Thinking non-neurotically about the party system

I am so old that I remember the election of 2004. Remember, Kerry crushed by the man who presided over the 9/11 moment of absolute incompetence and rode it to a second term? Remember the Dems acting like toothless old guys afraid of the Boss, and shaping the election completely to Bush’s specs?

At the time, I was struck by the free rider paradox that seemed, to me, to explain the election. That is, a certain part of the American populace, when freed by a quasi-delusional sense of their economic security, will vote for their most libidinous prejudices. Because they believe such a vote has no cost.
I am not as sure about that argument in the 2024 election. To my mind, the terms are a bit different, what with Biden presiding over the biggest spike in inflation since the seventies and thinking, or his people thinking, that they could nudge it away and massage the “vibes”.
But that is the election. The current discussion about the party. And myself, I’m turning back to the Bush moment to revisit what I thought then and think now is the real issue: the difference between a movement and a party.
Between the thirties and the eighties, the left in the U.S. did a very interesting thing: it invented a number of movements. From labor movements in the 30s to the Gay rights movements in the seventies, these movements originated political change. They had a galvanizing effect on the Democratic party. In 1900, there was nothing particularly progressive about the Democratic party, that collection of urban party machines depending on ethnic politics and white people in the South, but in 1960, there was. However, the party itself didn’t originate progressive politics – it rather responded to an exterior pressure. Anybody who looks at how, say, the Kennedys dealt with the civil rights movement sees this. The gun was in the hand of the movements.
On the philosophical plane, the sixties philosophers who broadcast a distaste for representation (Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida, etc.) were, in some manner, reflecting the revolt against the party as a political unit. This was obviously inflected by the Communist party in France, that black hole of the French intellect since the liberation in 1944. But in the U.S., the same thing was happening on a less philosophical, more pragmatic plane. The Black Panther/Civil Rights duo, for instance, destroyed the remnants of Democratic party machines in Chicago, Detroit, and Newark. In general, the perspective at the time was that the party exists as a vehicle for the movement; that the relationship between party and movement is purely tactical. The party never represents the movement. It never represents anything but itself. It is a vehicle. You don't ask your car where it wants you to go. You simply drive it, or fix it, or junk it.
The counter-attack came in the eighties. Movements were relabeled ‘special interests” by party intelligentsia. The New Republic played its one historic card during this era by actually generating writers and a vocabulary to crush movement politics, and to reverse the power relationship between movements and party. However, what was really important was the absorption of movements into various D.C. centered institutions. and the dispersion of movement figures into various institutions, academic and political. In the eighties, the Democratic party came to monopolize opposition in America, with fatal results for the Opposition.
What this means, to LI, is that it is a mug’s game to beat up on the Democrats. The party is structurally in contradiction with itself – its leadership is from a different social niche – overwhelmingly white, male, and wealthy – than its membership. That niche has used its position to discipline the membership – to crush the possibility of movement politics – and the answer to that is not to fight back by “saving” the party, but simply establishing a non-fetishistic relationship with it.
My story of parties comes from a lefty perspective, and has one gaping hole: the relation of parties to the right. Here, there’s an interesting parallel with the brief period when the Dems seemed, even to progressives, to be the next step up from movements. The Republican party in 2004, and now, and perhaps since Reagan, doesn’t have this movement problem: because the Republican party resembles a movement. The extra-party element – corporations and businesses and religious organizations – have a firm independent existence outside of the party. Thus, they can ignore that directive niche that occasionally tries to impose the same kind of discipline on movements as the Dem leadership does. The Lincoln project that calls out the far right part of the GOP for its lack of respectability simply get stomped. Whereas every Dem leader longs to display his racism in a sister soulja moment, to send the message that white rule is still at the heart of the Dem party.
So – who cares? The Dems leadership will never be young urbans like AOC, but always old deadheads like Biden. Use the Dems in some things, don’t use them in others, and never expect that they will protect your interests. Skip em, fuck em, and work on the movement rather than the party level, is the macro conclusion. The problem of course being that the old movement architecture has long been gutted, even as the new mediasphere actually allows it to grow again. In my view of things, it is more important for Trans peeps to win on Netflix than in the Dem party – a party that still honors rapey old Bill Clinton. And of course has never ever honored Jimmy Carter, who called the show in Israel apartheid decades ago.
The Dems are reverting to type right now. Centrist losers.