On Building an Ideological Left

requires first and foremost a generalizing theory that encompasses and accounts for the political, social and economic features and characteristics of an era.  Given that in recent times what passes for a left in the US has been utterly bereft of such concepts, we’re probably served best in the immediate circumstance to look at the right to see a current ideological construct in American life.

I think it would be fair to say that the post-60s ideology of the American right has been based on the premise that all in our national life is threatened with the anarchy and chaos of excessive freedom and excessive egalitarianism.  That the forces of liberty and equality that erupted out of the revolution of rising expectations of the postwar boom, the civil rights revolution, and the resistance to the Vietnam War are responsible for the economic decline and social decay that began in the 70s and have proceeded largly uninterrupted since.  That the decline and decay are coterminous with the period in which the right has been successfully advancing its ideology is a little fact that somehow manages to avoid scrutiny.

What the right has been advancing is well-precedented, in the Counterreformation, in the Restoration of the French Monarchy post 1815, in all the counterrevolutionary movements and governments of the 20th century.  Thus all elements of today’s American right point to reinforcing systems of hierarchy and authority, to augment the power of the powerful and to marginalize and suppress the organized expressions of challenge to authority.  In the area of the state, despite the boilerplate rightist rhetoric about “ljimited government” (which is indeed upheld when it comes to limiting the ability of government to interfere with profit maximization), the powers of the authority of the state, and the concentration centralization of the power of the state within one branch, even one man, the Unitar Executive is patent.  Every element of the ability of the state to impose its will and its authority, both domestically and internationally, have been relentlessly increased.  Military budgets that eclipse the spending of the rest of the world combined, vast networks of intelligence and espionage both overseas and in The Homeland (The Homeland itself as an ideological fetish cold warrant its own discussion), law enforcement, the constant expansion of SWAT paramilitarism and repressive apparatus to enforce compliant submission from members of the public, from tasers (what Latin American fascist regimes called electric cattle prods) to highly toxic gases, sound wave trucks, and the impending arrival of large-scale microwave weapons to basically stir-fry dissenters.  Penal codes have been harshened radically for even minor offenses, while simultaneously members of the elite classes, the figures of hierarchy and authority, have been increasingly held to be beyond the reach and penalty of law for even the most heinous offenses.

The same within the economic structure.  Regulations limiting the authority and freedom to act of management and ownership have been eliminated or simply summarily ignored (by administrations of both parties), while simultaneously, the rights and protections of workers and consumers have been legislatively and administratively gutted and leally, politically and socially suppressed. A vast ideological propaganda effort has largely succeeded in convincing working people to identify with the bosses, the figures of authority and hierarchy, in any conflict with their own fellow workers.  

The same ideological tendency toward concentration of power within authority and hierarchy is seen in the rise of the religious right.  The easy-going, quasi-democratic mainline Protestant churches, which emphasized the sense of themselves as a nurturing community are rapidly vanishing from society, while fundamentalist churches under the total sway and command of a authoritarian leader, often with an explicitly militaristic form of organization, have been and continue to rapidly grow.  In particular these churches take the central leadership role in the fight against the “social anarchy and chaos” (undermining of traditional hierarchy) represented by the advancement of women’s rights and gay rights.

Nonetheless, the point is not to get bogged down in any of these details, as none of them individually explain the ideology, except insofar as they represent elements of it.  What’s important is to recognize the cohesive, coherent (in the sense of being internally consistent, not as logical or rational) whole rpresented by this movement as its ideology.

Now the good news is taht for the first time since the 60s there actually is significant intellectual ideological stirring on the left that goes beyond the abstruse academics of Foucault and Lacan, and intersects with the real conditions of those of us on the receiving end of the prevailing conservative counterrevolutionary ideology.  The bad news is that it’s happening mostly in Europe and Latin America, and the hegemonic control hierarchy and authority have established in the US will make it exceedingly difficult for us to engage in promulgating these debates here.  That’s another thing, these new left ideological debates are just that, debates, polemics in the classic sense, there is as yet no decisively dominant discourse.  But that’s good, it allows us the flexibility to see those elements that apply to our circumstances and build on those.

Thanks for this Buhdy, it’s a difficult but a necessary beginning.