The Left's Lost Voice

 

 The contemporary, radical right-wing authoritarians who were behind the rise of the MAGA movement, with their podcasters, 4Chan, AM talk radio, and OAN, have learned more from the activist left of the 1960s and 1970s, with it consciousness raising groups and direct action campaigns, than the current left has managed to retain.

The 1990s saw a massive shift on the left away from the unapologetic activism of the '60s and '70s, which we can see in the Clinton administration's sharp rightward turn in policy and in neoformalist and neoconservative movements in literature and academe. It is out of this milieu that the current crop of establishment Democratic politicians have come. It is this rightward turn and lack of institutional memory that tanked the Harris-Walz campaign in 2024.

The problem is not, as all the pundits say, that the Dems lost the working class; rather, MAGA gained it, and not because the left's message doesn't "resonate" with them. The problem is that the left is not loud enough, forceful enough, brash enough, and unapologetic enough in our messaging. We haven't done the hard work of educating the public that the authoritarian right has done over the last 40 years, a disinformation campaign that has led to literally millions voting against their own interests again and again.

This isn't to say that we don't need to address people's real concerns, but we do need to do it in a way that represents the reality of structural injustice in the present and the promise of a more equitable future. Trade unionists at the turn of the last century knew they had to educate workers in order to build class consciousness, and feminists and other civil rights activists in the mid 20th century knew they had to constantly beat the drum and to work one-on-one in order to overpower the indoctrination of literally millennia of racism, classism, sexism, and homophobia. We need to do the same now

I'm convinced that, rather than having "strongly held beliefs, as the Supreme Court might have it, few Americans have much loyalty to any particular set of beliefs. No one who had a hard time deciding between Trump and Harris could be said to be driven by ideological commitments. Their commitments are to a narrow set of interests, whether those are the so-called "kitchen table" and "pocketbook" issues or single issues that loom large for them for whatever reason (abortion, the border, crypto). To get Americans to see their situations more broadly and more deeply requires a commitment to communicating directly and constantly and with a confidence in one's message that, for those in the nation's soft political midsection, speaks much louder than words with their hard and specific meanings.

After all, if people can believe, without any real evidence, that "the concept of a plan" beats an actual plan, they'll believe the truth, too, if they hear it over and over again in a voice of certitude and determination.