CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

What’s Wrong With the American Left: The Indifference to Governing

Gavin Newsom and Joe Biden in Mather, California, 2021. Photo by Adam Schultz, White House.

There is a fault in contemporary left politics that is easy to miss because it looks like a virtue. The new new left is rich in moral clarity about ends and strangely indifferent to means, treating the winning of office and the announcement of good intentions as the substance of politics while neglecting the unglamorous business of delivery. It legislates aspirations and then loses interest in whether the housing actually gets built, the train actually runs, the benefit actually reaches the person it was meant for. For a tradition whose entire claim is that democratic control of the economy would serve people better than the boardroom does, the inability to make government work is a betrayal at the root.

Robert Dahl, across A Preface to Democratic Theory and his work on polyarchy, insisted that democracy is not an abstraction but a set of institutions judged by........

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