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Notes
on Political Education
By Jonathan Scott
In assessing the political right's
performance over the last twenty years, different conclusions
can be drawn. Based on the most basic facts, the right has
failed in every area except one. This single success, however,
as the right's continuing dominance attests, is the most
important in any struggle for political power: the steady
production and dissemination of simply stated, emotionally
resonant, and easily remembered philosophic ideas.
In terms of the long catalogue of right-wing failures, we need
mention only the most obvious and consequential. The "free
trade" agreements have not made U.S. workers more
competitive in the world market. They have had the opposite
effect, wiping out entire local and regional working classes,
such as those in Pittsburgh and Detroit, while conjuring out of
thin air at the same time post-industrial (or so-called
"New Economy") middle-class simulacrums such as
Starbuck's Seattle. Indeed, we should never underestimate the
symbolic social power of the Super Bowl. Its specific
arrangement of two opposing regional teams that are feted
obsessively by the corporate media for two straight weeks in one
particular place has often a triangular density far weightier
than anything Dr. Freud theorized.
Of Dr. Freud, another major failure of the right has been its
revival of American Puritanism—the old "errand in the
wilderness" and Manifest Destiny. No weapons of mass
destruction sealed this errand's fate. And bringing democracy to
the heathens of Iraq has been revealed as the most monstrous
fraud, on every level, from Colin Powell's thoroughly
discredited snake-oil salesmanship at the U.N. to the fact that
the Bush administration's "global war on terror" will
go down in history as the U.S. foreign policy most enabling of
the greatest ascendancy to state power of fanatically
antidemocratic religious parties the world has ever seen,
beginning with further Israeli expansionism in Palestinian
Jerusalem and West Bank, which the U.S. supports unconditionally
with $4 billion annually. Israel is a religious state in which
Jewish women are legally prohibited from divorcing their
husbands, and where the non-Jewish indigenous population, the
Palestinians, has 3,000 of their homes demolished each year by
government authorities.
Here in particular is where the only true success of the U.S.
right comes into clear focus. To quote Rev. Jesse Jackson:
"Zionism by its soundest definition [is] a liberation
movement whose object is to secure a state for its people. It
must be seen as that, and not with negative connotations
attached to it" (Newsday, 7/8/92). One might argue that
Rev. Jackson's support in this statement for the racial
apartheid politics of Ariel Sharon and Israeli Zionism is simply
a case of keeping AIPAC's giant, and ruthless, pro-Israel
apparatus off his neck. Perhaps, yet rather than just moving on
from here, as if this kind of political reality is forever
unchangeable, it's better, I think, to question rigorously how
we got to this toxic place, where one of the U.S. left's most
creative and recognizable political leaders made himself so
easily, on the most elementary principle of justice and
emancipation, totally irrelevant. For Rev. Jackson is not alone.
The U.S. left has no ideas. Outside of either calling for Bush's
impeachment, to be followed by more politically useless yet
extremely costly and labor-intensive mass demos in Washington,
or giving all their energies to the blundering Democrats for
another ill-fated chance to take back Congress, the left has no
serious proposals on the table that could interest Americans.
In contrast, the right has many. More, the right has been
consistent, in a systematic way, with their ideas and very well
organized in terms of think tanks, policy journals and political
magazines, college recruitment, grassroots organizing, the
intellectual training of their cadre, and party discipline.
Political humorists like Bill Maher and Jon Stewart never tire
of poking fun at the uniformity of opinion advanced by
right-wing policy analysts and ideologues, but really the joke
is on Maher and Stewart, who clearly know nothing more about
politics than their nightly viewing audiences—everyday folk
who feel they're getting "the real news" just because
people are mocking cleverly on TV the Bushies. Notice that the
right does not mock the left: it ruthlessly attacks it, with
clear ideas.
The overwhelming success of the right at the level of ideas
makes it unnecessary to elaborate them here in any detail. Their
ideas have become common sense. Big government is bad because it
promotes corruption, incompetence, laziness and inefficiency. An
undeterred capitalist "free market" is the best of all
possible worlds not just because it regulates itself but, more
importantly, because it rewards labor productivity, creative
innovation, and good team work.
The tougher the criminal laws and
punishments, the less likely it is people will commit crimes.
Sex education is a mistake because it encourages young people to
have sex; abstinence is the only solution. The women's movement
has destroyed the moral integrity of the American family. Taxing
corporations is actually a civil rights violation because it
discriminates against rich people.
Multiculturalism is bad because it divides
Americans along ethnic lines, tearing to shreds our society's
wholesome national fabric. Hollywood and the mass media are
controlled by liberals who are probably Satan-worshippers, since
their movies, music, and television programming constantly
advocate sexual immorality and disrespectful and irresponsible
behavior towards adult authority, especially parents and
religious figures.
It's true that most of these ideas are identical to the Nazi
Party's ideological program of the 1930s. Just read Wilhelm
Reich's book, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, a systematic study
of Nazi ideology. Reich coined an important concept in this
work: "conservative structuralization." To briefly
summarize his argument, Reich shows that the Nazi Party came to
power in Germany precisely by seizing on the labor movement's
historic success
"…in winning socio-political improvements…shorter
working hours, franchise, social security…this had the effect
of strengthening the working class; but at the same time a
contrary process set in: With the raising of the standard of
living, there was a structural assimilation to the middle class.
With the elevation of one's social position, ‘one's eyes
turned upward.' In times of prosperity this adaptation of
middle-class habits was intensified, but the subsequent effect
of this adaptation, in times of economic crisis, was to obstruct
the full unfolding of revolutionary sentiments" (72).
Reich's main thesis is that the rise of Nazism in Germany
"was not to be explained on purely political grounds."
Its "basic elements," he argued, are "the
emotional tie to the führer, that is to say, the unshakableness
of the faith in the infallibility of the political leadership…
and the sex-moralistic assimilation to the conservatism of the
lower middle class. This assimilation to the middle class was
energetically encouraged by the upper middle class
everywhere."
Some of Bill Cosby's speeches come to mind here, as well as all
the "personal responsibility" rhetoric from both
political parties, expressed most lucidly a few weeks ago when
Hilary Clinton declared on Meet the Press that she now favors a
new national healthcare policy under which overweight Americans
are forced to pay higher premiums. Idiotic on its face, yet
underlying Clinton's proposal is her handlers' sense that this
idea will strike a strong emotional chord with most Americans,
who are easily bullied into blaming the victims, including often
themselves.
What's striking, if you look closely at the polls, is that the
majority of Americans sound like revolutionary socialists when
it comes to healthcare, education, and jobs—not to mention the
war in Iraq as well as Affirmative Action, which most white
Americans support when the question is dissociated from the red
herring of "racial quotas." But when asked about moral
and sexual matters, it's like listening to one of James Dobson's
lectures on the evils of the 1960s free love movement.
The right's "conservative structuralization" of the
American people has been conscious and deliberate and has been
working at the deepest emotional levels—on people's dreams,
fears, desires, and anxieties. To put it more specifically, even
though each and every right-wing social and foreign policy
program of the past twenty years has been, in empirically
verifiable ways, either a total fraud (from the war on drugs and
"Star Wars" to school vouchers and tax cuts) or a
complete disaster (from welfare reform, the Crime Bill, and
managed healthcare to NAFTA, campaign finance reform, and
deregulation), their philosophic ideas have been geared
perfectly to the real, everyday conditions of U.S. society.
To take one salient example, on a daily basis most Americans
interact with city and state workers whose relatively good
standard of living, compared to their own, is due directly to a
long history of strong labor union organizing and activism as
well as effective political lobbying in Washington. After the
great fiscal crises of the late 1970s, in which state and
federal funding for public education, healthcare, housing, job
training, and mass transportation was slashed, a brutally
austere and stressed-out social environment quickly developed.
And it became ripe for all kinds of popular resentment,
bitterness and contempt, such as adversarial relationships
between parents, students and teachers, riders and bus drivers,
and patients and healthcare workers. From public hospital
emergency rooms and the post office to public school classrooms
and subway stations, anything bad can happen and, when one
emerges unscathed from such places, a sense of euphoria can be
felt.
All this is the fault of the richest Americans and their
lobbyists and cheaply purchased prostitutes in Congress, who
have succeeded in making working Americans pay the very heavy
price of their ceaseless, shameless, and massively destructive
pursuit of present profit, financed by reckless Wall Street
gambling rackets.
The thing the right realized correctly, though, is that
Americans are not French or German. We are not a people who
spend two or three hours each night debating politics. We are
not a multilingual people either, nor are we in the habit of
reading four or five different independent newspapers each day.
Here the left keeps pointing to a depoliticized American public
as the reason the right is able to keep pushing through its
minority agenda, despite all the indictments and convictions and
the mountains of incriminating evidence of everyday ethics
violations, government malfeasance, violations of international
law, the obstruction of justice, and patently illegal activities
and unconstitutional practices of almost every sort.
Yet this theory doesn't hold water. Americans have never been
political, so how could they have been depoliticized? As the
right has understood sharply, politics is the business of
statesmen, intellectuals, publishers and publicists, policy
analysts, theorists, scientists, scholars, critics, organizers,
and researchers. The right has never imagined an American
populace eager to sit down every morning to C-Span, which is why
they leave C-Span alone. But they'll attack Spike Lee, Oliver
Stone, and Michael Moore relentlessly and with the greatest
passion.
This is where the answer lies, in my opinion. The right is
winning the battle of ideas because they produce ideas directly
for the masses of Americans, not each other. This is why they'll
savagely attack Michael Moore but not say a word against George
Clooney, whose Syriana film is far more politically nuanced and
critical of U.S. foreign policy in the Arab world than
Fahrenheit 911. Why is that? Because most Americans have not
been trained in literary theory and thus have a hard time trying
to sort out Syriana's intricate narrative as they follow the
visual images. But they're very interested in political
education, which can be seen clearly in the enormous popularity
of Lee's X, Stone's JFK, and Moore's Fahrenheit 911. Each film
is more than three hours long, and each narrative is richly
complex, politically anticapitalist, and, most significantly,
deeply emotional.
If the right has been pushing all the right emotional buttons,
such as patriotism, anti-elitism and family values, then why
can't the left do the same? This is not an argument for watering
down the message, or "reaching out" to the heartland.
It is the opposite. The left needs to do nothing but produce
revolutionary ideas for the broad masses of Americans. Right now
they're still talking to each other at academic conferences
about the hybridity of transnational subject positions and the
undecideability of all truth claims in language, or conducting
workshops on how a person can become more sensitive to other
cultures and traditions.
What they're not doing is "revolutionary structuralization,"
which has been, historically, the left's principal work in civil
society and, paradoxically, precisely what the right has copied,
to the letter, in their recent "march through the
institutions." Take Rush Limbaugh's prescriptive analysis
in his 1994 book, See, I Told You So:
"In the early 1900s, an obscure Italian communist by the
name of Antonio Gramsci theorized that it would take a ‘long
march through the institutions' before socialism and relativism
would be victorious… Gramsci theorized that by capturing these
key institutions and using their power, cultural values would be
changed, traditional morals would be broken down, and the stage
would be set for the political and economic power of the West to
fall… Gramsci succeeded in defining a strategy for waging
cultural warfare… Why don't we simply get in game and start
competing for control of these key cultural institutions?"
Today the right controls a majority of seats in 36 percent of
all Republican Party state committees (or 18 of 50 states), plus
large minorities in 81 percent of the rest, double their power
from a decade before. They are small in just 6 states. James
Dobson's radio program Focus on the Family reaches 4 million
people every day and is carried by 4,000 radio and TV stations
in forty countries. Ted Haggard's New Life Church community in
Colorado Springs, which is based on the Bolshevik model of
political organizing, has 1,300 cell groups, where local leaders
report to section heads who answer to zone leaders who report
directly to district officials, all under Haggard as head of New
Life. New Life argues that public schools must be abandoned for
home schools and that the Bible is the ultimate test of
scientific truth. (For more details about the right's
ideological program, see Carl Davidson and Jerry Harris's
excellent new article, "Globalisation, theocracy and the
new fascism: the U.S. Right's rise to power," in Race &
Class, January-March 2006.)
I have two proposals for the "revolutionary
structuralization" of Americans. The first is an attack on
corporate profits. Notice that the critics hated Jim Carrey's
new movie Fun with Dick and Jane. This film is exactly the kind
of anticapitalist structuralization of Americans that the left
needs to do a lot more of, and the huge hit it's been at the box
office is proof of this. The message of the movie is simply
stated and emotionally powerful: U.S. corporate profits are
completely conditional on an expendable American labor force
and, moreover, that without highly stressed-out workers there
cannot exist happy capitalists. The two are absolutely
inseparable.
This attack on corporate profits should have an emotional
lightning rod, such as the issue of anti-Americanism. To fire
thousands of American workers in order to employ Chinese workers
at fifty cents an hour is the height of anti-Americanism. CEOs
responsible for moving their plants offshore should have their
passports seized, their assets frozen, and declared traitors to
the nation. The left should also be pointing out that corporate
profits have nothing to do with American workers. More than 80
percent of Americans own not a single share of stock and thus
whether or not profits rise makes no difference whatever to the
majority of Americans. In fact, the higher the profits, the more
insecure workers become. Once these ideas become common sense,
huge taxes on corporate profits can be carried out.
Yet it doesn't matter if these ideas will immediately work or
not, and that's the main point: the right's ideas are not based
on any political pragmatism either. They're based on a unity of
thinking and feeling.
The second proposal is to attack racial resegregation. Jonathan
Kozol says we need to have "a revolution of the
heart," and in this statement is precisely Reich's concept
of structuralization. Racial apartheid in the U.S. has become
invisible again, as Kozol exposes in his new book Shame of the
Nation. People need to see what it's like today living in
Detroit, Baltimore, or Milwaukee.
We could use a new "Black Like Me."
The emotional lightning rod here is also simple: we have
disgraced our greatest American of the past fifty years, the one
American that all but the worst ingrates and sociopaths agree is
the truest embodiment and ultimate fulfillment of the American
democratic ideal. If Dr. King were alive today, he would vomit
in the street.
The solution to resegregation is a national public education
system financed entirely by the federal government, in which
every school receives exactly the same funding. If white
middle-class parents don't like it, they can send their children
to private Catholic schools, or home school them, which is what
the right advocates anyway. These schools will have plenty of
vacancies once the new national program goes into effect.
Accompanying the new national program will be a new addition to
city limits signs, in which every U.S. town and city must, by
law, indicate their racial demographic composition—for
example: "Welcome to Dearborn, Michigan, home of Henry
Ford: 98 percent White."
An emotional point of high affect with resegregation, which can
be easily linked to the attack on corporate profits, is that all
American workers are being treated "black" by the U.S.
ruling elite. The right's war against civil rights, labor
unions, and state regulation of the economy has brought white
American workers, for the first time, into direct competition
with 2 billion of the world's poorest people, against which they
have no chance at all.
Their only hope is to reinvest in the cities they abandoned
irrationally twenty and thirty years ago when they took the
baited hook of white-only neighborhoods and school districts.
This new form of white affirmative action, which was offered to
counter the sweeping force of the African American civil rights
movement and that featured zero interest rate mortgages and
automatic acceptance for their children into local colleges and
universities, has produced the triple disasters of the housing
bubble, ecologically and socially toxic suburban sprawl, and a
massive overproduction of college degrees, the majority of which
are today not worth the paper they're printed on. The last
national job report indicates that of the roughly 300,000 new
jobs created in the previous quarter, none requires a college
degree. Moreover, all the new IT jobs have been outsourced to
Asia and are never coming back.
I've yet to have heard this proposed by any Democrat, or in
Harpers or the Nation, but there are several simple, emotionally
appealing solutions to this problem. The first is for the state
to immediately declare eminent domain on all abandoned
manufacturing plants and factories and then re-tool these local
plants and factories for the production of high-speed light-rail
mass transit systems. All labor must, by law, be union and local
citizens with the longest residency will be the first candidates
for every position offered, also by law. And, since the state
will own the factories as well as the whole mass transit system
to be laid, the financing of the project will be free of all
private corporations. American workers will pay for it with the
pay they receive for working on it.
Finally, as thousands of American workers continue to get fired
each month now, with no chance of ever getting their outsourced
jobs back, the conditions are ripe for another new proposal:
that nobody works more than thirty hours a week so that everyone
can have a job. The precondition for this full-employment policy
is a national single-payer healthcare system in which everyone
is insured from cradle to grave. In this way, people are free to
leave jobs they hate, because of the long hours, for jobs that
are more suitable to their needs and interests, without ever
having to worry again about the health insurance issue.
The thrust of everything said here is that the right keeps
winning, despite their colossal policy failures, because they
keep pushing the same set of coherent, emotionally striking
ideas, no matter how ridiculous they in fact are. After all,
what could be more preposterous than the right's policy on
drugs, which is to bomb to death dirt-poor coca growers while
locking up at home other poor people selling dime bags on the
corner? Or the right's policy on cancer, which is to keep
pouring billions of dollars a year of public money into
researching privately a social problem that has a very simple
solution: a universal healthcare system based on comprehensive,
everyday preventive care? Or their gem about "growing the
economy"—to give away $60,000 tax rebate checks to every
U.S. millionaire? Or to fight terrorism by calling one of the
world's most despised terrorists, Ariel Sharon, a man of peace?
The objection will be made that the right's ideas are popular
because they own the media; not owning any major media, the left
is severely disadvantaged in the struggle over ideas. But if
this is true—not about media ownership but about winning the
war of ideas—how does one explain the great success of the
nineteenth-century abolitionist movement, which put the slavery
issue on the national agenda without owning any media? How would
one explain the civil rights movement, which won the battle of
ideas with just a fraction of the media ownership and access
enjoyed today by the American left?
The left is not structurally disadvantaged; it's living in la-la
land. All the talk about neo-con cabals and neo-liberal
imperialist world hegemonism, war crime tribunals, and the
dialectics of transnational globalization means nothing to most
Americans. These are abstractions they won't be looking up in
the dictionary any time soon. They simply aren't listening,
because their heads are filled with right-wing ideas that have
been successfully structuring their brains.
In my view, the left can never "deconstruct" the
pervasive effects of right-wing propaganda on the minds of
Americans. The only option, which is the most rational and
logical anyway, is to begin restructuring the brains of
Americans with a new core of clear and fresh ideas.
In this respect, it seems clear that one of the main reasons the
left is so impoverished when it comes to producing ideas is due
not only to its abstract idealism but also because of its
constantly negative political defensiveness. As Reich
demonstrated in The Mass Psychology of Fascism, the criticisms
of Hitler and the Nazi Party in Germany during the 1930s were
brilliant, forceful, and ubiquitous, yet they never made any
difference at all. While the left in Germany produced one
scathing critique of Nazism after another, the right meanwhile
went directly along structuring the brains of the German masses,
providing them with a whole unified system of philosophic ideas
that could answer their most basic questions about life and how
they might live it with a purpose.
It probably goes without saying, but the staying power of
anticommunist ideology in the U.S. is the biggest reason why the
left has failed in the last twenty yeas to produce its own march
through the institutions. That is, the left is often more
anti-socialist than the right. For example, whereas the right
has perceived in the intellectual authorities of the Marxist
tradition great visionaries and important writers and critics
whose work must be read and studied closely, the left tends to
see them as vulgarizers and reductionists—as totalitarian,
Eurocentric, sexist, and "top-down" theorists who were
trying to impute their agenda on to the self-determining
masses.
In this sense, the greatest of all ironies is
that the familiar left-wing charge against the right of
anti-intellectualism is really a self-reproach, for nothing
could be more the opposite. It has been precisely the right's
organic intellectualism that's paved the way for its tremendous
political successes.
In the end, though, the virtue always of left-wing ideas is that
they, unlike right-wing ideas, are consistent with the founding
myths and archetypes of America: they are strongly
anti-authoritarian and popular democratic. The right's ideas are
all authoritarian, which is why they work on only 20 or 30
percent of the population.
It's safe to say, then, that the U.S. today is actually a
left-wing paradise, where the majority of Americans are simply
waiting for a new system of popular ideas fit for their head.
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Jonathan Scott
is Assistant Professor of English at Al-Quds University
in Abu Dees, the West Bank, and the author of
Socialist Joy in the Writing of Langston Hughes
.
jonascott15@aol.com
posted 5 March 2006
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updated 2 November 2007 |
