Michael Lind: Occupation and Realignment
Michael Lind is Policy Director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation and is the author of "The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution."
Will the worldwide “occupy” demonstrations make 2011 the new 1968?
The liberal left must hope not. The global wave of left-wing radicalism that peaked in 1968 was followed by a generation of right-wing reaction in the United States and Europe. The rise of counterculture frightened the “silent majority” in the U.S. and Europe into supporting politicians like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, who, running campaigns based largely on patriotism and traditional values and “law and order,” used their power to undermine the labor market regulations and social insurance programs that had protected the socially conservative working classes who voted for them....
Instead of provoking a conservative backlash, or being co-opted by the existing progressive identity-politics machine, the Occupy Wall Street movement could indirectly benefit the American center-left by re-creating an American radical left.
If left-radicalism is defined as anti-capitalism and pacifism, American progressives and liberals in the tradition of Woodrow Wilson and Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson have never been radicals. The goal of progressive-liberals has been to save American capitalism by reforming it, not to replace it. And the progressive-liberal presidents led the U.S. into the world wars and the Cold War, over the objections of the pacifist left and the isolationist right. Today a case can be made for considerable strategic retrenchment by the U.S., but progressives in the Rooseveltian tradition want the country to maintain the capability to intervene in conflicts beyond North America, if that is necessary to prevent hostile powers from dominating the populations and resources of key regions....
The Occupy Wall Street movement has the potential to help the center-left, even if some of its activists despise the center-left the way that the New Left in the 1960s and 1970s dismissed progressive-liberals like the Kennedys and Johnson as sinister “corporate liberals” promoting the “warfare-welfare state.” The reemergence of a radical economic left can create a fourth point on the political spectrum, changing the relative position of all other points. The Tea Party right, now the mainstream right, would become the far right. Today’s center, shared by Clinton and Obama with Reagan and the Bushes, would become the new center-right. And the new center-left would be something like New Deal liberalism — to the left of Clinton and Obama, but to the right of an anti-capitalist left. Better yet, if the public tired of Tea Party conservatism, the far right could implode and the new “far right” would be moderate economic conservatism of the Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Obama variety. What until recently has been the left — old-fashioned social democratic reformism in the New Deal tradition — might once again be the center.
Good cop, bad cop works in politics as well as in police interrogations on television. A reformist center-left benefits from having an angry radical partner that it must restrain. Whether it takes the form of the Occupy Wall Street movement or something else, a radical economic left that despises weak progressive reform can inadvertently strengthen the position of the reformist progressives.