Though I’m listed as the author on this post, I’m actually posting Jeremy Kessler’s reply to my most recent post on the Occupation. This is definitely a departure from the kind of subjects we tend to engage in this space, but I hope you’ll agree that it is a worthwhile departure.
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Before responding to Reihan’s great post, I want to thank him for hosting my reply and for engaging with my writing. Ever since Grand New Party came out, I’ve been learning from Reihan’s creative thought and smooth style. It’s been a pleasure to argue with him about one of the more important social and political events of our time. As to the vanguard question, I acknowledge Reihan’s reference to a broader meaning of “vanguard”: “the forefront in any movement, field, activity, or the like.” To the extent that the OWS protesters are chronologically and vocally out front of a potentially bigger social movement, I get what Reihan means by calling them a “vanguard.” I do think it’s important to recognize the more specific meaning of “vanguard” — the leadership of a revolutionary movement — as it has profound historical and strategic connotations that the Occupation rejects. In my earlier post, I explained why the Occupation is not – and does not seek to be – a vanguard in this more specific sense.
Moving on, Reihan zeroes in on a set of claims I make about comparative economic welfare that I don’t think were central to my argument; but his careful treatment of them is fascinating in its own right, and points to where our agendas – perhaps more than our “ideas” – differ. He cites the following paragraph:
To be sure, not all Americans are equally oppressed by the system of chronic personal insecurity that our political and financial institutions have established. Students with lower debt burdens are better off than students with higher debt burdens, public employees in strong unions are better off than private employees in weak unions who are better off than non-unionized labor who are better off than undocumented workers; whites are better off than blacks; the old are better off than the young.
In this paragraph, what I was concerned with was the limits to political solidarity posed by differing economic interests. The inequities that I posited were ones that I thought would be in the minds of readers skeptical about the extent to which the Occupation could really develop into a broad-based political movement. They were, as it were, political economic clichés. I tend to believe that – like so many clichés – they are mostly true, but I am more than willing to learn from, and be corrected by, Reihan’s account of them.
So, for example, in the student debt case, what I was worried about was that kids who were better off – by whatever metric – might not see the world in the same way and benefit from the same policies as kids who were worse off, and this difference in economic position would make it more difficult for them to band together. Reihan’s deeper treatment of the debt issue points to different fault lines: not so much kids better and worse off as kids with different life-projects.
A similar shift occurs in his analysis of unions. For example, Reihan writes, “There are many workers who prefer the flexibility of a workplace that is not governed by union work rules. Teachers in parochial schools, for example, often see themselves as choosing more autonomy in exchange for less compensation.” Reihan asks us to consider that the sources of potential inter-class or inter-personal tension might be different than the ones I had proposed, stemming not from some simplistic economic calculus but from robust disagreements about the good life. But my immediate concern was whether such tensions – whatever their nature – are politically and sociologically insurmountable.
That being said, Reihan’s sensitive analysis of preferences moves us toward the nub of a difference in left-right worldviews that may help explain what is driving our debate. I find it very striking that the above quoted paragraph was, from my point of view, a list of potential political-economic obstacles to political solidarity, while, from Reihan’s point of view, it was mainly a series of claims about socio-economic difference. I now want to suggest the source of our divergent perspectives.
Here are a few sentences that capture an important motif throughout Reihan’s work, a motif that both unites and divides us:
Realizing one’s personal projects and ambitions with (self-perceived) integrity — which could mean taking on a higher debt burden rather than, say, relying on resources provided by others — matters to at least some people.
. . . of course some people prefer flexibility and autonomy and the prospect of shifting employers from time to time. This reflects the subjective experience of many of our readers, including many who’ve once worked in union shops
In a sense, we’re dealing with the issues raised by Richard Robb’s “economics of becoming” thesis. Are we animals that primarily seek as much material gratification as we can get? Or are our lives governed by a vision of the kind of people, the kind of workers, we want to become?
In these beautiful passages, Reihan describes the acts of self-fashioning through which we constitute ourselves as full, human persons. In doing so, he indicates the kernel of a distinctly Western anthropology shared by both left-wing and right-wing thought. Reihan opposes this anthropology to an inert, doctrinaire leftism that insists on the unquestionable superiority of unionization. But this anthropology – this notion that “our lives [are] governed by a vision of the kind of people, the kind of workers, we want to become” – is the key to understanding why the left has for so long been committed to unions, and why so many on the left today are committed to the Occupation, despite its incompleteness, its ideological obscurity, and its occasional challenge to nuance.
A deep premise of left-wing thought is that political power is crucial to our “(self-perceived) integrity,” crucial to our ability to govern our lives according to “a vision of the kind of people, the kind of workers, we want to become.” The left-wing thinker posits that the experience of political agency is vital to the kind of subjective fulfillment that Reihan elegizes. While the right hears in the left’s calls for centralization and solidarity a repression of individual difference, the left sees in centralization and solidarity the only way in which the vast majority of people can gain the political agency necessary to become fully autonomous, self-fashioning human beings. Whether we are talking about unionization, the seizure of the means of production, or the occupation of privately-owned Zuccotti Park, the guiding thread is not bare economic self-interest, but the refusal of fate.
This left-wing commitment to the existential importance of political power depends upon an assumption and comes with a caveat. The assumption is that the majority of people have sufficient economic and cultural interests in common that solidarity is possible; that is, the left must assume that there is a latent majority united by a set of common concerns. For Marx, this majority was the proletariat, whose immiseration was the basis of mutual recognition.
The caveat is that the majority is not everyone. Some people will lose out when the majority solidifies and exercises its newly discovered political power. This exclusionary violence is inherent in left-wing politics, and constitutes an ongoing ethical crisis for leftists. But, of course, such violence is not the unique burden of the left. Indeed, from the left-wing perspective, far more violence is being done right now to all those individuals – the majority – who lack political power.
I don’t think this simple schematic will surprise Reihan, but it will probably disappoint him. It sounds a lot like a refusal “to think through the inner workings of the system rather than just characterize it as morally outrageous and propose policy steps that don’t actually speak to its underlying flaws.” I am very glad that Reihan is thinking through the inner workings of the system, and I look forward to many years of thinking it through with his help. He wants to focus on “attacking bastions of privilege, like patents, copyright laws, occupational licensing, strict educational requirements, and attacking the outsized power of incumbent providers of educational, health, and financial services.” And I support these attacks, properly construed. The major question that the Occupation raises is not, however, the value of these attacks, but who should be doing the attacking.
The Occupation arises from an existential, which is to say, a political crisis – the feeling of millions that they will not have “flexibility and autonomy” or “(self-perceived) integrity” until they have political power. Should they achieve power, the question will then become, in part, whether “social democratic strategies” are able to lower “the costs imposed by medical and educational and financial providers.” I think the historical record here is not as bad as Reihan suggests. But either way, right now, many Americans have clearly decided that the costs imposed by the providers of our politics are the highest of all.