Socialism and the rhetoric of revolt
Attempts to normalize socialism will only wed it to an unpopular status quo.
Trump won even though plenty of people on the right - and not just fringe activists, but sitting Congresspeople and prominent media people - espoused incredibly unpopular social ideas. The reason he won was Americans are sick with decades of the status quo, so they voted for Trump who represented change - despite all the incredibly unpopular positions he's associated with. - Saikat Chakrabarti
Saikat is right, and even though he directs this lesson towards Democrats, it’s crucial for socialists to understand as well. The status quo that afflicts Americans is one of declining wages, longer hours, social alienation, deteriorating work conditions, and exploding inequality. People experience all of this, and even if they don’t quite appreciate where it comes from, they know that something in our society has gone horribly wrong. And they know that our ordinary political process is not going to fix it. That is why Democratic campaigns that position themselves as a continuation of or return to politics-as-usual do so terribly in the modern era, and why even a bog-standard Republican billionaire like Donald Trump can overperform at the polls if he positions himself against “the establishment.”
And this, in my view, is why it has been such a mistake for modern socialists to try to rhetorically normalize our politics as an expression of American traditions (think Harvey Kaye’s “patriotic socialism”) or as an incremental tweak of liberalism (think Matt McManus’s “liberal socialism”).
Rhetorical strategy aside, socialism would create a society that’s radically different from the one we have today. Just imagine what it would be like going to work knowing that this is your job in the most literal sense of the term: you own your labor, and you have control over what you’re doing. Imagine going to buy some clothes and knowing that you aren’t enriching some distant weirdo who lives a life of incomprehensible luxury. Imagine voting and knowing that the results really do resemble what people like you actually want simply because the candidates haven’t been bought by the super rich. Imagine knowing that even if you were seriously injured and no longer able to work you would be taken care of by a generous welfare state.
This is as different from the status quo as you can possibly get. But that’s a good thing! People want something different from the status quo. And Trump’s election is proof that they’ll take extraordinary risks if they think there’s even a trivial chance that things could improve for them.
Which brings us back to rhetoric. On this blog I have often counseled against using “progressive” rather than “socialism,” and this is one of many reasons why. The progressive tradition is so broad and vague that even mainstream establishment politicians like Joe Biden have publicly identified with it. Some socialists see this as an advantage because if people find “progressive” familiar — so the logic goes — they’ll think of socialism as something ordinary and familiar too. But this is a serious misread of the politics of class consciousness. Workers who are becoming class conscious do not want a familiar politics, the sort of politics that half the Democratic party claims to have; they want something new and different!
It is true that our society has built a massive stigma against socialism, and that some people see it as a dangerous or tyrannical ideology. But just as a matter of messaging, the solution to this kind of problem isn’t to try to rebrand socialism as something else (“progressivism”, “leftism”, “populism” etc); it’s to fight this stigma, and win. I think a lot of socialists would be surprised by just how much Americans respect this kind of honest approach to their critics. It’s one reason why Bernie Sanders, for example, is seen as such a trustworthy figure despite his self-identification as a socialist: everyone can see that he isn’t trying to fool them.
If socialists want to win, we need to highlight what makes us different from the various strains of social democrat and welfare liberal we are so often associated with in American politics. Simple example: as socialists, our enemy is not “crony capitalism” or “corporate capitalism” or any of the other adjective-capitalisms that everyone else rails against. Our enemy is capitalism. And if we make this distinction clear to Americans they will see that our criticism of the status quo runs deeper and our hopes for the future are much loftier than what they’re hearing from ordinary politicians.
I am not counseling that socialists make a fetish out of difference or that we should all start talking like early twentieth century Russians. I am, however, insisting that socialism is not “normal” politics — it’s a radical break from the status quo. And that’s how we should talk about it.
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