CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

What’s Wrong With the American Left: Captured by the Professional Class

Neera Tanden from Center for American Progress at the White House, 2014. Photo Photo Courtesy of: Faye Evans, ATI.

Ideas do not float free of the people who hold them, and the abandonment of class has a sociological shape. The center of gravity of American progressive politics has shifted from the working class to the college-educated professional. The activists, staffers, donors, writers, and increasingly the voters who set the tone of the movement are drawn from a stratum secure enough to treat economic survival as a solved problem. For this group, politics can become what it cannot be for the precarious: a matter of values, expression, and culture rather than of rent, wages, and health.

This is a quiet betrayal of the tradition, because the democratic socialism of Harrington and Debs was rooted in, and accountable to, the people whose labor it sought to dignify. Dorothy Day did not theorize poverty from a distance; she lived among the poor in the houses of hospitality she founded. The point was not charity but solidarity, the insistence that the movement and the people it served were not two different things. When the movement’s personnel no longer share the condition of those they represent, the accountability snaps, and the agenda drifts toward the preoccupations of the........

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