On the Atlantic website Amitai Etzioni writes that "the liberal narrative is not working." As a liberal, Etzioni finds this worrisome. He's under the impression that the "liberal narrative" is "government is good" or "government is not the devil." Too many people are frustrated by government dysfunction and genuine waste for such a narrative to be compelling. As a result, more people identify as "conservative" than "liberal," regardless of how they vote. Etzioni worries that you can't make a "government is good" argument without appearing to look naively uncritical about government's problems. Even if many voters remain "operational liberals" who support liberal policies without identifying as "liberal," elections force them to make blanket endorsements of "liberalism," at which many seem to balk. The solution, as Etzioni isn't the first to propose, is to go populist. For his purposes, going populist means attacking "special interests," by which he presumably means mainly "big business." He recommends, however, that liberal populists acknowledge that some special interests (he doesn't specify) have "liberal feathers."
Two problems arise. First, many liberals will feel uncomfortable attacking "special interests." They tend to think that everybody is special and no one is. Some may wonder who gets to define anyone else as a special interest. Many probably have been called "special interests" themselves. The adversarial imperative of populism doesn't go well with liberals' all-inclusive impulses. Second, populism is volatile and may only grow more effective the more concentrated, i.e. the more exclusive it gets. The Occupy movement didn't go far trying to pit 99% against 1% because the 99% had little coherent identity. The danger of populism is the temptation to declare anyone whose interests aren't mine or those of my group a "special interest," which follows from the urge to see oneself as the authentic American or authentic human being, or the one who doesn't need to change. Populism might be seen as a poor substitute for Marxism, or a refuge for those embarrassed by Marxism or afraid of its implications. You needn't endorse Marxism to recognize that it brings a little more clarity to the issue by rejecting the vague, volatile rhetoric of "special interests" in favor of class struggle. Of course, Americans are probably more uncomfortable with the rhetoric of class struggle than they are with praise of government, but a little background Marxism might inform whatever populist campaign Etzioni wants liberals to launch, just to make sure that not just any old group of people is scapegoated as the "special interest" to be tamed. Leave that approach to the Tea Party.
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Why is special interest "wrong"? I guess my main argument would be because they have far more money to use in political campaigns and bribes which gives them far more political power than their minority numbers entitle them to.
The only way to eliminate this problem is to eliminate money from politics but that won't happen as long as individual politicians enjoy personal gain from the current system.
What this country needs is to start electing socialist politicians. Why? Because the one thing big business is scared sh**less of is their breadbasket going socialist.
Start electing socialist politicians and I almost 100% guarantee you will see big business become more sensitive to the needs of the working class and more willing to work something out.
Anon May 9: Some historians will tell you that it's worked before, that we wouldn't have had the Progressive Era or the New Deal without socialist pressure and a few election victories. Nowadays a lot of people are scared sh**less of socialism because right-wingers have successfully identified it with the worst practices of Bolshevism, but socialists in this country share some of the blame for their own decline to the extent that they believed that they were better off pressuring Democrats to do things instead of beating Democrats and getting things done themselves.
I agree, which is why I say if we really want to see change, we must see a resurgence of a socialist party. Which means we need intelligent people who can answer the false charges and prove that bolshevism or maoism or stalinism has nothing to do with socialism...
As I've pointed to to others online, the fact that China has billionaire businessmen proves that they are NOT communists, regardless of what they call their ruling (and only)party.
We'll also need socialists who, once in power, could do the most to refute all those old charges by not lashing out at scapegoats or going paranoid about counterrevolution when things go wrong.
The wealth of Chinese communists might also prove anarchists' argument that socialists become an exploiting class once they have power, unless you can prove that those millionaires never really were socialists of any sort.
But those negative things did not happen because "socialism" took over. Those things happened because individuals who were in the lead caused them to happen. So should we make the assumption, based on the French Revolution and the resulting reign of terror is entirely the fault of anti-monarchists? Yet that didn't happen here.
The point to drive home, in that case, is to show that Stalin, Mao, etc were not socialist. That most of their actions were, in fact, directly opposite of what socialism stands for.
After all Eugene Debs didn't go around ordering the beatings and murders of coal miners and other workers attempting to unite. That was caused directly by the capitalists whose profits would have dropped because of workers uniting. So therefore, we should infer (on the same basis) that unregulated capitalism will have the same result as a communist takeover.
Insofar as Chinese billionaires (not to mention the Maoist party in general) do NOT act in the best interest of the workers, therefore, by definition, couldn't be socialists.
I'd say they are "socialists" by the same logic that murderious, intolerant right-wingers in this country claim to be christian. Just because they claim it, doesn't make it truth.
Anon 7:09 p.m. Capitalists will welcome a comparison between the victims of coal mine owners and the victims of Leninist regimes if the question is who's more violent. If you want to damn capital the real place to look isn't the picket line but places like Dhaka, Bangladesh. That building collapse, with 1000 dead and counting, sure looks like capitalism at work to some people. Of course, apologists for capitalism can make the same "bad individual" argument about the building owner. The real question may be whether any particular economic or political system does more or less to enable bad individuals to do their worst.
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