In 1984, Andrew Kopkind and Alexander Cockburn wrote a terrific jeremiad in the Nation that began:
“With hardly a backward—or forward—look, the bulk of the surviving American left has blithely joined the Democratic Party center, without the will to inflect debate, the influence to inform policy or the leverage to share power. The capitulation of the left—a necessarily catchall word, here covering the spectrum of progressive politics from old socialism to recent radical activism—is almost without precedent. This time out there is no McCarthy of 1968, no McGovern of 1972, no Kennedy of 1980; not even a John Anderson or a Barry Commoner to raise a standard of dissent or develop an alternative vision against a Democratic Party whose project is overwhelmingly conservative in attitude and action. The excuse for submission is easy to discern: Anybody But Reagan. But the consequences are likely to be dire, and they are already taking shape. By accepting the premises and practices of party unity, the left has negated the reasons for its own existence.”
I think Kopkind and Cockburn were marking a moment – the moment when the term “leftist” became an honorific, rather like esquire. Roger Gathmann, Leftist is the equivalent to saying I will mouth certain slogans and ideas, knowing of course that they have absolutely no attachment to any political force on the horizon – at least for the U.S. and most of the “West”. In France, theoretically and absurdly, the “Left” does name a real thing, the New Popular Front, which has been absolutely unable to stop the Macronist drift to the ultra-right, as the French shambles of a government proceeds in a numbed sleepwalk.
I was living in New Orleans in 1984. I was trying to be a writer, of course, of course. Working in a university library. And, in my spare time, protesting against the Nicaraguan intervention shoulder to shoulder so to speak with members of the local CISPES group.
I remember being told by someone in the group that there was a Social Democratic activist who wanted to meet with a bunch of us. I thought that sounded great. Socialism – this was my politics!
We met in someone’s apartment. Chips, sodas, a couple of sofas, a bearded guy. Whose talk, astonishingly, was: let’s all go out and elect Mondale!
I had to laugh. I didn’t have a tv at the time, and have never really cared to watch tv news, but I had seen a few clips of Mondale and the one thing I knew, immediately, was that Mondale was a loser. I mean, he carried such a loser vibe that him running for president had the air of giving some faithful bank employee a gold watch for his service.
Given his obvy lose vibes, here I was, thinking that a serious Social Democrat would think, we’ve got nothing to lose by trying to make a real third party! Instead of which we were supposed to get fired up about a moderate gray Democrat who went around saying things like “Isolate Nicaragua if it won’t bend”. Shit like that.
I realized, vaguely, something that Cockburn and Kopkind were on about. American politics was captured by a two party system which excluded any real leftist program, tugged America inexorably to the right, and there was nothing I could do about it. So, I demonstrated. I didn’t vote, of course.
The Dems, in true loser fashion, then came up with Dukakis (it was like they were trying to lose) and then Clinton. Again, some lefty person really kept after me – at this time I was living in Atlanta – to vote Clinton. I think I actually did. And Clinton of course did what he did, which was screw up universal health care, his one issue, then “reformed” the Great Society welfare system so that it became the shit it is today.
The Democratic party gets worse and worse, older and older, its wheeler dealers richer and richer, and we are now meeting with true authoritarianism and they really, really don’t give a shit.
I suppose 1984 was one of the quiet turning points. One can holler, out in the far seats, for the Dems to do this or that. But it is like hollering at the actors in a play that has already been scripted. They are not going to deviate from their lines. Which is why the other audience members, on social media, the volunteer Dembots, adopt, predictably, a scolding tone. Shush! You are objectively helping the fascists by not supporting the retreating bulk of Dem politicos in their "resistance" - why many of them have put hearts under a Selena Gomez video!
It is as if they are finishing off the job of alienating the people that might, vaguely, vote Dem if it would do something.
Such a sad piece of history I ‘ve lived through in the States.
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