Occupation and realignment: How a real leftist movement could create a new center by Michael Lind

[Douglas Carpenter]

I think this one of the most truly brilliant analysis of the Occupation movement and its possibilities by the always brilliant Michael Lind. I do hope everyone reads this insightful article in its full:

Tuesday, Oct 18, 2011 9:00 PM 01:09:59 UTC+1000

Occupation and realignment

How a real leftist movement could create a new center in American politics

By Michael Lind



Will the worldwide “occupy” demonstrations make 2011 the new 1968?

The liberal left must hope not. The global wave of left-wing radicalism that peaked in 1968 was followed by a generation of right-wing reaction in the United States and Europe. The rise of counterculture frightened the “silent majority” in the U.S. and Europe into supporting politicians like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, who, running campaigns based largely on patriotism and traditional values and “law and order,” used their power to undermine the labor market regulations and social insurance programs that had protected the socially conservative working classes who voted for them.

snip:

Because there was no longer any significant economic radicalism after the Cold War, old-fashioned economic progressivism — the living wage, universal social insurance, equality of educational opportunity — became defined as “the radical left” in the 1990s and 2000s. Meanwhile, Reagan-Thatcher conservatism, which had been the right-most right during the 1970s and 1980s, was out-flanked by an even more extreme free market fundamentalism, symbolized by the Tea Party — a further right.

The appearance of the further right, and the disappearance of the far left, shifted the entire spectrum to the right for the last two decades. New Deal-style progressivism, once the center between Marxism and conservatism, became the left. Reagan-Thatcher conservatism, having been the right, became the new center; and a new, radical economic libertarian right, far more extreme than Reaganism and Thatcherism, became the new right.

snip:

The Occupy Wall Street movement has the potential to help the center-left, even if some of its activists despise the center-left the way that the New Left in the 1960s and 1970s dismissed progressive-liberals like the Kennedys and Johnson as sinister “corporate liberals” promoting the “warfare-welfare state.” The reemergence of a radical economic left can create a fourth point on the political spectrum, changing the relative position of all other points. The Tea Party right, now the mainstream right, would become the far right. Today’s center, shared by Clinton and Obama with Reagan and the Bushes, would become the new center-right. And the new center-left would be something like New Deal liberalism — to the left of Clinton and Obama, but to the right of an anti-capitalist left. Better yet, if the public tired of Tea Party conservatism, the far right could implode and the new “far right” would be moderate economic conservatism of the Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Obama variety. What until recently has been the left — old-fashioned social democratic reformism in the New Deal tradition — might once again be the center.


http://www.salon.com/2011/10/18/occupation_and_realignment/singleton/

Michael Lind is Policy Director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation and is the author of "The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution.

More Michael Lind

http://www.salon.com/writer/michael_lind/



.

[TygrBright]

1. Not sure he understands who's in the streets.

Sounds to me as though he's bought the propaganda about it being "kids."

Has he looked out the window?

Because there are plenty of senior citizens, veterans, unemployed adults, union members and others out in the streets. The more the "it's kids" meme takes hold, even if pushed by folks on "our side," the easier it becomes for our Beloved Oligarchs to dismiss the whole thing.

frustratedly,
Bright

[Douglas Carpenter]

2. no I don't think that was his point at all

Michael Lind is very much on the left and foresees these events as something that may very well transform the American political landscape.

[RaleighNCDUer]

4. Funny, he's always struck me as being a DLC leftist -

a neo-liberal, Third Way kinda guy.

Since when is the Third Way the 'left'?

[Douglas Carpenter]

6. well no that is not where he is coming from at all - the whole point of this article

is how the so-called third way became the center and it is clearly his hope that once again social democrats and new dealers will become the center. That was the whole point of this article.

He wrote another article which I think makes his philosophy very clear:

In the last 30 years, under Republicans and Democrats alike, the conservative-neoliberal approach has been tried. It didn’t work. The result of trade liberalization was not a boom in American manufactured exports, but perpetual trade deficits, the offshoring of production by American companies to low-wage, repressive sweatshop countries, and the targeted destruction of one American industry after another by mercantilist foreign regimes like Japan and China. The result of the decline of unions has been a combination of lower wages and fewer benefits for most American workers. The result of airline deregulation has been chronic bankruptcy, awful service, predatory monopoly and the worst airline system outside of the Third World. Deregulation of electricity produced blackouts in California and the crimes of Enron.

The failure of the conservative-neoliberal theory of how the world works is manifest, even if Tea Party Republicans and Obama Democrats persist in revivals of the old time religion, each according to their own denomination. Unfortunately, there is no well-developed alternative waiting in the wings to make an entrance when the failed actors are booed off the stage.


http://www.salon.com/2011/08/09/lind_two_party/

.

[RaleighNCDUer]

7. Opinions differ -

http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2010/07/15/206401/michael-lind-the-dr-doolittle-of-the-new-america-foundation-misinforms-on-both-climate-science-or-energy/

http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2010/12/26/wikileaks-michael-lind-and-the-new-nationalism/

The New America Foundation, and the 'radical center' are hardly lefties.

[pnwmom]

3. Yes! 1968 -- and the aftermath -- has been my worst nightmare.

And with the demise of the Soviet Union, economic progressivism has become redefined as the "radical left."

I hope he's right that the center can shift back again -- in the leftwards direction.

[Scuba]

5. The center is actually to the left of where the media says the left is. n/t