CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

What’s Wrong With the Left: The First Rule of Politics

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

I have saved for last the rule the new-new left seems most thoroughly to have forgotten, because every other fault finally runs through it. The first purpose of politics is to assemble a coalition large enough to win elections and take power. Everything else, every program and principle, is inert until that majority exists. This is not cynicism; it is the precondition of doing any good at all.

Dahl understood democratic politics as the patient construction of majorities out of overlapping minorities, none of which can govern alone. The tradition understood it too: Harrington and Debs built coalitions of workers across trade and origin because they meant to win, not merely to bear witness. A left that prizes the purity of its positions over the breadth of its coalition has confused politics with testimony. The drift toward an agenda of identity and status is, among its other faults, a failure of this elementary arithmetic, subtracting where politics demands addition.

I should enter one caution against my own emphasis. There is an assumption, which I share only in part, that an electoral strategy can by itself challenge entrenched power relationships. The reality is that voting alone may not be enough to break an equilibrium of power in which ownership, wealth, and the structural veto of business are arrayed on one side. Elections can change who administers........

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