EYES LEFT

Jerry Harkins

For several decades, the American government has been driven by ideological conflicts that have grown more extreme and vituperative with each iteration.  Public policy is increasingly derived from abstract belief systems rather than empirical experience.  These ideologies, like religion, have no basis in the operational world but are held with a desperate tenacity.  Occasionally they work as anti-communism worked for Ronald Reagan.  Generally, however, they are irrelevant because they are immune to complexity, uncertainty and ambiguity.  The current prominence of the Tea Party is eloquent testimony to our modish taste for the politics of the absurd.  Under its aegis, a growing majority of Republicans have come to reject science, especially climate science and that historical bug-a-boo of the right, evolution.  In a red state near you, there are probably well financed battles now in their second and third generations against fluoridation of the water, the vaccination of children, the use of contraceptives to prevent the spread of sexually transmitted diseases and the horrors of even the most benign indulgences in recreational drugs.  Eighty years after the repeal of Prohibition, there are 271 counties in the United States that ban the sale and/or consumption of alcoholic beverages.  Admittedly most of them are in the South where they are likely to remain dry as long as the voters manage to stay sober enough to stagger to the polls.

Extreme leftist ideology has been largely absent from the national stage in recent decades but those old enough to have lived through the fog of the 60’s and early 70’s will recall the mindless causes and harebrained antics of the student “revolutionaries.”  Foolish as they may have seemed even at the time, they managed to work their way into mainstream liberalism.  Thus, serious politicians like George McGovern, Eugene McCarthy and even Bobby Kennedy were forced to make common cause with Yippies, Black Panthers, Weathermen and other anarchistic minigroups masquerading behind and often contaminating important progressive movements trying to address racial discrimination, women’s rights, environmental issues and, eventually, gay rights.  But, as usual, the crazies got all the ink and all the 90-second spots on the evening news.  Moreover the whole mess was politically counterproductive.  The old leftists who voted for Dick Gregory in 1968 because they thought Hubert Horatio Humphrey was a traitor to their cause brought about the election of Richard M. Nixon and Spiro T. Agnew.  That same year, George Wallace tried to do the same thing to Nixon whom he considered insufficiently conservative.  Although he carried five states, he had less effect than the anti-Humphrey liberals.  In 1992, Ross Perot garnered nearly 19% of the popular vote but it was so evenly distributed it did not affect the outcome.  However in 2000, Ralph Nader succeeded in denying a clear victory to Al Gore in Florida which ultimately delivered the election to George Bush.  Henry Clay’s remark, “I’d rather be right than President” has become a great American theme.  Nader, for one, simply wanted to deny the election to a candidate less liberal than himself.

David Brower, Archdruid of the environmental movement, said that someone always has to stake out the extremist position so that the real debate can take place within a penumbra of sanity.  It turned out that for him the extremist arena was not the Sierra Club or the Friends of the Earth, both of which were ultimately threatened by his rigid environmentalism.  What saved the environmental movement was that its most PR-worthy issues tended to be related to saving soft furry creatures and green leafy trees.  It was difficult to take such eco-terrorism organizations as the Animal Liberation Front, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, Earth First or even Greenpeace seriously but they did exercise significant influence for a time.  In its inimitable fashion, The New York Times did try to link some of the more outré forms of environmentalism to Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, but its story was contrived and inconsequential.  In the public imagination, Mr. Kaczynski couldn’t compete with baby seals.

Extremism almost always metastasizes out of important social concerns as a new cadre of leaders seeks to seize the media high ground occupied by established critics.  The civil rights struggles began as a legitimate non-violent protest by serious people.  On the cusp of success, which is to say after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, it turned into self-destructive hooliganism characterized by blood-curdling rhetoric and cries of “Burn, baby, burn!”  Students for a Democratic Society morphed into the Weather Underground which set out to force the creation of a Utopian, classless, communist world largely by blowing up the townhouses of their parents.  Today’s Tea Party movement is rooted in a well-founded distrust of contemporary government.  It quickly transformed itself by welcoming relatively small strains of ignorance, religious fundamentalism, nativism and racism.  Even intellectually respectable neo-conservatives and libertarians were seduced by promoters of laissez faire economics and political anarchy.

In the wake of the 2012 conservative debacle, liberalism began to show renewed signs of life.  It is still on life support.  It would be a miracle if the American people suddenly developed a taste for the higher taxes major liberal programs would inevitably require.  Moreover, the first generation of reborn liberals has no experience in governance and is likely to make a hash out of its early efforts.  In New York City, the voters have just elected Bill de Blasio as their new mayor by a landslide.  Bill is an outspoken old fashioned leftie who promises to soak (not his word) the rich to pay for universal pre-kindergarten, to weaken (not his word) the ability of the police to prevent crime and to return us to the glory days of education—the era of “community control.”  Against all odds, he may actually fulfill some of these dreams.  This is, after all, New York but he still has a lot to learn.  His carefully orchestrated inauguration was a nightmare.  Speaker after speaker (excepting a gracious and grateful Bill Clinton) denounced his predecessor Mike Bloomberg to his face.  Bloomberg was possibly the most effective mayor the city ever elected in terms of addressing the big ticket problems.  Indeed, during his tenure, New York displaced Chicago as “the city that works.”  But the inauguration speakers sounded just like the red meat Republicans delivering themselves of their considered opinions of Obama and Obamacare.  They excoriated the former mayor and his signature programs in terms that sounded like playground trash talk.  De Blasio himself seemed embarrassed as well he should have been.  But he learned nothing.  Almost immediately, he set out to alienate the Democratic Governor of New York and the state legislature without whose support he can accomplish virtually nothing.

In my mind, there is no doubt that de Blasio is right about a lot of these issues.  I am a huge supporter of free, universal, compulsory education and I think the charter school movement siphons desperately needed money from truly public schools.  I agree that it is a well established fact that an early start in school is the best way to assure success in later life.  I have serious concerns about the fairness and decency of stop and frisk and I believe the city must address the problem of affordable housing.  But to treat the wealthy, the business leaders, the politically more conservative and the pragmatic as morally repugnant enemies of the people is amateurish, foolish and counterproductive.  To act as though the horse drawn carriages in Central Park are tantamount to crimes against humanity is  a waste of time and an exercise in adolescent self-indulgence.

There has always been a leftist fringe.  In 1786, Shay’s Rebellion was a populist uprising brought about by the economic depression that followed the Revolutionary War and the austerity program instituted to reduce state debt.  The actual issues were surprisingly similar to those raised by the Occupy Wall Street protesters some 225 years later except that two of the rebels were eventually hanged for treason.  It drove another wedge between Washington and Jefferson and gave rise to one of the latter’s more asinine observations to the effect that, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.  It is its natural manure.”  A century later, the labor wars were waged against vast odds by two generations of committed, focused leaders.  Organized labor survived the Pinkertons and their machine guns, the hostility of government, the antipathy of the oligarchs and the stupidity of their own lunatic fringes.  It might have won by the simple expedient of having better songs but it ultimately lost because the unions allowed themselves to be dominated by anarchists, communists and organized crime thugs.  Corruption, violence and arrogance rendered the entire movement an easy target for its enemies.

For progressives, it’s often fun to watch the right wing crazies shoot themselves in the foot.  We enjoy watching these paragons of family values twist slowly in the winds of the latest lurid sex scandal.  It’s hard to keep a straight face when a congressperson named Bubba from a town called Dogpatch rants and raves about the evils of school lunches.  On the other hand, it’s easy to root for a candidate like Donald “Only His Hairdresser Knows For Sure” Trump as he trumpets one inane theory after another.  It’s natural to feel a bit smug when one discovers that fully 27% of the people who voted for Mitt Romney in 2012 are convinced that the government is still covering up the landing of hostile space aliens in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947.

Liberals, of course, are no fun at all because they’re such serious people.  A Seventeen Year Leftist just now emerging from his chrysalis is probably running against growing income inequality.  Mayor de Blasio’s signature “tale of two cities” issue is a case in point.  Again, he’s right.  The income gap between the richest and the poorest is growing. The Mayor’s plan, such as it is, is to raise the minimum wage to $11.50 an hour including $1.50 in benefits.  It couldn’t hurt but it’s not going to solve income inequality.  For a family of four with one wage earner, $24 thousand a year is still below the official poverty level.  So school crossing guards and home health aides are not suddenly going to find themselves anywhere within reach of Jamie Dimon’s $20 million compensation package.  To do that, the Mayor would have to institute a marginal income tax rate of 100% on every dollar of income above some arbitrary line.  It wouldn’t be the first time.  Huey “The Kingfisher” Long had proposed just such a solution as part of his “Every Man A King” platform in the 1930’s.  His cutoff varied but wound up at income of $1 million a year, assets of $5 million and an estate of $5 million.  Everything above those amounts would be confiscated.  As to income inequality, the nineteenth century reformer (and New York mayoral candidate) Henry George was far more sophisticated than De Blasio and his friends but was still unable to find a workable solution.  And therein lies the problem for ideologues of every stripe:  in an essentially capitalist society, the problem of income inequality belongs to the set of problems that have no political or technical solution.  In essentially socialist systems, a rough equality can be achieved but everyone is poorer for it.  It has ever been so.  There is no example in world history of a non-capitalist economy that came close to delivering the greatest good for the greatest number for any period of time beyond the blinking of an historical eye.  Not New Harmony which lasted four years, not Brook Farm which lasted five and not Oneida which preached free love (“complex marriage”) and paid for it by making flatware.  Even Amana collapsed after 82 years in spite of its excellent large appliances.  The Shakers came closest and lasted longer than the others.  At their peak around 1860 they had several thousand members in some twenty communities.  And that may have been their secret:  they kept the communities small and self sufficient.  Larger scale socialist societies universally failed.   The Soviet Union was impoverished from start to finish (75 years) and the People’s Republic of China, equally impoverished, lasted less than 50.

Capitalism gave people the incentive to throw over the old feudal order and made possible the idea of democratic governance.  Somehow socialism always seems that it should be better:  simpler, more moral, more equitable, less contentious.  But invariably it winds up producing more poverty, more disease and more misery for more people.  Capitalism, on the other hand, seems almost ugly, like a symphony composed by a committee.  As Daniel Bell pointed out it is based on what appears to be a fundamental contradiction in that it simultaneously requires asset accumulation or saving and consumption or spending.  Perhaps more accurately, capitalism requires a delicate balance between the two, a balance that is challenged by the brass ring that drives innovation and growth.  Call it an incentive or call it greed.  Either way, the prospect of personal gain is the engine that drives capitalism.  In moderation it yields prosperity.  Carried to the extreme, it is the fault that periodically comes close to destroying the whole system.

Striking the proper balance requires two policies that capitalists do not like:  government regulation and some level of wealth redistribution to provide a “safety net” and an incentive for the poor and otherwise disadvantaged.  Regulation seeks to deter or punish excessive greed.  A safety net promotes both fairness and a sense of fairness by fostering opportunity.  A proper balance also requires policies that liberals dislike including assent to a certain level of income inequality and the social advantages that wealth offers.  Without these, the incentive system near the heart of capitalism is and is seen as fraudulent. 

And so the economy staggers between Scylla and Charybdis depending on a multitude of forces some of which are quite mysterious.  It does, however, seem to have a direction at least over the long term.  In the lifespan of the United States, we have witnessed at least four very different kinds of capitalism:  the mercantile capitalism of Adam Smith, the laissez faire era of the Industrial Revolution, the regulated capitalism that prevailed roughly between 1910 and 1980 and the post-industrial capitalism now unfolding.  Over time, the American standard of living as measured by economic criteria has improved almost consistently for almost everyone.  Interestingly, this has not always resulted in increasing social and psychic satisfaction.  For example, as working conditions have improved, job satisfaction has declined.  Similarly, the social upheavals of the 1960’s produced steady, undeniable gains for women and African-Americans in every sphere of life.  But the dominant truth is that progress for both has been too little, too slow, too incomplete.

The poisonous tenor of our current political discourse is due almost entirely to the inability of our institutions to respond to challenges that require compromise.   Consider, for example, New York’s need for affordable housing.  It is not a new problem.  The city has experimented with rent control since the 1920’s and the current system was developed in the aftermath of World War II.  It was promoted as a temporary solution to a shortage created by the depression and the demand of returning veterans.  It consisted of legalized price controls which had also been a feature of the wartime economy.  It never worked.  It turned marginal landlords into slumlords by eradicating any incentive to maintain or improve property and destroying the market for anything but luxury development.  It turned tenants into a politically powerful bloc of advantaged stakeholders with a fierce sense of entitlement.  In essence, New York was saddled with an insoluble problem.  It tried everything including socialism.  It built thousands upon thousands of public housing units—depressing, crime-ridden, poorly maintained apartment complexes that worked no better than those of the old Soviet Union. The city quickly became its own worst slumlord.  For two decades, it looked the other way as desperate private owners turned to arson as a means of getting losing properties off their backs and books.  What this accomplished was to prepare whole neighborhoods for gentrification which rarely includes more than a soupçon of affordable housing.

Our problems are not due to the stupidity or corruption of our politicians or our bureaucrats although there is a great deal of both in City Hall and Albany and Washington.  Rather there has been a breakdown in the social contract and a consequent unwillingness to compromise.  We are alienated from the institutions that define us as a community including government, business, the press and the religious establishment and we have turned instead to harebrained, simplistic ideologies of the left and right.  The two most important pragmatists of our era, Barack Obama and Michael Bloomberg, have lost our favor.  In the face of complexity, we have become impatient and we demand magic.

This too shall pass.  We have survived worse and anarchy has never prevailed.  We are living through a period of wrenching, rapid dislocation.  Regaining our footing must begin at the grassroots.  Citizens have to vote and vote intelligently.  To do so, we have to become fed up with mindless gridlock and eschew the specious comforts of ideology.  It will certainly happen and it won’t take much to get it started.  “If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”