Defeatism on the Left
from NYBullshit.wordpress.com
At some point, the right’s response to the Obama Presidency turned into what feels like a rout. The old ready defeatism of the left reemerged: the astounded bafflement about the success of right talking points, the flustered games of catch-up with proliferating memes about Obama’s ’socialism’ and ‘foreignness’.
At the same time, the left performed an incredible 180 on the President, renouncing him for selling out with remarkable speed – as if the election had itself banished every demon and won every battle the left needed to move forward on an ambitious agenda. Part of the defeatism is the effective corralling of mainstream liberal sentiment by the ‘veal pen’ of the President’s popularity and obsessive message discipline. There’s always been the expectation that Obama would just take care of it himself, and that adherence to his message-line would get the job done. The result has been a woefully under-organized and frustrated left searching for a point from which to put pressure on the President, but still years behind the right in its organizing capacity.
There’s something about liberal thinking that makes it prone to easy defeatism. Part of the ideology of liberalism is an explicit pluralism, embracing the interaction between different interest groups in the public sphere as the path to a just society. This lends itself to a focus on strategy (the interaction of those groups in the public sphere) and an obsession with telling the story about the battle of those competing interests. Folks on the right tell a better story in the battle, and focus less on the interactions of strategy in the public, lending itself to a more effective language for mobilization – one that is more visceral, immediate, and messianic. The endless deliberations of strategy allow more points of division between left groups, and downplays values-driven emotional appeals. The result is less action, and an obsession with the effective strategies of your opponents, who consistently do a better job of getting people fired up. And so the defeatism slips back in, and the rout begins again.
The folks at SmartMeme have a good starting point for reversing the rout. They describe a division between “the story of the battle” and the “battle of the story”. The Story of the Battle is the liberal machinations about activism and interest groups; the Battle of the Story is the public-facing narrative that speaks to people and makes them want to get motivated to act. Left strategists need to think about the differences between the two narrative styles, and invest more time and energy into the battle of the story in order to turn the rout around, and continue building a better future for all.
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