The destiny of liberalism, for some time now, has looked like handshake agreements among corporate, academic and media power centers, with progressive rhetoric deployed either reassuringly or threateningly, depending on what’s required to keep discontented factions within the elite in line. The promise of the Sanders campaign was that the insights of the older left, on class solidarity above all, could alter this depressing future and make the newer left something more than a handmaiden of oligarchy, a diversifier of late capitalism’s corporate boards.
The current wave of protests will have unpredictable consequences. But right now, their revolution’s conspicuous elite support seems like strong evidence that Bernie Sanders failed.
Ross Douthat, "The Second Defeat of Bernie Sanders"
One of the things I admired most about Bernie was his understanding that the culture wars were a distraction, that the only things that matter were the underlying structural class issues. That's why he had trouble with the African-American wing of the the Democratic party despite his stellar civil rights record. For Bernie racial injustices were a function of broader structural issues that involve both, on the one hand, the distribution of power and wealth–and, on the other, deeply ingrained cultural attitudes that make advancement of the political and economic interests of Black and Brown Americans more difficult. But he also understood that when politics becomes hijacked by cultural issues–including concerns about racism–it's easier for those who control the power and the wealth to pretend they care if it helps them to hold on to their power and wealth.
Maybe this time it will be different; maybe what we have seen in the streets is announcing a truly transformative moment in our history. Maybe there is something going on now that none of us really understands yet. But attitudes within police culture simply reflect attitudes of the larger culture, and while you can criminalize certain behaviors, you can't criminalize attitudes, and in the long run that's what really needs to change.
In the meanwhile, white, brown, and black people whose economic and political interests are the same are easily divided and conquered by cultural, i.e., attitudinal, issues. It seems that criminal behaviors that reinforce inequities in power and wealth distribution are too abstract and require too much thinking to get any political traction these days.
Identity politics is where all the energy is. The oligarch's love it. That's why I fear that Douthat is right. Americans, whether on the cultural right or left, care more about having the right tribal attitudes than about understanding the underlying structural issues that transcend tribe and that enable the continued telling of the age-old story in which the rich to get richer and the poor poorer.
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