Author Archives: Josh Eidelson

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Paul Krugman gives the argument – advanced most recently by his newest fellow columnist – that the problem with political discourse today is the rudeness and meanness of the left exactly the response it deserves:

But there’s more going on than a simple attempt to impose a double standard. All this fuss about the rudeness of the Bush administration’s critics is an attempt to preclude serious discussion of that administration’s policies. For there is no way to be both honest and polite about what has happened in these past three years.

The problem with political discourse in this country, as far as I’m concerned, has everything to do with what issues are and are not on the radar screen, who gets a voice in the discourse, and what the assumptions are which undergird the discourse – and nothing to do with the civility of the diction.

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Hundreds rallied outside of the Albertus Magnus College office of the school’s President, Julia McNamara, who serves as the Chair of the Board of Yale – New Haven Hospital. The energy was real strong, and the cause imperative. Everyone who was there realizes that the fight goes on to get these 150 workers contracts, and Locals 34 and 35 will not soon forget the solidarity that brought us a win and that will will make us keep winning until Yale comes to internalize the extent to which its self-interest is tied up in that of this city and this movement. As the YDN reported:

“The members of our unions know, and Yale knows, and New Haven knows that we have unfinished business at the hospital,” Smith said. “It’s justice, it’s equal treatment, it’s treating people with respect for the hard work they do every day.”

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It occurs to me that Zach’s aspersions about my personal hygiene may be a hint that I haven’t yet responded to his latest thoughts on Rush, the Right, and such. I don’t think there’s much left to say. I of course agree with Zach that gloating at embarrassments of political enemies is less constructive than learning from them – that’s, in fact, exactly what I was endeavoring to do. I, like Zach, appreciate “insight both strategic and theoretical into the ways in which ideologies of control and strategies of Empire are linked” – I stand by my original (if I may be so bold) insight that the role of the right’s class agenda in determining the application of its social agenda raises questions about the integrity of the latter and the relationship between the two. On the other hand, while I share Zach’s aspiration of “destablilizing the structures of gender, sexuality, and race,” I don’t find the use of the term “minority” to refer to groups that are, empirically, smaller in this country than the majority along whichever axis we’re referring to a particularly problematic terminology. I would also maintain that while identities are constructed, they exist, and factual explorations of the breakdown of identities – who identifies how? what else do they have in common? where do they live? how are they changing? – in this country should be marshalled by the left rather than condemned and left as the province of the everyone else. Finally, resoundingly, I would affectionately but bitingly make a comment to the effect that sometimes we have to choose between laundering clothes and organizing a movement and then sing Pete Seeger’s rendition of “Which side are you on?”

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I’d have to count being satirized on the front page of Monday’s Joke Issue of the YDN (not on-line, for good reason) as a mark of pride for the UOC.

…they will spend all of today flagellating themselves with horsewhips on Beinecke Plaza in the middle of a mock-up Guilty Rich Kids Way Village…

I know it’s in to assume that all students making noise are spoiled effete bourgeois white activists, but if there’s someone in the UOC

supping a Starbucks caramel machiato, wearing a North Face jacket and sobbing on the corner of Wall and York streets

I’m pretty sure it isn’t me. Speaking of which, still have finished doing the first load of laundry of the year…

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Zach accuses me of “starting a blog war.” Nah – but I’ll finish it. This would perhaps be the place to warn Zach that we at LWB “will not tire, we will not falter, and we will not fail.” Or somesuch.

Zach takes me on for my suggestion that Limbaugh’s drug scandal, and the response from the media and the organized right, lend credence to the suggestion by certain ex-conservatives that the social agenda of the right operates primarily as a cover to advance its economic agenda. He argues that my argument is “mechanist,” and that it minimalizes the distinctive oppression of sexual and ethnic minorities and the stake of the right in that oppression by rendering it merely a by-product of an economic project. Perhaps unfortunately for those reading this site and Zach’s (you know who you are), again I don’t think my disagreement with Zach is as wide as it might appear. I argued yesterday not that social conservatism is merely a convenient superstructure over a material class war, but that conservatives lend credence to those who do think so when they take fundamentally libertarian stances on the failures of their fellow travelers to live by their social values. I would argue that the Right (capital “R”) of the past years is increasingly a libertarian one, and that there’s a great deal of deft politics and crass hypocrisy at work which makes it possible to draw on the libertarians at the Cato Institute as the brain trust of your movement and the Christian Coalition as your grassroots arm. Zach argues that Bob Barr’s suggestion that his daughter’s abortion is a private matter doesn’t detract from his work to make “the state apparatus to control people’s bodies in a fascistic linking of gender and power, of sexual reproduction and social reproduction.” Certainly, it doesn’t make it any less dangerous or any less real to those who suffer as a result. What it does detract from, however, is the integrity of the argument and the credibility of the stance. To argue that the right’s real relationship to its social values is soaked in classism does not, as I see it, suggest that sexism, heteronormativity, or racism are derivatives of classism. I would also argue, as I think Zach would as well, that the classism of segments of the right has a foundation of sexual and racial prejudice. The Wall Street Journal ran a long staff editorial a decade or so ago called “No Guardrails,” blaming the crime of a violent anti-abortion activist on the society that the left had fashioned for him to grow up in (strained already, yes, but it gets better). The basic thesis of the piece was that all things being equal, the elite might be able to dabble in drugs, sex, and pornography, but everyone should abstain because the lower classes don’t have the same reserves of strength so as not to be fully corrupted. This is to me a vital dramatization of the intersections of prejudice. All that said, I stand by my contention that the lifestyles and even personal beliefs of significant parts of the right elite are far less closely in line with their professed politics than are, say, their personal economic practices with their economics and that the right response to those who transgress its social agenda is often motivated by its economic agenda. I also strongly affirm Zach’s reminder that all oppressions are not the same and that economic determinism runs the risk of marginalizing both the nature and the victims of other types of oppression.

I should also note, perhaps, that I was not born with a copy of the Nation in my hand.

Zach ends with a call “to look more deeply at how racism, sexism, heteronormativity, and capitalism are both intertwined and sometimes contradictory as subjectivities from below struggle to reshape and have reshaped the social relations of capitalism.” Sounds good to me. But Zach, you’re gonna have to start that one off. Much respect to you as well.

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The Immigrant Worker Freedom Ride rally in Queens today was amazing, inspiring, and empowering. There looked to be hundreds of thousands of people there; it was also the most racially and economically diverse crowd I’ve ever seen at a rally of this size. We accomplished what IWFR Director described to me a few months back as an “intervention” in the American political process, and started the important work of recapturing the historical moment and building historic momentum for progress. That work continues tomorrow.

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Rush Limbaugh’s alleged drug addiction represents a public embarassment for the organized right. As well it should. The story here isn’t that national leaders sometimes call for morals that they themselves are unable to live up to. The real story is that Limbaugh’s addiction to large quantities of expensive painkillers will be – and already is being – played not only in the media but on the organized right as a personal indiscretion Rush needs time to reconcile with and move past, and not as, say, an evil crimminal felony. The latter term would be reserved with non-violent first time marijuana possession by lower-class teens. David Brock and Michael Lind, both ex-conservatives whose books I read this summer, both argue in different ways that the social conservative agenda is, for the Republican elite, a tool to rally the base and divide the working class in the wake of the Cold War so as to advance economic conservatism. Brock describes his disgust at discovering that his homosexuality was an acceptable foible as long as he was a rising star on the right and a cause for moral condemnation once he left it. Lind suggests that the social agenda of the right is counter to the personal values of most of its elite but provides a cover for its economic libertarian agenda. Arguments like these gain more credence with each public spectacle of a fallen angel of the right, be it Rush’s drug addiction or Bill Bennet’s gambling addiction. Few right hypocrisies can match that of Bob Barr, who defended his daughter’s choice to get an abortion on the grounds that it was “a private decision.” Conservatives who want to demonstrate their integrity could go a long way right now by calling for Rush Limbaugh to be sent to a prison cell – across from the one Ken Lay should be sitting in.

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Zach agrees that to see the Editorial Board of the YDN slamming University Properties for the vision for New Haven suggested by replacing a supermarket with a specialty running gear store, but faults me for not noting that they passed up the opportunity to Yale’s entire colonial project in the city. I guess I figured that was assumed until noted otherwise. I mean, I’d like to see the YDN come out for dismantling the Yale Corporation and replacing it with a Worker’s Co-operative, but they’re even less likely to give me that than that pony I asked them for (not that I’d have anywhere to put it). As I see it, for an editorial board closely aligned with and fairly uniformly supportive of the leadership of this University to take it to task for acting like New Haven belongs only to “upper-middle-class Yalies, wealthy suburbanites and runners who demand a certain kind of windpants,” is a real victory and a bad sign for Yale’s colonial project.

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Nathan Newman offers a new report on declines in unionization by state, and makes – by ranking states by unionization and coding them by 2000 election results – what should be a succinct, compelling, and visceral arguments for why progressives should prioritize unions and unions should prioritize organizing so that both can build over the next decades.

Much of the recent coverage of the Immigrant Worker Freedom Rides has contextualized them as a last-ditch effort by an anemic American labor movement to scrounge for new members and national attention. They’re right perhaps to the extent that a departure from the priorities and strategies of the old CIO bears partial responsibility (along with hostile governments, destructive international trends, and such) for the weakening of American labor over the past few decades. What the corporate media tends to miss is that what the rides represent, as much as anything else, is a historic return to the values and approaches which have brought every triumph that labor has acheived – organizing the unorganized, whoever they are, wherever they work, and building durable coalitions based on common interest and shared vision. Has a sense of crisis in the AFL-CIO played a role in making the “old guard” receptive to the focus on organizing and political mobilization that Sweeney – who won the first contested race for his post in a while – and even more so the “New Unity Partnership” – represent? Certainly. But they stand for is an old idea, not a new one, and in returning to it, the AFL-CIO is only catching up with the locals that compose it.

This is the future of the labor movement.

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Perhaps in anticipation of their departure at the end of the week, the YDN Editorial Board has printed an unusually articulate, compelling, and critical editorial in today’s paper, discussing University Properties’ choice to replace Krauzner’s on York Street:

We fear, in particular, that Sound Runner’s inapplicability to much of the community, apart from the serious runners in need of serious running clothing among us, reflects University Properties’ questionable motives for its selection of what retailers and restaurants fit best in the area surrounding Yale. The coming of this retailer typifies a development scheme that seems aimed to serve a dual purpose in the city: gentrifying for the sake of an image and further narrowing the level of clientele who will be drawn to the area. Despite what the newly unveiled roster of stores may seem to indicate, Broadway and New Haven are not just commercial destinations for upper-middle-class Yalies, wealthy suburbanites and runners who demand a certain kind of windpants.

If Yale’s vision for New Haven is drawing the ire of the Yale Daily News (as well as Republican economists), one wonders what kind of support it has left…