Defeating Trump: Cross-front or Intersectional Left Politics?
Is it possible to put the Humpty Dumpty pieces of the old Democrat party alliances back together? Or, at least, hold it together long enough to get the numbers of people willing to hold their noses and vote for Joe Biden?
What form of left politics will defeat Donald Trump?
Mrs. America
A commonplace of American political history is that the 1970s seeded the new configurations that have led to our current moment. The decade’s economic crisis eventually loosened its grip. Looking backwards this was the moment when the long postwar boom began to end.
Today many see this time as the decisive turn away from the Keynesian New Deal and towards neoliberalism, an outlook far more comfortable with the creation of economic inequality even if it meant ultimately dismantling the astonishingly successful construction of a broad American middle class.
Mrs. America, the 2020 prestige television series, uses the failed campaign for passage of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to tell a tale and warning about the political transformations within the 1970s. As the series has it, the recipe for the New Right was baked in by Midwestern Catholic Phyllis Schlafly (Cate Blanchett), who first saw the possibilities of a GOP alliance that would embrace white Southern evangelicals. The fusion of Bible Belt social prejudice with Goldwater xenophobia would eventually topple the then existing Republican centre-right’s equipoise. The party of Dwight D. Eisenhower, Nelson Rockefeller, and Gerald Ford would be vanquished in favour of one shaped in Donald Trump’s form.
Mrs. America seeks to mollify its assumed liberal feminist audience by eventually suggesting that winners lose. While Schlafly’s political insight helped stop ERA, it did not lead to her personal reward. Viewers know where the large story goes, though, and are left with a gritted admiration for Schlafly’s vision on how one can build a winning coalition for rule by a neoconservative state.
The women’s rights leaders - Bella Abzug, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Shirley Chisholm, Jill Ruckelshaus - are presented as throwing away their initial advantage of actual popular and party support for ERA’s passage. Gifted with the roots of the Democrat Party’s coalition of liberal WASPs, ethnic groups, and Black Americans, the pro-ERA leaders are shown as not seeing the strengths of diversity within American women. Mrs. America culminates with a penultimate episode on the 1977 Houston National Women’s Conference. There an anti-ERA lieutenant to Schlafly, a non-historical figure played by Sarah Paulson, wanders in a drunk and accidentally drugged state through a wide spectrum of women’s meetings, ranging from martial arts training to consciousness-raising sessions. Paulson’s character sees what the national women’s leader did not - the continued strength of a liberal politics of coalition building.
Cross-front or intersectional?
The challenge of making a machine that, to paraphrase Woody Guthrie, can beat Trump has led to a basic question for progressive politics in the US and elsewhere: cross-front or intersectional Left?
The German Green Left politician and sociologist Jutta Ditfurth has criticized the rise of “cross-front” (Querfront) politics as the idea that in order to win elections, the Left should incorporate right-wing views. A cross-front movement seeks to avoid notions of being seen as “politically correct” lest the left be seen as either elitist or exclusionary to a perceived white, working-class “silent majority” constituency.
This position might consider Hilary Clinton’s comment on the “deplorables” as a main cause for the Democrat party’s defeat. We see this tendency in UK’s post-mortem on Corbyn’s thumping loss in the recent election. Similarly, Roger Hallam, one of the founders of Extinction Rebellion, sought to mould the group as “beyond politics” and willing to be “hypocritical” by taking donor money initially gained in anti-environmental profiteering and open to those with racist and homophobic views.
An alternative to cross-front positions is what is now often called intersectional politics. “Intersectionality” was initially raised in the 1970s by the Combahee River Collective and coined as a term in the late 1980s by Kimberlé Crenshaw to mean the multiple identities an individual might carry, for instance, Black and Female. Today, younger activists use the word in a more collective sense, closer to the idea of a rainbow movement, a coalition of different groups who are willing to share and promote each other’s interests.
An intersectional left politics believes in confidently speaking truth (to power) and that there is a larger electoral base out there, larger than the right-wing media will admit, that does not want triangulated or throttled claims. The intersectional left position, today exemplified by Bernie Saunders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, feels that America is ready for real change, and the Democrat National Committee’s cross-frontism is a cookbook for generational defeat.
Michael Denning argued in his 1996 The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century that the left culture of the 1930s was not dictated by the small numbers of American Communists, but was a culture of convergence among second generation ethnics, Black Americans, Europeans fleeing Nazi and Fascist Europe, and elite educated white artists chafing against American social puritanism. These widely different groups came to recognize and support each others concerns about access to public institutions, labour rights, anti-lynching and Anti-Jim Crow laws. As a sign of this alliance, they began to forge new keywords, such as “the [American] people” to indicate a shared demand for rights of public participation in decision-making.
Dumping Trump
In Liam Kennedy’s collection Trump’s America: Political Culture and National Identity, I argue that we can see the presence of an analogous coalition and cultural strategy today. So, while the 1930’s used “the people,” today we speak of “the 99%.” While the 1930s used “fellow traveller,” today we talk of being “an ally” to #BLM and #metoo. Querfront or queerfront?
We don’t need to dream of a new cultural front or lyricize the old Democrat Party coalition. The new intersectional left is already here. It’s on the streets, mobilizing to dump Trump.
Stephen Shapiro is Professor of American Literature at University of Warwick