One of my biggest criticisms of the Left is that it hasn't done enough to build an effective infrastructure of media outlets and think tanks for informing the American people or making the case for progressive ideas, a failure that has created a dangerous imbalance in U.S. politics.
That wasn't always the case. In the last 1960s and early 1970s, when the American Left was a much bigger player in U.S. politics, there was a vibrant "underground press," including outlets like Ramparts magazine and the Dispatch News wire service that exposed major national security scandals. The left-leaning Institute for Policy Studies also was a powerful voice among Washington think tanks.
Not coincidentally, that period was also a time for significant reform, with the federal government taking steps to address the nation's environmental and energy problems. Ralph Nader's consumer-oriented organizations also worked cooperatively with Democrats and even some Republicans to enact common-sense safety policies.
However, a new wave of thinking gradually took hold on the Left, a fear that progressive media and policy institutions would fall prey to Washington insider-ism. The antidote was to largely abandon Washington and shift the Left's emphasis to "organizing" in the countryside. The operative slogan was: "Think globally, act locally."
As a result, media outlets were shut down or sold off. Not only did Ramparts and Dispatch News disappear, but other left-of-center publications and radio stations were sold to neoconservatives and conservatives or they were taken over by big corporations.
For instance, The New Republic in Washington fell under the control of neocon Martin Peretz and progressive radio stations like WBCN in Boston went corporate, replacing the likes of Danny Schechter, the News Dissector, first with a "classic rock" format and eventually with "shock jock" talk radio.
The Right Capitalizes
As the Left retreated from national politics and media, the Right moved in to fill the void. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, right-wing foundations and individuals invested heavily in creating a network of media outlets and think tanks based primarily in Washington and New York.
Despite warnings about the dangerous imbalance that was being created, key Left funders stuck with their approach of supporting local "organizing" and trying to meet the widening gaps in the social safety net (food, housing, clothing, medical care) resulting from the Right's growing power.
In this conservative political environment that abhorred "government solutions" and treated the word "liberal" like a curse governing Democrats increasingly went on the defensive. They shied away from principled battles with Republicans over whether the government could do any good at all.
Overwhelmed by corporate money going to Republican candidates and right-wing media, governing Democrats also shifted their positions so they could get their share of the corporate cash and deflect some of the harsh campaign attack ads on "tax-and-spend" Democrats.
During this period, the chasm widened between the governing Democrats and the Left, with both sides feeling aggrieved with the other. The governing Democrats felt that the Left was enjoying the luxury of living in a fantasy world that took no account of the harsh political realities of Washington, and the Left viewed governing Democrats as mostly corporate sell-outs.
Ralph Nader, who had achieved most of his major consumer reforms by collaborating with members of Congress in the 1970s and bureaucrats working for President Jimmy Carter, personified the Left's growing alienation from the governing Democrats. The Left began looking toward alternatives, such as building a third party, despite the political implausibility of this strategy.
The reason why the Green Party or some other leftist party makes no practical sense is that the U.S. political system operates under winner-take-all rules, including selection of the president. There is no parliamentary system that allows for proportional representation. All that leftist parties can realistically do is siphon off votes from Democrats and help elect Republicans and rightists.
This dilemma has led some on the Left to advocate a new constitutional convention that would put the United States under a parliamentary system or to find some other way of permitting proportional representation.
But that is simply not pragmatic, at least in the near term. Indeed, given the Right's upper hand in getting out its message to the American people, a constitutional convention would more likely end with a Christian nationalist government beholden to corporate interests than anything tilted left.
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