Repeat After Thee

The 'New Narrative' Is Very Old

I

The recent publication of Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson’s Abundance—a self-help, supply-side manual for those Democrats who, according to the authors, have been too invested in redistribution as against production—is both interesting and irritating because its intellectual patron saints are two historians, David Potter and Gary Gerstle. Interesting to me, at any rate, because I’m a historian, a contemporary of Gerstle in fact, and irritating because these historians are, like it or not, purveyors of political complacence, or, what is the same thing, the kind of intellectual stasis that demands “moderation,” no matter the stakes or the circumstance.

Klein & Thompson treat Potter’s semi-famous book, People of Plenty (1954), as their touchstone in celebrating the untapped productive capacities of Americans, the hardest-working people ever because no matter where they came from, they’ve believed—until recently, anyway—that in this country, their rewards in terms of income are more or less commensurate with their honest efforts at work.

But Potter is a celebrant only by default. In keeping with his Frankfurt School sources, he is instead a critic of what we have come to know as consumer culture—like the contemporary enemies of so-called identity politics, he assumes that producers are more sturdy and reliable constituents of progressive politics than consumers, and indeed insinuates that consumers are more susceptible than producers to the appeals of dangerous demagogues. To illustrate this contention, here is what I said about Potter’s book in my Project Syndicate review of Klein & Thompson:

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David Riesman made the cover of Time as a result of writing The Lonely Crowd (1950), a book that popularized the reporting of the Frankfurt School—Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, et al.—on the whereabouts of the “inner-directed” individual, that productive, energetic self-mastering man and omnicompetent citizen of the 19th century who had, it seems, given way to the “other-directed” 20th-century type, the languid consumer of goods and information who, as the bearer of an “authoritarian personality,” was a candidate for recruitment to revanchist social movements.

The eminent historian David Potter drew these strands together in People of Plenty (1954), a book meant to explain the “American character” by the outsize extravagance of its natural and artificial habitat. It is not a pretty picture. This “other-directed individual” is clearly a laggard who needs to relearn the lessons of his Puritan forbears, among them the fear of what abundance will do to the Protestant work ethic:

“Prior to the attainment of abundance, Riesman remarks, people are concerned primarily with increasing production. In their own temperament this requires hard enduringness and enterprise; in their external concerns it requires concentration upon dominating the physical environment; in their personal economy it requires thrift, prudence, abstinence. But once abundance is secured, the scarcity psychology that was once so valuable no longer operates to the advantage of society, and the ideal individual develops the qualities of the good consumer rather than those of the good producer. He needs now to cultivate interests that are appropriate to an enlarged leisure, and since he is likely to be an employee rather than an entrepreneur or to be engaged in one of the service trades rather than in production, the cordiality of his relations with other people becomes more important than his mastery of the environment.”

This sounds ridiculous because Potter has given us Willy Loman’s back story in prose fit for a peer-reviewed academic journal. But public intellectuals on the order of Susan Sontag, Paul Goodman, and Herbert Marcuse were indicting “consumer culture” on the same grounds, at the same time, and in the same words, as if they’d memorized the master text composed by the professors at the Frankfurt School (Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization [1955] was an attempt to grasp automated abundance as the portal through which society would pass beyond necessity and glimpse true freedom, but in One-Dimensional Man [1964], he reverted to the Frankfurt line).

And their indictment still stands. That is why it is disconcerting, at least, to find that Potter is the presiding spirit of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance: “We take inspiration from People of Plenty, the historian David Potter’s brilliant 1954 book on how abundance shaped American thought and culture.” They claim to have written a book about supply-side politics, not economics, but their critique of consumer culture could have been composed by Arthur Laffer [the economist who invented the infamous curve] or Jude Wanniski [former editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal in its supply-side phase]—or almost any academic across the disciplines. For some reason, intellectuals still code consumption as effeminate, passive, pliant, and conformist, not aggressive, creative, unruly, and contrarian, even though fashion, the extremity of consumer culture, is the scene of constant disruption, and leisure time is a highly customized space where people treat each other as ends in themselves, not means to the advancement of their careers.

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But wait, how can I say that Potter was a purveyor of political complacence if he was drawing on “critical theory,” which is synonymous with the the matriculates of the Frankfurt School? Weren’t those guys Marxists as well as Freudians? Well, yes, but the standpoint of their critique was anti-modern in the restricted but fundamental sense that it equated proletarian status with the erasure of individual identity—their model of genuine selfhood, and the premise of their distaste for capitalism, was the bourgeois proprietor of himself, the man who was his own boss because he owned property enough to rise above the dependent social standing of the wage slave: he was an “inner-directed” individual, not the “other-directed” kind who, lacking any stable, material groundwork for his identity in property, was subject to all manner of external constraint, determination, and manipulation.

The politics of complacence follows from “critical theory” insofar as its standpoint or premise or regulative principle remains this model of genuine selfhood. For what except mourning for the world we have lost is incumbent upon theorists who think that when “individuality loses its economic basis” due to the proletarianization of the majority—that is Max Horkheimer speaking, from Eclipse of Reason (1947)—selfhood as such has perished in the administered inferno of bureaucratic rationality? In fact, the range of politics that flows from this standpoint or premise or principle is worse than complacence, verging in some cases on regressive or reactionary, for example in the case of Steve Bannon, the man who cites Christopher Lasch, the farthest outpost of the Frankfurt School among American historians, as the key figure in his intellectual lineage.

Potter was more famous as a leading historian of Civil War and Reconstruction: his first book was Lincoln and his Party in the Secession Crisis (1942), where he argued, against the available evidence but to much acclaim then and now, that Lincoln underestimated, even discounted and dismissed southern threats of secession—thus precluding the very real possibility of the compromises on slavery that would have halted the approach of civil war. It was a major contribution to the Dunning School of interpretation, which held that the Civil War was a tragic, avoidable mistake, not an irrepressible conflict over the meaning and scope of freedom, and that Reconstruction was both a failure and a farce, not a valiant attempt by former slaves to redeem the founding promise of liberty and equality for all.

Here, too, Potter was arguing, consciously or not, for a politics of complacence, in this instance the kind of politics that treated the claims of the antebellum anti-slavery movement and of its secessionist counterpart as ideological “extremism” (a.k.a. radicalism) that would have been contained by cooler, moderate heads—real statesmen like Daniel Webster and Henry Clay—if the electoral system hadn’t emptied out the vital center. No matter that by 1858, there was no such center.

Potter was also confirming the political complacence that had not only let Reconstruction expire, but had also left Jim Crow standing since the 1890s, on the assumption that the black folk who weren’t ready for freedom back then were no better prepared for it a half century later. After all, the Dunning School was still the regnant interpretation of Civil War and Reconstruction when Potter wrote that first book, and it wouldn’t be dislodged until the 1960s.

II

But Gerstle? How can anyone characterize this product of the New Left, this critic of neoliberalism, as a purveyor of political complacence? Let’s have a look at the book that brought him to the attention of Klein & Thompson, among other notable journalists, pundits, and historians, including Noah Smith and Julian Zelizer.

The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order (2022) is an exemplary crossover text, which combines scrupulous scholarship and fluent prose to convince us that something important is happening here. What that is ain’t exactly clear, however, except for the idea of “political order,” a periodizing device that enlarges on what political scientists used to call party systems. For example, the third party system was constituted when a loose coalition of former Whigs and Free Soil Democrats came together in 1854 to found the Republican Party on the program of “no extension” of slavery into the federal territories (NB: they weren’t forming a third party).

The formal opposition of Republicans and Democrats has lasted to this day, but it has nothing to do with the names or the programs of the two parties, nor with the social composition of their constituencies: that third party system collapsed in the “realigning election” of 1896, and the fourth was replaced by FDR’s re-election in 1936, in a realignment that made the “New Deal coalition” of workers and white-collar professionals—the representatives, as it were, of industrial and post-industrial America—the ruling political bloc until the 1980s. And so on, unto the apparent “de-alignment” of our time, which is to say the breakdown of something that approximates a system of parties and that now, in the absence of party leadership, looks more like universal political disorder.

A “political order” according to Gerstle and the concept’s co-founder, Steve Fraser, is more than a party system—it includes what Althusserians used to call “ideological state apparatuses,” and what students of Gramsci still designate the elements of “hegemony,” both of which boil down to the capacity of ruling classes to legitimate their obvious power, whether economic or military, by appeal to principles that a majority assumes to be true and binding, thus translating that power into moral authority and exercising it routinely without repeated recourse to armed force.

According to this periodization, the New Deal Order was the fifth party system plus ideology. Its key element, by Gerstle’s accounting, was the truce between capital and labor codified in 1950, in the so-called Treaty of Detroit, an informal agreement which enfranchised organized labor insofar as its demands never went beyond the point of production, where collective bargaining marked the limits of negotiation, toward a larger program of social democracy.

The Neoliberal Order was inaugurated when Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, but really hit its stride in the 1990s, as the collapse of the Soviet Union zeroed out the international ideological dividends of conciliation between capital and labor—when the transfer of income from the latter to the former in the name of growth became the overt purpose and program of a new generation of corporate leaders dedicated to the protection of capitalism via expansion of its prerogatives. The outer limit that was the communist bloc had been breached, and with it any constraint on the claims capital could make on the world’s resources, including of course the labor time of every population.

As far as I can tell, the novelty of the periodization resides solely in this emphasis on the significance of Eastern European events in explaining capital’s aggressiveness vis a vis both labor and the state. The ostensibly new arguments—that New Left individualism became a component of neoliberal ideology, for example, or that the so-called Reagan Revolution was not simply foisted on an unwitting electorate, or that the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street were two sides of the same coin, both being symptoms of revolt against globalist neoliberalism—have been made before and elsewhere.

So Gerstle is simply reporting on the findings and insights of other historians, economists, sociologists, political scientists, and social theorists. That is probably why the book has become useful across the disciplines and to interested journalists: it’s a summary of received academic wisdom on the origins and character of politics in our time.

So what? Why would I suggest that a scholarly consensus enables political complacence? My complaint derives from the application of a straightforward pragmatic test: what follows from Gerstle’s analysis, what intellectual and political consequences flow from the acceptance of his narrative? The complacence of conventional wisdom, which as always steers us toward a moderate, middle ground.

This passage is plotted by the implicit recourse to the “New Deal coalition” as the cure for what ails us, as if reassembling an alliance of workers and white-collar professionals is as simple as executing the Heimlich maneuver—or composing a “new narrative”—not more complicated than robbing a grave and reanimating its contents. Or, to put it another way, as if there is something we can identify as “the” working class, which will serve as the manifestly superior social groundwork of a progressive politics than the interest groups that now define themselves in terms of racial or gender identities—and that supposedly dictate the programs of the Democratic Party. It’s nostalgia dressed up as radical departure from the decrepit state of both the Democratic Party’s leadership and the normal political discourse of our time.

The “new narrative” that derives from Gerstle’s analysis is on display in Klein & Thompson’s book, in Julian Zelizer’s review of it, in Noah Smith’s sincere pleas for moderation, and in the countless sermons issued by remnants of the Democratic Leadership Council to the effect that the party must move to the middle—as if that space hasn’t been hollowed out by party de-alignment over the last 30 years. This narrative is nostalgic, or anachronistic, on so many levels that it would be laughable were it not for Trump’s fascist retort to it.

The unstated premise here—its most explicit statements were Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Country (1998) and Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas? (2004), but Todd Gitlin, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Nelson Lichtenstein, Michael Kazin, Alan Brinkley, Michael Denning, and innumerable others have said or assumed pretty much the same thing—is that once upon a time, the intellectuals and the workers got together under the auspices of the Communist Party, or rather under the broader umbrella of the Popular Front, and, so united, they were able to kick ass, get unionized, build durable coalitions, craft a welfare state, etc. Since then, the story goes, academics have lost their ability to speak to and for the masses, an ability ascribed without evidence to a lost generation of professors who were presumably better equipped to deploy the vernacular, having been less removed, sociologically and otherwise, from those masses.

It's wishful thinking, of course, but the worst thing about it is that it enables and animates the self-flagellation that academics already excel at: "How come I can't communicate with the people who most need my help, which is to say my guidance, because they, unlike me, suffer from false consciousness, from adherence to myth, from inability to discern objective truth?"

As if the US isn’t the most advanced capitalist society on earth, with a division of labor that happily precludes the kind of intellectual who must also function as both political activist and party leader—like Lenin, Mao, Castro and Che, who understood that they were leading less-developed countries out of economic backwardness.

As if higher education isn’t the commanding heights of this country’s basic industry, making the university the central institution of its post-industrial society and, accordingly, the principal target of Trump’s savage campaign against intellectuals as such. As if middlebrow magazines and periodicals and websites don’t employ the graduates and convey the findings of the universities on a day-to-day basis. As if there is something that can be designated as a unitary, objective truth (rather than myth), and that credentialed academics know better than the un-degreed masses how to find, measure, and articulate it.

And of course as if there is “a” working class to be denominated by social origin or standing, not political commitment—a stratum to be galvanized by appeals to its obvious, objective economic interests, which its constituent members cannot grasp, as yet, because irrational impediments such as religious faith stand in the way.

That’s a lot of “as ifs.” Which is to say a lot of assumptions and ideas that are demonstrably false, or at least questionable: they’re certainly not self-evident. And so it turns out that the America conjured by left-liberal academics like Potter, Gerstle, Zelizer, et al.—and taken for granted by journalists like Klein & Thompson—is no less mythic than the America they denounce as the product of FOX News fantasies or the “cultural baggage” of laggard constituencies. The “new narrative” they promote is very old.