Notes on Party Politics

The shutdown of the federal government by right-wing fanatics last October triggered a rare bout of fresh thinking among progressives. Whatever else it was, it was also an object lesson in the capability of a relatively small but tightly organized, militant political faction to effectively—if temporarily—seize control of one of the major mass parties in the United States. Throughout the first half of October establishment Republicans and bewildered liberals helplessly looked on as the entrenched leadership of the Republican Party was utterly dominated by a well-funded and—more importantly—well articulated form of reactionary populism. The main liberal complaint against the shutdown—“but the Affordable Care Act is already the law!”—was of course entirely trivial, because it assumed that the whole affair could be reduced to a mere question of a positive legal fact.

The ideological extremism of the Tea Party goes beyond the dissatisfaction felt by rich people about the prospect of paying higher taxes. It taps into a deep well of existential dread about the fate of the country that is as fiercely ingenuous as it is dangerously delusional, and it channels this energy into a seething anti-government mass politics.

Although it may seem as if the radical elements of the Republican Party lost their great battle over the “Affordable Care Act,” it has been clear for some time that they have been winning the larger war. With each Tea-Party-orchestrated freakout in Washington, the political center of gravity shifts further to the right, and the lesson that ideological radicalization brings home the goods is further hammered home into the torpid brains of establishment Republicans.

This dynamic is not lost on keen observers from the left. If the American far-right can be motivated with the numbers and the organization to take the government hostage and impose their narrative upon public discourse for the better part of a month, then it seems plausible to suggest that a similar tactic might be deployed from the political left for progressive ends.

In the wake of the Tea Party’s government shutdown there has been no shortage of debate over whether or not emulating their tactics would be effective or even desirable for progressive objectives. Within this debate, the question of just what role the Democratic Party should play, if any, has loomed large, as have questions about the viability of third party electoral alternatives. Others argue that engagement with the U.S. electoral system amounts to political suicide, since it is basically like joining a game of cards in which the rules are rigged for the house to always win. Yet just last month we witnessed the election, for the first time in almost a century, of a dyed-in-the-wool socialist to the municipal government of a major U.S. city, along with a nearly-successful socialist victory in another major city. What might this portend?

Rand Paul’s route to victory and the transformation of the Republican Party

A path to the triumph of American reaction
Part 1 of 2 | Part 2

This is disturbing:
President Rand Paul: Watch out, he’s becoming a better politician every day

If Rand Paul were able to assemble an unlikely coalition of reactionaries and discontented youth, he would be in a position to win the presidency in 2016, fundamentally transform electoral politics in the United States, and bring down the corporate-state elite. There’s a lot of assumptions in that scenario, but it’s hard to imagine a bigger disaster for the country or the world if those assumptions prove well-founded.

Training Rebranded: Internships and the Value of Work

Unless you are under 14 or have been living on a desert island for a few decades, you know what an internship is. But just in case, internships offer young people the opportunity to work for businesses and institutions for little or no monetary compensation to gain references and experience in the process. The modern internship system began in the ’60s and ’70s as a fast track into certain elite financial industries, but starting in the mid ’80s they appeared in other industries. Thirty years later they have become not just a prerequisite for future employment but a hoped-for opportunity for millions of enterprising youth searching for a way into a future desk job.

Decades ago they might have been a relatively benign educational opportunity nestled in the comfort of the Fordist economic system. Today internships represent economic trends that raise disturbing questions about the present and future of capitalism, especially with respect to training, experience, and the devaluation of labor.

Dynamic stagnation: The most dangerous game

The crisis of neoliberalism has seemingly reached an impasse. On the one hand, predictions of another global economic collapse have repeatedly been proved wrong. Every month or two, a new danger threatens to bring everything crashing down—the US government debt-limit debacle, Italian borrowing rates, the Greek elections, Spanish borrowing rates, the slumping Chinese real estate bubble, a seemingly endless series of huge banking scandals, the botched Cyprus bailout, Italian elections. Every time, the danger passes.

Yet every month also brings predictions that the next round of indicators will finally register a real turnaround in the course of the global economy, or that the next central bank intervention will get the economy going again. The real estate market has recovered! The stock market is surging! Spanish bond rates are down! China is growing! Abenomics is a success!

The cosmopolitan imagination of neoliberalism

Regression to the nation form
Part 1 of 2
I’m glad that Paul raised the dangerous new nationalist energies starting to build in East Asia. Last year I started to lay out a historical account of the progressive potential that neoliberalism opened up to overcome the nation form, and the alarming threat to that potential posed by populist attacks on neoliberalism. I still need to come back to that general account; here I will begin to explore the growing tensions within countries that have produced the rise of nationalist politics.