoning restrictions that would prevent high-rise development in the area.

“Changing the zoning is not just a matter of how high a building goes, but it’s also a matter of remembering our history, being able to see our history, and beyond that, being able to protect our communities,” he said.

Beginnings of Sorrow / The American Left's Silly Victim Complex

Adbusters : By Matt Taibbi

Here’s the real problem with American liberalism: there is no such thing, not really. What we call American liberalism is really a kind of genetic mutant, a Frankenstein’s monster of incongruous parts – a fat, affluent, overeducated New York/Washington head crudely screwed onto the withering corpse of the vanishing middle-American manufacturing class. These days the Roosevelt stratum of rich East Coasters are still liberals, but the industrial middle class that the New Deal helped create is almost all gone. In 1965, manufacturing jobs still made up 53 percent of the US economy; that number was down to nine percent in 2004, and no one has stepped up to talk to the 30 million working poor who struggle to get by on low-wage, part-time jobs.

Thus, the people who are the public voice of American liberalism rarely have any real connection to the ordinary working people whose interests they putatively champion. They tend instead to be well-off, college-educated yuppies from California or the East Coast, and hard as they try to worry about food stamps or veterans’ rights or securing federal assistance for heating oil bills, they invariably gravitate instead to things that actually matter to them – like the slick Al Gore documentary on global warming, or the “All Things Considered” interview on NPR with the British author of Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook. They haven’t yet come up with something to replace the synergy of patrician and middle-class interests that the New Deal represented.

Bernie Sanders, the new Senator from Vermont and one of the few American politicians in history to have survived publicly admitting to being a socialist, agrees that this peculiar demographic schism is a fundamental problem for the American political opposition.

“Unfortunately, today, when you talk about the ‘American left,’” he says, “as often as not you’re talking about wealthy folks who are concerned about the environment (which is enormously important) who are concerned about women’s rights (which are enormously important) and who are concerned about gay rights (which are enormously important).

“But you’re not really referring to millions of workers who have lost their jobs because of disastrous trade agreements,” he says. “You’re not talking about waitresses who are working for four bucks an hour.” As often as not, he says, you’re talking about “sophisticated people who have money.”

This is a snip from a long piece by Taibbi; I have yet to read all of it through, and see what he thinks follows from this diagnosis.

Frances Fox Piven on "The Vanishing American Left"

From Dissent :By Frances Fox Piven

...On the other side, the political bulwarks of the New Deal–Great Society era are weakened, in part simply by ongoing changes in the American economy. The mass-production industries are shrinking, and the unions that emerged from them are on the ropes. The working-class communities once nourished by jobs in nearby factories and mills are unraveling, weakened from within by the influence of television, and from without by suburbanization and dispersal. The Democratic Party, once it had been shorn of its southern wing in punishment for caving in to civil rights demands, might indeed have become something like a working-class party. Instead, it is penetrated, and its messages diluted, by the influence of big money and by the compromises promoted by the Democratic Leadership Council.

ALL THIS IS TRUE, and I suppose it is what is meant by the vanishing American left. Still, I understand the left as a constellation of political forces dedicated to greater social equality—of material goods, of respect, of cultural recognition, and of political access and influence. Understood in this way, there are many lefts. If the New Deal Left saw the working class as its vanguard and the workplace as its context for organizing, other lefts identify different vanguards, organize in different institutional contexts, and advance different ideas and programs....

THE OLD NEW DEAL LEFT, and indeed the labor movements spawned across the globe by industrial capitalism, were galvanized by a dream of power through the mass strike. Organized workers could shut it down, and because they could, they had the power to transform society. The variegated contemporary left has not yet settled on a comparably electrifying idea. Still, the awesome possibilities are there in the complex and fragile organization of a global political economy that depends on the widespread cooperation of ordinary people everywhere. We may look back on these years to see not the vanishing left of the New Deal but the birth of a new era of left power made possible by the institutions of a complex global society.

Michael Walzer on "The Vanishing American Left"

Dissent :

Todd Gitlin, Frances Fox Piven and Michael Walzer spoke at a City University of New York symposium on “The Vanishing American Left” in September 2006. These essays are drawn from their talks. —Eds.

I DON'T KNOW about “vanishing”—we probably weren’t as strong as we thought we were in the sixties, and we probably are not as weak as we think we are today. Back then, there were still some illusions about ideological coherence and perhaps some sense that we were actually building organizations. But the sixties left no organizational residue, and we no longer can have any illusions about ideological coherence. Still, if you add up all the “fragments”—environmentalists; feminists; antiwar activists; all the people still fighting for civil rights; ACLU types; multiculturalists of all sorts (well, of some sorts); Americans active in global civil society in organizations such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Doctors Without Borders; the readers of left magazines, and so on, I doubt that our numbers have dropped all that much.

If we are politically weaker, as we obviously are, it is not because we are fewer, but because of two long-term trends: first, the demobilization of the labor movement and the decline of the unions (liberals and leftists have paid too little attention to this); and second, the mobilization of evangelical Christians, who were largely withdrawn and politically passive back in the sixties (and also, though we never noticed it, bitter and resentful)....

I remember or think I remember an oppositional politics that had some weight and integrity. I am less sure about the existence of a politics like that today. What’s been vanishing in this country over the last years is a left that doesn’t deserve to vanish....

But the real left, I mean, the left whose members vote Democratic (or should vote Democratic, though too many of them don’t) but think of themselves as an independent political force—that left should never be muffled or evasive. We should have a clear position or, because we are an argumentative lot, a range of positions that have a strong family resemblance. We should share a commitment to a set of principles, even if we disagree sharply about how best to represent those principles in the “real world.” The principles are big ones, like freedom, democracy, and—the defining principle of any left—equality. What these words mean is uncertain, but not all that uncertain, and we need to take them seriously.

What would a left be like that had commitments like that? Ever since September 11, 2001, the really difficult political questions have had to do with global politics. But the Bush administration has used this fact, has used the cover of war and terror, to push the country hard right on domestic issues. So let’s start there.

The left we need would be strongly pro-labor and committed to rebuilding the union movement. I put this first because the idea of an egalitarian politics without a base among industrial and service workers is an illusion—a common illusion among leftist defenders of “difference,” but an illusion nonetheless.

We should have a redistributive program with teeth in it, which means that we are committed to a radical revision of the way the tax system works, so that the burdens of both domestic welfare and an internationalist politics are shared fairly by all our citizens.

Public education has to have a central role in any left program—and it has to be funded in a way that reflects its centrality. We should be the defenders of a secular curriculum, with strong intellectual content, imaginatively taught, by teachers who are respected and decently paid. And we should be defenders of schools that are integrated across the lines of class and race. “Difference” (especially religious difference) should mostly be accommodated in after-school and weekend classes, but we can live with head scarves and yarmulkes—we don’t have to be Jacobin secularists.

We should, obviously, be the advocates of comprehensive national health insurance. That is the keystone of any decent welfare system. But after that we need to be a lot more inventive than the left has been in the past in designing the administration of welfare programs. We should aim at higher levels of participation in “helping” activities and mutual aid and a greater role for civil society. ...

We need to oppose the neoliberal economic order, but without setting ourselves against economic growth and globalization. Perhaps the most important contribution the left can make would be to expose the complex patterns of politics and finance that make for grinding poverty, rampant disease, and governmental failure in the developing (or not developing) countries. Sometimes it is true that “all politics is local,” but often there is Western state and corporate complicity in the patterns, and we must speak clearly when that is so, and work for radical change.

Finally, and perhaps this is the most difficult thing, we need to recognize that although we have opponents at home, with whom we are engaged in democratic debate and competition, we have enemies abroad, with whom we are engaged in a much fiercer kind of conflict. If the left vanishes as a moral-political force, it will happen because we turn out to be incapable of intelligent enmity. ...The standard enemies of the left are all the people, East and West, North and South, who have a vested interest in economic inequality, in the gender hierarchy, and in the authoritarian rule of oligarchs and plutocrats.

BUT OUR MOST dangerous enemies right now are people who defend inequality, hierarchy, and authoritarianism idealistically, with ideological fervor and organizational discipline. ...Today we need to be clear about our hostility to religious fundamentalism—in all its versions, but most important, right now, in the form of Islamic radicalism, because this is by far its most threatening form. Here we have idealistic hatred of everything the Western left stands for (or should stand for); here we have fanatical zeal, cruel intolerance, a cult of death, a passionate commitment to the subordination of women, vicious anti-Semitism, and a pervasive hostility to liberalism and democracy. And yet there are people on the left who insist that the dangers posed by this hatred are exaggerated (or even invented by right-wing politicians) or who make excuses for it, invoking cultural difference or imperialist oppression—as if our enemies were (secretly: it would have to be secret) advocates of multiculturalism and national liberation. It won’t be easy to maintain moral clarity here and do everything else that the left needs to do, but that’s what the times require if we are to maintain our rightful place in the political world, if we are to deserve not to vanish.