Collective Conscious

Chris Dil­low:

This draws atten­tion to a debate the left should be hav­ing — but isn’t — namely: to what extent can the state be a means of achiev­ing left­ist ideals? There is abun­dant evi­dence that the state, as it has been used in the past and present, is not a great tool for the left.

Responses to this fall into two camps. The dom­i­nant camp, asso­ci­ated with the likes of Richard Mur­phy and Polly Toyn­bee, seems to take a “one more heave” view; if only we could try harder, the state will suc­ceed. The other camp, which includes me and other Marx­ists, thinks we should infer that there are strict lim­its upon what the state, at least as con­ven­tion­ally used, can do to ame­lio­rate the inequal­i­ties gen­er­ated by cap­i­tal­ism. In this sense, we have some­thing in com­mon with right lib­er­tar­i­ans, except that we say in sor­row what they say in joy.

You’ll note, though, a qual­i­fy­ing clause in that last para­graph: “as con­ven­tion­ally used.” Too often, the left has viewed the state as a means for dol­ing out favours to its pas­sive clients. There is, though, an alter­na­tive way of view­ing the state — as a means whereby ordi­nary peo­ple can be empow­ered to take more con­trol over their own fate. To use Marx’s phrase - “force is the mid­wife of every old soci­ety preg­nant with a new one” — we should ditch the nanny state and have instead a mid­wife state.

I’m glad he’s rais­ing this issue. I do agree that the left doesn’t do enough over­ar­ch­ing reflec­tion when it comes to pol­icy strat­egy. Whereas the right is focused on explic­itly redis­trib­u­tive eco­nomic poli­cies, the left doesn’t have much to coun­terof­fer, save for a gen­eral long-​​term pol­icy of per­ma­nent fed­eral social poli­cies. In par­tic­u­lar, the left has, for exam­ple, imple­mented Social Secu­rity, Medicare, Med­ic­aid, the Afford­able Care Act, began and ended Don’t Ask Don’t Tell as it was appro­pri­ate, cod­i­fied the labor union reforms, passed the Civil Rights Act, and so on and so forth.

There are two issues that imme­di­ately jump to mind with this pol­icy. The first is that the left’s goals are things that are best achieved at the fed­eral level. We really have no clue what to do with state-​​level poli­cies, except bal­ance the bud­get pro­gres­sively:

[Connecticut’s new Demo­c­ra­tic Gov­er­nor] Mal­loy has pro­posed eight income tax rates, rang­ing from 3 per­cent for joint fil­ers earn­ing up to $20,000 a year to 6.7 per­cent for joint fil­ers earn­ing $1 mil­lion. Occhiogrosso said qual­i­fied lower-​​income earn­ers will be able to off­set some of the tax increases by par­tic­i­pat­ing in a new earned income tax credit Mal­loy has proposed.

Malloy’s bud­get calls for increas­ing Connecticut’s gaso­line excise tax - already among the high­est in the nation - to climb from 25 cents per gal­lon to 28 cents.

There also is a pro­posal to require com­pa­nies that earn income in states with no cor­po­rate income tax, such as Nevada, to pay cor­po­rate income taxes in Con­necti­cut on that income.… The plan con­tin­ues a 10 per­cent sur­charge on the cor­po­ra­tion tax for two more years.

Repub­li­cans, on the other hand, gen­er­ally screw the bud­get and imple­ment their pre­ferred social poli­cies. In Geor­gia:

The end result? Geor­gians mak­ing over $180,000 would see steep tax cuts while mid­dle class Geor­gians mak­ing between $20,000 and $180,000 would see tax hikes.

And Ari­zona:

As luck would have it, that $500 mil­lion fig­ure Brewer seeks to cut from state Med­ic­aid ser­vices fits snugly into a rather gap­ing hole in the Ari­zona state bud­get –the one cre­ated when Gov­er­nor Brewer pushed through a $538 mil­lion cor­po­rate tax cut pack­age ear­lier this year.

Not to men­tion the ongo­ing union-​​busting efforts across the coun­try, of course. But Democ­rats? Bor­ing gov­er­nors, for the most part. Lots of bor­ing account­ing, but no “pro­gres­sive the­ory of state gov­er­nance”. So that’s the first issue.

My sec­ond thought is more of a direct response to Dil­low, think­ing about the fed­eral gov­ern­ment explic­itly. I have to agree that the state is not exactly the ally that the left wants, pre­cisely because of its poten­tial to be abused. In fact, I fre­quently argue here that the strong state is the fetish of the right, whereas part of the goal of the left is to enshrine civil lib­er­ties in the Con­sti­tu­tional model, by restrict­ing the gov­ern­ment and main­tain­ing its sub­servience to the pub­lic good.

But what the hell does that mean? It more or less means that the left isn’t that aggres­sive on national pol­icy. If we were, we’d have used rec­on­cil­i­a­tion in 2009–2010 to pass uni­ver­sal health care with the sup­port of just 50 sen­a­tors, just like Pres­i­dent Bush used it to pass a budget-​​busting tax cut in 2003. But it means the left needs to be more proac­tive on other issues.

We should look to reduce the size of the secu­rity state. Unfor­tu­nately this is beyond us, as it relies mostly on the Pres­i­dent and lots of top secret stuff we don’t see until too late. We should make sure the courts are filled with sym­pa­thetic judges, which also pretty much relies on the Pres­i­dent and the Sen­ate. So fed­er­ally, a lot depends on the Pres­i­dent, and that’s just a crap­shoot, so we seem to be out of luck there too. Maybe we can do some good on immi­gra­tion, but in the cur­rent envi­ron­ment there’s just no momen­tum with­out a mas­sive Demo­c­ra­tic majority.

Okay, so really, what can we do? The left really ought to refo­cus its goals on the states, given that lack of unity dis­cussed ear­lier.  If the goal is pro­tec­tion from poten­tial gov­ern­ment abuses, then the ideal path is to expand civil rights as broadly as pos­si­ble at the state level, while exper­i­ment­ing with the insti­tu­tions of the wel­fare state in micro­cosm. The left should be out in Mass­a­chu­setts mak­ing the Afford­able Care Act unnec­es­sary, and in Cal­i­for­nia legal­iz­ing gay mar­riage, and so on and so forth, and to this end I think a new push to nation­al­ize state-​​level pro­gres­sive gov­er­nance would be a really good thing (espe­cially now that we have the Cal­i­for­nia gov­er­nor­ship back).

Fed­er­ally, we’re on the defen­sive. At this point, we’re prob­a­bly not going to get any more mileage out of the Con­sti­tu­tion amendment-​​wise, so we’ll have to stick to defend­ing it in the courts. Major pol­icy suc­cesses from the past are now under attack, and so our best best is to repel con­ser­v­a­tive garbage and keep up with mar­ginal progress as best we can. Of course, I have no idea what this should look like, since the only era of pro­gres­sive gov­er­nance in the last decade is this one, and it was mostly a mop-​​up job from eight years of mis­man­age­ment and cri­sis. A lot of new lib­eral gov­er­nors are in the same boat, and maybe that will be the lib­eral project a lot of the time, just clean­ing up after the other guys.

But mov­ing for­ward? In an era of fed­eral paral­y­sis, that’s going to take state action above and beyond just clean­ing up. And I’m glad we have that option, because I don’t see any other route to it. We have to show the world that single-​​payer works (Ver­mont seems to be all over that), that med­ical mar­i­juana can actu­ally help peo­ple with pain (nice try, Cal­i­for­nia), that strong unions make states more pros­per­ous, and so on and so forth. And we’ll have to just keep mov­ing the nee­dle on that, and make sure that what we do is irreversible.

That brings me to one last idea that brings this all together. If we can’t beat out­right upward redis­tri­b­u­tion from Repub­li­can ini­tia­tives, and spend a lot of our time clean­ing up after their excesses, maybe states ought to con­sider really more rad­i­cal changes. Maybe that’s the way to fun­da­men­tally rebuild the sys­tem and move it away from clas­si­cal neolib­eral capitalism.

If the states pass social­ized med­i­cine, invest in pub­lic trans­port, and in other areas gen­er­ally cre­ate the sort of social own­er­ship of cap­i­tal mobi­lized for the ben­e­fit of the masses, then the fed­eral gov­ern­ment won’t have to. And in fact, that might be fairer; if we don’t have to use red-​​state taxes to build blue-​​state ben­e­fits, the road will cer­tainly be a lot easier.