Misconceptions of the Left (and What to Do About Them)

 

Months out from the 2024 elections, the punditocracy is still nattering about why the Harris-Walz campaign lost. Most of this consternation relies on the following misconceptions, which have become holy writ on the left, and none of which are true.

There is such a thing as natural solidarity.

Not all Latin-Americans will naturally see their struggles as akin to those of Black Americans, or, especially, those of LGBTQI folks. Likewise for any other minority group, no matter their history of being oppressed. It's not just that the American public is decimated; it's that we're alienated from everyone else individually and between the groups with which we identify. For some, traditional ways of life or systems of belief pose further barriers: a Catholic of Mexican origin is likely to see herself as more aligned with other Catholics than with the queer Colombian kid down the street.

If the left wants to create a movement, build solidarity, raise consciousness, public education must commence.

Oppressed people cannot themselves hold discriminatory attitudes or practice discrimination.

This is a popular misconception on the right as well. Consider, though, that the same Puritans who, deposed from power in England, freely persecuted Quakers in the Massachusetts colony. Latinx folks can hate Black folks who can hate Asian folks. Remember the situation in Koreatown in the aftermath of the Rodney King beating? Seems like nobody on the left does anymore.

If the left wants to create a movement, reconciliation efforts need to happen and trust needs to be actively developed between potential coalition members.

Self-hatred/the acceptance of one's own oppression is impossible.

We woke ones may despise the Uncle Toms of the world or, at least, pity them, but recall that one of them has served on the Supreme Court for over 30 years. One way to get ahead in the world is to work hard; another is to buddy up to those who oppress you, telling them what they want to hear. One of the strongest advocates of bringing back feudalism in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, Firs, was formerly enslaved by it.

Bucking the system can be heroic, and it may lead to progress, maybe even revolution. It also leads to trouble.

A hopeful sign that progress is possible is Cory Booker's historic 25 hour speech on the Senate floor, invoking John Lewis's idea of "good trouble." But we must build the groundwork for it by raising people's awareness of their own self worth and making the movement's goals and means safe, hopeful, and full of opportunity.

Established immigrants will naturally have fellow-feelings for recent immigrants.

The history of the US shows precisely the opposite. Even first-generation immigrants, once they have "made it" here, are notoriously disdainful of those "fresh off the boat." So familiar is this idea that there was even a mainstream sitcom with that title, yet we on the left somehow forget it as soon as the election cycle heats up. It took decades for colonial Englishmen to accept the Germans, for these newly minted "Americans to accept the Irish, for them to accept the Italians, and so on.

If we want to win, we need to revisit and celebrate the immigrant experience, yes, and to remind people of the hardships that brought people here to begin with and the hardships they faced building new lives. Why do you think the rightwing downplays, ignores, or, now, purges these stories from the public discourse?

We need to restore the public image of immigration as heroic, not as scurrilous.

The working class, farmers, and those lower on the income scale automatically understand their situation better than the "educated elites."

You'd have to be stupid or misinformed or both to believe that Donald Trump could magically lower grocery prices or instantly bring American manufacturing jobs back through tariffs or stop the war in Ukraine in 24 hours, yet millions of voting Americans believed exactly that. (Many still do, contrary to the clear evidence before them.) Working class people and farmers live in the same toxic media environment the rest of us live in, and they believe or reject misinformation based on a variety of factors, but because of generations of media programming, the one thing they believe about themselves is the "salt of the Earth" myth, that their judgments are more pure and more accurate because of, not despite, their lack of sophistication. The programming they receive, from AM talk radio, from Fox"News," from the pulpits of their churches and in their Facebook groups, though, is the sophisticated communication of educated people, people who don't have their best interests in mind. Their "commonsense" has been ginned up for them by the rightwing message machine.

It's dead wrong, but when it's all you know, and when it reinforces your own self-image, it starts to seem like the eternal truth.

And so, last of all, the left, if it wants to win, needs to play the long game, just as the right has done, thinking not one or two election cycles out, but decades, centuries, through, as we like to say about the environment, the seventh generation.

We love to hate on Project 2025, but, notably, we on the left don't have one, no playbook that articulates our aims, no "bible" to manifest our vision.

Given all this, it's no surprise that, despite most people agreeing with us on the issues, we continue to lose. But to win, we need to abandon these misconceptions and work hard to build the coalitions necessary for real progress to take place.

"Is Sending" and "Theft" as Trumpist Legerdemain

by Lael Ewy

Because I don’t want OnWords to become only about the ways Donald Trump abuses the language, I’m addressing here some special concerns.

In this case, it’s his use of “is sending” in regards to immigration from Mexico, and “theft” in the case of manufacturing jobs in China.

The president-elect assured us during the campaign that Mexico “is sending” people here in order to rape and sell drugs. This implies that there is some intentional, planned effort on the part of either the Mexican government or some other massive national organization to send people here.

As far as I can tell, unless this program is the world’s best kept secret, that’s poppycock.

People from Mexico risk their lives to come here because economic and social conditions in Mexico are very bad. They come here fleeing the violence created by drug gangs—gangs sustained by the immense appetite for drugs in the US. They come here because Mexico’s class structure prevents them from advancing. They come here because their farming communities have been devastated by cheap commodity exports from the US, thanks to NAFTA.

Nobody is sending anybody anywhere; people are coming here because it’s better to live poor in the US than it is for some people to live at all in Mexico.

In other words, they’re coming here for the same reason immigrants have always come here.

When Mr. Trump says that China is stealing American jobs, that this is unprecedented “job theft,” he is, likewise, simply not telling the truth. China welcomed US jobs, but they were sent here by manufacturers in the United States.

American executives chose to export those jobs, and their companies received nice rises in their stock prices when they did. The executives then used that increase in stock value to justify bonuses for themselves. They used that increase to raise the value of their own stock options.

They did it for the same reasons they have long sought to reduce labor costs. That payroll costs are the highest costs a business faces is axiomatic in American economic thought. Businessmen in this country seek to reduce payroll costs for that reason alone.

The last few decades have also seen US markets “mature” and growth slow. Because publicly traded companies are judged not on profitability but on the continual rise of profitability, American executives chose to show growth by reducing labor costs instead of lowering growth expectations or increasing efficiency or pursuing new markets.

Exporting US jobs also follows a long-term trend: in the ‘60s and ‘70s American companies outsourced manufacturing to Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan. When labor costs rose in those countries, they began to export to South Korea and China. As South Korea and China become more costly, they are moving jobs to India, Cambodia, and Vietnam.

Last, moving jobs overseas accomplished something American executives have sought to do for more than a century: it devastated the power of organized labor. Rather than shooting and killing striking workers as they did in the early 20^th century, rather than negotiating as they did through the middle part of the 20^th century, executives saw the opportunity to do an end-run around unions by sending jobs to a place where the authoritarian government and the massive number of available peasants assured little resistance to low pay and poor working conditions.

If anything was stolen, it was the profit created by US workers, and if it was stolen by anybody, it was stolen by shareholders and the executive class.

Trump’s rhetoric in these cases is dangerous not merely because it grossly misrepresents what’s going on. It’s dangerous because it distracts angry, working Americans by placing the blame for their plight on others who are simply acting in the same way any of us would given their circumstances.

His rhetoric is dangerous because it conflates desperation and opportunism with malice and foments enmity among those whose common interests suggest solidarity.