Humanizing The Vacuum

Thinking about what caused the New Deal coalition comprised of business, labor, and government to crumble, I wonder whether, giddy with success (until the Vietnam War-created deficits a GDP to be proud of and a vibrant middle class), business, looking to earn even higher profits, balked at its thirty-year commitment to preserving some measure of decent living for its workers. When the new conservatism incarnated by Ronald Reagan found an opening, so did business, and another alignment began – one with whose consequences progressives and indeed any non-wealthy Americans have to do deal for the last quarter century.

I’ve been reading a lot of Ellen Willis, the late political essayist and record critic whose work is experiencing a rediscovery. The self-avowed democratic socialist observes the timidity and incomprehension of the left as trenchantly as she paints right wing authoritarianism. She reminds us of the origins of liberalism in the early twentieth century: a gradualism by millimeters. Liberalism accepted capitalism; it didn’t question its primacy in American life. They broke bread. This was the message of the strangely forgotten Louis Brandeis, whose battle against the avarice of life insurance companies in his native Massachusetts led him to conclude that while what he rather coyly called “bigness” was to be opposed it couldn’t be destroyed (it surprises me that Willis neglected him). Bigness — by which he meant aggregations of wealth — had to be tamed and harnessed. Progressives held the whip; liberals applied the bridle and saddle. Big business realized that it created a febrile, productive, happy work force when it provided vacation time, sick leave, pensions, and, in the nineties — one of the last victories for the middle class — pregnancy leave for women. “The modern state came into being to support the needs of the market,” Willis writes.

But the fun begins sixty years later when liberal’s final and most important victories in civil rights for women, blacks, and homosexuals led its adherents to a defensive crouch. Assaulted by radicals on one side and Nixon-led disaffected middle class conservatives on the other, liberalism faltered, and faltered badly. Liberalism’s belief in the assumptions of the Cold War finally triggered disgust from progressives who opposed the wars in Southeast Asia; there was simply no money in the coffers to create the Great Society and fight in Vietnam. As Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland makes clear, this confusion on the part of the Johnson administration fueled the rise of demagogues like the undead Richard Nixon, adept as always at spotting, exploiting, and finally — cruelly — discarding proletariat resentments.

What did liberals have left? The state apparatus: the courts, state legislatures, and civil service. Not even Nixon’s appointees to the Supreme Court seriously shook the assumptions of the New Deal coalition (its paper cuts to reproductive rights and the Seventh and Eighth Amendments would turn into full-scale bleeding in the late nineties). It’s at this point in my post that Ellen Willis becomes relevant:

Leftists unconsciously identify freedom with power. Instead of rejecting the state “parent,” they aspire to take over the role and suppress “selfishness” in the interest of “social justice.” Where right libertarians see their moral agenda as natural and therefore compatible with freedom, leftists openly use guilt as a political weapon. Freedom becomes a positive value only when redefined to mean collective empowerment for subordinate classes and social groups.

And who wants to feel guilty? Try reminding anyone who’s not black, gay, or a woman about “privilege.” I tried last weekend. The result is a body of social legislation, resistant for more than half a century from serious legal challenges, getting reduced to a list of grievances by a rightfully embittered minority who come off as scolds, whiners, and satraps when questioned on Sunday talk shows or skewered by Rush Limbaugh (whose talent for mimicry and ad man copy remains underestimated). As Mike Lofgren pointed out in a widely circulated piece which I posted a couple weeks ago, Democrats don’t realize they lost the language battle when Reagan was inaugurated.

Willis is dead now — way too soon. I will not pretend to know her work as well as the many leftists who revered her good sense and precision, but I’m sure she would encourage us to send money to our favorite causes — reproductive rights, the ACLU — before automatically punching the chad for a Democrat because he’s not as gruesome as Rick Perry, especially when socioeconomic conditions worsen for everyone who’s not a septuagenarian and living in the city. Willis:

A serious effort to crush racism and sexism with the blunt instrument of law would be a project of totalitarian dimensions — and still it would fail. Transforming a culture and its consciousness requires a different sort of politics, a movement of people who consistently and publicly confront oppressive social patterns, explain what is wrong with them, and refuse to live by them — to stay in the closet, make dinner, smile, ignore the patronizing remark or the nervous surveillance. IN fact, the turn toward the state is a symptom of the social movements’ current weakness….It’s the general repressiveness of the social climate that encourages moves to ban offensive speech or define any form of sexual expression in the workplace as sexual harassment. The main effect of these maneuvers is to foment confusion, cynicism, and sexual witch hunts, trivialize sexual violence, and legitimize conservative demands for censorship — while at the same time ceding the moral high ground of free expression to the right.

Fight statism on the left and right.

As a postscript I urge my readers to buy a copy of Don’t Think, Smile!, Willis’ last collection of political essays, published at the end of a low, dishonest decade, and the newly published Out of the Vinyl Deeps, a collection of her seminal rock reviews, recommended especially to those who enjoyed her excellent Lou Reed-Velvet Underground essay housed in Greil Marcus’ Stranded.