Missing the Movement

by Michael Walzner

Enclosed are a few pertinent excerpts from a much larger essay, which can be accessed here.

I have never found the pendulum metaphor particularly useful, since pendulums swing as far to the right as to the left, and politics is obviously not like that. We have had over 30 years in which all the momentum has been on the right, and the leftward swing of the 1960s has been more than equaled. Politically and ideologically, the shift has been very great; the whole country has moved rightward; every argument starts from a different place than it did 30 or 50 years ago. On a whole range of issues, it is extraordinarily difficult to make any headway: on the state’s obligation to provide health care (without the mediation of profit-seeking insurance companies), on the importance of unions, on a decent environmental policy (and a decent regard for the wellbeing of future generations), and even, in the midst of the recession, on the importance of job creation. November 2008 may have been the beginning of a reversal, the pendulum swinging leftward again. Maybe. But it looks right now like a very weak swing.

What happened to that advantage? I think we all know. Starting with the antiwar movement of the ’60s, the left constituency divided in a pretty radical way: on one side, the liberal, secular, well-educated cosmopolitans and on the other side, the religious, socially conservative, working-class patriots. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama managed in different ways to bring these two groups together, at least to some extent, but only as an electoral coalition, not as a cohesive political force able to mobilize its members between elections. Is cohesion and mobilization even possible today? If not, we are likely to have more presidents like Clinton and Obama, who can win elections but cannot enact anything more than a highly compromised version of their own agenda–which is not, in any case, a strong left agenda.

This is an incrementalist time, and the crucial thing is to get the increments right. The economic crisis and the two wars that Obama inherited make this difficult for our embattled president–and the fierceness of the opposition, which I don’t think he expected, makes things even harder. Obama certainly believed everything he said about reconciliation; he thought that he could at least take the edge off the bitter partisanship of Washington politics. Obviously he hasn’t been able to do that, and now every step forward, including the small steps, will require a bloody fight. Meanwhile, the costs of the stimulus and of the wars leave the President very little money for social experiments. He has to move forward with health care and the environment and education even if he can only move slowly, much more slowly than he hoped. This is one form of incrementalism, and what is important is that each move open the way for further moves–no dead ends!