Left, Right, or Muddle
Batty Langley: Mazes and Labyrinths, 1922. Image by Wikimedia Commons
Local political watcher Tobin Gilman recently bemoaned the loss of fiscally responsible voices on the SJ City Council, noting a fundamental shift to the Left. But Amy Offner in Dissent takes a look, from the Left, at the merging of political ideologies into an ungainly centrist coalition and sees the triumph of neoliberalism.
Given all that midcentury and neoliberal political economies share, a few life-altering distinctions mark the last half-century as a new era. The rising power of finance capital and the repression of labor and revolutionary movements decisively shifted the balance of power in political and economic life. We continue to live in a world structured by those facts. The current wave of labor organizing and strikes in the United States, the historically high level of public support for unions, and the rebirth of socialism as a living tradition in this country all represent important shifts. But the fundamentally hostile structure of U.S. labor law, the ability of employers to exploit it, and unions’ reliance on political and shareholder power in the absence of real freedom of association have remained defining features of our political-economic order since the 1980s. What we are witnessing today is an extraordinary, high-profile mobilization against all odds—a critical fight on what continues to be an unlevel playing field. The future is unwritten, of course. If this mobilization can force the passage of labor legislation that genuinely protects the right to organize and extends it to all workers, we may well be turning a new page in the history of U.S. political economy.
The elements of the neoliberal order that have proven more fragile have been ideological. Today, no politician in the United States can get anywhere by presenting free trade as an expression of freedom. The concept of freedom has been so tarnished and divorced from the idea of economic liberalization that what once seemed a significant ideological dimension of neoliberalism is largely superfluous today.
This article originally appeared in Dissent. Read the whole thing here.
Read about the “elusive center” in SJ politics here.
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