In his first post on Tikkun Daily, Eli Zaretsky succinctly laid out what he sees as the “Obama shell game:” a method that a president committed to “rightist and neo-liberal policies” uses to paralyze and preempt any opposition to his left. The left in Zaretsky’s view is “easily misled.” Obama, who knows the left well from his university days, is a master at misleading it by the occasional speech or promise that holds out hope. He is then free to enact his center-right policies.

Is this correct? The part that interests me most is this point that the left is easily misled. Can one say anything more contemptuous of a large group of people? Sheep, who don’t think for themselves, who just can’t see through the woolly sweater to the wolf beneath. It’s not that they are bad, selfish, cruel — there’s some respect implied in that — it’s that they are foolish, lacking analysis, toughness, and what it takes.

They — even the college-based left, replete with degrees in analytical wizardry — are as prone to illusions, Zaretsky, says, as those saps the Russian peasants, who always believed the Czar loved them, really, if only they could reach him. Of course it was not just the Russians. This was equally a theme in, say, English and French history, until the peasants’ descendants rose up and cut off their kings’ heads. Every middle class, and especially the intellectuals of that class, have always defined themselves as not peasants. Peasants! What a put down.

This is an enormously frustrating time and it is tempting to be contemptuous. It’s a traditional tendency in the left I have known all my life. Mostly, the contempt has been towards the right, though the deeper one gets into actual left political organizations, the more it is towards rivals on the left. This tone of contempt is one of the reasons I lost enthusiasm for reading left journalism for many years.

One of the things I have always most questioned or hated about Marxist analysis is the idea that the working class can have “false consciousness” — an inability to understand the reality of their position and their true interests. It gave cover to the intellectuals and powermongers in the Communist Party to do away with democracy. They knew better what was good for the people. The university-based left’s contempt for the peasants and working class today is surely one of the prime drivers of the popularity of hate radio and of rightwing success in getting the lower income vote.

One of the reasons I came to Tikkun is how refreshing it was to find Michael Lerner resisting the temptation to treat the Reagan Democrats — the working class voters who started to support the right in the late 1970s and 80s — as idiots who didn’t know what was good for them. Instead, by interviewing and talking with many trade union people, especially, he looked at the full range of their aspirations, and found out how much of their dissatisfaction was what one might call spiritual — a set of needs that the left was barely addressing but the right was.

It’s not that the peasants were wise and knew their true interests in looking to their royal fathers to care for them, or that today’s left voters were necessarily wise in voting for Obama and then imagining that they didn’t have to take to the streets to hold him to his promises. It’s that saying they were deluded on its own doesn’t do anything to help us understand the power of such delusions in our lives, nor does it help us understand our own ambivalences.

That’s why I am looking forward to more posts from Eli Zaretsky, who has a far greater understanding than I do of the unconscious forces running our lives.

The desire for a strong and loving father to run things; the desire for an end to the politics of contempt and mutual name-calling: both these were surely strong in our votes for Obama. Andrew Sullivan’s essay on Obama during the primaries saw the desire for him over Hillary as generational, the need of younger people to get past the epithet-filled conflicts of the boomer years, a desire for civility and peace. The essay title “Goodbye to All That” echoed a famous denunciation by Robert Graves, in his 1929 memoir of that title, of the generation that had caused the first world war.

It’s not that it’s necessarily wrong to feel contempt. If I look at humanity as whole right now, if I imagine our descendants ten generations hence looking back at us today, can I doubt they will feel a great deal of contempt and frustration, hatred likely, at the way we have been blindly spoiling our nest, using up the easy fuels and catastrophically changing the climate? Humans!

It’s just that I want to understand. I don’t know why the left has faltered so completely in the last forty years. In an insightful review of Zaretsky’s Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis in 2004, the feminist left-wing critic Ellen Willis asked:

What forces propel the march of the right, the paralysis of the left, the identification of ordinary people with the rich and powerful, rampant sexual anxiety, al-Qaeda’s apocalyptic violence, Donald Rumsfeld’s delusions of omnipotence, the torture at Abu Ghraib?

Her response to her own question:

By themselves, conventional categories of class interest and geopolitics do little to enlighten us. It’s the psychoanalytic vocabulary of unconscious conflict and ambivalence; of sexual desire, guilt, and rage; of sadism and masochism that supplies the missing link in the discussion.

This is the vocabulary that Zaretsky knows and I don’t, beyond what the educated lay person picks up from the culture. I would love to see more of this vocabulary in this Tikkun Daily context. But I find it notable that Willis does not include in that list the vocabulary of the spiritual, or even the psychoanalytic vocabulary of hope, faith and love.

My own sense of it is that the left has run up against an understanding of how intractable human nature is. The dreams of socialists implied that human nature was rather easily malleable. The great insights of Marx and his generation of sociologists that we were products of social forces suggested that if we changed the structures of society, we would change ourselves. We would become loving, cooperative, peaceful. Now we know it ain’t so easy. The conservatives all along have been saying it ain’t so easy, and that’s why they want to stick with tradition, the devil we know.

Psychoanalysis and the whole therapeutic world was also supposed to pioneer a way through, to help us individually to change and get over our destructive behaviors and hang-ups. It was a kind of complement, then, to the structural changes the left was trying to make. Work from both ends at once.

I do think that in many ways that has worked. It is better to be a newborn or a child, better to be old, better to be unemployed in social democracies than in the same countries in earlier times.

Though we also know that a lot of that is due to the success of capitalism and cheap fossil fuels in giving us material wealth that we can distribute, if we have a mind to. We feel dependent on this economic system, parasitic on it even if we hate its values, and we have learned enough about human nature and socialist revolutions to have our conservative caution come out: better not bite the host too much. What if it died, or got really sick, as in the Great Depression? It might lead to major and useful changes, but do we want to go through that kind of agony?

What would give us a wild hope like that of the early socialists, that we could actually create a better system?

I believe that hopefulness will not happen so easily again. I think reclaiming it is now a much longer process, and at the heart of it will be experiences of creating actual loving communities in small scale, in which people consciously learn how to change selves and structures simultaneously in an upward spiral. Then political organizations that have learned from these communities can form that carry this hopefulness within their own functioning. At present too many attempts to change the wider system add to the disillusion that activists feel about their goals, by demonstrating in the daily activism itself that even the activists don’t know how to be kind to each other. Peter Gabel wrote eloquently about this in his recent Tikkun piece about the troubles at the SEIU and Unite Here. If even the activists can’t do it, then why are they struggling to make a radical change? Why not just settle for a good manager like Obama who can slightly humanize the devil we know?

I think that in fact a great many activists have been struggling successfully in their disparate ways. We are awaiting more real syntheses, though, of (1) the various therapeutic and spiritual methods of personal transformation, with (2) the organizational achievements of many nonprofits in developing better relationships between leaders and followers, with (3) the wider strategic understanding of mass psychology that you see, for example, in the writings of Michael Lerner. Such syntheses will enable practices of personal development to be fitted in with more democratic and participatory models of organization — models that actually require a high level of personal maturity and social skill in order to function. In turn, well functioning consensus-building organizations can take on the big strategic structural goals of political change without fueling their own activists’ and potential constituents’ sense of disillusion with humanity.

Is it possible? I think it is. I think it’s happening. I am doing Tikkun Daily in the hope that we here can help it happen faster.


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