This week saw the five-year anniversary of the murder of George Floyd. It seems to have gone by without fanfare. Why? I think it’s because whatever gains were made after his death, in the name of equity, inclusion and justice, have been rolled back by the regime.
I think that’s because most Americans want it that way.
As Alma Rutgers wrote in the New Haven Register: “Now, five years later, George Floyd is all but forgotten. And the hope for change that followed his murder — the promise held by the massive rallies for justice throughout the country and in the heightened public understanding of Black Lives Matter — has been whitewashed away.”
The conventional wisdom is that the last election was decided by inflation, but I would argue it was decided by backlash. The protests that arose in the wake of Floyd’s death were some of the biggest in our country’s history. There was a feeling that something transformational was happening. Marginalized voices were suddenly getting platforms. Most important, respectable white people were taking them seriously.
But like all movements of progress in American history, it was met with reaction. No matter how criminal and constitutionally perverse Donald Trump is, it wasn’t as bad as Black and brown people – and women – getting a say in how the country is run. Sure, voters said they hated high prices. I believe them! I just don’t believe that was their reason for voting for Trump. There was something they hated more, something so normal as to be invisible. Indeed, it was hardly worth mentioning.
Because of the structural and historical power of white power, the political left in America has always been at a disadvantage, but the disadvantages seem greater these days. How do you move the country toward liberty and justice for all when a majority of Americans appears to be indifferent to justice or even hostile toward its administration?
I can’t say I know. That’s why I got in touch with Noah Berlatsky. As the publisher of Everything Is Horrible, a newsletter, Noah has what I don’t have: a sophisticated understanding of the state of the left. In the following interview, we talked about a range of issues relevant to the progressive project. How do we live in a constant state of regression?
JS: In your view, what is the left doing right? What is it doing wrong? Is Bernie Sanders the future or the past?
NB: I think there are a range of lefts doing a range of things, some of which seem like they’re working and some of which maybe less so. The Tesla takedown protests have been quite effective in making billionaire Elon Musk miserable and maybe prompting him to leave the White House, and I think a lot of people on the left have been involved in that.
Parts of the putative left I’ve been most unimpressed with is cheering on Musk for gutting the US Agency for International Development. Natureestimates that’s going to kill 25 million people. I know that Ken Klippenstein distrusts all US foreign policy, but you should get it together to oppose fascists when they set out to murder 25 million.
More broadly, I think this is an opportunity for the left, since Trump is radicalizing a lot of people and since the left is generally the group leading the demands to fight — and fighting is very popular with Democrats, and I think in general. I think AOC has capitalized on this very intelligently, and has rallied a lot of her colleagues and the public to her, even those who might have been skeptical of her in the past.
Re Sanders — I think the rallies with AOC are a way of passing the torch. Which seems like a wise move; he’s 83! He still seems quite fit, but no one lives forever.
JS: Why are some progressives hellbent on overlooking bigotry and giving white working class folk endless benefit of the doubt?
NB: I think that we live in a very racist society, and people across the political spectrum are affected by that in a range of ways. The idea that the white working class represents true authentic Americana, or true authentic class struggle, is appealing to a lot of people, whether right, left or center.
JS: It seems to me that liberals don't talk about masculinity in ways that can counter the rightwing obsession with it. You might be the only one, Noah. Why is that? What needs to be done?
NB: I don’t think I’m the only one! I’ve learned a lot from writers like Kate Manne, Julia Serano, Tressie McMillan Cottom, Adam Jones … I don’t know. Just lots of folks.
I’m not sure the issue is that liberals or the left don’t talk about these issues in the right way, so much as the fact that a lot of people (definitely on the right, but not just on the right) have a lot invested in patriarchy.
So when people talk about issues affecting men, they tend to interpret the problem as being that men aren’t living up to their roles or privileges and rights in patriarchy, rather than thinking about the ways that patriarchy is a cruel system that harms people of all genders.
Just as one example, people talk about a male loneliness epidemic. But, you know, the people who are most horrifically affected by loneliness are people who are incarcerated; we are obsessed with solitary confinement in this country, and we use it to literally drive people insane. Most of those people are men. But they’re men who patriarchy has decided are worthless or don’t matter. We’re always wondering why cishet straight white guys aren’t model patriarchs, rather than looking at who patriarchy is grinding underfoot. Why isn’t mass incarceration seen as a quintessential problem for men in these discussions? It’s pretty clear why, but there are strong cultural and financial incentives not to address it in that way.
What’s to be done is kind of a frustrating question, because there are pretty obvious ways to help men. Stop preventing trans men from getting health care; better worker safety so working class men don’t suffer horrific workplace injuries; free health care so disabled men can get care, etc. There are lots of things we could do that would improve men’s lives, but instead we’re always diverting into talking about saving patriarchy, and then the left gets shamed for not cosigning Jordan Peterson’s hateful rants. We need to stop pretending that the way to help men is more patriarchy when it’s patriarchy that harms them.
JS: There is so much cynicism about public protest, even among progressives. Why is that? And do liberals understand that we're living in the shadow of the backlash against the George Floyd protests?
NB: Public protests have always been controversial. The current attack on pro-Palestinian protest is partly a backlash to the George Floyd protests, but I think it’s also the result of decades of bipartisan bad faith about Zionism and what it actually means on the ground for Palestinian people. There are a lot of liberal Zionists — Jewish and non-Jewish — who are very invested in an idea of Israel as a great triumph of human rights, and they do not want to hear the very ugly downsides.
That’s created powerful incentives to silence people pointing out those downsides. And unfortunately, the right has very adeptly seized on this liberal bad faith to target the students, professors and institutions that should serve as a bulwark against fascism here at home.
There are some signs that some people are beginning to see the evils here, both at home and abroad; like Dick Durbin has been voting against unlimited Israel aid, which is pretty stunning given his history with AIPAC. At the same time, you know, Chuck Schumer and Jonathan Greenblatt still provide Trump rhetorical cover when he goes after Palestinian protestors. So I just don’t know. It’s pretty bleak.
JS: Someone told me recently that the story no one is telling is the one about liberal resentment, as in: I will gladly suffer to see these Trump voters suffer. What do you make of that?
I’m not sure I’m seeing a lot of that. Or, I guess people are definitely angry, and there’s a lot of rage at the people who brought us to this. But I think in terms of an actual political wish-list or political policies, there’s not a lot of enthusiasm for, like, withholding disaster relief from red states — not least because the people you’d hurt most in those cases are the marginalized people who were least likely to vote for Trump in the first place.
I think we need accountability for MAGA leaders; like, not just Trump, but corrupt judges like Clarence Thomas, corrupt media figures like Jeff Bezos, Republicans who cosigned Trump’s assault on the Constitution, from Mike Johnson on down.
What that looks like, I don’t know. But I don’t know how we move forward if these people remain in power or suffer no consequences for the hatred and misery they’ve spread.