Confronting the Democratic Front

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the idea of political commitment. Specifically, if you’re into politics, maybe you should be committed to a therapeutic institution because it is likely to bring on derangement, paranoia, delusions of grandeur and what else.

I have never been a very politically-committed person, but lately, I can’t kick the derangement and delusions that have come along with living in a political world.

A old leftist saying has it that even if you’re not interested in politics, politics is interested in you. It means that you’re confined to a world ruled by powerful forces whether you want to be or not, so you might as well do something to protect yourself and your own.

Nowadays, we hear, there is a threat to us and our own, our whole species, in the destruction of the nonhuman world on which we depend. Even if climate change weren’t upon us, there is the increase in precarity for most people in the US, a majority into which as a newly-unemployed PhD, I fall. Then of course there is the global decline in democracy and democratic institutions amid the rise of renewed rightwing extremism, but really if democracy can’t deal with the first two issues, what’s it good for?

So, what’s to be done? Join a mass movement to change things of course! And as inconvenient as that is for my inherited prejudices against mass movements, mass culture, mass-anything, the credible alternatives are rapidly discrediting themselves.

They are discrediting themselves, at least to me, to the extent that they put up something we can call a “Democratic Front”.

Here, I’m evoking the idea of the French “Republican Front”. The idea goes like this: should a far-right movement arise in France, it’s the duty of everyone else: the conservatives, liberals, socialists, communists, and all the others, to resist it. The reason behind this is idea is probably the war and all that.

I wonder if there isn’t something parallel in American life, an implicit pact among the press, both parties, and the major US institutions that a movement from the left, a real one, must be similarly opposed by everybody. The reason behind this is likely the cold war and all that.

Why would anyone sign on now that the cold war is over? Well, it may be over for us under 40, but the political class came of age in the cold war, many in the paranoid 1960s.

In the ‘60s we also got the intellectual basis of the Democratic Front: the bipartisan consensus of philosophy of neoliberalism. While we can imagine neoliberalism surviving under fascism, it would not under socialism. Even the moderate, lightly-Nordic-accented social democracy offered by Bernie Sanders and AOC is too great a risk for the philosophy.

Where can we see the Democratic Front?

We can see it in the Democratic party’s near-coronation of Joe Biden as its 2020 nominee. Biden is the 76-year old architect of mass incarceration, who has never met a war he didn’t support, and is uncomfortable with even the Obama administration’s extremely superficial environmental agenda.

But with the threat to the Democratic Front, even the moderation of Pete Buttigieg might hint at the left on environmental issues, and so an elite white neocon is too close to the edge for comfort.

We can see the Democratic front’s fear of the incipient progressive movement in Congress, which has been swiftly excluded from power and even serious consideration. I don’t expect that to change any time soon.

We can see the Democratic Front in patterns of the mainstream media’s alarm. Consider the shock in the liberal press at the prospects that public health care would devastate the insurance industry. Millions will be on the street we are told.

However, these reasonable media, who inform the the Democratic Front’s alliance of reasonable people, are meanwhile unfazed by the extremist precarity of medical costs and medical debts. In the US, it’s not really news, it’s just a fact of life. It’s “the price we have all agreed to pay” for our system, our way of life, and questioning this arrangement is as unthinkable in the liberal press as supporting the Vichy in France.

Of course, lots of French people are warming to the Vichy these days. The Republican Front held itself together for the 2017 French elections of course. However, its longer-term fate is unclear despite united elite-institutional support.

So perhaps after another round of impotent but inveterate moderation, the Democratic front will lose its aura of historical inviolability.

The idea that we can turn back the momentum of history sounds like a political delusion of grandeur (can you imagine a more romantic idea). But lately I am thinking that what must be done is clear, and so romance that helps our spirits along the way might not be such a bad thing.

Our opponents have not let probability or reasonableness dissuade them from their commitment, and they are rapidly remaking the world in which we live.