The fact is that there can be no remedy without a proper diagnosis.
There’s this Bill Moyers interview with Adolph Reed making its way around, in which the political scientist (and one of my favourite critics) makes several excellent points about the demise of the left. It’s based on his Harper’s article, “Nothing Left: The Long Slow Death of American Liberals.” Reed’s views matters like race and neoliberalism have often meant censure from an insecure Left which needs to believe that its own tattered and cherished existence simply cannot be questioned.
Watching responses to either or both the interview and the original essay online, and having listened to people argue about Reed in real life, I’m struck by how often they’ll peevishly ask, in varying ways, “He criticises us, but what’s his solution, huh? What should we doooooo, Adolph?” There’s an annoyed—and annoying—belligerence to that question, and it’s asked in a way which signals that simply asking the question, “What would you have us actually do, Adolph?” should silence Reed’s critiques.
That kind of response is one that I’ve been met with quite often, when I critique gay marriage, for instance, as yet another sign of neoliberalism taking over. It’s one that often greets me and my friends and comrades in Against Equality, Ryan Conrad and Karma Chávez, when we present on our collective’s work about the problems with and solutions to the mainstream gay movement. Every time, without fail, we’re asked a variation of the same question posed to Reed, “Well, what’s your solution, huh?”
There are several problems with the posing of that question, and the first is that those who ask aren’t actually looking for a real answer. In our presentations and our work, AE does in fact have several excellent responses. For instance: One of our main critiques of the gay marriage movement is that it naturalises the idea that marital status should determine whether or not you gain life-saving benefits like healthcare. Our solution and alternative is fairly simple: Work towards a society that guarantees healthcare for all, regardless of marital status. In response to that, angry gays and lesbians will respond: “That’s just unrealistic; it’ll never happen in the US!” This, of course, contradicts a long history of organising for universal/single-payer healthcare in the States. In fact, until AIDS became a treatable disease for mostly white gay men, they were at the forefront of demanding universal healthcare.
But that petulant and unrealistic response also erases the fact that the concept of universal healthcare is not a Martian one, but is a fixture in nearly every other industrialised nation, including most of Europe. In other words, the countries in which several Americans like to vacation, where they go to soak up castles, legal marijuana, and legally available sex work, are the same countries that are deeply, deeply puzzled by our inability to consider that health care is not a privilege tied to a moral standard of what counts as a family, but a basic right.
And then, of course, there is the presence of a large country to the north of us, with a similar population and history, which in fact has long implemented universal healthcare. Somehow, gays and lesbians are able to convince themselves that there is simply something in the air of the US that prevents us from even wishing for the same.
In other words, there’s nothing rational in either the question or the response to our response. In AE, we learnt to not waste time in endless retorts to the niggling demands that we explain how universal healthcare might come about but to simply turn to the more sensible members of our audiences and discuss why such simple solutions might be necessary.
Which brings me to the second problem with the varying forms of the question, “Yes, but what will you actually do?”, and the fact that it’s often accompanied by a, “Well, all you’re doing is criticise.” All this ignores the fact that even a diagnosis alone is desperately lacking, whether in understanding what Reed, and I, and many others, see as the failure of the left, or in the failure of a gay movement, which pretends it is on the left, to envision a future more radical than marrying, joining the military, and locking up people for infinite amounts of time for perceived wrongs to the “community.”
The fact is that there can be no remedy without a proper diagnosis. The problem with the so-called left is that it has become intractably tied to the idea that its very existence, however tattered and weary and worn, is somehow enough (hence, for instance, the misbegotten idea that there MUST be an elected Democrat, no matter how problematic, no matter how troubling, like Clinton, Obama, or, well, the other Clinton). The first step is to acknowledge there is a problem, and the vast, vast majority of the left-prog-liberal bunch has no idea there’s a problem.
Furthermore, diagnosis/analysis on its own is also a form of action (for lack of a better word). I’m always struck by how often people distinguish between “analysis” and “action.” When I wrote about the problems with and even outright corruption of the undocumented movement, which furthers a neoliberal agenda of detention and surveillance but is frequently lauded as leftist and even radical, I was met with cries that my “analysis” (somehow determined to be from a distance) was and is dramatically opposed to the “real work” of “action” that goes on “on the ground.” In particular, I pointed out that the frequent calls for ending deportations rest on the idea that what matters is to “end” deportations, but do nothing to address the root causes of the immigration crisis, a crisis which has its origins in the severe economic exploitation which keeps the neoliberal economy—and several immigration “rights” groups—going.
In fact, actions like those of undocumented youth who enter prisons with the full knowledge that they will in fact be let free, or to “block” deportations vans are based on an analytic framework: That nothing makes an idea seem more radical than staging fake protests for the benefit of the media. Off-camera, once the media have rolled away, the vans presumably continue to take deportees to prisons and eventual deportation. Enamoured reporters, who are often friends of the activists in these cases, never bother asking the most basic questions, so we never know; my (highly educated, as someone who also works on immigration) guess is that people simply get put on the exact same buses the very next day, once the media attention has dissipated. The commitment in these cases is to a very particular ideology, one devoted to getting benefits for the chosen few but cloaked in the appearance of benefits for all. To get arrested, as the undocumenteds often do, simply in order to further a neoliberal agenda, for instance, is based on an ideological commitment to a form of neoliberal politics; it’s a problematic analysis that takes the shape of problematic action. In other words, simply bringing about “real” political work is not in itself a guarantee of anything better; it can in fact be far more problematic.
So to simply ask, “What solutions do you propose?” (or any variation of that) is to profess a belief that describing the problem is somehow irrelevant. But if we were to consider that undocumented actions in fact emerge from analysis, we would have to call for an end to media-driven arrests (those who unwittingly put themselves in the line of fire without support from the power players are the ones who get deported, not the “leaders”). We would have to cop to the fact that those who direct the movement are ultimately fighting to continue the neoliberal politics of a state that knows full well that a few vans blocked here and there amount to nothing when literally millions, whose lives have been deemed undesirable by both the administration and the activists, can be safely thrown into prisons and then out of the country, out of sight and behind the scenes.
The criticism of Reed, and groups like AE and individuals like myself is also that we simply don’t understand the necessity of real political work because we supposedly have no experience. Again, as with other questions, we in AE have chosen to ignore such accusations (our friends and colleagues know our work, and that’s enough for us, as we continue to do what’s necessary), focusing instead, again, on pressing for difficult solutions to difficult issues: the kind of work that’s often obfuscated by ranting critics who insist on shouting us down with cries that we have no right to criticise. So while I don’t think we need go over and justify Reed’s life and work, I’ll also point out that he has a long history of activism as well as academic work, which he often references in his work and which is clear in the interview (and you can see and hear more about his work on Doug Henwood’s website, including a new and forthcoming interview). Perhaps a better question might be: What do we make of the fact that someone with considerable organising experience does in fact state that times are as bad as they are?
Image: Liberty Leading the People, Eugène Delacroix, 1830