For years, Jon Chait has been chided for focusing on the flaws of leftist politics, because the flaws in rightist politics are potentially lethal to American democracy. I shared in that somewhat, as I thought his repeated columns on the issue were rather a pointless use of column inches.
Today, he explains himself within the context of a book, Solidarity, that makes the case why liberals need to shut up and support leftist groups, but leftist groups need not support liberalism. One subject he did not delve deeply into in this column is the undemocratic nature of the left. He sort of talks around the issue, but I think it's the critical rebuttal to leftist political ideals that you only have to motivate and mobilize the right groups of minority political position and the majority will bend to your will.
One point that he and Yglesias talk about a lot is how the Biden Administration is largely staffed with the progressive left, even if it's helmed by many old school liberals. The result has been both a surprisingly effective administration and a surprisingly left wing one. The problem with the "professional left" is that getting 3/4s of what they want isn't a victory, but a defeat, so they tend to spend more time criticizing Biden for somehow not getting around the Republican supermajority on the Supreme Court than for the many things he's actually done.
Of course, the current focus is on campus protest groups, and they do exhibit strikingly anti-democratic ideals and practices. A lot has been written about horseshoe theory, and while this isn't that, it is an example of how neither the far left nor the far right is interested in democratic practices. On either side, the basic idea is that the purity of their ideas is more important than the will of the majority.
Building majority support is, of course, hard to do. It involves compromises and a lot of half measures. The whole point of Yglesias' Substack is Weber's dictum of politics being the "slow boring of hard boards". In fact, today he makes the following observation about the difference between "being heard" and "solving a problem."
In practice, though, a lot of political engagement is almost purely expressive, and that’s especially true in a world where social media has flattened the distinction between “blowing off steam with your friends at the bar” and “communicating ideas about politics to the mass public.” It’s understandable that people experiencing subjective distress sometimes want to be heard and validated on social media in exactly the same way that we often want to be heard and validated in our personal lives. But it pollutes mass understanding of issues if public discourse is swamped with validating behavior rather than helping behavior. One place I’ve seen this a lot recently is with a situation that I actually do have personal experience with. Attending a good college in the United States is at least in part a fun consumption experience. You may then graduate, and find yourself in an entry level job that pays dramatically less than tuition plus room and board at your school. This means that, in practice, you experience a precipitous decline in your living standards right after you graduate.
That sucks, and it sucks for anyone living through it, so I think it’s completely understandable that lots of recent college graduates like to hear that they, personally, are living through an unprecedented period of economic distress. And they do not like to hear some middle-aged man saying “it was way worse for people who graduated 10-15 years ago and slightly worse for people like me who graduated ~20 years ago.” But it’s still true. And the solutions to this problem, such as they are, would mostly involve making the college experience less nice and less fun, which is just going to further alienate people. I don’t know what the answer to that is. It would be nice if TikTok and Twitter and Instagram had wholly separate lanes for “just mouthing off” and “having a serious discussion about issues.” But it doesn’t work like that, so we are doomed to muddle.
Earlier in the column, he basically admits he has little empathy. The issue of student debt and being kinda poor after you graduate is real, I guess. I was both poor and not poor after college. My parents were well off so there was always a safety net, but I worked crap McJobs, I sold possessions to make the rent (but had the possessions in the first place). And I didn't have student debt to worry about. So, yes, I went through a rice and beans phase of life, but -like Yglesias - I was never really poor.
There are glaring needs surrounding college debt, and they are structural and institutional, and that requires structural and institutional reforms. However, leftist critiques are largely about tearing the whole edifice down.
It all reminds me of my visit to a friend in Argentina who said he supported Milei because everything was so broken. I cautioned that tearing things down is easy, but building them back is hard. Liberalism's great strength is its adaptability, its ability to change with new information. That allows it do to the "slow boring of hard boards."
Are things perfect? Absolutely not, but if you believe that everything is horrible, then tearing down the whole structure of society makes sense. But it gets weird. Gaza is a tragedy - and it's a tragedy that Hamas bears some responsibility for, but that nuance gets your censured on the left. However, if we care about "genocide" then we should look at what Myanmar is doing to the Rohingya. It's just as bad as what Israel is doing in Gaza but its not even prompted by an event like 10/7. Since the perpetrators aren't "white" then it - like similar atrocities in Africa - doesn't warrant encampments.
The failure of those encampments is that they are neither seeking to educate nor be educated. They KNOW what they FEEL and the primacy of their opinions is gospel. Liberalism tests and picks apart arguments and positions because the goal is better policy, better outcomes. Even actual conservatism is part of that process. The far left and right simply do not operate under those conditions - dissent and argument is heresy and we all know what happens to heretics.
UPDATE: This from an Atlantic article on protests:
Yet in nearly every case that the researchers examined in detail—including the Women’s March and the pro–gun control March for Our Lives, which brought out more than 3 million demonstrators—they could find no evidence that protesters changed minds or affected electoral behavior.
As the marginal cost of reaching hundreds of thousands, even millions, of potential protesters drops to zero, organizers have mastered the art of gaining attention through public demonstrations. Mass actions no longer require organized groups with members who pay dues, professional staffers who plan targeted actions, and designated leaders who can negotiate with public officials. They just need someone who can make a good Instagram graphic. But notwithstanding the clear benefits of social media for protest participants, the lure of racking up views on TikTok or X and getting on the homepage of major news sites can overwhelm other strategic goals. Protests are crowding out the array of other organizing tools that social movements need in order to be successful—and that has consequences for our entire political system.
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