‘Glory Days’ is more than just a great song by Bruce Springsteen. The image is of aging men remembering the great days and achievements of their youth, and living in the past, and not facing the routine mediocrity into which their lives have settled. I think this image can give us some insight into the failures of the US Democratic Party in the recent Presidential election, in which Kamala Harris was defeated by Donald Trump.
The great moment of the US left and the Democratic Party was the civil rights movement of the 1950s-1960s, in which there were great steps forward, both legal and cultural, in regard to racial discrimination. And progress against racial discrimination had ramifying effects on discriminations around sex and sexual preference. The work is of course incomplete, but huge strides have been made in the last 70 years or so.
This is partly because the very nature of those discriminations were founded in legal conventions, which are amenable to legal change. Race and sex are also shaped by economic structures of the division of labour and class, and in different ways, given the biologically fundamental nature of the sex difference (biological reproduction) compared to differences posited on socially constructed racial differences.
Meanwhile, class differences stubbornly persist. While the relative advantages and disadvantages of different class fractions (defined by professions, fields of industry, levels of education, etc.) evolves according to economic pressures, the tendency of the capitalist economy to generate ‘winners’ and ‘losers’, is structurally fundamental to the capitalist economy. Investment opportunities and strategies change, and with it the fortunes of average persons rises and falls, as investment flows into and out of various forms of work.
The major process here has been the ‘globalisation’ (scare quotes because it was always global) of the capitalist economies since about the 1970s, weakening the advanced capitalist nation state’s capacity, or at least the political will, to prioritise the interests of their middle classes, much of whom only a generation or two earlier had been among industrial and agrarian working classes. At the same time, capitalist globalisation has contributed to the remarkable rise of China and other ‘BRICS’, further weakening the control of capitalist heartlands over their own economies. The American anxieties in the 1960s and 1970s about the economic rise of Japan turned out to be only a foretaste of what was to come.
The restless evolution of the world capitalist economy involves very deep and diffuse structural processes, and governments, political parties, and intellectuals struggle to get any control over it. Thus, while, considerable advances have been made in regard to race and sex discrimination, substantially improving economic opportunity and conditions for ethnic/racial minorities and women, this process articulates with class evolution that is much more intractable, and shifting.
In this context the left, and many of its representative political parties such as the Democrats in the US, have found it difficult to demonstrate control over these processes of economic and class change, tending to acquiesce to them. Globalisation has served the interests of major economic powers, and driven national strategies of wealth creation. Stock market values skyrocket, despite economic recessions, while middle and working class incomes stagnate or decline. Parties of the left have been able to achieve some ameliorations at the margins, but the overall sense is that they are at the mercy of these economic processes.
This has led to a ‘culture’ on the left, highly influential on the Democrats in the US, of focussing on their glory days, and acting as though the struggles of their ‘youth’, the civil rights movement of the 1960s, is where we still are today. An array of movements around politicised identities of sex, race, and gender are treated as the most important struggles they currently confront. Politics of this form echoes a time when ‘we were great’, and made a difference, so this is what we must keep doing; this is ‘who we are’. But this is also a confession of weakness. It is accompanied by an embarrassed neglect of the much deeper issues of stagnation and alienation among working middle classes, which cuts across race and sex lines, as demonstrated in Trump’s relatively broad support. The Democratic Party will discuss the economy, but in a technocratic way that downplays its importance, as if it were secondary issue in the background. Meanwhile Trump’s Republican Party addresses the matter head on, but often promising unrealistic and even fantastic solutions, as if a strong economy were merely a matter of Presidential will. But at least for a modest majority, this appears to be living in the present, not lost in ones’ glory days. I don’t think the Democratic Party will recoup its losses until it confronts reality, stops living in the past, and makes class politics, and a broad conception of the national interest, central to its agenda.
Uneasy Essays 