Benjamin Wallace-Wells writes:

Since roughly 2015, every part of politics has been pressured by the possibility of authoritarian developments on the right. When I reached [Adolph] Reed [emeritus political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania] on Zoom in Philadelphia, he confessed that he’d been feeling those pressures, too. For his Zoom background he’d chosen a diagram of a mounting tsunami, which he said represented his fears of an imminent surge of authoritarianism and the retreat of American democracy. “I’ve basically been haunted by that image of drawback for a couple of months now,” Reed told me. In the fall, he said, he’d begun to doubt that the democracy would survive the 2022 midterm elections. That so many “voices among the governing class and the corporate media” had since expressed a similar alarm made him a little less panicked, without making him doubt that the situation is existential: “Either the Biden Administration and congressional Dems begin to deliver material benefits to the American people, to the working-class majority, or the right, which seems pretty uniformly bent on imposing authoritarian rule, will succeed in expunging nominal democracy.” He later e-mailed me that one possibility he foresaw was something like Biden running with the Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney on a national-unity ticket, “which wouldn’t resolve the contradictions—the problems of mounting inequality and economic insecurity—but, in kicking the can down the road, could help buy time for the real working-class organizing that I think is the only way to turn the tide.” (Later, he said, of Vice-President Kamala Harris, “To be clear, I’m not part of the tendency that sees Harris as a liability to Biden.” He also seemed to have reconsidered the idea, saying, that it might “cater to a supposed Republican constituency I’m not even sure exists.”)

Some of the things Reed said struck me as surprisingly bleak, coming so soon after the Bernie Sanders Presidential campaigns. I had imagined that Reed might take some comfort from the swelling young membership of the D.S.A., but instead he dismissed it, comparing it to the late-period Students for a Democratic Society, full of political naïfs, and noting that Socialism was a somewhat “vaporous concept at this point,” anyway. “It may sound odd, but where the hopefulness lies is in recognizing that, as the real left, we can’t have any impact on anything significant in American politics,” Reed told me. “So we don’t have to constrain our political thinking.” To illustrate how far the left is from power, he said something I’d heard him say before: “The most significant left force in the Biden Administration on domestic policy is the asset managers of BlackRock, and on foreign policy it’s John Mearsheimer and the foreign-affairs crowd.” Reed did not mention that these developments—that his ideological enemies in the Administration were pushing large amounts of social spending in the domestic sphere and retreat from forever wars overseas—might count, from another perspective, as a left-wing victory.

Reed seemed confident that American politics are turning away from him; this seemed less clear to me. It is possibly, but not definitely, true that authoritarianism is a nearing possibility, and possibly, but not definitely, true that a spending program that delivered “material benefits to the working class,” in Reed’s term, would stave it off. Maybe most relevantly, it is possibly, but not definitely, true that anti-racism has become the essential progressive creed, even though conservative and contrarian media outlets insist that it has; in the past few months its presence in politics has faded, as Democrats have focussed on the lingering emergency of covid and the economic projects of infrastructure and inflation.

What does seem more obviously true is that, at a moment of very high political stakes, it isn’t clear what the Democratic Party will organize itself around. [Continue reading…]