Alas, we’ve reached the fall. But there’s still plenty of reading to do.
For this edition of the reading list, I’ll continue with the themes of baseball and history. Along with those books, I’ve also got some new sci-fi for you.
Enjoy!
Month: September 2024
In his account of the political rise of Benjamin Netanyahu, Guy Laron lays out a framework we could apply to the politics of many countries.
Laron describes how Netanyahu gradually fused together a coalition between business interests, religious fundamentalists, and disaffected working class people. He did so by using state power to tie these groups together under his leadership. For instance, he used the promise of housing and resources under a settler colonialist regime to tie ultra-Orthodox religious people to his political project.
Israel thereby stands out as but one example of a politics that has degenerated into a rivalry between technocratic liberalism (e.g., the Labor Party in Israel, Labour in the UK, the Socialists in France, and so on) on one hand and a xenophobic far right that occasionally represents the interests of a segment of the working class, on the other. We find many such examples.
But that’s not how things work in at least one country – the United States.
By the end of the 1980s, Reagan Republicans successfully turned ‘liberal’ into a dirty word. In their vision of America, liberals stand for the opposite of wholesome American values. In response, liberals ran away from the word. Those who won public office even dreaded having a photo taken next to the likes of Ted Kennedy.
Those days are long gone. Liberals, at least those who don’t live deep in GOP territory, embrace the term. If anything, more people attack the word ‘liberal’ from the left than from the right.
So, happy ending, right? We can call it a day?
Not exactly.
For some reason, socialists approach the fight over the ‘progressive’ label from the opposite end. As socialists, we keep calling ourselves progressives. We do so though the progressive label doesn’t fit and we’d be better off rejecting it.
Why?
The contemporary left repeatedly tries to solve all the world’s problems through linguistic idealism. It’s one of the more discouraging aspects of left politics today. And almost anyone with organizing experience born before 1985 knows we can’t ‘language’ our way to a socialist world.
In the DSA, for instance, we see repeated appeals to the ‘multiracial working class‘ as a target base. And in activist spaces across the progressive and left worlds, we see pronoun introductions and attempts to get people’s pronouns right as an end in itself, rather than a means to open up further work.
To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with either of these things, in the abstract. We should target a working class across base racial lines. And, of course, we should get people’s pronouns right. These count as very basic background things we should do.
However, the left adopts a bizarre sort of linguistic idealism by treating these things as an end, rather than as a means. We slide into the idea that by getting the language right, we magically also fix the world.
But you don’t build a multiracial working class base just by saying you’re doing it. You build it by getting out into communities, talking with people, and inviting them to join you.
And that’s where most activists just haven’t succeeded.
