Indeed. Indeed. The ’70s, and even to some extent the ’80s, perhaps especially the ’80s, were among other things a moment of contestation within the Democratic party between what would later be understood as the neoliberal wing. You remember these guys…

Sure. The new Democrats—the Democratic Leadership Council.

Them. And the Atari Democrats and that crowd. Clinton, who had been president of the DLC, as had Gore, that administration is what installed them basically.

It’s funny though, now that people look back, younger people—people younger than me…I mean, I barely remember any Democrats other than Clinton myself. The Carter Administration which was not exactly the greatest time in the world. Before that you got Johnson. Vietnam. People look back at the Clinton years and see success.

Yeah, but success by a really shallow standard. Just that he won.

Exactly, he won. That’s right. I live here in Washington now. For people here, that’s it. It’s one or zero and he got one.

Even then, yeah. I’ll accept that he’s a savvy pol and all that, but Kerry, I think, got a higher percentage of the vote losing in ’04 than Clinton got winning. Maybe either time. I know one of them for sure. Because in both cases the smartest move he made was when Ross Perot filed to run. That’s the only standard. But that’s the other thing that’s happened. As the left constituencies have shriveled and have been pushed to the side, the inside-the-beltway types that we know and love set the agenda. I wrote this in a symposium years ago. Rick Perlstein did a symposium in the Boston Review that was later published.

I believe I’ve got a copy of that around here somewhere.

And one of the points I made was that the rise of the political consultants is an expression of the problem because the service that they sell is the alternative to popular electoral mobilization. So of course they have no time for that. They don’t think it’s necessary. They don’t think it’s important. You target this. You target that. But on the other hand…

Exactly. I’m here among them and they, Democrats, don’t think they don’t need to worry about…all the problems you’ve identified sort of making people angry, lose interest. They don’t need to worry about this. They think they have an iron clad coalition behind them. They have this term for it: the Coalition for the Ascendent. I forget what it is. Made up of these groups, and labor is not one of them.

Really?

Generally, who do they mention? Women, minorities, and millennials—meaning young people.

Which is not a group. That’s a demographic category. It’s bullshit, like the other bullshit that they’ve come up with. Remember the National Security Moms?

Yes. When was that? What year was that?

I think that was ’04.

Yeah. And they were going to deliver the election for Karl Rove or something like that?

No, Kerry.

But they’ve got it all figured out. You don’t need movements like what you’re describing. For the Democrats to continue to win you don’t need movements.

That’s right. In fact, you don’t want them.

Well they would only complicate things.

That’s right. And get in the way.

You had so many fascinating passages in this article and I want to unpack them more. You started talking about the left itself, and you say that they careen from this oppressed group to that one, from “one magical or morally pristine constituency or source of agency to another.”You nailed it there. But you need to tell us what you mean. That is fascinating.

Some peasants somewhere. The urban precariat. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers in Florida.

These are all real things though, right?

Well they’re real, but the problem is the fantasy of the spark. That there’s something about the purity of these oppressed people that has the power to condense the mass uprising. I’ve often compared it to the cargo cults.

Ouch!

Well that’s what it’s like. Frankly, what I’ve come to describe as the Internet fundraising left—Common Dreams, TruthOut, and all the rest of that stuff….

I probably get 10 solicitations a day.

Me too. Yeah. But I think the proliferation of that domain, no pun intended, has exacerbated this problem. Because there is always a crisis. There is always something that’s about to happen. I think, frankly, a lot of the demoralization and the fretting that followed in the wake of the UAW’s defeat in the Tennessee plant was the product of expectations that had been unreasonably stoked in advance. This was going to be the thing that reinvigorates the labor movement. It would be like the CIO going into the South. It would be like the Flint sit-down strike. It was a 1500 member bargaining unit in a rabidly anti-union state for God’s sake. So you would expect that the greater likelihood would be to lose, right? That’s what’s happened.

Why do we put our hopes in these magical constituencies?

I think there is a good reason and a bad reason. Well, no. There’s a nice reason and an ugly reason. The nice reason is that people see how desperate the circumstances are and they feel a sense of urgency and they want to have something happen that can begin to show signs of turning the tide. And when somebody says, “You know, we didn’t get into this overnight. We’re not going to get out of this overnight,”then people start to yell at them for being insensitive to the suffering and the urgency. The other side of the coin by that reasoning is they don’t want to do the organizing or they can’t figure out how to do it or their sense of how political change is made is so underdeveloped that they can’t conceptualize a strategic approach to politics. So it’s like the bearing witness stuff basically.

That’s a fascinating term. So they want to bear witness. I think another word for what you’re describing is, they’re “fans.”

Yes. Exactly. For some as well it’s the expression of an earnest but naïve, or too self-centered, inclination to stand publicly against injustice.

They want to watch it. And we have this army of bloggers and everybody wants to be an op-ed columnist. I shouldn’t complain here because I used to actually be one. And it’s great and everything. But can you have a movement that’s just made up of commentators?

I think that’s corrosive in another way as well. Yes it’s true that any fool with a computer and internet access can call himself or herself a blogger. But to the extent that people actually see the blogosphere as kind of like the audition hall or the minor leagues for getting onto MSNBC, then it encourages a lot of individual posturing, the conceptual equivalent of ADHD, hyperbolic crap. And you’re right. The answer is, no, you can’t have a movement of just commentators. But there’s so much of that back and forth, so much of it, and it just seems to me like noise, the great bulk of it. Because it comes along with a sense—and I think this is also an artifact of the larger condition of demobilization and defeat. But the notion that being on the Left means being seriously well-informed about everything that’s going on with the world, every travesty, and tragedy, outrage and victory. So I’m sure there are a lot of people around now demanding that we do something about Ukraine. Like, what the fuck can we do about Ukraine? There’s nothing. The only thing we could do is something bad which would be to join the chorus for the U.S. to invade.

Lord, please don’t go there, Adolph Reed.

AR: I’m telling you. The last time I actually talked to Chris Hitchens we got in an argument about this at a bar on Dupont Circle. It was during the Iraq War and I kind of stopped him in his tracks, which didn’t happen often, I said to him, “There’s no place in the world that’s been made better by the presence of the 82nd Airborne, not even Fayetteville, North Carolina.”

I was going to say, the town, wherever they’re based is probably…

It’s horrible. I used to work down there. Although my son, who was actually born there when I was working there, pointed out to me that it was the 82nd that JFK sent to Oxford, Mississippi, in 1962 to quell the riot after James Meredith integrated Ole Miss, where among other things they confiscated the arsenal from cheerleader Trent Lott’s frat house. So that’s the one place in the world that has been made better by the presence of the 82nd Airborne.

So you make another point about the left that’s very good, and we’re sounding very negative here, but there’s also some victories. [You write:] “Radicalism now means only a very strong commitment to anti-discrimination, a point from which Democratic liberalism has not retreated.” But then you say, you modify this: “rather, this is the path Democrats have taken in retreating from a commitment to economic justice.”  Explain, sir.

It goes back to the disparity thing. The Democrats have been very good in pursuit of the goal of reducing racial and gender disparities, which is a good thing. But it is as a small wheel, within the big wheel of pursuit of an economic policy that is all about regressive upward transfer.

Right now the hot topic in D.C. is inequality. They’re all talking about it. Larry Summers is talking about it.

Well, there you go. (laughs)

“Upward transfer,” that is inequality. They’ve signed on to this deliberately you think?

That they’ve signed onto the upward transfer?

Yeah.

Well they certainly haven’t done anything to stop it. Look, stuff like this—the Transpacific Partnership, financial sector deregulation, the transfer of subsidies from poor people to employers of low-wage labor.

That’s in the Clinton years.

Well, the same thing with Obama. Here’s the rub, too. It’s one thing to talk about inequality. Most people who are not on the Fox list will at least nod and say, yeah, inequality, tut tut. But then the question becomes: what approaches do we take for combating inequality? And that’s where you look at stuff like cultivation of petty entrepreneurship, human capital tales, breaking teachers unions and destroying the public schools to make them better.

So, these are all things that they have done? These are steps that they’ve taken. They have all backfired.

No, they haven’t backfired. I mean, they wouldn’t produce other than what they produced anyway. That’s what’s creepy about it. There is an open question as to how genuine they are in the belief that these market-based approaches—that are, at best, an attempt to dip the ocean with a thimble basically—can produce anything…and to whatever extent that’s cynical. It’s a tough call. My father used to always say that ideology in one sense is the mechanism that harmonizes the principles that you like to think you hold with what advances your material interest. Then he would say something like, “I’ll bet you that God has paid off so well for Billy Graham that he probably even believes in Him by now.”

That’s harsh.

So there is an element of true belief there. For instance, I believe that Obama truly believes that this kind of self-help twaddle that he talks is a way to combat inequality. I also believe that he believes, in his heart of hearts, that public schools are for losers and that what you got to do is identify the bright kids from the ghetto and get them into the Lab School or the Lab School equivalent. So in the ideological frame of reference that the dominant elites within the Democratic party operate now, this is the element that defines the center of gravity of political liberalism and also sort of has captured the imagination of those who want to think of themselves as being on the left. They, often enough, will invoke the same general principles at a high level of abstraction that we associate with the Democratic Party and its history back to FDR. But the content that they load into those lofty symbols is neoliberal and reinforces the logic of a regressive transfer. If you cut public services and privatize and outsource, that hurts people at the bottom half of the income queue, or the bottom two-thirds of the income queue. There’s no way around that. You can only talk about equality and support that kind of agenda if you are fully committed to a neoliberal understanding of an equality of opportunity.

The labor movement. You said to reverse all this, it requires a “vibrant labor movement.” How on earth is that going to happen? Actually I’ve made this point to progressives and they don’t understand. They’re like, “What’s so special about labor?”They don’t particularly like labor. Culturally, it’s not them. They don’t really get it.

They like their workers when they’re brown and really abject and getting the shit beaten out of them but they don’t like them when they try to work through institutions to build power for themselves as a class. That’s one way to put it.

These are people on the left that I’m talking about.

That’s who I’m talking about too. That’s exactly who I’m talking about. It’s a few things. One of them is the cult of the most oppressed that I mentioned a while back. And as my dad used to say, “If oppression conferred heightened political consciousness there would be a People’s Republic of Mississippi.”And the fact is all that oppression confers is oppression really. There’s that which connects with the cargo cult aspect that kind of fills the whole of…

Wait, stop for a second. Did you say, “The fallacy of the most oppressed?”Is that what you said?

Yeah.

So it’s like a logical fallacy?

Well, yeah in the sense that, I’ll tell you what happens. There’s a conflation of the moral imperative and the strategic imperative. In fact, it’s not even conflation, it’s substitution of moral imperative for a strategic imperative.

So what do you mean? We choose the one that our heart goes out to and imagine that they are the ones who have the answer?

Exactly. In a way, from an organizing standpoint, that often means that you’re stacking the deck against yourself or picking, choosing, to focus on the populations that have the least in the way of resources, the least in the way of institutional capacity. Take a group like the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in Florida. They’re really good organizers with good, sharp politics doing that work, and they understand that those workers are so weak in their market position that they can’t assert power on their own against the owners. They’re dependent on mobilizing middle-class consumers to bring pressure on the fast-food companies and supermarket chains to get the chains to get the growers to sign the accord. It’s a clever approach for marginally, or maybe more than marginally, improving the conditions of these highly exploited workers. But you can’t generalize from that to a strategy for political change.

So with labor, how is it going to happen? In my lifetime all they’ve done is lose.

Well, they’ve won some.

In the big picture…

No, that’s right. Look, I’ve spent upwards of 15 years working in an effort to build an independent political party that’s anchored in the labor movement. I wouldn’t say that a political party is the model. But I think that what’s got to happen is—and this may sound like doubletalk, but trust me, I’m not a University of Chicago political theorist—just as a revitalizing trade union movement is essential for a grounding of a real left, a serious left is important for revitalizing the labor movement. There are a lot of leftists with serious politics in responsible positions in the labor movement. I don’t just mean the rank and file fetishist guys. I mean people who are core leaders. And I’m not talking necessarily about internationals, but at the district level. Big locals, and there are a lot of them around the country, who function in something like that old CIO social movement unionism capacity around the country now. . . . So there’s stuff like that going on.

Let me ask you this. One of my hopes for Obama was card check. Remember, he had been in favor of that when he was a senator.

Well, no, he wasn’t. He said he was. I had no illusions nor did anybody I know in the labor movement have any illusions that that was going to last. And it functioned kind of cynically, to be honest, as part of what union activists could point to to build a turnout that elected him and that also meant there was a tendency to exaggerate the significance of the E[mployee] F[ree] C[hoice] A[ct]. I mean, how many things did you read that touted it as the most important piece of labor legislation since the Wagner Act?

Well, I don’t know about that, but certainly there has to be some change in the playing field.

Yeah, and it’s certainly much better to have card check than not to have it. But the problems that confront the labor movement aren’t that simple. That would help around the edges but there are structural problems too, not the least of which is that the Democratic party said to go punt and treats the trade unions like a 3 a.m. booty call. They come by when they need the money…

But that’s exactly right. I mean, how much longer can that go on?

I wonder. Yeah. I wonder.