Michael Steinberg writes

"The Liberal Mirage:
(A Pre-Election Day Rant)"
Michael Steinberg

"By most standards the Bush Presidency has been a humiliating failure. There is one group, though, that has done very well, and it's not the corporate elite. It's American liberals.

Bush has done wonders for their self-esteem. One can almost hear the happy buzz on any liberal blog. All those new voters, the 527 groups, the ads: liberalism is BACK! Not only that: the whole world is cheering them on. In sober moments they can be made to admit that John Kerry was just about their last choice as a Democratic nominee. He is, after all, a man who took his one claim to moral authority and repeatedly trashed it on national television. But wait until the election is over, they assure us. A revitalized liberal movement will take back the ground it's lost since—well, since the Nixon years ended.
But as our school system demonstrates every day, high self-esteem doesn't always translate into success. The incredible ineptness of the Democratic Party in countering the pseudo-fascist right is more than a coincidence and more than an institutional failure on the part of American liberalism. It comes about because liberals are unable to see the secular decline of American economic and political hegemony and the neoliberal reaction to that decline.

The most telling aspect of liberal blindness is that the Republicans, while apparently delusional, in fact have a keener appreciation of these facts than do the Democrats. It's really the liberals who are in denial. The right understands that there's a crisis, and they are frantically beating on any head they can find in the hopes of warding it off. The liberals just don't see that there's a crisis at all.
 
All American liberals pine for the sixties. That golden age of American liberalism and its bipartisan coalition--in support of the welfare state, government-aided health care for the poor and elderly, environmental protection, affirmative action and jobs programs for African Americans and other groups historically victimized by racism, and more--were made possible by the dominant position in the world economy that the United States had grabbed after World War Two and the thirty years of economic growth that followed. There was lots of money around--never mind who paid for it in the Third World--and it was to everyone's advantage to spend some of it to ensure social peace. Liberals did double duty. They advocated, with a whole heart, for the victimized. At the same time they provided invaluable ideological cover for the ruling class and the capitalist system, reframing the issues from exploitation to distribution.
 
We were living, lucky us, in an age of affluence--something that most Americans attributed to technological advances rather than to the fortuitous position the United States held in the global economic system. (Was this perhaps an exorcism of the dread of technology that had found its metaphor in Hiroshima?) Wealth was the natural state of a developed industrial economy, and the great liberal crusade was to open up equal opportunities for sharing in that wealth.
 
As more and more people are noticing now, the party's over. American power peaked in the early years of the Vietnam War and by the oil crisis of 1973 the most far-seeing capitalists were already moving their money into financial speculation. The "Reagan Boom" of the '80s was entirely based on speculative ventures--takeovers, arbitrage, currency swaps and so on. It could not conceal the decline in production and the long-term contraction of the American, and to a large extent the world, economy.
 
Starting at the same time and accelerating once quick killings in finance became less likely, the neoliberal reaction to the shrinking capitalist pie has removed the preconditions of the bipartisanship of the 1960s. From a strictly cost-benefit perspective it's cheaper to delude or suppress the poor than to buy them off. The public relations benefits of noblesse oblige aren't worth it any longer.
 
In the cold new world liberals have lost their usefulness to the ruling class. More precisely, their services as a smokescreen proved to be too expensive, and so they were downsized along with everyone else. In their place there appeared the modern conservative movement, focused on "cultural issues," as Thomas Frank documents in "What's the Matter With Kansas?"
 
The Rush Limbaughs, Ann Coulters and Dick Cheneys speak directly to the unease and fear of the castoffs of neoliberalism--a category which, let's be honest, includes most of us to one degree or another. In the time-honored tradition of conspiracy theorists they offer up a cabal of wrongdoers as a blatant diversion. Gays, African Americans (the uppity ones, not the ones at church), the liberal media and Hollywood--they're the ones that cause the problems.
 
Liberals go half crazy trying to understand how the right can feel so victimized by groups that either have no real power (gays and Hollywood liberals, for example) or which don't exist at all (the so-called liberal media). And of course from a strictly logical point of view they're right. But they don't see that the partisans of the right feel victimized because they are indeed victimized, and that they have to ascribe that assault on their lives to someone or go nuts themselves. Their error is not the perception of victimization but the scapegoat they blame it on.
 
My analysis here really goes back to C.B. Macpherson's "Democracy in Alberta," which described the closest thing to a fascist state that North America produced, the Social Credit government in Alberta in the 1930s. Macpherson saw the conflict that produced Social Credit as the impasse between the actual class position of the Prairie farmers and shopkeepers--functionally proletarians--and the class position they believed they occupied--independent businessmen. Unable to see the real roots of their economic crisis, they embraced a crackpot economic panacea which quickly assumed a nativist, anti-Semitic and conspiratorial character akin to the European fascisms.
 
For all the delusion being peddled in the Bush campaign, the reality that Bush's appeal draws upon is the insecurity of life subject to the dictates of an ever more brutal capitalism. The apocalyptic tone of the right responds to a genuine if vague awareness of the nature of the times, even though it issues in violence, unprovoked wars, bigotry and other forms of evasion. And the liberals just don't see this. They don't see that anything is deeply wrong, and blithely assume that the only thing we lack to bring back the welfare state is political will. Unfortunately, political will is just as much an illusion as the individual will. There will never be a return to the welfare state because there isn't enough affluence or the promise of future affluence to persuade the wealthy to let some of their wealth go.

   
What liberals have never realized is this: they never had any real power. They were, alas, useful idiots--but for capitalism, not for the real left. In the age of affluence liberals had a starring role in the political drama then in vogue, fighting for the poor in Act One and bringing home a share of the bounty of triumphant capitalism in Act Three. But they have never realized that they were just playing a part. Once the curtain came down on that particular drama they found themselves out of a job. They keep auditioning for the same role, but nobody's casting that part. It's not in the script.
 
It's simply not possible for liberals to grasp the nature of capitalist reality and remain liberals. They are, at heart, the most stalwart defenders of the capitalist system, so much so that whatever horrors they encounter they identify as "abuses" which will be corrected in the fulness of time. But the abuses are the norm; it's the broad prosperity of the 'sixties that was the aberration. That's why the only reasonable prospect is for the right to gain even more power and influence and the liberal left to fade. Liberalism has nowhere to go but down.