Is Triangulation Back?

Norman Solomon, board member of Progressive Democrats of America, already detects The Return of Triangulation:

The mosaic of Barack Obama's cabinet picks and top White House staff gives us an overview of what the new president sees as political symmetry for his administration. While it's too early to gauge specific policies of the Obama presidency, it's not too soon to understand that "triangulation" is back.

In Solomon's view, Obama is a 'centrist' and 'pragmatic' politician who will seek and occupy the center of political gravity. He quotes his biographer David Mendell, who describes Obama as

an exceptionally gifted politician who, throughout his life, has been able to make people of wildly divergent vantage points see in him exactly what they want to see.

Criticizing progressives for projecting their worldviews on Obama, he is concerned that the progressive base will again be frustrated and demobilized under Obama's triangulation, just as it had been under Clinton's in the 1990s.

Therefore, progressive grassroots need to move the center to the left, by reframing crucial policy choices, such as health care, Afghanistan, etc. This approach is very similar to what progressives like John Nichols recommend, and suffers from the same deficiencies.

Reframing of course is reminiscent of Lakoff's approach to framing and his Rockridge Institute, which had to close last year due to a lack of funds. The whole notion that the Left can change policies by changing public opinion through reframing issues has not been very successful, and needs to be fundamentally reconsidered.

Politics in large part is about the concentration and centralization of resources and decision-making power in organizations. Political power is largely organized power, and organizations are structures of power.

Therefore, progressives need to build and strengthen their own organizations and infrastructure more generally, in order to gain greater influence over and ultimately break into centrist and conservative power structures.

In other words, progressives can frame and reframe issues and policies all they want; as long as they don't have the organized power to make credible demands on those in power, all this activity is unlikely to lead to positions of strength, from which more power could be built.

Towards a Realistic Left Strategy

Last week, John Nichols, Washington correspondent of The Nation, published How to Push Obama in The Progressive.

Nichols recalls how he first covered Obama in the mid-1990s when he ran for the Illinois state senate as a candidate endorsed by the labor-left New Party. Nichols affirms that Obama self-identifies as a progressive, and quotes him:

I am somebody who is no doubt progressive. I believe in a tax code that we need to make more fair. I believe in universal health care. I believe in making college affordable. I believe in paying our teachers more money. I believe in early childhood education. I believe in a whole lot of things that make me progressive.

According to Nichols, Obama knows 'the specifics' of 'the left-labor-liberal-progressive agenda,' but is cautious, 'because knowing the ideals and values of the left is not the same as practicing them,' which Obama certainly hasn't.

So here is Nichols' main recommendation of how 'progressives' should 'push' Obama to the left:

The way to influence Obama and his Administration is to speak not so much to him as to America. Get out ahead of the new President, and of his spin-drive communications team. Highlight the right appointees and the right responses to deal with the challenges that matter most. Don't just critique, but rather propose. Advance big ideas and organize on their behalf; identify allies in federal agencies, especially in Congress, and work with them to dial up the pressure for progress. Don't expect Obama or his aides to do the left thing. Indeed, take a lesson from right wing pressure groups in their dealings with Republican administrations and recognize that it is always better to build the bandwagon than to jump on board one that is crafted with the tools of compromise.

Smart groups and individuals are already at it. [...]

The examples he gives are critiques of the bailout, and advocacy for civil liberties and single-payer health care.

Now, unfortunately, but rather predictably, this is really nothing new, because the Left has been criticizing policies and advocating for alternative policies for decades, with very little success.

It reminds me of the famous definition of insanity as 'doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results,' which is alternatively attributed to Albert Einstein or Benjamin Franklin.

One day before Obama's deeply historic and highly symbolic inauguration, it is high time for the Left to ask itself a very basic but also very important strategic question: Not only: Are we doing things right, but more importantly: Are we doing the right things? In other words, it is high time that the Left not only improves tactics, but changes strategy.

A good starting point for the Left is to remind itself that, in the words of Frederick Douglass,

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.

Effective strategy begins with a sober and realistic assessment of the current situation, including one's own position and resources. The sad truth is that the Left is simply not in a position to demand much of anything of Obama. It is simply too weak, if not to say marginal.

It lacks the leverage, and therefore the bargaining power to make demands on the Obama administration. Its 'threats' of withholding support lack credibility, because the consequences are simply not significant enough.

So the big strategic question the Left needs to answer is how to build power cumulatively and long-term, starting from a position of weakness, and how it can make use of the Obama administration in gaining strength, as opposed to the lost decade under Clinton.

Until the Left has adequately addressed this critical strategic question, it will simply continue doing what is has done for decades, with hardly any structural effect: It will criticize, complain, express outrage, suggest alternatives, etc. - but who is listening?

Obama will continue to tell leftists that he hears them loud and clear, and will, from time to time, give them the impression that he, in some ways, is really a leftie himself. But he won't listen to them, much less act on their recommendations, because he is constrained to operate in a very centrist if not conservative political and social structure.

To be fair, Nichols emphasizes the importance of changing public opinion. He could have used Lincoln's famous quote, which in recent months has been used ad nausea:

With public sentiment, nothing can fail. Without it, nothing can succeed.

And indeed, the left-liberal every day is filled to the brim with critiques, advocacy, alternatives, outrage, etc. This is what publications such as The Nation, The American Prospect, Dissent, Harper's, Mother Jones, TPMCafe, Campaign for America's Future, AlterNet, Common Dreams, Daily Kos, OpenLeft, etc. do, frequently recycling materials quite a bit, which leads to quite some redundancy.

But who is reading these publications, and more importantly: Who is acting on all this information? I think it is likely that the readership for all these publications is small, is more or less the same for each one of them, and that they hardly have any influence on the mainstream, much less on political decision-making.

Further to the left, let's say with the CounterPunch crowd, the typical take on Obama is that he is a centrist and the best you can hope for is Clintonism 2.0. Instead of dismantling the empire, he will simply manage it more efficiently. Instead of shifting from neoliberalism and the failed Washington Consensus to neo-Keynesianism (or better yet: full-fledged social democracy), he will simply sell neoliberalism with a social touch. Obama represents a new style rather than new substance.

But where do all these unrealistic assumptions and expectations come from in the first place? I suspect the blinding effects of ideology and wishful thinking play an important role. It is also much easier to continue coming up with laundry lists of desiderata, of all the things that should happen, just like you have done for years if not decades, instead of asking yourself why the Left is still so marginal, and developing a strategy to become less marginal. Further to the left, the better can easily become the enemy of the good: Since Obama won't overthrow capitalism, why bother?

Nichols concludes, as is very typical these days, with FDR's famous response to labour leaders after his election in 1932:

I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it.

In the case of the relationship between Obama and the Left, each of these three statements is questionable and problematic: What do Obama and the Left actually agree on, what does Obama really want to do that the Left wants him to do, and, most importantly: How should the Left 'make' Obama do the things it would like him to do, and why this way, and not another way?

Nichols' understanding of all three components of this statement are symptomatic of too many people on the left. Too many left-liberals actually believe the first two parts, and continue to think that essentially more of the same (more 'pressure,' more 'pushing') will nudge him to the left. Too many further to the left completely disagree with the first two parts, and therefore don't even need to try or do anything differently, because it is hopeless anyway, which of course if very convenient. They can just continue scoffing and sneering more or less cynically or become increasingly apathetic in what has been called 'sophisticated resignation.'

To better be able to analyze and characterize European foreign policy, Christopher Hill of the London School of Economics in the 1990s developed the concept of the 'capabilities-expectations gap,' which describes the relationship and gap between capabilities and expectations and how it has evolved historically. It might be useful to apply this concept to the relationship between the Left and Obama and to progressive strategy more generally.

There are two basic options. Either you maintain your high expectations, and try to strengthen your capabilities to better be able to realize them, or you reduce your expectations in the hope of better being able to meet them with capabilities that are likely to remain limited for a long time. The problem with too much of the Left today is that it maintains unrealistically high expectations and/or has still not found a viable way of strengthening its capabilities in a sustainable way. And so it continues to remain in lamentation mode as described above.

Just yesterday, Obama said again what he has said many times before, that in a country called America, 'everything is possible.' What is possible for the Left in the US under Obama's leadership? Such a realistic strategic assessment is fundamental for the Left today if it wants to stop squandering preciously scarce resources on both lamenting and dreaming, which are equally ineffective, and start concentrating its efforts on realistic goals. Above all, the Left needs to determine what not to do, and then actually stop doing it:

The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do. (Michael Porter, my emphasis)

Cracks in the Edifice?

So here I finally go. Originally I wanted to blog live from the last Left Forum, exactly one year ago, if only because hardly anybody else did. Left Forum emerged in 2005 from a split with the Socialist Scholars Conference over strategy, governance, and personalities, according to reports.

While the Left Forum describes itself as the largest annual gathering of leftists in North America, and presumably in the world, it not only gets no coverage in the mainstream media, but is not even mentioned in the leftitst media. Last year, all The Nation did, was to announce it. Interestingly, while it called it 'one of the country's premiere progressive events,' it did not cover it at all. Neither did any other leftist media.

Why is that? Is it because of a lack of resources and/or a lack of professionalism in promoting it? After all, it does not take very much to post a news release. Or does it accurately reflect just how marginal the left remains, both in the US and globally?

At last year's opening plenary, Cornel West openly admitted that the left simply lacks the resources, in terms of finances, personnel, and infrastructure generally, to move beyond its marginal status. This however did not keep a number of panels and participants to enthusiastically debate how best to organize the revolution, and how to decide who should be part of the leadership once the movement reached critical mass. This kind of attitude always reminds me of Seymour Lipset's famous remark they overcompensate their political irrelevance with excessive rhetoric.

In any case, last year's motto was 'Forging a Radical Political Future,' and this year's theme is 'Cracks in the Edifice.' In both cases, there is a palpable sense of frustration with 'the system,' and a great desire to change it radically, and not only 'superficially' through reforms. Understandably, given the socialist background, the ultimate goal is not merely to reform capitalism and imperialism, but to overcome them. However, the main thrust of the contributions is one of criticism, protest, and resistance, and unfortunately there is very little on what to do, and especially on how to do it in a strategic sense. There frequently is a big disconnect between big picture analysis and criticism, and punctual and sporadic initiatives and activities on the ground.

Yesterday evening's opening plenary featured speeches by Tariq Ali, Adam Hochschild, Mahmood Mamdani, and Naomi Klein. They were encouraged by Left Forum to identify 'cracks in the edifice' and specifically address how to use those opportunities to bring about change. As was to be expected, with the exception of Hochschild, they were primarily critical.

Ali spent most of the time criticizing US foreign policy in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, and ended by pointing out that the regional cooperation in Latin America could serve as a model for the Middle East.

Hochschild drew parallels between the late 18th century, emphasizing abolitionism, and today. He highlighted what today's activists can learn from that movement, focusing on the importance of new organizing tools and on never giving up ...

Mamdani criticized the Save Darfur campaign for egregiously exaggerating mortality rates, according to a 2006 study by the General Accounting Office. All of the $14 million spent by a professional advertising company on the campaign was spent outside of Sudan. His larger criticism was that Americans prefer to feel good by doing something about Darfur, however inadequate, instead of risking to feel guilty by organizing against the Iraq occupation. He emphasized how remarkable that discrepancy is, and concluded by insisting that Save Darfur has become one of the biggest obstacles to progress in Darfur. He is currently working on a book on this subject.

Klein declared that key points of the conservative ideology, especially concerning the economy, have been discredited by developments over the past 35 years, and especially most recently. This crumbling of neoliberalism opens many opportunities, but unfortunately she did not go beyond exhorting the audience to take on these forces and resist them. This is the same mode in which she wrote her most recent book, The Shock Doctrine.

Leftists tend to be strong on analysis and criticism, but weak on strategy. This is one of the main reasons why the left has not made more progress. This year's Left Forum would be a great opportunity to engage in what is known as SWOT-analysis: Systematically identifying the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats, both of and for the left, and of and for its adversaries. This would be an important first step towards formulating and implement realistic and effective strategies. Regrettably, not a single one of the 116 or so panels seems to do this, at least not in explicit terms.

Of course it is so much easier to ridicule Obama's rhetoric of hope and change, and deride his record. Fortunately, some pointed out that the left also has itself to criticize for failing to build a movement that would lead to more genuinely progressive and viable candidates.

JoAnn Wypijewski's Response to 'Is there a Left left'?

Please note: This is JoAnn Wypijewski's response to my post on 'Is there a Left left,' a talk she and Alexander Cockburn gave at UMass Amherst on October 15, 2007. It is posted here with JoAnn's permission.

I just saw your blog about the talk. Too bad we didn't get to meet at the event. The question 'Why hasn't the Left done better at organizing around these key issues?' presupposes there is a coherent force in the country that can be called by that name. I don't think there is, in the sense of any potent organized force, let alone mass movement or even mini-movement that is challenging the fundamental terms of the system and is equal to the moment. And this -- the disequilibrium of movement to moment -- I think, is the cause for so much despondency (secret and not-so-secret) among American leftists, who certainly are alive even if some identifiable political and ideological home with a clear project, "The Left", is not.

There are a lot of reasons for this -- obvious ones, like the long-term effect of the imploding of the Soviet Union, the long-term effect of a reigning ideology in the West that 'there is no alternative', the demobilizing effect of Clintonism on vast sectors of progressive America, disorganization and disarray of the black community as a result of repression/criminalization, deindustrialization and split level economic conditions (economic catastrophe for part of the community, McMansions for another part), the continuing long slide of organized labor, a generalized sense of insecurity (economic and personal) that lends itself more to caution than to daring, and so on.

I don't think there is any magic formula, any set of approaches, to 'fix' this, and it would have been presumptuous or dishonest or both to say there was. Why, for instance, is the antiwar movement basically nowhere on campuses? I don't know, and the people on campuses I've spoken to don't have good answers either, but it's up to them to answer that. They were disappointed when the war wasn't stopped before it started after the Feb. 15 worldwide demos. They were disappointed when it wasn't stopped after that, and after a few more marches. They were disappointed and demoralized when Bush was re-elected. They can never get more than 15 people for a meeting and 5 are pushing a sectarian agenda, 5 want to talk only about Palestine and 5 can't get past identity politics. This last, admittedly, I've only heard from Columbia students, but the point is the institutionalized leadership of UFPJ and ANSWER isn't being challenged by a younger generation pushing itself to the lead. And that institutionalized leadership is exhausted. Friends who work for UFPJ every day as volunteers say privately, "It's hopeless." Work goes on, the demos get planned, people do their vigils.

The only force with any juice, it seems to me, are the military families, the counter-recruiters, the antiwar vets. I don't believe some tactical adjustment will change this -- ditching "Support the Troops", ditching big demonstrations, embracing the Moratorium idea of doing one small thing every day on the same month in the same place, ditching UFPJ, ditching any engagement at all with electoral politics, throwing all effort into electoral politics, waving the flag of the Mahdi Army or whatever faction one wants to choose of the Iraqi resistance.

All of those tactics have been proposed by various people. We can discuss till we're blue in the face the various merits or demerits of such ideas, but I think it's foolhardy to think any one or combination of them is going to invigorate the antiwar movement into an edgy potent force. I'm not meaning to be glib. The antiwar movement is in a weird position: it's job is not to sway public opinion, since a majority of Americans agree with it; but nothing changes, so people are demoralized. They're not illogical in their demoralization. And there is neither the wild courage nor the organization to throw a spanner in the works to disrupt the war machine -- not from labor (though some unionists on the West Coast and internationally are trying to see what they might put together toward this end), not from the campuses, and only so far among the soldiers. The latter are the most promising, but are nowhere close to the situation of mass mutiny of drafted armies past. At this point it looks as if the war will end when the Iraqis punish the US beyond endurance or the generals mutiny or both, but I don't think we should have illusions that that will be a glorious day for the Left.

I see you have an entry about a meeting with Naomi Klein. I don't think either that cheerleading -- we need the will! we need the courage! another world IS possible! -- is much of a solution to anything, though I wasn't at that meeting so I won't presume that reflects the whole of it. There are world historical forces afoot here, and one of the jobs of anyone who considers herself on the left is to try to understand them.

I don't think the Left in the heady days of empire really thought too much about the privileges and distortions being children of the empire conferred on it, except to say, in some quarters, We don't want any part of it! But opting out only goes so far, and is delusional even if understandable. Now that the empire is exhausted at the top -- and we could disagree about that, but I think the signs are more indicative of fundamental weakness than of strength even if the US can still kill everyone in the world many times over and still 'afford' billions of dollars a day doing that in one way or another -- radicals are feeling what it means to be part of the general decline. How do we deal with it? That's not an idle question, or one that has an obvious answer.

What I was suggesting was that there was a certain amount of chauvinism attached to the American Left in the sixties, a sense of being at the center of the political universe even if people did make their trips to Hanoi or Ghana or Paris. And part of that was even justified, because America at the time could be said to be "swinging", as I quoted Andy Kopkind from 1967. It's not swinging now, but at the same time it's awfully narrow to have to think of 'the Left' as something that's bounded by national borders. And if we look beyond our borders, there is clearly a Left, in the sense of powerful movements or currents challenging the fundamental terms of the world economic system.

So if one asks, Is there a Left left? the answer is clearly yes, but not necessarily within our borders. So then how do we engage with that? What does solidarity and internationalism, as opposed to rad-tourism, demand today? What can we learn from those who have set out a task of developing "socialism for the 21st century" or autonomy and freedom from the neoliberal chokehold? And how can we support those efforts, while not abandoning organizing at home that might not rattle the world, at least not this minute, but is still necessary if one has any sense of politics as being a long walk?

You ask, in reference to my comments on Latin America, is this something Americans should 'imitate'? and then say isn't it doing that on countless blogs? Come on, you have massed organizations of peasants, workers, farmers, indigenous people in Bolivia toppling two governments, facing bullets and suffering casualties to do so, asserting in the most powerful way claims against the force of privatization, deregulation, immiseration, etc. You have the Zapatistas arising from seemingly nowhere on the eve of NAFTA's implementation saying No, everything is not finished; it is still possible to put up a fundamental fight -- and changing Mexican politics. This is not akin to blogging. And it's not something that can just be 'imitated', which I never suggested. Nor is it something -- either in Bolivia or Mexico or Ecuador or Venezuela or Argentina or Cuba or Brazil -- that is perfectly realized, without contradictions, without setbacks, weaknesses, disappointments and more likely ahead. Most of all it is not something to be romanticized.

But it is, I believe, where the center of political energy has shifted. It is where what Eqbal Ahmad called "the logic of daring" is at work. And it is the original homeland of millions of people now in this country whose movements and organizing here may be uneven, may not conform strictly to some notion of the Left but do bear attention and support from the rest of us. I don't believe I used the term 'new energy' in the pollyannaish sense you imply, but certainly in the realm of labor, organizing by immigrants is where most of the action is. I think one can with justice say that May 1, 2006, was the closest thing to a general strike that the US has seen in a long time, to take the most obvious example.

Now that movement is fractured too, and has its contradictions, and has come under severe repression. That there has been no wider Left in the US to defend immigrants, to articulate the rights of people not only to move across borders (mobility of labor) but also to stay in their homelands and survive -- and to link the international experience with the domestic experience of dispossession on any number of fronts (the most glaring being Katrina) -- indicates that there is a task at hand considerably more robust than blogging in the fight for a world fit to live in.

There are people and groups chipping away at a piece of this here and there, but I'm certain they don't think it will be realized off a breezy checklist of 'things to do' and I doubt you would have been any more satisfied with the talk if Alex or I had suggested that it could be.

Is There a Left Left?

This was the title of an event I attended yesterday evening, October 15, 2007, at the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, which is part of a tour they recently participated in. Alexander Cockburn, columnist at The Nation and co-editor of CounterPunch, and JoAnn Wypijewski, former editor of The Nation and now contributing writer to Harper's and Mother Jones, talked about the current state of the Left in historical perspective. They did a similar tour back in 1995, called Left Alive.

I was initially attracted by the catchy title, which reminded me of all the debates about what was left of the Left after the end of the Cold War, and expected to learn something new about why the Left in the US has been so weak for such a long time, and how best to rebuild its strength and power. The waY PERI framed the debate on its website made sense: Given the growing opposition to the Iraq war and rising inequality, why hasn't the Left done better at organizing around these key issues, and what needs to be improved in order to do so? Instead, I heard mostly a string of anecdotes, with very little analysis. Is this symptomatic of one of the many problems of the Left, i.e. the fact that there is an overabundance of criticism and lament, coupled with a shortage of feasible alternatives? Making people aware of how bad things are is clearly necessary, but it is not sufficient for building something new.

Cockburn's main message was that there was much more optimism on the Left back in the 1960s and 1970s, compared to today, where many seem to be 'shell-shocked by history.' Back then, many leftists actually believed that a better society was not only possible but that they would soon achieve the positions of power necessary to bring it about. Why didn't it happen and what can we learn from this for efforts at rebuilding the Left today? Unfortunately, he did not address this question. Instead, he illustrated his historical overview with lots of examples and anecdotes, ranging from all the initiatives and projects (decolonization, banning the bomb, the nuclear freeze 'movement' and Randy Forsberg, the New World Economic Order, etc.) to the many disappointments and countervailing trends (the rise of the 'catastrophe' of neoliberalism, the disenfranchisement of voters ... up to the demobilization of the Left in the Clinton 1990s). In short, 'a lot went on,' and leftists back then had much more 'zap.' Again, why did all that energy dissipate, and where did it all go?

Today, Cockburn concluded with a 'downbeat message,' the Left is merely 'around.' How to reinvigorate it? Cockburn emphasized that the Left needs 'bigger and better ideas,' needs to articulate 'coherent restatements' of the big questions, such as who owns what, the role of the banks and industries, etc., and to link local struggles to the larger picture. Again, regrettably he did not elaborate on what precisely this means and how to go about putting it into practice.

After sharing her pessimism about the prospects for change coming of age in the 1970s, JoAnn Wypijewski came to a similar conclusion, but in addition highlighted the 'new energy' coming primarily from immigrants, related to the need to regain the awareness of the Left as an internationalist phenomenon. Here she joined Cockburn in emphasizing all the important developments in Latin America, particularly in Bolivia. At least, 'the people in Latin America are asking the big questions, challenging neoliberalism.' Is that what the American Left should imitate? Isn't it doing it already, in fact on a daily basis, in publications such as The Nation, TomPaine, AlterNet, many 'progressive' blogs, etc.? But apparently to not much avail.

Her overall assessment, however, was equally pessimistic as Cockburn's. 'There hasn't been a Left in this country for a very long time,' she said. Her main thesis was that because the American empire is increasingly exhausted, so is the American Left. Hence the need to redefine what the Left is, especially in today's more global context. Here, she emphasized the need to not loose hope and to keep on fighting ...

During the discussion, however, Wypijewski very candidly acknowledged: 'Let's not fool ourselves: Who really cares about what we have to say? Nobody! It's infinitessimal!' Unfortunately, I couldn't agree more, especially if you don't have that much to say to begin with. That's what this event, like so many similar ones, felt like: Preaching to the choir. So what? What else is new? The real question of course is: Now what? And in particular: How to strategically build power for the long-term.