America swings to the Right. The Left loses. How has the Left dug itself into this hole?

Larry Kummer, Editor

12 years ago

Summary: Today we look at one of the defining political trends of our time — America’s movement to the Right. Like most political evolutions in our history, it’s bipartisan. Previous posts have examined how the Right has won. Today and tomorrow we look at how the Left has accomplished this (it didn’t just happen), and how they have responded to this long series of defeats. These are just sketches about vast and complex trends. At the end see links to other posts in this series.

America has been moving to the Right since roughly 1980. Not in all things. The 1% cares about power and money; as a class it does not care who marries who. The US health care system’s decay, and the Right’s indifference to reform, allowed the Left to pass ObamaCare.

But the overall trend has been to the Right. A few examples…

Defunding public colleges.
Cutting taxes on the rich and businesses, shifting the tax burden down (as the GOP is doing in the States today).
Reducing the safety net (e.g., . Reducing the minimum wage (in real terms), Clinton “ending welfare as we know it” in 1996).
Crushing private sector unions.
Deregulation of corporations, especially banks.
Eroding away the 1970s reforms on the military and intelligence agencies.

We can debate the wisdom of these changes (I’m mostly against them all), but let’s leave that debate for another day. How has the Left responded? Today we’ll see how the Left has worked to gain public support — and failed. Tomorrow we’ll examine how they addressed the equally important (in an operational sense) task of maintaining internal cohesion during their long defeat.

The Left fights back

The Left responded its efforts on use of two tactics.

(a) Legal leverage

The Left used its strength in the Courts to effect public policy measures they could not do through democratic means. Most notably, expansion of environmental protections, plus expanded rights to abortion and same-sex marriage. Although this produced some wins, the long-term effect has been catastrophic for the Left.

The focus on legalistic tactics led to an atrophy of grass-roots organizing, and a loss of legitimacy for the agenda. Legitimacy in the political sense, people’s acceptance of governmental authority. From bussing to abortion to closing logging in the NW to save the spotted owl, court-driven policy measures produce powerful backlashes unless supported with deep measures to gain public support — which step the Left has often skipped. An increasing fraction of the public believes the Left uses anti-democratic (even authoritarian) means to change public policy.

Now the real weakness of this strategy appears, as the increased strength of the Right results in more conservative judges at all levels. Judicial activism works just as well for the Right as the Left. Indeed for most of American history the Courts have been a conservative, even reactionary force. We might return to this old normal.

(b) Gaining strength by sounding alarms

The Left attempted to regain public support largely through one tactic: sounding alarms. Shrill, loud, warnings of certain doom. Exaggerating the science to gain public support for their long-standing public policy proposals. The Population Bomb. Pollution. Pesticides (the Alar on apples hysteria). Nuclear war (the nuclear winter scare). Resource scarcity (from the exaggeration of the Club of Rome study to the Peak Oil hysteria of 2005-2009). Killer bees.

Doomsters like Paul R. Ehrlich and Lester Brown became their vanguard. Saving the world became their raison d’être. Catastrophic anthropogenic global warming. Agitprop became their major communication tool. Skillfully done, such as at the birth of the climate change crusade: opening the windows in the Senate hearing room to produce sweltering heat (see the story here).

Now much of that project lies in ruins, along with much of the Left’s credibility. They put much of their remaining resources — financial and political — on the climate change crusade. This seemed like a sure things, based on the public statements of some scientists (but not the peer-reviewed literature). But nature has disappointed them, and the public support is fading (see poll results here, and more here).

What next?

Major political movements do not die. But they can lose influence for generations, until either they reform or circumstances change. That appears to be the fate of the Left.

Tomorrow we ask how the Left maintains its internal cohesion while losing, and fights off internal pressure to change (e.g., adopt new and potentially more successful policies and methods).

For more information

(a) Other posts in this series: