Take my advice, stop existing: conservative and neoliberal advice to progressives

Part of politics is an endless stream of allegedly friendly advice to progressives by people who opposed their goals and programs. It's an international phenomenon. It's usually pretty transparent when it comes from people who clearly identify with a different side. Like our old friend David "Bobo" Brooks.

Bobo was holding forth from his regular weekly PBS slot on Friday (Shields and Brooks on impeachment hearing revelations, Democratic debate takeaways PBS Newshour 11/22/2019). First comes the alibi:

Judy Woodruff:

So, the case — is the case stronger, David, or does it even matter?

David Brooks:

Well, the case [against Trump] is legally stronger ...

So Bobo the NeverTrumper can say he was a consistent critic of Trump after Trump is out of office.

Then comes the stock Message Control Republican Party line of the moment:

... but it's not politically stronger.

We have had now a bunch of polls. Nate Silver's Web site, FiveThirtyEight, has an agglomeration of them. And it shows that the public support for impeachment has gone down very slightly over the last couple of weeks. It's now about 45-45. The nation is evenly divided.

In swing states, it's gone - impeachment has become less popular. We don't have a lot of data. But, in Wisconsin, only 40 percent of voters support impeachment. Roughly 53 oppose it.

And I think we have seen there's a Politico poll where they asked independent voters, what do you think? And independent voters don't like it at all, and by 61-23, they think that's the sort of thing that's more of interest to media people than it is to me.

And so I don't think — I don't think — I think everybody knows he's guilty. They just don't think this is the issue that affects my life. And why are they talking about all this stuff? [my emphasis]

And then he recaps:

They [the Democrats] had to do this just to uphold the standards of our country, and that I can't think of any president who has done anything as bad as this and didn't get impeached.

And so, I mean, that's basically true. I think Democrats do have to acknowledge that it's not a political winner. And some of them walked into this sort of knowing that. [my emphasis]

Yes, the Democrats are doing the right thing and the Republicans know they should be doing so too but they aren't. So, the Democrats are not only losers, they should admit that they're losers. And then nominate Mitt Romney as their Presidential candidate. Or something.

The New Republic brings us this piece by Ryu Spaeth (The Strange Liberal Backlash to Woke Culture 11/25/2019), reporting on a trend of people grumping about "woke culture," i.e., people concerned about racial and gender equality and the environment and so forth:

There is a certain kind of liberally inclined writer who sees Donald Trump’s America as a nation in crisis. ... The twist is that this crisis has its source, she contends, not in the person of Trump, but in his frothing-mouthed opposition: the left.

That, roughly speaking, is the thesis of a group of writers who, since Trump’s election in 2016, have chastised the left for its supposedly histrionic excesses. Their enemies extend well beyond the hashtag resistance, and their fire is aimed, like a Catherine wheel, in all directions, hitting social justice warriors, elite universities, millennials, #MeToo, pussy hat–wearing women, and columnists at Teen Vogue. Everyone from Ta-Nehisi Coates down to random Facebook commenters is taken to task, which makes for a sprawling, hard-to-define target. These writers might call their bugbear “woke culture”: a kind of vigilance against misogyny, racism, and other forms of inequality expressed in art, entertainment, and everyday life.

Spaeth gives an explanation of how that particular controversy plays out, including how that woke-ness, being a human enterprise, does have some adherents who do or say things that can be reasonably criticized. Or, as he puts it, "I should note at the outset that I am not unsympathetic to the concerns of these liberal (or liberal-ish) writers, although none of them shows a particularly firm grasp of the thing they are rejecting or its history."

I believe that calls damning with faint praise.

He deals with three different examples from woke-critical writers. Or maybe we should call them pro-sound-asleep. One is Bret Easton Ellis, whose argument Spaeth characterizes as, "Why can’t the kids stop whining?" Not exactly an original argument, since thousands of generations of homo sapiens have been making similar arguments about the young'uns. Ellis complains that the Mean Libruls are pickin' on him.

Meghan Daum is also tired of hearin' all the bellyachin' from what she calls Generation Wuss. Daum appears to be working on positioning herself as a repentant former leftie who has now discovered the immense virtues of being a reactionary. Daum seems to think not just those so-fun-to-criticize Millennials but feminists of all ages are a bunch of whiny poopy-heads who should just suck it up and stop their griping.

Spaeth quotes Wesley Yang's that Mean Libruls are employing "administrative and disciplinary power to delegitimize, stigmatize, disqualify, surveil, forbid, shame, and punish holders of contrary views."

Those examples are stock conservative arguments accusing those on the left/center-left for being Big Ole Hypocrites who supposedly are violating their own professed ideals of free expression and free inquiry. That's the sense in which those three are "liberally inclined," as Spaeth describes them in the quote above.

Then there is the neoliberal/corporate-Democratic pitch to progressives. A leader in the Austrian Social-Democratic Party (SPÖ), Gerhard Zeiler, just published a book in which he makes his own version of that appeal, Leidenschaftlich Rot (Passionately Red) whose title might give a misleading impression of his message, which is more along the lines of a TINA (There Is No Alternative9) neoliberalism. In a review (Gerhard Zeilers Abrechnung mit der SPÖ Standard 25.11.2019), Theo Anders writes (my translation from the German):

Social Democracy must seek an alliance with entrepreneurs and avoid an overly edgy attitude against them, otherwise a "false polarization" would arise, [Zeiler argues]. That is why the red [social-democratic] poster slogan "People instead of corporations" was also a bad one in the recent European election campaign, says Zeiler. Moreover, the SPÖ's opposition to making working hours more flexible [removing overtime pay requirements after eight hours] is "unworldly"; opening hours for shops should be deregulated, and in general [the SPÖ] should be less oriented towards Jeremy Corbyn than toward Emmanuel Macron, whom Zeiler counts as belonging to reckons as belonging social democracy, in a rather broader interpretation of the concept.

As a man of the "Third Way" with a neoliberal tilt, Zeiler nevertheless does not want to be understood as such. He criticizes the dominance of unleashed financial markets and considers a minimum wage of 1,700 euros to be necessary. However, this should be laid down by law and, contrary to Austrian usage, should not be negotiated by the social partners [unions and management] via collective agreements, "even if unions and the Wirtschaftskammer [Austrian management group] raise a fuss about it."

This is similar to how American supporters of Status Quo Joe Biden or other corporate Democrats also argues. We have to show we’re reasonable by caving into to business lobbyists demands that result in lower wages and worse working conditions! We should avoid looking like actual Social Democrats (“Jeremy Corbyn”) and instead posture as pro-business conservatives (“Emmanuel Macron”). And in general we should make vague promises that sound pro-worker (but which we won’t take all that seriously) while we distance ourselves from our most important base voters, unionized workers.

A common theme for all these arguments, from Bobo to the conservative American whiners to the conservative Austrian social democrat, is that progressives should never actually fight for things that would actually benefit a left/center-left constituency and that those constituents actually want.