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)

Progressive Grand Strategy: Goals - A Response to Shai Sachs

This is a preliminary response to Shai Sachs' Outlining a Progressive Grand Strategy, Part I - Goals and Assessment (full disclosure: Shai is a personal friend). We are very happy about his response, which is in part inspired by our report, Finding Strategy, which he also reviewed, because one of our goals is to stimulate discussion of grand strategy, which unfortunately we have not been able to find much of so far. Our basic premise is that a more systematic and sophisticated approach to progressive strategy can contribute towards making it more effective in building power over the long-term, in a cumulative and comprehensive way.

Shai differentiates between political and cultural goals, and begins to analyze both of them. The distinction between these two types of goals is useful - more on that later. Indeed, as Shai points out, most progressive focus on political goals. This is very important, because strategies are very much goal-driven, and as goals diverge - as they do significantly between different types of progressives (centrists/moderates, liberals, left-liberals, leftists) - so do strategies: Neoliberalism, for instance, is very different from social democracy, and everything that comes and goes with these two, in many ways diverging traditions.

We have begun to address this in our report by differentiating between three major types of strategy: Electoral, movement, and movement-electoral. It seems to me that these types of strategy tend to correlate somewhat with the ideological orientation of their proponents, though this is by no means a hard and fast rule: Centrists/moderates seem to be primarily interested in winning elections, and tend to focus on methods and tactics that they think are most likely to achieve this goal (polling, sociodemographic analyses, framing, messaging, voter mobilization, etc.). On the other end of the progressive spectrum, as it were, those primarily if not exclusively interested in building movements, if not the movement, essentially through grassroots organizing, tend to be further to the left. Finally, there seems to be a growing number of progressives who increasingly focus on how best to combine movement and electoral strategies, and how to articulate their relationship most effectively. Here, progressives seem to be coming from both ends of the spectrum, and it seems that this offers the greatest potential.

Paul Wellstone used to emphasize what might be called a 'progressive trinity:'

There are three critical ingredients to democratic renewal and progressive change in America: good public policy, grassroots organizing and electoral politics. [...] Electoral politics without grassroots community organizing is a politics without a base, community organizing without electoral politics is a marginal politics, and electoral politics and community organizing without good, sound public policy is a politics without a head.

I'd be tempted to develop this metaphor further, hopefully without pushing it too far, into a kind of progressive body politic, as it were. Thus, movement and infrastructure are the legs that move politics (and culture) in a progressive direction. Elected officials and politicians at the local, state, and national level are the arms and the hands that change policies at that level. And there already is an abundance of excellent progressive thinking on public policy. So the head of the progressive movement, the collective intelligence, as it were, with the vision and the ideas, already exists (The Progressive Strategy Brain understands itself as a contribution to this.). The main challenge is to integrate these three components into a functioning body of strategy, so to speak. And again, this is a very hard challenge for progressives, because on all three levels - grassroots, elections, and policy - there are significant differences between and among progressives. Grand strategy requires a lot of coordination, cooperation, and ultimately integration.

Closely related to this progressive trinity is another trinity, the differentiation of power developed by Steven Lukes, and known as the three faces (or levels, dimensions) of power, which has strongly influenced the strategic work of the Grassroots Policy Project, among others:

1. Decision-making power, i.e. the visible, highly institutionalized and organized governing and ruling power of governments
   
2. Non-decision-making power, referring to agenda-setting and the closely related infrastructural level
3. Ideological power, arguably the most important level, since the ability to influence the self-understanding of people, their ideas, attitudes, interests, and desires of people is the most effective way of exercising power
   

These three levels of power identify another set of key challenges progressives are facing, and that progressive strategy needs to address systematically. The relative weakness of progressives on all three levels is well known. Given scarce resources, including time, attention and energy - and not only money and personnel - a key question in strategy always concerns prioritizing and sequencing, in other words: Where should progressives start, and what aspect should they privilege, necessarily at the expense of others - and which ones? Especially in strategy, there is always a very significant opportunity cost, and in a very fundamental way: Not only that one can spend every dollar only once, but also that one can effectively only pursue one progressive grand strategy, and not two; and which one should it be? In any case, it doesn't exist yet. What we have are fragments, but it is increasingly urgent to begin to put them together. Who is going to do that important work? Someone once told me that the reason that so few progressives concentrate on grand strategy, because hardly anyone considers it to be his or her job - and in a very literal sense: They don't get paid for it. Why isn't there more funding for progressive strategy?

Lukes emphasizes that ideology/worldview is the most important dimension of power; it is also the hardest to change. But the increasing difficulties faced by conservatism provides a good opportunity for progressives to restore their values, principles and priorities in society. Shai rightly emphasizes the crucial connection between politics and culture. In fact, a good starting point might be to slightly paraphrase a famous motto: The political is cultural, and the cultural is political. Indeed, many progressives understand themselves as 'culture workers.' While culture is very important, it is much harder to operationalize it for the purposes of progressive strategy, a challenge Shai clearly addresses.

Indeed, lots of work need to be done in this highly contested terrain. How do you change a culture? What even is culture? One fruitful, and probably rather unfamiliar approach would be to conceive of culture as a form of second-order observation. Inspired by second-order cybernetics, the key idea is to understand culture not only as a structure of cognitive and normative expectations that shape perceptions, communication, and behavior, but also always as a form of observation that not only observes what social actors do, but also observes how they observe, and how the way they observe any phenomenon determines what they observe, how they relate to it (or not) and how they deal with it (or not) - and always with respect to the contingency of any observation, i.e. the fact any observation is a social construct: One can observe and behave that way, but one does not have to do so. In short, it is always selective, depending on one's perspective, if not to say: ideology/worldview, which is where we come full circle! I know, this all sounds terribly abstract, if not irrelevant; but my hope is that this constructivist approach opens up new ways of thinking about and changing culture. Although I do have to admit that I am somewhat skeptical when it comes to changing a whole culture, given how hard it is for progressives to transform a comparatively simple organization such as the Democratic Party into a more progressive organization ...

In the next installment, I will address strategic assessment. I very much hope others will join us in this important conversation.

The Interplay of Movements and Electoral Politics (Panel, Left Forum 2008)

Strange how predictable some things are. The Left Forum, probably the biggest leftist conference in the world, yesterday evening concluded a whole weekend of panels and discussions, and it is not mentioned at all, and not only in the mainstream media, but not even in the leftist media, with this exception, a podcast of a panel on the prospects of a more coherent left. This is very ironic, because coherence is one of the many things not only the left is lacking, but also most of the presentations I attended at the Left Forum.

What is going on here? What a missed opportunity, all the more that it coincided with the Fed bailing out Bear Stearns, which some call 'the ultimate financial scam,' probably with more to come. Most leftists would agree that capitalism is in crisis, and yet the biggest anti-capitalist conference in the world gets no coverage!

From my rather limited experience at the Forum, one of the many problems is the often stark discrepancy between panel descriptions and panel performance, which was certainly the case here. This was the description: 'Focusing on particular movements, the perennial dichotomy between doing electoral work or movement work will be examined, as will what can we learn about the impact of electoral politics on political movements, and the impact of political movements on electoral politics.' Sounds promising, doesn't it? That's what I thought, too.

Alas, the promise was not kept, for hardly any of the issues were addressed, much less systematically. Curiously, none of the attendees seem to mind. Is this lack of professionalism a more general problem on and of the left? In any case, this is really too bad, because these are really important questions, and are being addressed by what in our report, Finding Strategy, we termed 'movement-electoral strategies,' which try to articulate these two components. Perhaps most well known is one variant of this type of strategy, the inside-outside strategy, especially as practiced by Progressive Democrats of America.

Dorian Warren, political scientist at Columbia University, said that Frances Fox Piven had asked him to talk about 'Electoral/movement dynamics in the labor movement,' adding that she would have been much better on this topic. He then proceeded to talk primarily about the perennial question of why an influential labor party never emerged in the US, and in very general terms. Potential 'solutions' to this problem include reforming the electoral system to make third parties viable, focusing on the local rather than the national level, and promoting municipal socialism. Unfortunately, as generations of political scientists have conclusively demonstrated for decades, the prospects for creating viable third parties are very close to zero. As Domhoff and many others have suggested, it is strategically much more effective to concentrate on transforming the Democratic Party into a more progressive organization by forming left-liberal alliances.

Howard Hawkins, Teamster, and former candidate of the Green Party in New York, and editor of Independent Politics: The Green Party Strategy Debate (2006), emphasized how important it was to build an autonomous left party. He concluded: 'Basically, we have to build a vast party of the left.' This sentiment seems to be widely shared at the Forum in general.

This is remarkable: After more than a century of failure, many leftists still pursue this chimera. This leads to an important question: How long do strategies have to fail before they are being abandoned in favor of more realistic ones? Apparently, for all too many, a century of failure is not enough. What a terrible waste of precious resources, and what a huge opportunity cost. Just imagine what could have been achieved instead. This is a key strategic insight: Strategy is as much - or perhaps even more - about what what you don't do rather than about what you do. There are still way too many losing strategies being pursued on the left. It is high time to abandon them.

Ron Scott, member of the Detroit Black Panther Party and a TV producer, primarily talked about the importance of building long-term personal relationships in building a movement. The other two panelists did not show up.

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.

It's the Emotion, Stupid!?

Will Drew Westen succeed George Lakoff as the new "guru" of the Democratic Party or is it just another unfortunate case of confusing tactics with strategy? Now that Lakoff supposedly has taught all Democrats how to properly "frame" issues, is it time now for them to learn how to talk more emotionally and passionately about issues as a new strategy and not just as a different way of talking about issues, as USA Today put it rather bluntly (see below)?

Drew Westen's new book, published in late June, The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation, is getting a lot of attention these days; some even hail it as some sort of panacea for Democrats. However, there are also some important criticisms.

Iterestingly, the original subtitle apparently was meant to be "How People Vote, and How to Change Their Minds," which of course sounds much less grandiose, if not to say dramatic, than the subtitle that was eventually chosen. Perhaps this illustrates the very message of the book, to use more emotionally appealing language. But perhaps the original subtitle more precisely expresses its purpose.

Westen is a psychologist at Emory, a guest blogger at HuffPost, and the founder of Westen Strategies, a consulting firm with the motto "Persuasion is about Networks and Narratives."

This motto is also the main thesis of his book. Essentially, Westen claims, Democrats have operated for too long with the wrong theory of mind. According to Westen, the mind is not disapassionate but passionate. Voters are primarily driven by emotions, and Democrats need to adjust their rhetoric accordingly in order to win elections. The brain is a highly complex network of associations, and Democrats have to articulate the kinds of narratives that most effectively activate those networks that get them elected. Democrats need to learn how to use a new language, one that is less laden with arguments, stats and facts, and instead filled with more emotion and passion. In short, Democrats have to become less intellectual and more passionate in their public rhetoric, especially on the campaign trail.

There are some rave reviews of Westen's book out there, with no shortage of superlatives. Some even suggest that all Democrats have to do is to read and act on this book, and the country will be theirs. See, this is how easy (electoral) strategy has become. So what's all the debate about? Just read the book and you are all set:

This is the most interesting, informative book on politics I've read in many years. - Bill Clinton

In 2008 we will win the presidency if our candidate reads and acts on this book. - Howard Dean

The Political Brain is the most illuminating book on contemporary American politics I've ever (my emphases) read. By explaining how voters actually process information, Drew Westen lays bare the connection between political technique, political conviction, and the Democrats' habit of bungling winnable elections. If every leading Democratic politician reads this book, we could have a decent America back. - Robert Kuttner

Praising the journal he writes for, Ezra Klein of the The American Propect says that Westen was "largely discovered" by Kuttner, who according to USA Today, also introduced him to key Democrats. Moreover, as Klein points out, it was the Prospect that first popularized Westen's work.

According to an article in USA Today, whose title summarizes Westen's book rather nicely, "Democrats get advice on how to talk about issues," Westen is also working with the progressive think tank, Third Way (see previous post), on a "strategy memo" (my emphasis), to get candidates to focus less on what they are saying and more on how voters understand what they are saying.

This is very similar to the main recommendation in Frank Luntz's new book, "Words That Work: It's Not What You Say, It's What People Hear." Luntz, a communications "strategist," has been a longtime advisor of Newt Gingrich and other Republicans.

I highlight how the term "strategy" is used because I find it problematic. In very widespread usage, certainly in mainstream media and political discourse, it is consistently confused with tactics. This is not only a matter of semantics. The fact that not even this most basic distinction is made reflects the rather mediocre state of strategic political reflection, especially when compared with much more advanced strategic thinking in military or business affairs. This fundamental problem is compounded when one takes the interdependence, divergence and variation of means and ends into consideration.

In any case, so if Westen's insights and recommendations are of such crucial importance for Demcrats, how come no less a commentator than Kevin Drum, in one of the earliest reviews of the book, formulates what seems to be a rather devastating critique of Westen's book that - if correct - would severely limit its applicability:

The problem is that his made-up speeches are practically parodies. They're so insanely belligerent that no politician in his right mind would give them. (my emphasis) Even the wingiest of the wingnuts doing their late-night CSPAN schticks don't give speeches as aggressive as Westen's.

So, is that the case? Is Westen going too far? Is the rhetoric he recommends excessively emotional, to the point of making it impractical? If so, would that really be a problem? Isn't there much more that Democrats need to do in order to not only win elections, but make policies genuinely and lastingly - and I would be tempted to say: progressively - more progressive? After all, according to many progressives, the realization of the Clinton/Gore slogan, "It's the Economy, Stupid!," did not go far enough. How far will and can the new slogan go, "It's the Emotion, Stupid!"?

For the answer to that question depends on where you want to go, not only on how to get there. Strategy asks, are we doing the right things? Tactics only asks, are we doing things right? Again, as we find so often in these pages, how you get there depends on where you want to go. In other words, strategies vary according to ultimate objectives, and these continue to diverge between and among progressives and Democrats. How far can "we" go, with or without Westen?

Is the 2008 Presidential Election a Great Opportunity for "Progressives"?

In its latest editorial, Get In It to Win It, The Nation suggests that because of its "volatility" the 2008 election offers

perhaps the best opportunity in a generation to nominate a genuinely progressive candidate - a candidate who can win next November.

And that's precisely the crux of the matter: A "genuinely progressive candidate ... who can win." In the US of 2007, isn't this necessarily an oxymoron? Much of this of course depends on how you define "progressive." I have addressed this question in a previous post, Who is Progressive? For a more recent and more extensive discussion, see What does it mean to be "progressive"? at TPMCafe.

Just to underline the main point: Who is a "genuine progressive" and electable at the same time? For example, many believe that people like Dennis Kucinich and Ralph Nader are genuine progressives; yet few think it very likely that they could ever get elected. In fact, some think that their campaigns are counterproductive, because they take precious resources and votes away from better-placed candidates.

Likewise, many progressives don't consider Hillary Clinton to be really progressive, and some doubt whether Obama really is, all the more since his platform is not very well defined yet. (For a series of probing questions concerning Obama, see David Sirota's post from today). Yet for the past thirty-some years, whoever raised the most money was eventually nominated to run. Depending on where you stand, this is either a huge problem for "progressives" or not a problem at all.

Since hardly anyone dares to call him-/herself liberal anymore, almost everybody on the left is a "progressive" now. The problem remains that this includes a whole spectrum of "progressives," ranging from rather conservative centrists to pretty hardcore leftists, with very different and ultimately irreconcilable agendas. Since strategy is primarily goal-driven, and since "progressive" goals diverge so significantly, there necessarily have to be painful trade-offs when it comes to uniting behind a candidate and an agenda. There is no easy way out of these strategic dilemmas.

The Nation editorial further opines:

The point is not to organize for a particular contender but rather to assure that whoever wins is accountable to our stances against the Iraq War and for restoration of civil liberties, a robust response to global warming and universal healthcare.

Yes, but this is one of the key questions: How can progressives effectively keep candidates accountable to a progressive agenda once they are in office? One would think that the fact that they were elected with their support would help. It would help even more if they were "one of them," so to speak. Many had hoped that this would be the case of Deval Patrick in Massachusetts, only to be rather disappointed once he assumed office. Could that happen with Obama on a national scale? How deep does his experience as a community organizer in Chicago reach, of which he claims that it was the best education he has ever received (including Harvard Law School). Or is this an irrelevant question?

Finally, The Nation appears to advocate for what we call a "movement-electoral strategy" in our survey (pdf) of progressive strategy, which includes Democracy for America and Progressive Democrats of America:

The progressive voice on these issues will gain traction only if MoveOn.org, Democracy for America and Progressive Democrats of America, as well as unions, environmental groups and other issue-focused organizations, rapidly expand into a cohesive movement. New technologies make it easier than ever to organize voter lists and to communicate with voters about the candidates and the evolving dynamics of the race. In partnership with innovative state-based organizations, MoveOn.org, unions and other national groups should prepare interventions throughout the process. Such interventions are essential.

Interestingly, Dan Berger also identifies the beginning of a "mass movement" from his experience at the first US Social Forum. Yet if you compare the agenda of the Forum with those of the leading "progressive" candidates, you can measure the distance that separates very different understandings of what it means to be "progressive."

Very appropriately, the motto of the Forum is "Another World is Possible. Another US is necessary." But how do make the necessary possible, when the leading candidate is Hillary Clinton? Though it is hard for some progressive to accept, politics, it seems, stubbornly if not necessarily, remains the art of the possible.

And please don't forget to be "realistic" when it comes to political strategy.

The Peace Movement can only win with a strategy: a comment on Wittner's "How the Peace Movement Can Win"

In April 2007 Foreign Policy in Focus published an essay by Lawrence S. Wittner called How the Peace Movement Can Win. In May Foreign Policy in Focus published responses by eleven peace activists and scholars.

Lawrence Wittner and Foreign Policy In Focus have begun an important discussion about peace movement strategy and institutional structures. We really can't expect to have an effective peace politics in the US unless it is guided by a widely shared strategy and the construction of organizations/institutions capable of carrying out that strategy...especially when the opposition is so politically powerful and artful.

The peace movement is made up of many disparate tendencies and so the road to a common strategy will be very difficult. Many of the peace movement tendencies don't share common goals and objectives which is the starting point of strategic analysis: how do we get from this undesirable place to a desired place?

None the less, there is probably a significant sub-set of the peace movement that would agree that one objective should be to contend effectively in the arena of national security policy. If that is the case, nothing short of a serious long-term strategy will do. The forces in opposition to peace politics are well organized and have thousands of professionals employed to advance their cause. If this part of the peace movement proceeds without strategic coordination it will be defeated at almost every turn.

Although Peace Action may be the largest membership-based peace group in the US, it is not structured to lead a strategic challenge to the national security establishment...or to even develop a strategy. Peace Action has an organizational model suitable to running campaigns around selected issues. To the extent it has a democratic process it is limited to its active members.

Peace Action could, and probably should, play a role in developing an effective peace politics strategy. It could join with other organizations in convening a broad and diverse group of progressive leaders (activists, scholars, and even a few trusted politicians) to begin the process of strategic development with the goal of changing US foreign and military policy.

Such a strategy will probably take years to develop and will be implemented over decades; and the sooner it begins the better, especially for the victims-yet-to-be of the current policies.

Charles Knight