On Mon, 23 Oct 2006, Doug Henwood wrote:
> A discourse of individual rights is compatible with American principles,
> but it's a real stretch to make them conform to anything collective (or
> secular).
Okay, now we have something serious we can discuss where we agree about the starting point. I completely agree that "Individualism" is hegemonic in American thinking in the way that Gramsci originally used that term: it is part of the deep structure of thought, even among those of us Americans who set ourselves against it. And any attempt to evolve a compelling leftist American vision has to take that into account. And this is an essential step we have to accomplish if we are ever to prevail, a sine non qua for ever making our worldview into common sense.
It's against this background that our differing interpretations of history and American identity matter. As I understand it, we have two major disagreements:
1) You think the New Deal came out of nowhere. I think the New Deal was a culmination of a clearly continuous tradition that started after the Civil War, and which continued into Johnson's Great Society. It then began to break up in the 1960s (for mainly exogenous reasons that are important to understand in their own right).
I think your completely upside-down understanding of populism -- as a manifestation of individualism -- keeps you from seeeing this. And that this is important precisely because if you write us out of history, you make our task impossible. It's not only that your interpretation implies impossibility; it's not only that it daunts our courage; it'sthat it cuts us off from the solution.
As you are fond of saying, all collective identities, can be changed. They are terrains of struggle. And this is just as true of American identity as any other collective identity. It has been changed before, it can be changed more. And part of the means for changing it is an appropriation of collective memory.
Which brings us to
2) How we could can do it? We both think the New Deal didn't go far enough. We both not only farther in terms of material provision, we want add on things that the New Deal had nothing to do with (like identity issues).
I think there's a lot of options. There's a lot more communitarianism in the American tradition and creed than you give it credit for. And there there is more collectiveness in secular thought than you give it credit for -- once we make clear just how inextricably collective and individual identity are linked in the identity politics that now define secular morality -- a morality that truly isn't based on god, but on the creed.
In short, the American identity cannot be reduced to "competitive individualism." There is a lot of surplus. And there are also possibilities opened up by the logic of identity that we have not even begun to tap. Identity politics is not simply the problem; it is also the solution.
And now I will go off, gather my thoughts, and come and address both those questions and we have a good discussion of the sort this list was made for.
But, preliminarily I want to get rid of something small and factual and I hope easier to dispose of: what I consider the diametrically wrong identification of populism and anti-trust:
> So much of American populism has centered on a critique of monopoly, the
> offense being the restriction of free competition, the unexamined virtue.
> It's in Naderism, it's in a lot of Green politics, it's in the anti-Wal-Mart
> movie, it's everywhere.
Anti-trust is not populist. Let me qualify: anti-trust sentiments were expressed across the political spectrum in the late 19C frenzy of trust-busting rhetoric, from anarchist terrorists to hoar-frosted theocrats. It was found in the most respectable quarters in the land and the most nutbag. But if you compare all relatively, populism was the least fertile soil for it. Populism, at its essence, was for state control of monopolies, not for breaking monopolies up. And they were for creating monopolies, in the forms of collectives -- which anti-trust law made illegal. Anti-trust law was anti their essence.
The true origins, and the true ideological home, of antitrust as a panacea is among the current that is usually juxtaposed in opposition to populism: urban progressivism and mainstream liberalism. The intellectual godfather of antitrust as panacea is Louis Brandeis, the ultimate Boston Brahmin, who later became Wilson's advisor on the topic and was then appointed by him to the Supreme Court. And Wilson didn't simply like it as a policy, he made it into the heart of his political philosophy. It was the fundamental base of his New Freedoms. It was exactly what was supposed to distinguish him from the New Nationalism of Theodore Roosevelt's Bull Moose Party.
We'll leave to later how those two currents later merged. But the point is, anti-trust has always been a liberal panacea, not a populist one. It has always been a hobby-horse of lawyers who believe that the solution to political and social problems is more refined lawyering -- which is as un-populist as you can get. And this is exactly the tradition Nader belongs in. It's no accident that he was a major force for deregulation. The liberal anti-trust tradition runs in a straight line from Brandeis to him. Nader hasn't got a populist bone in his body. His entire approach to organizing has been to set up organizations of lawyers. PIRGs do lots of good. But populist approach they are not.
Michael