I recently re-read Erich Fromm's 1941 book Escape From Freedom (Fear of Freedom outside the US). And something he says there keeps occurring to me when I read articles like Spiers'. In that book, he draws on the work he did with the Institute for Social Research on an innovative study about the effects of personal and social psychology on political attitudes. (Studien tiber Autorihit und Familie, 1936)
Fromm in Escape From Freedom poses the question of why there was not more resistance to Hitler's takeover in Germany in 1933 among workers, i.e., unions, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Communist Party (KPD), and their supporters. He doesn't discuss the various options he may have had in mind, though a general strike may have been one of the measures he had in mind. Instead he focuses on the fact that the unions and parties had shown themselves to be unable to effectively counter setbacks like the brutal austerity politics of Chancellor Heinrich Brüning, the "Hunger Chancellor", in 1930-32. The SPD supported Brüning's government by "tolerating" it, i.e., voting to give it a majority in Parliament but without participating in the government with SPD ministers.
Fromm's observation there is that, while economic and social factors shape political actions, there are important psychological factors at work, too. And when people see their party continually failing to fight for their interests or even their own political program, the emotional bond to those leaders that would be required to take drastic actions in a crisis may not be strong enough.
How that resonates with the current US political situation is probably pretty obvious. Nancy Pelosi presents the Trump Administration as a basic danger to the US Constitutional system, and Democrats along with TV pundits point to his Russia connections as a key danger to American national security. But Pelosi is also dead set against impeachment proceedings against Trump:
When forced to comment, she’s fearless, but only in her willingness to insult the intelligence of other Democrats. We’re told that the plan, whatever it is, is working because Trump is “self-impeaching”—a nonsensical claim belied by the daily onslaught of cascading horrors that the administration continues to unleash upon Americans with no consequences whatsoever. (If he is self-impeaching, however that happens, it’s happening so slowly and incrementally that it’s not visible to the naked eye, and it’s doubtful that he’ll have completed the process before the end of a second term.) [my emphasis]Spiers also stresses how Pelosi is leaning on anti-Trump sentiment for fundraising:
It’s not clear whether Pelosi even thinks people actually believe this line of reasoning. She just doesn’t seem to think it’s her job to convince them. Voters handed Democrats a meaningful avenue for holding the executive branch accountable in 2018, but Pelosi seems to have no interest in the hard work of doing that, except inasmuch as it means Democratic Party elites will issue public statements condemning the president’s actions, and effectively fundraise off of those public statements. As far as she’s concerned, her assurance that she’s in some distant fashion righting the wrongs of Trumpism by hoarding her own symbolic political power should be action enough for now. ...Spiers connects Pelosi's stance with patterns the Democratic Party have sadly developed over decades.
Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee donor inboxes are littered with appeals signed by the speaker to, all caps, stop Trump, as if the critical brake mechanisms are being controlled by donors and not by the officials whose elections they support. It’s like watching a person drown while the lifeguard sits in her tower, performatively noting with alarm that someone is sinking into the sea and surely someone—someone!—must save the swimmer. [my emphasis]
Since Pelosi's disappointing surrender on the concentration camp funding earilier this month and her renewed attacks on progressive Congresswomen have left me worried that the Democratic Party in the face of a genuine Constitutional crisis is frittering away the willingness of many Democratic supporters to actively mobilize behind the party's leadership. A symptom of this sinking feeling is that I didn't see any need to elaborate in the previous sentence what I meant by "concentration camp." This is our political condition in the US in 2019.
So is this:
Compare this incredible passivity with the offensive maneuvers frequently adopted by the Republican Party and its leaders, who have always taken it for granted that the only way to win is to run roughshod over any Democrat who hesitates to use the power they have. Recent political history shows that the Democratic model of continual retreat into watchful, timorous bunker-mode is a losing proposition.
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