[Originally posted at my Wordpress blog]

What makes a socialist a socialist in the 21st century? I owe it to myself one day to provide an answer to that question. As Owen Jones has argued over at his blog:

There are issues that the left must be at the forefront of championing: like equality for women and gays, or opposing war, for example. But these issues by themselves do not define us as ‘left-wing’, even if we have a left-wing take on them. A good liberal will support gay rights, and a maverick Tory like Simon Jenkins can oppose wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is the fight for working-class representation and emancipation that makes us ‘the left’.

I agree with the general thrust of that argument. I think defining oneself as a wo/man of the left is next-to-useless, or at least incomplete, without an element of class consciousness–without at least a minimally empathic response to the severe dislocations caused by modern capitalism. (What socialism’s response to capitalism’s discontents should be, I leave for another day.) And Owen is equally right in pointing out that a social liberal (and here I take the classical meaning of the term) of any political stripe can equally support causes close to the left’s heart–you can believe that gays should be allowed to live their lives in peace, whilst supporting regressive economic policies.

So if asked to sketch an idealised lefty, I suppose I’d settle for a women’s/queer rights-championing Martin Luther King Jr.-cum-Clement Attlee. Cumbersome, perhaps, yet evocative.

***

I stumbled upon this image on Facebook today, proudly shared by friends who–perhaps–I’d call fellow travellers on a good day. The image proudly defends the president from what it considers obviously defamatory labels, and is meant to stir the spirits of the Democratic Party’s base. I, unfortunately, find little to be impressed by–whether in the image above or in the president’s record. Sure, Barack Obama’s personal story remains as inspiring as ever, but a president cannot stand on his background alone. And indeed, his record is pretty patchy. His administration’s under-powered fiscal stimulus; its unwillingness to admit that the stimulus didn’t pass muster; its refusal to contemplate a follow-up despite mass unemployment; its capitulation to lobbies on healthcare reform, refusing even to consider a single-payer system; its continuation, and indeed expansion, of dubious policies vis-à-vis terrorism; and more–all of these are reasons for a healthy dose of scepticism, at minimum, from anyone remotely sympathetic to the left. In many ways, none of this is surprising–Obama was, and remains a president of the establishment, seeking from the beginning of his political career not to rock the boat too much for corporate interests.

So far, so predictable.

The real trouble comes in explaining just why and how America’s ‘liberals’ continue to believe the president deserves the leeway many have given him. And a large part of this leeway is explained in the shockingly staid conventions of US political thought–in America’s ceaseless conformism, especially in the political realm. Take that poster: It goes out of its way not to label its man a ‘socialist’ or a ‘radical’. The trouble, of course, is that for many of us (36% of all Americans, a majority of Democrats, and an even healthier majority of ‘liberals’) view ‘socialism’ positively. But the Obamanauts seem to live on a planet where they assume socialism is, by definition, a very dirty word–even within their base. That the majority of Americans view socialism negatively is neither here nor there–I expect that the majority of those critical of the concept probably have some pretty warped views of socialism. The point is that within his base–and this image is clearly aimed at young, already-converted supporters of the president–a healthy number probably wouldn’t mind giving ‘socialist’ proposals a fair hearing.

In failing even to acknowledge this reserve army of the left, the American progressive movement as currently constituted will never achieve the sort of success America needs–to rebuild its economy on fairer grounds, to restore a sense of dignity to the deprived and middle classes, and to build a stronger and more cohesive union. This perennial fear of even contemplating ‘socialist’ (read: public-sector-led) solutions to the many ills that trouble us will continue to handicap the greatest agent for progressive change available to the country–that is, the authority of the central state to provide solutions, on everything from infrastructural development, to better education, to universal healthcare, to greater income equality. Insofar as mainstream American politicians largely refrain from making the case–yes, for socialism, and yes, even on unabashedly ideological grounds–Americans will only mildly take-up the half-baked, tepid solutions the mainstream offers as a pale consolation.

And it is precisely this lack of radicalism–which Obama’s supporters, the president and his administration wear as a badge of honour, on display in the image above–which makes the Democratic Party perhaps the most unappealing major party of the left in the Western world. It might have the best intentions, but the Democratic Party today is largely a vacuous ‘progressive’ party (a watered-down term explicitly avoiding the Marxist baggage)–fitfully propelled forward by platitudes, though usually bogged down by our cumbersome, and archaic constitutional order. (How’s that for a radical statement?) How so-called American ‘progressives’ think anything short of a ‘radical’ programme for renewal–similar to a codified version of Franklin Roosevelt’s second bill of rights, coupled with a robust economic framework–will do, is beyond me. (And how America’s youth today can’t yet manage to respond to their viscerally straitened horizons, relative to earlier post-war generations, with anything near the baby-boomer’s confrontational confidence is even more confusing.)

So permit me while I refrain from being inspired by our not-socialist, not-radical president. If only he dared be a bit of both.

***

Historical Post-Script

In 1999, the Democratic Leadership Council hosted the leaders of the centre-left parties then in power in every major Western power–including the United States (Bill Clinton), Germany (Gerhard Schröder), France (the co-habitation government of Lionel Jospin), Britain (Tony Blair) and Italy (Massimo D’Alema). The context matters: this was the heyday of the long 1990s boom; this was the triumphalist post-Cold War era, the ‘end of history’, during which the victory of Western liberal democracy became entrenched. And whatever their nominal ‘leftism’, these leaders were mostly post-left–these were leaders of the ‘Third Way’, reconciling capitalism with ‘social solidarity’. It fell to Italy’s Massimo D’Alema to remind the assembled leaders that the European centre-left, at least, owed its traditions to socialism. Admitting that the five leaders shared a reformist agenda, D’Alema nonetheless suggested they also shared a ‘big problem’:

There are words that in your civilization, in your history, sound difficult to understand or to accept…For example, we belong to the Socialist International, and I’m aware that this word is somewhat sensitive here…[at this moment, the crowd cracked up in laughter]…and I can see that we have avoided pronouncing this word here. But we should prevail over this fear of words.

D’Alema was decidedly right–and his words have greater potency now, as capitalism suffers its greatest crisis since the 1930s. Yet, Bill Clinton’s jarring response then is as equally incisive as D’Alema’s comments: ‘I’m not sure I would have you here, Massimo, if I were running for reelection.’ Barack Obama would hardly disagree.

Post-Post Script (1:40 AM)

I was reminded of two articles I’d read in the last year in the London Review of Books, with some appropriate passages for what I’ve written above.

On Obama, the ‘establishment president’: ‘Obama is choosing to leave behind the popular base of the Democratic Party and build an ecumenical consensus which starts in his head. The process seems to be intuitive, and to explain it one can only fall back on psychology. Obama sees himself as the establishment president. If a populist insurgency on the right presses hard against his legitimacy, if disappointed supporters stop giving money or knocking on doors, still he has the confidence of a leader whose standing is buoyed up by corporate leaders, by a famous general and the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, by a decent preponderance of Wall Street, and by the mainstream media, whose resources he deploys and channels with a relentlessness no other president has approached.’ [LRB, Vol. 32 No. 9 · 13 May 2010, pp 39-40]