The Enemy of My Enemy's Enemy is My... What?

Bernie Sanders

I shouldn’t pretend I didn’t know the American Left wasn’t a monolith. Despite growing up Republican, believing anything more progressive than Spiro Agnew was a threat to American greatness (or something), I’ve always understood that Leftism wasn’t a unified political front. But watching the 2020 primary has really revealed how little American Leftists have in common. We’re unified by what we oppose, not what we favor, and that scares me.

Like many ex-Republicans, I’ve long understood conservatives weren’t a united front. American conservatism is a loose coalition of religious traditionalists, Ayn Rand agnostic libertarians, strong-state war hawks, small-state fiscal restrictionists, and others. These conservative groups share occasional core beliefs, like the idea, explained by CUNY professor Corey Robin, that society’s power hierarchy exists naturally, and shouldn’t be monkeyed with. But overall, they’re as divided as they are unified.

But somehow, it’s only becoming obvious to me now that American progressives have this same division. Though we share an idea that fairness exists, and our economic and social order should be amended to reflect our values of fairness, we lack any through-line of what fairness actually means. The Democratic Party debates have highlighted this underlying lack of agreement, to say nothing of those too far left for the Dems.

What vision of fairness unifies the Left? I struggle to identify any consistent through-line. I’d like to imagine economic fairness looms large, since the last Democrat to win the presidency with a simple majority, Barack Obama, promised sweeping change during the 2008 housing bubble meltdown. Sure, his policies were somewhat less than revolutionary. But his promises of economic transformation fired the base, and got frequent non-voters to the polls.

Elizabeth Warren

Economic fairness, though, proves totally elusive. Trade unionists, the backbone of the Democratic Party’s coalition under FDR, fled during the Johnson and Carter administrations, leaving Democrats flailing for a generation. The group organized specifically around demanding fairness in pay and workplace conditions, currently has limited apparent interest in progressive voting. This probably reflects Reagan-era union-busting, but I think it runs deeper.

American trade unions have traditionally been White, male, and dominated by citizens. Despite the AFL being founded by an immigrant, Samuel Gompers, unions have frequently held an unacknowledged subtext of racism, sexism, and nativism. Beginning in the 1960s, when Lyndon Johnson threw the Democratic Party’s support behind Civil Rights, while tying it to an increasingly unpopular Asian war, unionists began leaving the party.

Thus, arriving at my construction job daily, I see manual laborers with hourly wages—the people most likely to be displaced by the current administration’s economic policies—wearing red ballcaps, or having “Trump 2020” hand-painted on their hard hats with acrylic paint. Because the party traditionally dedicated to economic fairness, has also affiliated itself with other forms of fairness, which their traditional base sees as an attack.

Racial fairness, for instance, requires letting Black and Brown people into jobs which unions historically protected as all-White. Fairness for homosexuals, transgender people, and other Queer groups, can feel threatening to people who define themselves as assertively male, heterosexual, and nuclear-family-oriented. And, not incidentally, the political Left has long attracted atheists and agnostics, while White traditionalists often lump religion, especially Christianity, as a core identity issue.

A brief overview of Leftism reveals a coalition deeply sundered. Karl Marx’s writings reveal deep-seated prejudiced against not only obvious enemies, like the rich, but also less-obvious foes. Marx hated smallholders and farmers, whom he called “lumpenproletariat.” He openly described non-Whites as “primitive” and “savage.” Marx’s later followers, including the Black Panther Party, have needed to read his writings selectively, to expunge his deep social conservatism.

Donald Trump

Right now, the two leading Democratic contenders talking about economic fairness, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, are members of groups which traditional unionists marginalize. Sanders is Jewish and agnostic; Warren is a woman. Though I suspect many of my coworkers would nod sagely if I read these candidates’ platforms aloud, once I mentioned their names, my coworkers would retreat into their nativist cocoons.

No wonder centrists and lite-beer Republicans, like Biden and Buttigieg, persist so adamantly.

Democrats will probably win in November, because opposition to the spray-tanned monstrosity in office will coax frequent non-voters to the polls. But that isn’t enough to build a persistent coalition. Unless American progressives find ways to link their various definitions of fairness together, 2020 will prove a fluke. Leftists are linked, right now, by the walking embodiment of what we hate. But we’ll never survive unless we can unify over what we actually love.