The Catastrophic Weakness of the Left
And why we've failed to make much of the last 10 or 15 years of gaping wide opportunity.
Toward the end of my last podcast, political scientist Corey Robin and got into what I thought was a really fascinating discussion about what Robin called “the catastrophic weakness of the left” over the past decade or two.
By this Robin meant something more specific than just the standard story of the weakness of the American left, which is a well covered story. He meant the weakness of the left in the context of what was, in his analysis, real opportunity of the sort that the American left has actually done something with in the past.
There was power to be seized, because the conservative energies that had dominated American politics from Reagan’s election through to the end of either the Clinton or W. Bush administrations (depending on how you dated it) were wholly exhausted. The right had achieved most of its goals, and therefore was bereft of the kind of passion that a movement needs to sustain power. The left, on the other hand, was full of passion and ideas, and seemed capable of capturing the political imagination of the nation. Yet in each moment of dramatic symbolic crystallization—Occupy, Black Lives Matter, the 2016 Bernie Sanders presidential campaign—the left utterly failed to convert potential political energy into real power.
One of my frustrations with Robin over the many years I’ve been reading him is his resistance to taking a side in certain intra-left battles, and you can hear him, in the excerpt below, directly rejecting my efforts to corral him over to my side of the fray. Which is annoying, of course, since obviously my side is right. At the same time, much of what I’ve come to value in Robin’s writing are the insights that emerge from his unwillingness to accept the standard frames or binaries. He seem to have a visceral aversion to being pigeonholed in certain ways, which is both a weakness in certain contexts, I think, but also a reliable source of creative inspiration. I think both elements are on display here, but much more the latter than the former. Hope you enjoy.
Make a comment in the comments, if you’re so inspired.