R.K.: Now you also mention the idea of neo-progressives. What's the difference between a neo-progressive and a neo-liberal?
A.R.: I don't know. I'm not sure I can recall having made that reference, but perhaps I did. I don't know. I mean, I think I'm not sure what I would say about that. I guess I would say that what's happened is that what it means to be on the left has changed and evolved pretty remarkably over the last thirty years or so, right?, and it's possible now to be considered a progressive without any particular commitment to an ideal of a downward economic redistribution.
R.K.: The word "redistribution," now that, I just wrote a piece, I've been doing a series of articles about how we need to de-billionairize the United States. That billionaires are dangerous, they're abnormal mutants, and examples of giantism which are freaks of nature and when I wrote it, I got a comment from somebody who believes he is a progressive I think. He says, well, that's redistribution of wealth and that's Marxism. What's your take on redistribution and how that fits into the left?
A.R.: Well, let me give you a little allegory. Years ago, I was involved from beginning to end with effort to build an independent political party rooted in the labor movement here and one of the programs that we adapted at our founding convention in 1996 was a demand for a constitutional amendment that would give every resident the right to a job and a living wage that we tagged at a certain rate in 1995.
So I was visiting friends in California. One of my friends was a professor at a community college in the interior and she asked me, just on a lark, so I went to visit her class and she asked me to give a presentation about this to her students. Young people, mainly college aged, largely working class background and so I did and one student said that he felt that I was trying to bamboozle him because I didn't call this program, I didn't describe this program, as socialist and he claimed, I don't know whether he was trying to bait me or not, but he claimed that if I did identify, admit that it was socialist, he might even support it.
So I said to him well those are terms that don't have any real meaning for people at this point. Nobody really knows what you're talking about if you say socialism and what we say is this: there are two simple propositions. One is that, with regard to this program, every person who is willing, able to work should have the right to have a job and that everyone that has a job who works for a living should have enough to live on. I said if you want to call that socialist you can call it socialist.
You can call it Keynesian, you can call it reformed capitalism, you can call it Christian Duty, and I said you can even call it Teddy Pendergrass, (that was the name of a pop singer at that point) if you want, but it comes down to the principles and this is what I think has happened with how all of us, as you say, even a lot of people who consider themselves progressive- labels have come to take the place of thinking and argument, right?
So, somebody says well that's Marxist, and you know, I mean Marx also believed that the Earth revolved around the sun, so is that Marxist too? Is that then a Marxist belief? And the levels of income and wealth distribution in the US throughout the post-war period were much more, much less attenuated than they are now. It's possible to have significant income differentiation and differentiation of wealth and at the same time avoid having people homeless in the streets, to have a stable floor below which people can't fall and simultaneously as you point out eloquently to avoid the pathology of this giantism.
Because you're absolutely right, I couldn't agree with you more. What can... who needs a billion dollars, right? And I think that we've seen the pathological character of the society that permits and that privileges and lauds actually great concentrations of wealth like that just in the last month or two with all these clowns proclaiming that trying to tax their income is the equivalent of sending them to Auschwitz.
They lose perspective. So yeah, I mean I apologize if that was too long winded and round about response to the question but-
R.K.: No, this show does the longer rhythms so it's just fine.
A.R.: Okay, great.
R.K.: You said our politics have been hollowed out and it's one of the sources of the collapse of the left. What does that mean?
A.R.: Well, I mean, let's think about it for a second. Go back to 2008, or even more recently, well yeah, actually let's start out a little closer to home. Wendy Davis in Texas became a star in the MSNBC world and then in the salon.com, Huffington Post world, etcetera. People were talking about, got behind the idea of her gubernatorial candidacy and possibly a redeemer of Texas and bringing Texas into the blue state camp and so forth and so on, even though nobody knew anything about her.
The only thing that anybody knew about her was she apparently has a strong bladder. So now she's running for governor and it turns out that the big thing that she did was to back away from the issues that she stood up and fought for, right? And, you know, I don't mean that to consign her to the netherworld, but I think the problem is that we've kind of lost site of a fundamental reality about politics.That is that any politician, especially in a system like ours where candidates are basically free agents to some extent, that the politicians are going to be holograms created by the social forces that they have to be accountable to, or that they consider that they have to be accountable to, and we've fallen into a position of, I think, confusing politics with, well, first of all of reducing politics to electoral politics, to the electoral realm, and then confusing the electoral realm with something like American Idol where you're just voting for an individual and it's a bizarre thing.
I mean, now I will go back to 2008, because Obama had never really been identified with any progressive left of center political initiatives or programs at all in his career and all that he'd offered, but what he'd done was offer himself, the narrative of his own biography as an alternative to, or as the sensation of a progressive politics, right?
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
3
3
1
