The Left's Will to Powerlessness

A Reply to Matt Stoller

“A man knowes no more of righteousness than he hath power to act.” Gerrard Winstanley, A New Yeare’s Gift to the Army (1650)

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Readers at this site know that from time to time, I complain that the American Left behaves irresponsibly because it believes in its own powerlessness. I mean that American leftists typically believe that to “speak truth to power,” they must be free of the corruptions and compromises that power inevitably brings. They believe, accordingly, that the marginal status which derives from their political abstentions secures for them a moral clarity and standing—a platform, if you will—that is unavailable to those who have power. The origin of this stoic attitude toward history is the unhappy consciousness of religious experience: its ultimate issue is the ridiculous notion that one can be in but not of this world, aware of but somehow exempt from its seductions.

The identification with abject and oppressed minorities, with those who have in fact been rendered unseen and powerless by “the system”—whether slavery, feudalism, or capitalism—teaches leftists that they will and indeed must lose to the powers that be, who of course have privileged access to the state, and thus to armed force, on the one hand, and cultural authority, on the other. For provisional proof of these untimely propositions, you need look no further than Howard Zinn’s rendition of American history, which was laughably immortalized by Matt Damon in “Good Will Hunting,” and which is, lamentably, the received wisdom of most high school graduates in the US. Or, alternatively, you could ask why the Left, academic and otherwise, has long believed that Marxism is a foreign import, and that socialism is the thing that dare not be named.

II

Matt Stoller, the brilliant proprietor of the Substack BIG, is not, to my knowledge, a reader at this site, and, as a former Congressional staffer specializing in a anti-trust issues, he owes nothing to my way of thinking about the Left. But he has just published a long post-mortem on the election entitled “On the Democratic Party’s Cult of Powerlessness.” He blames the Left for this affliction, so you might think our etiologies converge, or at least intersect. They don’t, not quite. Let me explain.

Stoller begins by noting that the Democratic Party has long been the residence of the “classical,” Brandeisian approach to anti-trust interpretation and enforcement which Lina Khan brought to the FTC under Biden—and that Khan’s approach, a radical departure from the “consumer welfare” doctrine approach perfected by Robert Bork, has now been discredited by the elevation of Trump’s newest bro-minion, Elon Musk. So we’re almost certainly back to Bork’s inane position, that rigorous anti-trust enforcement is an infringement on the property rights—the liberty—of the persons known at the law as corporations. (Does this mean that JD Vance’s reported enthusiasm for Khan was populist cover for Trump’s preposterous economic policies? Not necessarily: MAGA Nation is still an unstable isotope of a political coalition.)

Stoller then summarizes the many strands of post-election, intra-party recrimination—by now, you’ve read them all—and insists that the rot runs deeper than any of these arguments reveal (my emphases throughout):

“But as I watch the angry back and forth, and more broadly the institutional actors who were rejected by voters, I find a curious dynamic that explains far more than any tactical mistake. From local field organizers to the most prestigious people in the Democratic Party, like Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama, all seem to feel powerless. For instance, most insiders felt Joe Biden was far too old to win reelection, but did not feel able to act or say anything when it mattered. Similarly, Nancy Pelosi and Obama indicated they knew Harris was a bad candidate, but holding an open process to find a new one was, in Pelosi’s words, ‘impossible.’

“And it’s not just an electoral problem, it goes back to governing. It’s not that Democrats didn’t know the core problem they faced among voters. The main legislative effort they passed in 2022 was titled ‘The Inflation Reduction Act.’ They knew that people were mad about inflation, hence the title. But did it actually do much about inflation? No. And they knew that too. It was a pre-baked set of solutions and they would have applied it to any problem. They knew they should do something about costs, but, well, there was just no way to do anything but ride off the cliff with everyone else.

“In other words, there is a cult of learned helplessness at the core of most American institutions, one that Trump punctured by appearing to be a man of action. And the Democratic Party in 2024, with its associated law firms, think tanks, elected officials, donors, and media outlets, was rejected by voters precisely because the core value on the left, center, and right is about embracing powerlessness. This pervasive belief has an intellectual and political origin, and it conflicts directly with the anti-monopoly framework.”

III

So, what is that origin? Like many right-wing culture warriors (he is not), Stoller blames the Sixties—the moment of a paradigm shift that seemed to rob all political persuasions of faith in the possibility of redeeming the American experiment in democratic-republican government by reforming it, that is, by persuading the American people to live up to the nation’s founding principles and commitments. But at this point in his argument, the so-called cult of powerlessness becomes the exclusive property of the Left. Here is how Stoller makes the argument, quoting an unnamed Columbia professor (who is presumably Todd Gitlin):

“Prior to the 1960s, Americans largely situated their critique of existing institutions as contesting the meaning of America. . . . In the 1960s, a set of disillusioning arguments prevailed on the left, particularly in academia. The idea that the American republic was committed to the ‘political program of the Enlightenment’ seemed fraudulent. But dissidents didn’t renounce egalitarianism or elements like liberty for all. Instead, they ‘disconnected Lincoln’s proposition from the idea of America and reattached it to the aspirations of those subordinate groups of Americans—women, African Americans, the working class—oppressed, victimized, or excluded by an irremediably corrupt nation.’”

In sum, then:

“If you don’t believe in the state, or if you don’t associate enlightenment notions with the American project, then rolling back democratic protections for working people simply doesn’t matter. If America itself is immoral, then who cares what the governing apparatus looks like? If all commerce is driven by forces out of our hands, then there’s nothing we can do anyway. Politics, which is fundamentally the forming of a society, itself becomes immoral. The wielding of authority, which is essential to a democratic polity, is indistinguishable from authoritarian abuse. . . . “

In concluding, Stoller announces his allegiance to the old-school, Brandeisian version of anti-trust interpretation and prosecution, which was—and in Khan’s hands, is—avowedly political, at least in the terms Stoller proposes (forming a society), because its aim is to enforce inter-firm equity in the market through competition, and thus to disperse market power. Notice the insertion of the first person pronoun, and, more important, how political action has become the condition or cause of moral legitimacy, not its antithesis:

“The reason the anti-monopoly movement is interesting is because we are a break from this attitude. It’s not that we are fighting Bork, it’s that we are fighting the whole notion of anti-politics itself, the idea that protest and marginalized communities are the only mechanisms for moral legitimacy. We are saying that morality is shaped by politics through the state itself.”

IV

Whew. How to disagree with this angry, eloquent elegy, written on the occasion of anti-monopoly’s expiration? I’ll count the ways this time.

(1) To begin with, the resolute deployment of anti-trust law is a way of defusing larger political movements and goals, by assuming or claiming that the restoration of competition in the market is sufficient to the purpose of maintaining equality in the larger setting of civil society as such—sufficient to the purpose, that is, of regulating the market without resort to socialism. At least that was how the last truly trust-busting president, William Howard Taft, understood the choices on hand: he insisted that it was “back to competition” or forward, God forbid, to socialism. Louis Brandeis didn’t see it quite as clearly, as an either/or choice, but he believed, fervently, that equality of opportunity and the bourgeois virtues were functions of inter-firm market competition, and that anti-trust law was the best available means of keeping the market competitive.

Taft’s predecessor and nemesis, Theodore Roosevelt, thought instead that something approximating statist command of the market—federal charters for corporations, a federal trade commission empowered to intervene routinely in the market, far-reaching social welfare policies (a minimum wage, child care subsidies, trade union protections, etc.)—would eventually, inevitably be necessary to stave off “proletarian revolution” (his locution). Their opponent in 1912, Woodrow Wilson, staked out the middle ground, offering “positive government” as an alternative to exclusive reliance on either anti-trust litigation or statist command as the effective antidote to socialism.

All three represented variations on the theme of corporate liberalism (not corporatism), the cross-class ideological formation that emerged as an explicit and successful alternative to both the rising tide of socialism and the enduring appeal of populism in the American context, ca. 1890-1930. (Note: as of 1911, the Socialist Party USA had roughly 600 elected representatives in state and local offices, and its affiliated periodicals, including Appeal to Reason, had a circulation of well over 2 million.)

(2) Moreover, misgivings about the “program of the Enlightenment” do not have any predictable political provenance or valence. In fact, the Right is much more likely than the Left to embrace received wisdom or irrational inheritances—custom, tradition, religion, “original intent,” and so forth—as necessary constraints on political and intellectual innovation (Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine are the founding personifications of these different attitudes toward history). For example, in his dystopian masterpiece, Slouching Toward Gommorah (1996), Robert Bork himself claimed that the Declaration of Independence was a big mistake because, by enfranchising the unruly individualism of the Enlightenment, it ignored the problem of social order, and that—oops—Western civilization itself was to blame for what happened in the abominable Sixties. No, really:

“This [the shrinking number of required courses in college curricula] confirms a pattern repeatedly suggested in this book: trends slowly moving through an area of life, in this case higher education, until the Sixties when those trends accelerated rapidly. This [antecedent in doubt] suggests, as noted earlier, that we would in any event have eventually arrived where the Sixties took us but perhaps two or three decades later. Which [antecedent absconded] in turn suggests that we are merely seeing the playing out of qualities—individualism and egalitarianism—inherent in Western civilization and to some degree unique to that civilization.”

(3) The Left’s doubts about the Enlightenment are better placed, shall we say, than the Right’s; at least they’re not derived from fear of a future in which the benefits of science and reason are shared equally among all people. Those doubts are grounded instead in the assumption that there is no such thing as objective truth or reality, or, to put it another way, that truths aren’t copies of a fixed, external reality that is evident to all observers from every point of view. Also, that the “man of reason” posited by the Enlightenment project as the bearer, in theory, of objective judgement and universal truths was, in practice, a man, and of European extraction as well—a white man, in other words, who knew that Africans were backward, uncivilized people, and that women were naturally inferior to men.

In any case, to the precise extent that the Left assumes that there is such a thing as “objectivity,” which affords it a God’s-eye view of the world, it will be able to believe that its appointed constituencies in “the masses” or “the people” or “the” working class are suffering from false consciousness—they cannot apprehend their own interests—or are stupid enough to believe the lies they’re told by the Right. And so the Left will continue to find solace in exile at home, and of course in the spastic gestures of huge demonstrations whose only lasting results are satisfying crowd estimates and enhanced moral certainty.

V

It goes even deeper than Stoller lets on.

It's a matter of faith, good and bad.  The Left (until Bernie) has never been able to approach the American electorate in good faith, on the assumption that socialism is a winning program.  Instead, the Left has assumed that it must disguise its intentions or dispense with electoral appeals altogether, because socialism is, after all, “foreign” to the American experience—it’s an invention of the “Old World,” where class conflict and political upheaval were commonplace, where individualism and political stability weren’t underwritten by a liberal tradition.

The Right, by contrast, has always been able to approach the American electorate in bad faith, knowing that a celebration of capitalism—“greed is good” and all that—won’t win the hearts and minds of voters who, by and large, believe that MLK got it right on the promise of the Declaration, and/or that Bernie gets it right about M4A.  Instead, an increasingly sophisticated Right has reframed its intentions, mainly by appeal to individual rights (liberty) as these are protected by “free markets,” “free enterprise,” and “small business.” Or, in its own way, dispensing with electoral niceties altogether.

But let’s not kid ourselves. The leaders of MAGA Nation aren’t trying to deceive anyone. It doesn’t matter than Trump, Gaetz, Hegseth, et al., are exemplars of a nihilistic moral universe in which Jeffrey Epstein is a principal, even a role model; they intend to reinstate the bourgeois virtues, including male control of female sexuality, by any means necessary.

Notice that both Left and Right agree that socialism is antithetical to the American Dream, the American experience, the manifest destiny of the American people.   But they also agree that capitalism is not the name of the people’s desire: the neoliberal project is by now the object of revulsion and ridicule from both sides, as the corrupt, elitist, unfair, and unsustainable regime of the globalist Davos Man.  As always when at the outer limits of interpretation, “America” appears as an exception to the laws of historical motion.

The terrible effect of this agreement was and is to disarm the Left by convincing it that the American people are not to be trusted at the ballot box—they won’t vote for socialism, or for racial justice, or for income redistribution, but they will vote for candidates who deceive them. Indeed, the liberals among us who insist on “objectivity” believe that the majority’s opinions are by definition irrational and inadmissable evidence in political debate because they’re derived from sources that border on insane.

The question that follows, for me anyway, is this: does the American Left have any faith in the founding principles of the republic? According to my reading of the revolution, the bedrock belief of the founders was that liberty couldn’t last in the absence of equality. All previous republics had perished, James Madison wrote, because they couldn’t balance the rights of persons and the rights of property, and so “the poor were sacrificed to the rich.” My fellow writers on the Left have long held, by contrast, that the founders weren’t much interested in equality, and didn’t attend to its maintenance in crafting their republic. Then as now, they insist, it was the outsiders, the dissenters—the anti-Federalists, the abolitionists, the radicals, the miscreants, the malcontents—who have pressed that claim.

In any event, the Right, especially as represented by the Federalist [sic] Society, has long since given up on “original intent,” no matter who interprets the scope of that phrase. For the founders were intent not on reconciling liberty and equality, not on seeing them as the terms of a trade-off, but on grasping them as the indissoluble ingredients of a republic that would last because it would allow for the development of the people’s capacities. Not some of the people, but all of them, because they were created equal.