MLK and the Class Struggle

In honor of MLK day, Matt Yglesias posted again something he posted last year about MLK and class struggle. I liked that post so much that I will follow Yglesias' lead and publish it again here.

"Martin Luther King, Jr. died in Memphis standing in solidarity with a sanitation workers’ strike. But at the time of his murder, he was planning something bigger for later in the year. And the week before the assassination, my grandfather met with King and his lieutenants to preview their agenda for the coming months, publishing an article titled “Dr King’s March on Washington, Part II.”:

A few minutes later, in Dr. King’s office on the other side of a thin partition, an office no larger than Young’s and much more cluttered, I asked King also if he hadn’t abandoned moral issues for the class struggle. He was in shirt sleeves and had leaned back in his chair, one arm raised, tapping his head lightly with his hand, a favorite position with him. Now he leaned forward and spoke directly, a manner I was to find customary with him, so that interviewers seldom have to rephrase questions; he responds to the tone and level of the question but also, as if fulfilling a personal need, to implications that at first do not seem implicit in the question: an intellectual curiosity that gives the effect of total sincerity.

“In a sense, you could say we are engaged in the class struggle, yes,” he said. He explained that the gains for which the civil-rights movement had fought had not cost anyone a penny, whereas now — “It will be a long and difficult struggle, for our program calls for a redistribution of economic power. Yet this isn’t a purely materialistic or class concern. I feel that this movement in behalf of the poor is the most moral thing — it is saying that every man is an heir to a legacy of dignity and worth.”

Although we went on to talk of other things, this question remained with him, and I heard him the next night, at a church in Birmingham, expand on it. There he continued with a discussion of the parable of the rich man and the beggar Lazarus. Lazarus had not gone to heaven simply because he was poor, King argued, nor was the rich man to hell because he was rich. “No, the rich man was punished because he passed Lazarus every day and did not see him … and I tell you if this country does not see its poor — if it lets them remain in their poverty and misery — it will surely go to hell!”

In his office, however, I quoted to him a New York radical who had said that Dr. King’s political problems derive from the fact that his present support comes from middle-class Negro churches and organizations: they would oppose his new tack. Has there been opposition?

He shook his head. “When we began discussing this thing last fall, we expected there would be opposition — from the timid supplicants and from the ultra militants.”

He shook his head again.

“In a sense, you could say we are waging a consensus fight. The Harris Poll recently showed that 68 percent want a program to supply jobs to everyone who wants to work, and 64 percent want slums eradicated and rebuild by the people of the community — which means a great many new jobs.”

I think this is quite different from — and much better than — both the washed-out version of MLK that you can from conservatives and the Tema Okun version of racial justice politics that has become faddish recently."

I couldn't agree more with Yglesias' last sentence here. We've got to find our way back.

SLOWBORING.COM

Martin Luther King, Jr.'s plan for class struggle

"If this country does not see its poor — if it lets them remain in their pove

We Need a Politics of Abundance!

I quite liked this piece by Derek Thompson on the Atlantic site. He's singing my song!

"Zoom out, and you can see that scarcity has been the story of the whole pandemic response. In early 2020, Americans were told to not wear masks, because we apparently didn’t have enough to go around. Last year, Americans were told to not get booster shots, because we apparently didn’t have enough to go around. Today, we’re worried about people using too many COVID tests as cases scream past 700,000 per day, because we apparently don’t have enough to go around....

Zoom out yet more, and the truly big picture comes into focus. Manufactured scarcity isn’t just the story of COVID tests, or the pandemic, or the economy: It’s the story of America today. The revolution in communications technology has made it easier than ever for ordinary people to loudly identify the problems that they see in the world. But this age of bits-enabled protest has coincided with a slowdown in atoms-related progress.

Altogether, America has too much venting and not enough inventing. We say that we want to save the planet from climate change—but in practice, many Americans are basically dead set against the clean-energy revolution, with even liberal states shutting down zero-carbon nuclear plants and protesting solar-power projects. We say that housing is a human right—but our richest cities have made it excruciatingly difficult to build new houses, infrastructure, or megaprojects. Politicians say that they want better health care—but they tolerate a catastrophically slow-footed FDA‪ that withholds promising tools, and a federal policy that deliberately limits the supply of physicians.

In the past few months, I’ve become obsessed with a policy agenda that is focused on solving our national problem of scarcity. This agenda would try to take the best from several ideologies. It would harness the left’s emphasis on human welfare, but it would encourage the progressive movement to “take innovation as seriously as it takes affordability,” as Ezra Klein wrote. It would tap into libertarians’ obsession with regulation to identify places where bad rules are getting in the way of the common good. It would channel the right’s fixation with national greatness to grow the things that actually make a nation great—such as clean and safe spaces, excellent government services, fantastic living conditions, and broadly shared wealth."

This reminds me of some of the themes in my recent essay on The Five Deadly Sins of the American Left:

"The final deadly sin I discussed in my essay was technopessimism. I observed that:

[M]any on the left tend to regard technological change with dread rather than hope. They see technology as a force facilitating inequality rather than growth, destroying jobs rather than leading to skilled-job creation, turning consumers into corporate pawns rather than information-savvy citizens, and destroying the planet in the process. We are far, far away from the left’s traditional attitude, which welcomed technological change as the handmaiden of abundance and increased leisure, or, for that matter, from the liberal optimism that permeated the culture of the 1950s and ‘60s with tantalizing visions of flying cars and obedient robots.

The passage of a year and a change in presidential administration does not seem to have altered this attitude much. There remains a distinct lack of optimism on the left that a rapid advance and application of technology can produce an abundant future. But there is an endless supply of discussion about a dystopian future that may await us thanks to AI and other technologies. This is odd, given that almost everything ordinary people like about the modern world, including relatively high living standards, is traceable to technological advances and the knowledge embedded in those advances. From smart phones, flat-screen TVs, and the internet, to air and auto travel, to central heating and air conditioning, to the medical devices and drugs that cure disease and extend life, to electric lights and the mundane flush toilet, technology has dramatically transformed people’s lives for the better. It is difficult to argue that the average person today is not far, far better off than her counterpart in the past. As the Northwestern University economic historian Joel Mokyr puts it, “The good old days were old but not good.”

Doesn’t the left want to make people happy? One has to wonder. There seems to be more interest in figuring out what people should stop doing and consuming than in figuring out how people can have more to do and consume. The very idea of abundance is rarely discussed, except to disparage it.

These attitudes help explain why the left does not tend to feature technological advance prominently in its policy portfolio. The Biden administration did manage to get the U.S. Competiveness and Innovation Act through the Senate (it has yet to pass the House) but with far less funding and far less probable impact on scientific innovation than it had when it was the Endless Frontier Act. But nobody on the left seemed to mind very much since it just wasn’t very high on their priority list.

You can also see this in the rather modest amount of attention and resources devoted to technological advance in the Democrats’ other bills. The bipartisan infrastructure bill did contain some money for developing next generation energy technologies like clean hydrogen, carbon capture, and advanced nuclear, but the amount was comparatively modest. The clean energy money in the last version of the Build Back Better bill, now shelved, was mostly focused on speeding up deployment of wind, solar, and electric vehicles.

It is hard to avoid the feeling that the left thinks about the clean energy future in a dreamy, fuzzy way as entirely driven by all-natural wind and solar power. But if there is to be a clean energy future, especially on the rapid timetables envisioned by most on the left, it will depend on our ability to develop the requisite technologies—not all wind and solar—quickly. Here is an area, perhaps more than any other, where the left’s technopessimism does not serve it well.

In the end, most of what the left says it wants to accomplish depends on rapid technological advances. That would seem to call for techno-optimism rather than the current jaundiced attitude toward the potential of technology."

https://www.theatlantic.com/.../scarcity-crisis.../621221/

https://theliberalpatriot.substack.com/.../the-five...

THEATLANTIC.COM

A Simple Plan to Solve All of America’s Problems

The U.S. doesn’t have enough COVID tests—or houses, immigrants, phys

The Democrats' Voting Rights Chimera

I analyze the Democrats' bizarre focus on voting rights bills that will not pass in my latest at The Liberal Patriot.

"The Democratic focus in the new year has been on trying to pass some version of voting rights reform. President Biden went down to Georgia and put the effort in stark terms: “Do you want to be on the side of Dr. King or George Wallace? Do you want to be on the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor? Do you want to be on the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?”

Aside from the unhinged level of hyperbole here, is this choice of focus wise? Democrats seem to believe both that this focus will produce big electoral dividends and, more grandiosely, that it is the key to saving democracy in the United States.

Wrong. Oh so very wrong. Here are five reasons why...

Nothing that has happened since the 2020 election suggests a reconciliation between Democrats and working class voters. If anything, the situation has gotten worse. That is what the Democrats should be most worried about—not changing voting procedures but changing minds among a disenchanted working class."

Check out all five reasons at The Liberal Patriot. And subscribe--it's free!

THELIBERALPATRIOT.SUBSTACK.COM

The Democrats’ Voting Rights Chimera

They’re Barking Up the Wrong Tree

The Biggest Problem Is the GOP Might Win Fair and Square

Biden was down in Georgia flogging voting rights bills that won't pass and, even if they did, wouldn't do much to solve what is arguably the Democrats' main problem: they might just get fewer votes than the other guys. I shall more to say about this presently but here's an interesting piece by Megan McArdle:

"What happens if Democrats lose in 2024?

I don’t mean “What if Republican-controlled legislatures override the results of the presidential election?” or even a less noxious “What if a Republican wins the electoral college but loses the popular vote?” I mean, what if Democrats just … lose?

The question is admittedly speculative, but it’s not as far-fetched as my left-leaning readers might imagine. They ought to start imagining it, however, because the more the left assumes it can’t happen, the more likely it becomes.

Democrats have gotten out of the habit of thinking of the Republican Party as a normal opposition that sometimes beats them by the simple expedient of winning more votes. Even before Jan. 6, they often saw Republican victories as a bit of a cheat, the product of voter suppression, gerrymandering and the bad luck of a Constitution that grants outsize influence to low-population states. Democrats push election reforms so aggressively because they believe their cause is right. But it’s also true that they tend to assume that any accessible, fair and honest system will give the majority of votes to Democrats."

Wrong, wrong, wrong as I will explain more detail in my Liberal Patriot piece tomorrow.

WASHINGTONPOST.COM

Opinion | What if Republicans become a majority party?

If shifts among Hispanic and Asian voters continue, it’s not as far-fetch

The Democrats Have Lost Their Way (Economic Pessimism Edition)

At The Liberal Patriot, John Halpin takes a look at new data from AP-NORC He notes the widespread economic pessimism among the public and suggests that Democrats might want to focus on that problem rather than the various quixotic crusades that now consume them.

"As 2022 gets underway, discussions about January 6, political polarization, and a phantom “second civil war” dominate elite discourse. Meanwhile, in less politically charged communities across the country, American voters remain focused on pocketbook issues, and express rising dissatisfaction with the nation’s economy and lack confidence that the nation’s political class can or will do anything about it.

Despite overall numbers that suggest America’s economy is in relatively good shape and recovering well from the pandemic hit, Americans themselves aren’t seeing it and many are nervous about the coming year.

Economic pessimism is now the most pressing and politically potent issue facing President Biden and congressional Democrats ahead of critical midterm elections....

Given widespread dissatisfaction and nervousness about the economy, President Biden and congressional Democrats would be wise to drop everything else they are doing and focus their entire policy efforts and public messaging on proving to Americans that the government: (1) can work effectively to bolster the overall national economy in terms of jobs, supply chains, public health, and getting businesses back to normal in the current Covid context; and (2) help struggling families deal with the pinch of stuck wages and high costs.

Pessimism about the economy is pervasive and incredibly hard to address.

But if Biden and Democrats focus their political efforts in the next few months on consensus and popular steps to help build public confidence in the government’s management of the economy, it is possible to restore some if not all public trust in their leadership ahead of the midterms. Everything else is secondary to Democrats’ political standing now.

Publicly haggling over the huge Build Back Better legislation won’t cut it. Take a few parts of the bill with the most immediate and important economic impacts and pass them into law. Make sure the remaining stimulus funds and new infrastructure projects are well designed, effectively spent, and widely touted across the country. Take inflation seriously and help Americans with high costs generally and on big ticket items like housing, education, and health care.

Do a few things well on the economy and let Americans know about it."

Read the whole piece at The Liberal Patriot!

https://theliberalpatriot.substack.com/.../is-it-possible...

Oddly Enough, If You Want to Win, Nobody Has To Be Thrown Under the Bus

But you may have to change what you talk about and how you talk about it. That's the message of Sheri Berman's excellent new article on the Social Europe site. I would go so far as to say Democrats will either absorb this message or their future does not look particularly bright. Berman:

"Over the past months in the United States, something resembling panic has overtaken the Democratic Party. The popularity of the president, Joe Biden, is extremely low, major policy initiatives have stalled, a governorship election in supposedly solidly Democratic Virginia was lost and significant setbacks are likely in the upcoming Congressional midterms.

For many Democrat ‘progressives’, the blame lies in the stars rather than in themselves. Republican success, in this view, is due to a combination of ‘anti-black white supremacy’ and structural features of the US political system, such as the presidential electoral college and the Senate, which favour regions and populations that do not support the party. For ‘centrist’ Democrats, on the other hand, the real problem lies in the party itself—or, rather, in its progressive wing insisting on championing issues of racial or social justice with ‘views and values not shared’ by a majority of voters.

There is much that is distinctively American about this debate but echoes can be found in left parties across Europe. In particular, the challenge of reconciling a progressive social and racial agenda with the need to attract a majority coalition, which includes non-urban and working-class voters, is one faced on both sides of the Atlantic today.

Centrists and progressives often portray these goals as irreconcilable: either left parties champion progressive social and racial agendas or they attract more non-urban and working-class voters. Yet they need not be.

As the political scientist William Riker famously argued, to borrow his book titles, political outcomes depend on The Art of Political Manipulation and Agenda Formation. ‘Successful politicians structure the world so they can win,’ he wrote. Concretely, how issues are framed plays a critical role in determining how attractive and salient they are to voters.

A recent study of working-class voters sponsored by YouGov, the Center for Working Class Politics and the left-wing magazine Jacobin confirms what many previous studies have found: when policies are framed as benefiting one group over, or at the expense of, another, they are less popular. For example, when white voters are told that redistributive policies require taking money from them to fund programmes primarily benefiting minorities, support for such policies plummets. When precisely the same policies are presented as taking money from the rich and redistributing it to working people or the less fortunate, support goes up.

This is often portrayed as the result of racism—and, of course, some white voters harbour racist sentiments. But minority voters prefer colour-blind or class-based issue framing as well. As two well-known scholars put it, ‘the strongest arguments’ for redistributive policies are those that ‘reach beyond race to the moral principles to which both black and white Americans are committed, not as blacks or whites, but as Americans … Reaching beyond race has a power to it, not because it evades the reach of prejudice but because it calls into play the principle of fairness—that all who need help should be helped, regardless of their race.’"

Read the whole article. It's worth your time.

SOCIALEUROPE.EU

Unnecessary tradeoffs

Progressive ideas can prevail in a democracy, Sheri Berman writes—b