That’s key: political economy. And you use the word "egalitarian.” That’s sort of what’s completely missing today. All of these victories on these other fronts, largely matters of identity politics, and where is the egalitarian left?

Right, and my friend Walter Michaels has made this point very eloquently over and over again . . .  that the problem with a notion of equality or social justice that’s rooted in the perspectives of multiculturalism and diversity is that from those perspectives you can have a society that’s perfectly just if less than 1 percent of the population controls 95 percent of the stuff, so long as that one percent is half women and 12 percent black, and 12 percent Latino and whatever the appropriate numbers are gay. Now that’s a problem.

Do you remember those wealth-management ads in the 1990s that said "Money: it’s just not what it used to be,”and it would have a black-and-white photograph of rich white people, rich white men, from a long time ago. And then they would have a photograph of what the rich look like now and it’s what you just described.

No. I didn’t see that. But, yeah, it’s perfect. I wish I had. It would be a nice book jacket. Yeah, I think where we are now is, from one perspective, the result of either 30 or 60-plus years, depending on how you want to count it, of a left that has been able to take only what the other side would make available . . . would permit them to take. And what that’s meant is that our political strategies…I’m not saying this to fault activists; you can only do what you can do, but the political strategies and understandings that have constituted the Left have come increasingly to accommodate with neoliberalism. And the only place that that’s a conspicuous problem is in the labor movement because that’s the one interest group that basically can’t be accommodated to neoliberal economic policy.

Interesting. So the other movements that make up the historical Left have prospered…

Right. Well that’s true by some standard. Like in black politics, for instance, the subtle shift from a notion of equality that’s anchored in the political economy to a notion of equality that tends to a norm of parity has been a really important shift. And when we look around now at academics and others who plead the case for racial justice–Merlin Chowkwanyun and I did an article on this in the 2012 Socialist Register, a challenge to the racial disparity discourse. The language through which briefs for racial justice are crafted at this point are much more likely—I mean, vastly more likely—to point to the problem as a racial disparity instead of inequality. And that might sound…

I don’t get the difference…

I was going to say, it might sound like a pedantic distinction. But the notion of disparity as the metric of racial justice means that blacks should be represented roughly in their percentage of the population in the distribution of goods and bads in the society. So you can have 15 percent unemployment, but if blacks are only 12 percent of the 15 percent that are unemployed basically…

Then it’s OK?

Yeah. And while no one actually says that would be okay, the way in which the problem is posed leaves that implication and deflects discussion away from the underlying structural problems in the political economy that put anyone in the exploited or oppressed position. I just saw an article in Labor Notes a month or so ago about how  Kellogg’s is jerking workers around in a plant in Memphis. And the slant of the Labor Notes article is that the moves that the company is making disproportionately hurt black workers. The logic of that argument, that type of argument is, in effect, that we can understand the costs of economic restructuring or whatever, but they need to be borne on an equitable basis. Because it was Labor Notes, I know that’s not the intent or the perspective of the magazine or presumably the author, but that just makes the trope stand out even more.

Yeah, you hear that all the time.

Right, and my argument is: well, let’s back up.

Maybe the whole project of economic restructuring should be called into question.

And the funny thing about it when you think about it, Tom, is that if you’re concerned with the conditions of black Americans, most black people are working people. One might say even disproportionately. And what improves the condition of the working class is going to improve the condition of more black people than the disparity focus would. That’s not to say it’s either/or. But the fact is we’ve largely dropped the one in favor of the other. You can see the same thing in the women’s movement. I made this point in the article. It wasn’t that long ago when the political agenda of the women’s movement included stuff like comparable worth and universal child and elder care. And right now, attention to that stuff is shriveled. The defense of reproductive rights is a constant, of course. But the political-economic program that gets touted by the women’s movement is directed toward the glass ceiling and the first woman president. Stuff like that.

I was thinking of Sheryl Sandberg.

Right. She is the Alexandra Kollontai of our moment.

Who?

Or the Clara Zetkin. The radical Bolshevik theorist who was also a feminist. I guess I should say that Sandberg is the Alexandra Kollontai of the bourgeoisie at this point.

Wow. That is a tough metaphor.

Sorry (laughs).

You use this word "electoralitis”to describe what’s happened to the left.

Well, it’s a bizarre one, man. I wrote a progressive column on this 20 years ago or close to it. And it just seemed somewhere in the mid-’90s almost like I didn’t set my alarm one night and woke up and the rules of being on the left had changed. Everyone was focused on electoral politics. That’s a phenomenon that’s like cause and symptom. It’s certainly a symptom of not having any other kind of traction in the social-movement world as a left. And once again, I acknowledge there are all kinds of people out there doing all kinds of good stuff. Who are trying to make people’s lives better. And to the limited ways it’s possible to succeed, succeeding. But there is not a left social movement that’s got any capacity to do anything. That has any institutional capacity. And most of all, that has any capacity to alter the terms of political debate at the national level, or for that matter even the local level.

So in the absence of that, what can you do? Well, voting has come to seem more important as a form of political practice. We’ve lost the capacity to do anything else. And when you think about it now we’ve got at least a generation of people who never had any experience with any other kind of politics.

You’re talking to one of those people. What other kinds of politics is there than voting? There’s protesting, I suppose…

Well, actually I think protesting is overrated. In fact, I think protesting was always kind of overrated in the sense that it’s not so much the protest that produced the change; it’s the movement that produces the capacity for the protest to be effective. That’s the source of the change.

So it goes back to the movement?

Yeah. Yeah. But I would say—and a bunch of us have been saying for a while—that I think it’s much more useful . . . to look at elections as vehicles for consolidating and expressing power that’s been created on the field of social-movement organizing around issues. Ultimately, mass mobilization around issues that connect with concerns that are broadly shared among the mass of people that live in the country—those of us who are expected to get up and go to work every day. And that’s how the nature of the debate changes.

Here’s a factoid: a Roper poll a month before the 1944 presidential election found that 68 percent of respondents said that they would not favor a political and economic system no matter what it was called that didn’t pivot off of a fundamental right to a job, that didn’t rest on the fundamental premise that everyone in a society who is willing and able to work should have a right to a job.

Sixty-four percent?

Sixty-eight percent. That’s a month before the 1944 presidential election.

What ever happened to that view?

Well, the other side won. There’s an interesting literature on the streams of the defeat. The public opinion industry was mobilized in the support of selling the gospel of free enterprise, which itself was only invented in the late 1930s. The term wasn’t even around before then. But there is a steady mobilization of bias, as political scientist E. E. Schattschneider used to call it, against left ideas.

I wonder if you did a poll today what would happen?

Yeah, I wonder. The numbers might be higher than one might think. What full employment meant then in terms of the full-employment bill that passed the Senate and was defeated in the House…

You’re not talking about Humphrey–Hawkins are you?

No, no. I’m talking about the full employment bill of 1945 that went down, despite passing the Senate – so it wasn’t a gimmick bill — that would have mandated that the federal government take action, both in public spending and public works job creation when unemployment crossed the 3 percent threshold with the goal of moving the full employment threshold over a decade to 2 percent. By the Kennedy Administration the full-employment bill became four percent with fingers crossed. Now, I understand it’s 6 percent.

By that metric we’re almost there!

(laughs)

The problem is we’ve given up on movement building for elections. But not just elections, elections between the two parties. This was driven home for me most emphatically after the 2000 election, when lots of people voted for Ralph Nader, and here Al Gore loses. Theoretically, the people who voted for Nader, if they had played by the rules of the two-party system, Al Gore would have won. This frightened a lot of people.

Well, there’s a lot of crap going on there, too. And I’ll come clean. I voted for Nader in 2000 partly because I lived in Connecticut and it wasn’t a big choice because I knew the Democrat was going to take the state anyway. But partly also because I had lived in Connecticut in the ’80s and I had a track record to maintain of not ever voting for Joe Lieberman for anything.

But I was struck, too by the incredible vitriol that the Dems directed at Nader and anyone who supported Nader after that defeat. And it was a defeat that Gore wouldn’t even fight against either, which they tend to forget. My response to them was, the vitriol was a signal that they were looking for a scapegoat because their flawed candidate couldn’t even carry his home state. I mean, if he could have carried his home state he would have won the presidency. But I always said to them the best explanation of the defeat in 2000 came from a 1970s R&B singer named Ann Peebles with a song called "I Didn’t Take Your Man, You Gave Him To Me.”

The Nader thing. The vitriol of the reaction was striking to me because it communicated that the Democrats felt entitled to every left-of-center vote, but that they didn’t have to do anything to get it. They didn’t have to appeal at all. And distaste for Lieberman notwithstanding, I would have voted for Gore if he wouldn’t have run such a right wing campaign. That’s part of it. And this goes back to Clinton’s first campaign too. I worked in the short-lived [Tom] Harkin campaign and the word we were getting in that campaign from people in the South in particular was that Clinton’s people were coming through and saying, "Our guy’s going to win the election so you better get on board if you want any consideration. And don’t ask for anything because if you ask for anything we probably aren’t going to give you any access.”And that’s pretty ugly. And that’s the way they can be. And I think that Clintonism basically polished off the purge of the left wing of the Democratic party.

So it was a success in that regard.

Yes it was. It was an utter success in that regard. But it’s the cycle though, right? So there’s nothing to do at election time except vote for the Democrat because the Republican is almost invariably going to be worse and despite the Third Party votes I’ve cast in my life, that’s no response to anything. And that speaks to another problem that’s an element of the electoralitis within the left and that’s that the same thing happens every four years. Around this time you begin to look around and see how the Democratic presidential field is shaping up. Then one strain of lefties will say, "God, Hillary Clinton? This looks terrible. We need to find a progressive candidate.” So now there’s talk about an Elizabeth Warren of the Democrats that’s supposed to an alternative to the corporatist Clinton wing, and there’s even talk of Bernie Sanders running. Well, at that point, it’s too late. You can’t build a base for a candidacy in a year or two years or even four years. The only way to get candidates worth having is to build the social force that will create candidates worth having.

So it comes back to movements again.

Yeah. It comes back to movements all the time really.

The two-party system is so frustrating for someone like me. I often wonder why the Republicans don’t ever make a play for disaffected Democrats. They certainly could have in 2012 and they had almost no interest in that.

Well, no. There are a couple things going on. One of them is…I think the capture by the Tea Party tale is overstated. It’s true that that element has some—a disproportionate—impact in the primaries, and I may be wrong about this, but I’m still hard pressed to think that there is anything truly organic in the Tea Party movement that wasn’t already the sort of Birchite nut cases on the right flank. And now they’ve been fueled by the most cynical kind of right-wing money.

But Republicans, why don’t they play those guys the way Clinton and company played the Left?

Well, they did with Romney and McCain. They get their candidates. I remember back in 1996 when Pat Buchanan won in New Hampshire and he came out of there with a big bounce and was moving down to South Carolina next which is where his real base was. His main bank roller was a mill operator down there named Milliken. So I was afraid enough to begin to wonder what I was going to do if he won the presidency. Either head north or head south, across the border. But what’s fascinating was that the Moral Majority pulled the rug out from under him in South Carolina. The holy rollers backed [Bob] Dole. And that’s where the field capacity was in South Carolina, among the holy rollers. And you’d wonder, well, why would they do that, right? Partly, it’s because they made the rational calculation that the interests that the elites in the right wing with populist tendencies are fundamentally connected with right wing corporate and financial sector interests.

And they want the presidency. They’re not fooling around.

Exactly. And they figured that in strategic terms they’d be better served by getting behind Dole and helping to deliver him the nomination than by going down in flames with their version of Henry Wallace, I guess. It’s interesting in that regard too that year when they had the big jamboree they had down in Dallas. I think it was Jerry Falwell. I often get him and Pat Robertson confused. But he said that the two things God was most interested in that year were cutting capital gains taxes and I think the other may have been the estate tax.

(Laughs) That’s what God wants them to do…

Make it plain, why don’t you. So in effect, and I think this gets to the point I was making in the article, that the choice is between two neoliberal parties, one of which distinguishes itself by being actively in favor of multiculturalism and diversity and the other of which distinguishes itself as being actively opposed to multiculturalism and diversity. But on 80 percent of the issues on which 80 percent of the population is concerned 80 percent of the time there is no real difference between them.

When people say things like that they often run into trouble. Because, you look at something like Fox News, and they talk about Obama as if he were a socialist or a communist or a dictator. And as you point out in your article, Obama’s entire career has been triangulation, conciliation, and compromise — and yet they look at him and see red.

Well, yeah, kind of. This gets into another issue. In a way, I think their hysteria about Obama being a communist or a socialist is in a funny way a backhanded acknowledgment of the success of the Civil Rights movement. Because they can’t say he’s a n—– in the White House. Right? And I don’t even necessarily think that people are being consciously disingenuous about it. I think they sell…

So instead they say, there’s a communist in the White House. Someone actually had a song that they would sing at these Tea Party rallies, "There’s a Communist in the White House.”

I’ll tell you, it’s that Birchite psychosis. This is the social base of fascism, really, is what they are.

They don’t have the street gangs.

No, thank God. Not yet anyway. And I guess that’s partly because a lot of them are pensioners.

They’ll get you with their golf carts.

But I still think there’s a lot of astro-turf there. I go back to the founding moment of the Tea Party. And I’ve watched this clip a number of time since then. That day that Rick Santelli…

I’ve written about that at great length.

Oh good, I need to read that because when I watched it after the founding moment it seemed pretty clear to me—I mean, you can tell me if I’m wrong—that the co-host knew what was coming. That this was not a spontaneous rant.

It might have been planned, I dunno. You know what got me about it, is that it was on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade. And you think about Populist movements, like my favorite one from the 1890s, where the Chicago Board of Trade was the pit of evil. And here’s a guy launching his populist movement from that same spot. Remember, he’s not yelling at the traders, he’s not chastising the traders, he’s speaking on their behalf. What kind of populist movement is that? It’s like they were trying to reverse the fundamental symbolism (of populism). Because that’s what the Tea Party movement is: it takes all of the classic populist symbolism and reverses it.

Right. That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. Yeah.

Here we are in hard times, second only to the Great Depression itself and what are the demanding? An end to the welfare state. Destroy our unions.

Right. That’s exactly right. And it says something about the extent to which content has been drained out of our politics too.

The symbolism is quite persuasive to some people.

Sure. Well yeah because there’s nothing else. The Democrats don’t have an alternative to offer. Right? I mean, that’s the problem. My son said in ’04 that either, in the industrial Midwest in particular, either Kerry would talk about NAFTA and trade or Bush would talk about gay marriage. And that’s what happened. And I recall…

Now the shoe’s on the other foot.

It sure is. Which is kind of funny. And frankly, it also says something about how successful an egalitarian—a reasonable egalitarian program—can be if it doesn’t cost anybody anything. If it doesn’t raise the backs of upper-class economic interests.

You’ve got to explain that a little more.

Well, in not much more than a decade, gayness has gone from being if not completely stigmatized, certainly not normalized. . . .

Yeah, you’re right. Ten years ago, remember, those ballot initiatives all over the country in the election of ’04 to outlaw gay marriage and it was instrumental to winning Bush’s reelection.

That’s right. And here we are like a decade later and that’s. . . .

Going the other direction now. But the symbolism of this is all very interesting. In your Harper’s article you talk about Obama as a symbol, that he’s a cipher. I think you’re quoting someone…

I think I’m quoting Matt Taibbi I believe, but I’ll take it. I’ll take credit for it also. Because he is. He’s always been a cipher. You know that.

Obama’s a highly intelligent man. You’ve met him.

Yes.

Maybe he’s a cipher in the sense that he’s a symbol. But he’s not a cipher of a human.

I don’t know. Look, I’ve taught a bunch of versions of him.

You mean you’ve had people like him as students?

Yeah. So his cohort in the Ivy League. His style. There’s superficial polish or there’s a polish that may go down to the core. I don’t know. A performance of a judicious intellectuality. A capacity to show an ability to understand and empathize with multiple sides of an argument. Obama has described himself in that way himself in one or maybe both of his books and elsewhere. He’s said that he has this knack for encouraging people to see a better world for themselves through him.

Yeah, he’s like a blank slate.

Right. Which in a less charitable moment you might say is like a sociopath.

Come on now!

I’m not saying that. But I’m just saying. I’m not saying he’s a sociopath but…

That (blank slate personality) seems like the classic … the kind of people who lead the Democratic Party. Only he’s got considerably more charisma than most of them.

He’s better at it than most. And this is another point that I make. That any public figure, especially a politician or a figure in a movement, is going to be like a hologram that’s created by the array of forces that he or she feels the need to respond to. That’s how it was that we got more out of Richard Nixon from the left than we’ve gotten from either Clinton or Obama.

That’s a provocative point right there.

Not that he liked us any more, to put it bluntly.

Yeah, he said terrible things. Right? Kent State, all that…

Right, but the labor movement and what are now called the social movements of the 60s had enough traction within the society that, as part of his understanding of who he was as someone that had to govern the country, was that he had to take them into account in some way. Clinton, as he pointed out, felt our pain, except for maybe Ricky Ray Rector. And when he dreamt of a world he would like to see in his earnest moments I’m sure it was closer to the world that you and I and others like us would yearn to see, than anything that Nixon ever wanted. But he screwed us a lot more. And the same with Obama.

That’s interesting. If Nixon had to take the left into account and Clinton didn’t, that’s very interesting.

Well, in fact, I go a step further about Clinton. He not only didn’t have to take the left into account, his presidency was in good measure about making that clear to the left.

Making it clear to the left that they were of no importance or significance?

That’s right. That they were cue-takers, and cue-takers only. NAFTA. Welfare reform. The effective elimination of the federal government’s commitment to provide affordable housing for the poor.

Yeah. There’s a long list: deregulated the airwaves, deregulated banking…

I’ve got the photo of him signing the repeal of Glass-Steagall.

With Larry Summers at his elbow I believe.

GO TO PART  2