Elections are indeed part of the problem.
teal deer!
I'm not sure what the point is of excerpting at such length? If I am going to read that much, I'll just click over to the article.
(Also: what's wrong with the word scalable?)
[I]t's only when individuals are joined together by something more substantial than the rights they share that they have any real say in the way the world treats them.
I'm not sure I follow this logic, although I am moved to look for an essay that I think I have quoted here that traced the decline of both liberal and conservative politics in the devolution of their organizing principle from solidarity, to rights, to "the children."
I'm not sure what the point is of excerpting at such length?
Because (a) I wanted to make the point that there were multiple ideas worth excepting and (b) I was tired and not thinking clearly at the time I pulled that together (bad guest poster).
I'd absolutely give HG permission to delete everything other than the first and last paragraphs -- but only if you'll join me in encouraging people to click through.
Yeah, if he thinks that's one of the ugliest words in the contemporary lexicon, he doesn't read much.
Here I would normally tell everyone the first cited use of "scalable," but (sniff) my school OED access finally got cut off. It's in an 1830 dictionary, but meaning scale as in climb a ladder.
Well, that's why it was the International WW and the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Internationals. That's why owners always wanted "factory" unions, and why sympathy and general strikes were banned. This is part of the meaning of Sorels "Myth of the General Strike" Capital must expand, and does, and goes global, creates geographical networks within itself. It is eventually impossible to fight that with localism.
The problem is elections, which for workers will remain mostly local, but the answer isn't elections, or any local response, but global organizing. And the bosses will fight like hell, and make you illegal.
(Also: what's wrong with the word scalable?)
There's a criticism that can be made of importing technical terms into colloquial dialogue with a meaning that is only somewhat related to the original technical meaning (h/t plastic words).
I don't know if "scalable" is a good example of that.
The argument essentially goes that the terms have a gloss of precision and scientism which is unwarranted when they aren't being used in a way which conveys a precise meaning.
I'm struck by what is, in my opinion, the cart/horse problem with criticizing Blair (and the same charge is made of Clinton etc) for acting like the era of big government was over. I mean, were the revealed preferences of the electorate from the late 1970s and consistently through the 1980s really not supposed to mean anything to people aspiring to be elected in the early 1990s?
I think there's a real problem in thinking that the election of Reagan and Thatcher (if that's what you mean) reflected an across-the-board drift away from 'big government'.
I was trying to understand the perspective of the Tea Partiers the other day, and I thought about Clinton's famous line about the era of big government being over, and yet the undeniable truth is that government is still quite big. Clinton fooled us!
I think there's a real problem in thinking that the election of Reagan and Thatcher (if that's what you mean) reflected an across-the-board drift away from 'big government'.
I believe, as an example, that "Welfare Reform" under Clinton was a major political positive for the Democrats (not just for Clinton). We can argue about whether it was worth it or not, or whether it was shortsighted, but I think it was a (rare) example of a case where a policy move designed to destabilize entrenched rhetorical positions succeeded in doing so.
Speaking of which, I wonder what SomeCallMeTim is up to these days, I recall him making that argument effectively.
8: that's why it was the International WW
If the "WW" here stands for "Workers of the World", then the "I" is actually "Industrial". It is a common mistake, but you see, "International Workers of the World" would be somewhat redundant.
Be that as it may, I concur broadly with your analysis here. Bourgeois democracy did not stand up to Capital in the 1930s, so much as it saved it from the torches and pitchforks. The few gains that were won in terms of locating significant power in unions were pretty well undone within a generation and a half. And of course none of that made any difference to the people outside of the bourgeois democracies who were still getting crushed by colonialism and neo-colonialism, with the latter condition not exactly ameliorated by the pretense of having their own elites robbing them by proxy for the benefit of their old rulers.
11 -- Re-election means more, I agree. And election of their immediate successors. Opposition parties in both countries ran very different campaigns (and more finance friendly) when the successors came up for re-election and won.
Ok, the 'size' of government is never, even to people who talk about it, the actual issue. It's the size of the commitment to poor people. Are you saying that in this regard, there's no difference in general public position between 50s/60s and 80s/90s?
15: It's a question of whether Reagan (I don't have nearly as good a sense of the details with Thatcher) was leading or following the electorate on shutting down the commitment to poor people. Carter lost the '76 election on the economy, more than on a perception that he was too social-welfare state friendly.
And Reagan had to whip up anti-social welfare sentiment with racist shit like talking about the "strapping young bucks" buying T-bones. It seemed more like something he was using his popularity to sell to the electorate, than something he was using because of its pre-existing appeal to most people.
16: Carter lost the 1980 election (not 1976). And there were many many reasons why he lost -- the gas crisis, the hostages in Iran, stagflation, etc.
'80, '76, what's four years between friends. (I am, of course, a careless nitwit.)
And yeah, 'the economy' was oversimplified, but the point is that he wasn't swept out of office on a wave of hatred for the welfare state. Reagan was elected on charisma, foreign policy, and anti-Carter feeling, and sold the low-tax anti-welfare state ideology that his corporate backers wanted.
Now, I can't prove that there was no pre-existing drift away from a more social-democracy friendly electorate, maybe Charley's right or partially right. But what he's saying doesn't seem self-evidently true to me.
I think 16 underestimates how salient the idea of urban failure, crime, etc as a product of the Welfare State were in the late 70s/early 80s. A lot of people thought that liberalism had failed, and they had burnt-out shells of cities to prove it.*. Clinton, and much more so a lot of social and economic changes in the 1990s, helped kill that dynamic.
*I don't agree at all with that diagnosis, but I can understand why someone in, e.g., the Detroit suburbs might have thought so in 1979.
Ok, the 'size' of government is never, even to people who talk about it, the actual issue. It's the size of the commitment to poor people. Are you saying that in this regard, there's no difference in general public position between 50s/60s and 80s/90s?
Worth pointing out that the size of the "target" (commitments by the government to poor people) was much larger in the 80s/09s than the 50s/60s.
But, as Natilo alludes to above, one element of the story is just that organized labor had a very good run from the end of WWII to the mid 70s and when that tide turned, it turned in a hurry.
I'm still mulling over Bob's comment which is interesting. I don't have much sense at all of the politics of the 30s.
19: Yeah, I was overstating, in response to perceived overreaching. But I do think there's a good argument that the social-welfare hostility of the '80s and '90s was at least in significant part an electoral response to charismatic and competent rightwing leadership, rather than solely, as Charley implied, a grassroots feeling that politicians only followed.
The Republican Congressional Leadership, and I doubt the Democrats are any different, greet the new members on Day One with a celebration and orientation. On Day Two they are put on the phones to raise money, not just for their own re-election but also for the Party coffers. They are told in no uncertain terms that this is the bargain if they want any legislation for their constituencies. By Day Three they are totally co-opted. I don't worry about elections, They are useless.
Moscone and Miller, Iron Law of Bureaucracies. Any organization large enough to be effective will become centralized, corrupt, and co-opted. This is not just a lesson of Post-WWII unions, it goes back to the AFL 1880-1920. Scalability is impossible.
I am encroaching on Nat's turf here, but a possible difference is that I don't think local anarchism can be very effective, even locally. My idea is a million Egyptians flying to Madison, and a million Wisconsonites landing in Damascus. Spontaneously, via twitter communication.
Solidarity without centralization, even without organization because hierarchies will always get co-opted. Yeah, the multitude. The global multitude.
I am no longer interested in much of anything liberals or social democrats have to say. They lost. They failed. They are the past, as much as the Stalinists.
22: So there's a whole bunch of people in solidarity without organization. I think they are burning stuff down at first, but what happens after that?
I am encroaching on Nat's turf here, but a possible difference is that I don't think local anarchism can be very effective, even locally. My idea is a million Egyptians flying to Madison, and a million Wisconsonites landing in Damascus. Spontaneously, via twitter communication.
Swarm, locusts, swarm!
20:Nick S:
I remain an old Fordist myself, but I am trying. But time and space has changed and 30s politics will fail. 1900 politics, because they had to confront global capital v 1.0 and time-space compression may be more useful.
But there are smart people out there. Currently reading the works of David Harvey, the geographer of Capitalism. Last book was The Condition of Post-Modernity, which is twenty years old.
They have failed so let's try something that hasn't failed yet because it is impossible to actually do.
Yes, I agree that Reagan helped lead as well as follow, absolutely. I also reject the "centrist democrats are the best of all possible results in this the best of all possible worlds" that seems to motivate some of Carp's argument in these topics, though I broadly agree with him most of the time on specifics. Nonetheless, the shift to the right in the late 1970s/1980s was global and engulfed even ostensibly left wing movements (I'm thinking about Mitterand in France frex). Traditional liberalism/Keynsian social democracy seemed intellectually dead as well as unpopular. I'm not totally sure why.
23:More Tottenhams, and a whole lot more repression.
Revolution chooses us. It is a good idea to look at the first half of the twentieth, the last collapse and restructuring, and prepare.
Meanwhile the ranks of the permanently unemployed will swell. At this point companies simply don't want to hire anyone who has been unemployed for longer than about 3 months, and have a strong preference for the currently employed. If you don't find a new job in 3 months, you are probably never going to have a good job again. The data is clear on this, what is also clear is that the developed world has made a hard turn for austerity, one which will do damage for years to come. A decade is modestly optimistic.This will increase social disorder, of course, and our lords and masters and the remnants of the middle and working class who scream "they're criminals, pure and simple", will double down on repression, again and again.
This is, of course, a big mistake. It may turn into a relatively stable solution set in some countries, but they won't be places you want to live unless you have the morals of totalitarian, and in others it will lead to revolutions, while in others it will lead to outright failed states. We can hope that a few will turn aside from this path. So far in Europe only one country has, Iceland.
25: Bob, do you mean the last book you read or the last book he published? I can understand that your local library might not have kept up with their Harvey, but The Enigma of Capital came out last year, with about a dozen publications between that and Post-modernity.
A good (animated!) intro to Harvey is here. I believe it's made the rounds here before.
As to the original post, the idea I like that doesn't get expressed nearly enough is the idea that elections prevent democracy -- that, by extrapolation, they're a kind of pressure valve that allows populist expressions without consequences for capital. This is how you get fetishizations of performance like that Drew Westen article from a week ago.
31:Last I read. I have read at least one other Harvey book, uhh, the Neo-Liberalism one. I am working my way through all of him. Got Social Justice and Companion to Capital queued up.
Along with other recent authors. de Certeau, Poulantzas.
Don't stress me dude, I'm slow.
they're a kind of pressure valve that allows populist expressions without consequences for capital.
Sanford Wolin.
I don't think centrist democrats are the best possible result in the best possible world. I do think no one to the left of Carter could have been elected in 1976 and that no one to the left of Clinton could have won in 1992. The latter's 'new covenant' section of his convention speech was designed to appeal to a specific constituency that he needed to win the general.
2008 might have turned out differently for someone with national stature two clicks to the left of Obama. But there was no way for primary voters to guess how clueless McCain would appear in (a) selecting a VP candidate designed to appeal to disgruntled Clinton supporters and (b) reacting to the financial crisis. And that person, whoever he or she might be, didn't appear in the nomination race.
the idea that elections prevent democracy -- that, by extrapolation, they're a kind of pressure valve that allows populist expressions without consequences for capital.
Relatedly, they also take all the organizational energy, time, and money that people in developed democracies are willing to devote to politics and put it into deciding the horserace.
Once again, the solution is obvious. Put me in charge. We'll have more democracy, summary executions of people who annoy me, and I'll empty most of the red states to create the strategic bison reserve.
What I mean is, I aspire to just the kind of arbitrary, brutal rule that will inspire genuine populist revolt. I would be an excellent crazy dictator.
Haven't read the full linked post, I'm afraid, but jesus christ, am I tired of the horserace already. There seems to be little to no discussion of the actual merits of various policy proposals (such as they are, from, e.g. Rick Perry). I realize it was ever thus, but jesus christ, this is a serious situation, people.
Rick Perry makes me throw up (figuratively), unfortunately. And it's early yet!
And: the amount of money spent on national elections is somewhat ill-making as well. Do you know how many people could be fed and housed with that money? It is extraordinarily fucked up that we treat this blithely.
I'm in a bad mood.
2008 might have turned out differently for someone with national stature two clicks to the left of Obama.
Actually, the 2008 election was won by someone significantly to the left of Obama. Shame that guy didn't end up governing.
And: the amount of money spent on national elections is somewhat ill-making as well.
Really? The 2008 totals, for all candidates, primary & general, were about $1.6b; in a $14.7t economy, that's 0.0108844%. Given how massively important elections are, and how presidential ones only happen every four years, it's hardly absurd to spend .011% of social resources on building awareness.
The problem isn't the total sums, which even if completely wasted, aren't that big a deal; the problem is the process itself.
I wouldn't mind if we spent that much in a well-designed public financing system. Or we could blow it all on ponies. Either way.
In real life, I think liberals/progressives/the left (American version) need to spend a bit more time on the lobbying/"public affairs" side than they are now. It doesn't seem like they're able to keep much pressure on outside of elections, at least relative to the big centrist and conservative money.
One thing I'd like to see is a comparison between the pre-limits era and today. Back before 1907/1911, you had a few people dropping what must have been the equivalent of $1+ million in contributions (aggregated between candidates and political committees). There seem to have been people contributing more in non-inflation-adjusted dollars to a single candidate than you would be allowed to contribute today - that is, more than $2300 in pre-1910 dollars.
I think this halford fellow may be on to something!
no one to the left of Clinton could have won in 1992
Probably true in a normal two-person contest, but Perot made '92 a year where I'm not sure that's necessarily true. Clinton won a 370-168 EC victory with just 43% of the national vote.
So, imo, W. won re-election solely because we were mid-war. It occurred to me that it might have occurred to Obama that he could be a mid-war president for re-election purposes, and it would be indistinguishable from being a mid-war president for all the other normal terrible reasons.
Runciman's comments on the potential of looking to the EU for democracy are interesting in light of his piece from 10 years ago on the idea of a European state (and more broadly on relationship between space, representation, and the state), which is still well worth reading.
I have no idea what Runciman's academic work is like, but at least back when I was reading the LRB regularly a few years ago, I really liked his reviews.*
*Although Andrew Gelman has pointed out a couple of times more recently some errors Runciman's made with statistics. Fair enough. It was really the way Runciman laid out concepts that I liked, more than the current events commentary.
34
... I do think no one to the left of Carter could have been elected in 1976 and that no one to the left of Clinton could have won in 1992. ...
I don't see how anyone can believe this. It would be pretty extraordinary for leftists to have obtained the absolutely best possible electoral result not just once but twice. As 43 points out Clinton won by a substantial margin leaving room for a more left wing version to lose a few votes and still win. Carter-Ford was close but Carter wasn't (at least in my opinion) a very good politician. A more talented politician to his left could still have won. History just isn't that deterministic and elections are affected by a lot of things besides the candidates position's on the left right scale.
21
Yeah, I was overstating, in response to perceived overreaching. But I do think there's a good argument that the social-welfare hostility of the '80s and '90s was at least in significant part an electoral response to charismatic and competent rightwing leadership, rather than solely, as Charley implied, a grassroots feeling that politicians only followed
I think this is largely wishful thinking. The social-welfare hostility then seems similar to anti-immigrant hostility today. Where the grassroots are significantly more conservative than the leadership class.
46 -- I think there's a range within the zeitgeist of any particular time period. I agree that left/right orientation isn't the only variable. I think it's very significant, in the system we have, in the way it affects other variables.
WRT 92, I think if the charges that Clinton was some kind of wild leftist had seemed more plausible than they did (which wasn't very, outside the wingiest), a lot fewer Republicans would have supported Perot. That is, I think there's a certain tipping point effect at work here.
I don't have to like triangulation to think that it has been effective.
I guess we'll have a test of the economic determinists view (not saying that you are one, JBS) in 2012. The state of the economy will likely be such that the econ/election models will show that O cannot win. And yet, he very well might, depending on how far out of the mainstream the Reps go. Among other things, obviously.
On the question of whether centrism was the best available option in the 90s because the electorate had revealed its preferences in the 70s/80s, is there not the possibility of the electorate looking at the outcome of its preferences and changing its mind? ISTR that in the US Bush Senior was regarded as a Reagan redivivus and had won a (much more justifiable than any subsequent) war to some acclaim. Yet he was out on his butt after one term. It's impossible to say that nobody left of Clinton could have achieved this, because nobody left of Clinton was nominated by a major party.
Certainly in Britain, John Smith, who was elected leader of the Labour Party after 1992 was considerably more radical in many respects that Blair, and would have won in a landslide in 97, if indeed he had allowed the Tories to remain in government so long. He was far better liked and trusted than Blair despite his residual Social Democracy. Unfortunately, he died and Blair outmanoeuvered Brown to succeed him. The fact that Blair had a majority of 140 in 97 says more that the Great Pumpkin would have beaten the Tories in that year than that there was any great enthusiasm for Blair.
The fact that Blair had a majority of 140 in 97 says more that the Great Pumpkin would have beaten the Tories in that year than that there was any great enthusiasm for Blair.
Arising out of that, a fact: the Conservative Party has now gone 22 years without winning a general election. The last time this happened was in the mid-18th century...
Charley, I'm going to suggest a hypothesis for your consideration: leaders lead. Germany did not invade Poland because the zeitgeist called for it, but because Hitler did. Republican voters are now global warming skeptics because their leaders are. Voters do not have well-formed opinions or coherent world-views, and rely on leaders to tell them what to think. Leaders do not have mind control powers, but people are generally content to be led, as long as they respect their leaders as leaders.
I used to think that at least in the long run Clintonian triangulation would work to the Democrats' advantage because it would permanently kill certain pet rhetorical issues, like "welfare queens". At this point I don't see any evidence that it gave the Democrats any advantage at all, other than one extra term of the Presidency. They didn't retake Congress until the worst Presidency since Civil War.
"Moscone and Miller, Iron Law of Bureaucracies. Any organization large enough to be effective will become centralized, corrupt, and co-opted."
Glib reactionary nonsense. Was it better had the Labour party never existed so that Blair and his cronies couldn't betray its ideals in the nineties, but the NHS would not exist either?
52: well, it's not nonsense, but the reactionary thing to do is to read the invisible words "and therefore ineffective and not worthwhile" at the end of the sentence.
If I believed any of the stuff about standing up to the bankers, I'd be keener on "Blue Labour". But I suspect it's just a lot of guff about religion and little platoons and whatnot designed to squeeze out the Left.
Runciman dances around this, but if West Germany is an example, it didn't come from no church fete and Ernie Bevin was pretty much the ultimate Fordist mass politician. The general secretary of the TGWU, then the personnel chief of the whole British Empire's war economy, then the foreign secretary.
Also, Maurice Glasman's ideal type of grassroots organisation seems to be a black church, but he wants to be deliberately nasty to immigrants, and atheism is the UK's biggest religion. While there's a significant effort out there to spread right-wing evangelical bullshit within the Church of England.
I mean, how the hell can anyone look back at the last 18 months in the UK and argue that elections (!) don't matter?
As Glasman admits, he is harking back to an earlier period in Labour history, when the movement was centred on local struggles and community organisation, before it fell into the hands of Oxford-educated do-gooders who wanted to set the world to rights.
Clem Attlee was Oxford-educated. How far back are we supposed to be going here? Back to before Labour was an actual political party?
55. Back to before Labour was an actual political party?
Presumably, as the Oxford educated do gooders sensu lato have to include the Webbs.
A quick shufti reveals that the 1924 cabinet included 3 Oxford, 1 Cambridge, 1 Edinburgh, 1 KCL, 1 Sandhurst and 1 RNC, Greenwich. Whether they were do-gooders is beyond my remit to decide.
Glasman is full of it.
At this point I don't see any evidence that it gave the Democrats any advantage at all,
Clinton left Al Gore in a great position to win the presidency. As James (and you!) rightly point out, history is contingent. The world would be a lot different had Gore gotten a few more votes.
OT, but as this is a somewhat UK centric thread, it might as well go here: NI are in deep trouble.
As I see it, it's not so much the Goodman letter as the Harbottle letter, not least the discrepancies between the two as presented to the committee. Funny how NI's version redacts all references to wider criminality at the NOTW. And having your own law firm accuse you of misleading parliament is never good.
Unfortunately, the CMS comittee seems to have botched uploading them to the website - there's pages missing from the Harbottle letter that suggest the original was double-sided and they only scanned one side, while the cover letter throws up a 404. Hopefully they'll rectify this soon or somebody else will post them.
I didn't mean to suggest that Clinton's triangulation was any more effective than winning a single Presidential term.
In a democracy, would-be leaders get themselves a chance to lead by trying the match, within a range of where they personally are, where people are. IANAB, but my perception is that British parties have tried to pick candidates they think will do well in the current situation. Parties pre-exist the personality of the leader -- except Hitler. The US process of choosing a temporary leader is particularly chaotic. Bachmann, Perry, Romney; Clinton, Tsongas, Brown: Leadership skills, yes. But also a reflection of where people (funders on the one hand, nominating electorate on the other) think the general public is (or can be gotten to be) on the issue spectrum.
The Left's best candidate for 2016 is in public office right now. Who is he/she? How can his/her chances of getting the Dem nomination be brought to a high enough level to attract money and followers? It's not that far away, considering all that has to happen.
Maybe Glasman is harking back to Hardie and Maxton and the like? But I don't think they are really the sorts of people he has in mind, either.
And the current NI troubles, I hope, dramatically increase the likelihood of jail.
Actually, I've managed to dig up the relevant letters, and the NI redaction is not quite as bad as the Grauniad makes out. While parts of it don't look good, particularly the redaction of "daily editorial conference" I think they can make a (legally) plausible argument that they did it to protect the identities of people as requested by the police. It's still perfectly clear in their version that Goodman was alleging wider involvement and knowledge at NOTW.
48
WRT 92, I think if the charges that Clinton was some kind of wild leftist had seemed more plausible than they did (which wasn't very, outside the wingiest), a lot fewer Republicans would have supported Perot. That is, I think there's a certain tipping point effect at work here.
On the other hand a version of Clinton without some of Clinton's liabilities (like Flowers) would have been a stronger candidate.
60
The Left's best candidate for 2016 is in public office right now. ...
Not necessarily. Reagan wasn't in public office in 1975.
61
He was Governor of California.
Until January 6, 1975. So to be precise he wasn't in public office in August of 1975.
67 was a response to 66 not 61.