Isaac Chotiner
The New Yorker
Em 2010, em meio aos destroços de uma crise econômica, Bhaskar Sunkara, então com 21 anos, começou a revista Jacobin. Socialista democrata na perspectiva e com o objetivo de replicar o sucesso que revistas como a National Review tiveram em estimular a revolução conservadora, a Jacobin se tornou um periódico às vezes doutrinário, mas frequentemente envolvente e instigante. E quando a campanha presidencial de Bernie Sanders em 2016 superou as expectativas de quase todos, ficou claro que as ideias que a Jacobin vinha promovendo tinham um apoio mais amplo do que era geralmente compreendido. Dois anos depois, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez emergiu como uma estrela democrata; Sanders se tornou um favorito em 2020, e retratos de jovens socialistas apareceram em uma reportagem de capa na New York.
Não gostamos de ser oprimidos. Não gostamos de ser maltratados. Acho que queremos um grau de autonomia pessoal. Acho que essas coisas são bastante inatas. Vou dar um exemplo concreto. À medida que as mulheres se tornam mais seguras economicamente, pois estão no local de trabalho, elas conseguem deixar relacionamentos, e as taxas de divórcio aumentam. Isso é porque essas mulheres foram automaticamente doutrinadas com ideais esquerdistas? Acho que tem mais a ver com o fato de que elas são realmente capazes de buscar um melhor negócio para si mesmas, pois recebem mais poder. Quando os trabalhadores estão em condições de baixo desemprego, eles tendem a estar mais dispostos a entrar em greve e lutar. Além disso, se você olhar para as pesquisas, as pessoas realmente têm muitas das mesmas preocupações. Elas têm as mesmas preocupações sobre assistência médica, sobre segurança.
I think after Trump’s election there was this idea that there is this original sin of racism in the United States, and we can’t get rid of it. Obviously, the United States is a society that was built on exclusion, that was built, in particular, on the exploitation of black Americans during slavery, and after slavery, too. It’s also a society in which there’s been a mass civil-rights movement and a feminist movement. There have been other things to make it more humane.
I don’t want to be Panglossian, but I want us to look back at the progress of the last half century and say, “There was great progress, but it wasn’t enough.” I think there was too much pessimism coming from liberal quarters about this. I think people could be won over. Do I think the ordinary Trump voter can be won over? I guess it depends. There’s obviously a core of Trump voters who are racist, who cannot be won over to a progressive program, and many of them aren’t even workers. They’re people who are the traditional base of the right in any country, this middle-class base of authoritarianism. There’s also a bunch of people who were just angry and discontented.
Many people voted for Trump because he’s a Republican and they’re Republicans, and they’re often Republicans for reasons having to do with cultural issues like abortion. This gets back to what we were talking about earlier, about people wanting different things.
Yeah, I take your point that there is a caricature of speaking about economic issues that means essentially not speaking about other issues. But for me, for example, the struggle for reproductive rights is not a cultural or social issue; it is an economic issue. It’s an issue that I want to bring into working-class politics. In other words, who are the people who suffer the most if there’s no abortion clinic within fifty, sixty miles of them? It’s the poorest workers. Who are the people who suffer most from harassment on the job? The women workers. There is a way, I think, to foreground economic issues but not downplay other things.
I agree that, by and large, Democrats do better when they talk about economic issues first. But there probably are a lot of poor people who feel like no abortion clinics mean fewer fetuses getting killed. I do think acknowledging that people have a totally different way of looking at things is important.
Yes, definitely. I think maybe one way to do this is to say, “Listen, we’re not going to backtrack or capitulate on anything we think is important, like fighting for immigrant rights or fighting for abortion rights, but we want to be so convincing on other issues that we can win people over.” For example, if someone’s No. 3 issue is immigration, and they’re on the right on immigration, but their No. 1 issue is jobs and their No. 2 issue is health care, we want to convince them that we’re so good on No. 1 and No. 2 that they’ll vote for the Commie bastards anyway.
It’s interesting that Trump thinks that his appeal is based on cultural and racial issues. His closing message in 2018 was not “Hey, struggling guy in Ohio, I improved your pocketbook.” It was “The Muslims are coming” or “The immigrants are coming.” His message in 2020 will likely be the same. I think it’s at least worth paying attention to the fact that he thinks that’s the way he can win those voters.
This is typical of this kind of right-wing populism. It’s pretty slippery. What he’s primarily pointing to is the idea that something was lost. Obviously, we need a counter to that. Part of it is speaking to a loss but in a different way. You want to talk to people about the fact that jobs have been lost. The unions have been devastated. We just want to point to different villains, which, of course, is a dangerous thing. But at least as far as Sanders or A.O.C. and this crop of left-wing politicians that emerged the last couple of years, I don’t see them as doing it in a way that fuels the right. I see them as doing it in a way that is helping to neutralize those on the right, keep it where it is, which is a minority authoritarian movement that’s going to cause a lot of headaches, that’s going to be around for a long time, but we’ve just got to keep them to their thirty-five or forty per cent, and we need to win over the rest.
What have you made of the Jeremy Corbyn experience in Britain? Labour recently said that it wanted to end the principle of the free movement of people in any Brexit deal, and Corbyn hasn’t generally been strongly against Brexit. I wonder how you think he’s dealt with that, and if it’s given you any pause about how socialist or left-wing policymakers sometimes deal with these issues.
Even foregrounding the question of freedom of movement seems to be playing on the terrain of the right. Any voter that is going to vote on the issue of immigration and opposition to freedom of movement as a primary thing is not going to be won over. I think it’s counterproductive even at that political level.
So to synthesize what you’re saying about Corbyn, and Sanders, too, who sometimes seems like he’s in favor of more restrictive immigration policies than some on the left—you want them to neutralize the right by talking about economic issues without engaging in any of the cultural demagoguery. Is that fair?
Yes, I want Sanders, instead of just saying, “Oh, I’m against open borders,” in this very negative way, to just say, “Immigrants are coming here because they want to construct America, and they’re working hard. I’d rather have them in the country than people like Donald Trump.” I just can’t imagine the Democratic electorate would be turned off by that. I can’t imagine it would be a poison pill. That’s the one thing that I see a lot of people on the left have been consistently prodding Sanders on, and he has showed a capacity to evolve on certain things. I do believe that if he were in power, you would see something like amnesty for people already here, and you would see a more humane immigration policy.
Is Donald Trump a neoliberal?
This is a complicated question. Neoliberalism to me means the movement to use the power of the state in order to decrease the power of labor and to deregulate and restore the profitability of firms in the seventies and eighties. Since then it’s become the dominant economic consensus in the U.S. You still have a very strong aggressive state, but you don’t expand social welfare. You make sure things stay deregulated, and so on. In that sense, Trump is with the neoliberal consensus, but I think the term has been used as a pure pejorative to the point that it’s losing its analytical value.
In terms of weakening Wall Street regulations or watering down regulations via Cabinet agencies, or not expanding the welfare state, I don’t think those really fit as a description of the Obama Administration, but maybe you do?
I think the Obama Administration represented a centrist consensus within the Democratic Party, which said that the best way to preserve the welfare state was to insure that the economy was humming and growing and that, broadly, the interests of corporations were served because corporations were the ones generating the wealth that Obama wanted to use in order to sustain and expand social programs like Obamacare. But he, in the construction of the social programs, shied away from the creation of big universal programs that would have required more political struggle and actually might have been impossible to enact under his Administration. Would I call that neoliberal? I mean, maybe. I probably have many times in short columns and things like that, but I’m not sure how much analytical value it has.
If you watch what the Trump Administration is doing at the Environmental Protection Agency or the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, talking about it as neoliberal seems to miss what’s going on to me because it seems noticeably different than what we—
I don’t think there’s a strong contingent of capital that’s calling for some of the things that Trump is doing. In other words, it seems to me that neoliberal policy would be deregulation that capital demanded, whereas Trump seems to be operating in his own ideological direction—it seems like with a degree of autonomy that I would have to reconcile with Marxist theory. [Laughs]
It seems different than what we’ve seen in the past from either Republican or Democratic Administrations to some extent, no?
There’s definitely been a big departure in certain ways. I think there has been a continuity with Republican Administrations as far as tax cuts and so on. But things have definitely gotten worse, and worse faster than they did under Obama. Obviously, we opposed a lot of Obama’s policies, but there’s no point in saying it’s all the same, because it absolutely isn’t. If push comes to shove and I were in a swing state in 2020, of course, I would vote for anyone in the Democratic field over Trump. I think that’s common sense. It should be hegemonic on the left.
When Sanders was refusing to release his tax returns, you had a series of tweets in which you wrote, “People obsessed with tax returns are narrowly looking for personal corruption as a sign of capture. Politicians serve capitalist interests because they administer a capitalist state dependent on private profits and favorable market conditions to survive and fund programs.” And “Candidates aren’t literally bought by elites, they structurally represent capitalist interests. Bernie is an exception.” Can you explain this?
I was trying to make a broader point about the way in which the interests of businesses exert themselves in government, which is not through direct bribery or coercion or lobbying but more often than not through the dynamics of the economy itself. Things I said, like Bernie is an exception, undermine that point. So I wouldn’t stand by all of that. I would say I agree with my underlying point, but I do want to see Trump’s tax returns. I’m glad that Bernie released his tax returns, too, so I guess I should say that as well.
Corruption occurs in noncapitalist countries, too.
Yeah, of course. But corruption to me isn’t a widespread issue. The conversation often is about Trump only being in power to enrich himself and make his business more profitable. Or back in the Iraq War days, it was, “Dick Cheney only did this war just to make money for Halliburton.” On the one hand, as a populist thing, they’re attacking the right enemies, so maybe it’s O.K., but, to me, it just isn’t the way society actually works. That was the point I was making, but I do think you’re right. There are other levels of corruption that don’t have to do with the things I said that we should obviously be on guard for, and that’s why we need transparency in government. If you’re running for public office, we should know your finances.
Before we go, the Jacobin coverage of Venezuela was more positive during the Chavez regime and earlier in the Maduro regime. Has the way in which that situation has gone downhill made you think any differently about any conception of socialism, or about signs that people should be on the lookout for in leaders that you or other people on the left missed?
There was a lot of debate in the Latin American left about certain things that Venezuela was doing, as opposed to Bolivia and Ecuador. One is, Venezuela seemed to be breaking with some of the “neoliberal consensus” more than Bolivia and Ecuador, but doing it through using oil rents, and I think in the long run that probably created some more macroeconomic instability. In Bolivia and Ecuador there was a more conservative approach on some of the macroeconomic stuff, and that enabled them to create more stability in the long term.
You undermine a lot of the gains of your programs for workers if you’re also going to expose them to hyperinflation. That doesn’t make me some deficit hawk or austerity type to say that. I think there were macroeconomic mistakes. There was obviously, at times, an extremely right-wing opposition in Venezuela. There was a lot of political instability, some of it coming from the United States. I think as a whole, the mentality of the left has been to say that we in the U.S., a country that has been the perpetrator of so much injustice in Latin America and so many interventions, don’t have a right to critically look at states.
I meant that the way Chavez used rhetoric was more important than some people on the left maybe thought. Do you think that it’s worth paying attention to things like this and that we probably shouldn’t be totally surprised by how it played out?
When we were analyzing Venezuela, we analyzed it mostly through the populist tradition, saying that Venezuela was a manifestation of left populism. Maybe this is kind of an academic cop out, but I think some of the rhetoric Chavez was using, some of the approach from his government, the fact that he did have a segment of capital on his side, the fact that he would have all these military officers and a segment of state bureaucracy on his side, the fact that there wasn’t an active labor-backed party in Venezuela and whatever else, meant that we interpreted it all as, Hey listen, this is definitely redistributive. This is vaguely left. This guy seems good, so it’s good. This is a social movement if he says it is.
I guess the underlying point of your question is, Might creating this kind of polarization of us versus them, and pushing very hard to destabilize the country lead to that outcome? Burke had that one line, I’m paraphrasing very brutally, that the only thing worse than existing tyranny is a failed revolution against that tyranny. I think we always have to be on guard with what happens when our revolutions fail, because often it leads to a counterrevolution on the right or a situation of political paralysis. That can’t stop us from trying to make change, but I think a lot of the lesson of the last hundred years is to pay attention to unexpected outcomes and to construct policies in a way that makes sense.
You talk about Sanders a bit at the end of your book. Is it fair to say that in your mind Sanders is a good democratic socialist, and Warren is a good social democrat?
I’m not sure if I would call Warren a social democrat, but in my mind she’s definitely the second-best in the field. I think the gap between Sanders and Warren and the gap between Warren and the rest of the field is equally significant. I think a lot of the things she’s proposing are great. I think she’s pushing the policy debate in a really good direction.
Does any part of you ever think that someone like her being President, given how the government works, would actually be more effective for the left than someone like Sanders?
I see your argument. Let’s say you have a scenario where the world ends in eight years, and you’re talking about what can get passed within this next eight years. Then you would say that maybe Warren has certain skills that might be useful administrating the state. Maybe those skills exceed those of Sanders.
In my mind, thinking about politics over ten, fifteen, twenty years, someone with the strength and moral clarity of Sanders, with the ability to attract people to him and create a movement around him, can really create the conditions in which we’re not just writing policy but we’re changing the conditions in which policy is written. Does that make sense? I think Sanders is better at changing the conditions in which policy is written and being uncompromising in certain things in a way that is actually useful in the long term.
Isaac Chotiner is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he is the principal contributor to Q. & A., a series of interviews with public figures in politics, media, books, business, technology, and more.
 |
| Bernie Sanders supera o resto do campo democrata em sua capacidade de mudar as condições em que a política é escrita, diz o editor da Jacobin. Fonte Fotografia de Mark Wilson / Getty |
Em 2010, em meio aos destroços de uma crise econômica, Bhaskar Sunkara, então com 21 anos, começou a revista Jacobin. Socialista democrata na perspectiva e com o objetivo de replicar o sucesso que revistas como a National Review tiveram em estimular a revolução conservadora, a Jacobin se tornou um periódico às vezes doutrinário, mas frequentemente envolvente e instigante. E quando a campanha presidencial de Bernie Sanders em 2016 superou as expectativas de quase todos, ficou claro que as ideias que a Jacobin vinha promovendo tinham um apoio mais amplo do que era geralmente compreendido. Dois anos depois, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez emergiu como uma estrela democrata; Sanders se tornou um favorito em 2020, e retratos de jovens socialistas apareceram em uma reportagem de capa na New York.
Agora vem o primeiro livro de Sunkara, "The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality", que é tanto uma história do socialismo no século XX quanto um modelo de como as ideias democrático-socialistas podem ter sucesso no século XXI. Abrangendo tudo, desde a ascensão de Lenin até o status da Suécia como "a sociedade mais habitável da história", o livro não defende os fracassos das sociedades de inspiração marxista. No entanto, Sunkara despreza a ideia de que esses fracassos devem limitar as ambições de reformadores e revolucionários com a intenção de criar uma sociedade mais justa.
Recentemente, falei por telefone com Sunkara, que, além de seu trabalho na Jacobin, é colunista do Guardian US. Durante nossa conversa, que foi editada para maior clareza e extensão, discutimos as diferentes abordagens que Sanders e Elizabeth Warren adotaram para a reforma progressiva, por que os americanos votam contra seus interesses econômicos e se os liberais estão muito focados no poder explicativo da raça.
Como você vê a diferença entre socialismo democrático e social-democracia, e por que você acha que essa diferença é tão crucial para o futuro da política radical?
Ótima pergunta. Obviamente temos um ancestral comum, Karl Marx.
Não você e eu, só para esclarecer.
Certo, não nós. Karl Marx e [Friedrich] Engels se autodenominavam social-democratas. Era um movimento unido nos grandes partidos dos trabalhadores no final do século XIX. Então o movimento meio que mudou. Hoje em dia, o que você chamaria de social-democracia é o movimento que busca expandir o estado de bem-estar social, mas dentro dos limites do capitalismo. É um tipo de socialismo funcional. Vamos ceder a propriedade, mas vamos taxar essas empresas produtivas e garantir que pelo menos haja um nível básico de segurança e direitos para as pessoas.
Um socialista democrático diria: "Isso é ótimo. Vamos lutar por todas essas coisas, vamos ter esse tipo de sociedade." Então também queremos fazer perguntas mais profundas sobre propriedade. Uma é, em uma sociedade onde as coisas estão melhorando para os trabalhadores, mas a capacidade de manter o investimento ainda está nas mãos dos capitalistas, os capitalistas sempre podem se rebelar contra o acordo social-democrata. Na Suécia, por exemplo, o capital no final dos anos setenta está basicamente dizendo: "Tudo bem, esse acordo estava funcionando para nós antes, mas agora não estamos lucrando o suficiente. Precisamos reverter o estado de bem-estar social". Se você finalmente puder socializar o investimento e encontrar uma maneira de transferir a produção para cooperativas e para essas outras formas de propriedade socializada, então talvez possamos evitar isso.
A segunda razão é apenas moral e ética. Acho que o trabalho assalariado constitui uma forma de hierarquia e exploração da qual poderíamos prescindir.
Seu livro também demonstra um certo respeito pela política reformista, em vez de radical, e você escreve que está ciente de "quão profundos os ganhos da reforma podem ser". Então por que a Suécia é insuficiente? Acho que muitas pessoas olhariam para a Suécia e diriam: "Ok, não é perfeita. Pode melhorar. Mas é tão boa quanto qualquer sociedade que os humanos foram capazes de construir".
Parte da razão pela qual meu tom é assim é que acredito que uma base de massa de pessoas pressionando por coisas, como o Medicare for All e todas essas outras reformas de que precisamos nos Estados Unidos, serão pessoas que serão exatamente como você descreveu, liberais e progressistas. Se nós, como socialistas, adotarmos esse tipo de mentalidade muito sarcástica e radical, na qual obviamente todos nós podemos cair às vezes, alienaremos a base potencial que poderia realmente fazer um país melhor e um mundo melhor.
Na Suécia, temos que olhar para o que aconteceu nos últimos vinte ou trinta anos. Se você pudesse congelar a Suécia em 1974 ou 1975, seria uma sociedade muito boa. Nos últimos vinte, trinta anos, houve uma guinada para a direita na política sueca. Houve espaço para a direita populista e racista. Muito do estado de bem-estar social se deteriorou.
Não tenho certeza se a social-democracia é sustentável a longo prazo. Eventualmente, os trabalhadores começarão a exigir coisas que farão incursões na lucratividade das empresas capitalistas, e esses capitalistas então se voltarão contra o compromisso social-democrata. Existe um caminho social-democrata para o socialismo? Não os vejo como caminhos separados. Vejo um como uma espécie de parada rápida, parando na linha de cinco ou dez jardas.
Parece que você está tentando fazer um argumento prático, essencialmente dizendo que a social-democracia sempre vai falhar e que há razões estruturais pelas quais isso provavelmente acontecerá. Seria justo dizer isso?
Sim, exatamente.
Não há realmente nenhum antecedente do que você está defendendo. E então, se quisermos discutir praticamente sobre o que pode funcionar, isso o deixa ansioso ou cauteloso?
Sim, definitivamente. Acho que essa é uma das razões pelas quais gosto de dizer: "Vamos para a social-democracia. Vamos ver o que funciona". Mas em algum nível, eu apenas acredito que a democracia é uma coisa boa e que devemos ter um certo conjunto de ideais para nossa sociedade, que é o máximo de democracia possível, o mínimo de hierarquia possível. Agora, pode haver limites para isso. Talvez uma sociedade complexa com uma divisão complexa de trabalho exija algum tipo de hierarquia. Não tenho certeza até onde podemos ir, mas acho que é útil ter o horizonte social.
A Suécia do pós-guerra não era uma sociedade multiétnica e multicultural da maneira que a América moderna é. Você está preocupado que haja uma contradição inerente entre o que estamos falando e uma sociedade que é multicultural e multiétnica — que muitas pessoas não estejam dispostas a fazer parte do socialismo democrático quando as pessoas parecem diferentes delas?
Não estou completamente preocupado. No caso da Suécia, eles estavam se organizando em um país profundamente desigual. Agora, existem certas barreiras de organização nos EUA, um país com uma história muito profunda de racismo e desigualdade racial? Sim. Mas acho que essas barreiras podem ser superadas pela política. Acho que todos os seres humanos querem as mesmas coisas. Todos nós queremos cuidar de nós mesmos, cuidar de nossas famílias. Sabemos quando estamos sendo oprimidos. Sabemos quando estamos sendo explorados. Sempre procuraremos uma maneira de sair dessa situação se ela surgir.
O que faz você pensar que todos os seres humanos querem a mesma coisa?
Somos animais, certo?
Não estou falando de sexo e comida.
Não gostamos de ser oprimidos. Não gostamos de ser maltratados. Acho que queremos um grau de autonomia pessoal. Acho que essas coisas são bastante inatas. Vou dar um exemplo concreto. À medida que as mulheres se tornam mais seguras economicamente, pois estão no local de trabalho, elas conseguem deixar relacionamentos, e as taxas de divórcio aumentam. Isso é porque essas mulheres foram automaticamente doutrinadas com ideais esquerdistas? Acho que tem mais a ver com o fato de que elas são realmente capazes de buscar um melhor negócio para si mesmas, pois recebem mais poder. Quando os trabalhadores estão em condições de baixo desemprego, eles tendem a estar mais dispostos a entrar em greve e lutar. Além disso, se você olhar para as pesquisas, as pessoas realmente têm muitas das mesmas preocupações. Elas têm as mesmas preocupações sobre assistência médica, sobre segurança.
Certo, mas os homens se sentem mais seguros agora que as mulheres têm mais liberdade? Essa parece ser uma pergunta mais perturbadora ou uma resposta possível mais perturbadora. A questão é que acho que algumas pessoas percebem sua segurança como algo que vem às custas de outras.
Sim, essa é uma coisa contra a qual precisamos lutar politicamente, porque há uma mentalidade de jogo de soma zero quando se trata de imigração, quando se trata de ganhos de minorias raciais, de mulheres. Precisamos lutar contra isso. O caso socialista é que quando se trata de, digamos, trabalhadores brancos do sexo masculino, qualquer privilégio que eles possam ter sobre trabalhadores não brancos ou sobre mulheres é um privilégio relativo, não um privilégio absoluto. Não quero minimizar a dificuldade e a necessidade de organização antirracista e feminista, mas é dizer que nossa premissa, como socialistas, é que podemos construir uma coalizão política na qual todas as pessoas oprimidas podem obter ganhos, mesmo que algumas pessoas obtenham menos ganhos do que outras com base em sua posição relativa anterior.
Você escreve no livro: “Os socialistas precisam argumentar contra a ideia de que racismo e sexismo são inatos e que a consciência das pessoas não mudará por meio da luta. O racismo assumiu um papel quase metafísico na política liberal — é de alguma forma a causa, a explicação e a consequência da maioria dos fenômenos sociais. A realidade é que as pessoas podem superar seus preconceitos no processo de luta em massa por interesses compartilhados, mas isso requer envolver as pessoas nessas lutas comuns para começar.” Quando você diz “papel metafísico”, está falando sobre as respostas à eleição de Trump?
I think after Trump’s election there was this idea that there is this original sin of racism in the United States, and we can’t get rid of it. Obviously, the United States is a society that was built on exclusion, that was built, in particular, on the exploitation of black Americans during slavery, and after slavery, too. It’s also a society in which there’s been a mass civil-rights movement and a feminist movement. There have been other things to make it more humane.
I don’t want to be Panglossian, but I want us to look back at the progress of the last half century and say, “There was great progress, but it wasn’t enough.” I think there was too much pessimism coming from liberal quarters about this. I think people could be won over. Do I think the ordinary Trump voter can be won over? I guess it depends. There’s obviously a core of Trump voters who are racist, who cannot be won over to a progressive program, and many of them aren’t even workers. They’re people who are the traditional base of the right in any country, this middle-class base of authoritarianism. There’s also a bunch of people who were just angry and discontented.
Many people voted for Trump because he’s a Republican and they’re Republicans, and they’re often Republicans for reasons having to do with cultural issues like abortion. This gets back to what we were talking about earlier, about people wanting different things.
Yeah, I take your point that there is a caricature of speaking about economic issues that means essentially not speaking about other issues. But for me, for example, the struggle for reproductive rights is not a cultural or social issue; it is an economic issue. It’s an issue that I want to bring into working-class politics. In other words, who are the people who suffer the most if there’s no abortion clinic within fifty, sixty miles of them? It’s the poorest workers. Who are the people who suffer most from harassment on the job? The women workers. There is a way, I think, to foreground economic issues but not downplay other things.
I agree that, by and large, Democrats do better when they talk about economic issues first. But there probably are a lot of poor people who feel like no abortion clinics mean fewer fetuses getting killed. I do think acknowledging that people have a totally different way of looking at things is important.
Yes, definitely. I think maybe one way to do this is to say, “Listen, we’re not going to backtrack or capitulate on anything we think is important, like fighting for immigrant rights or fighting for abortion rights, but we want to be so convincing on other issues that we can win people over.” For example, if someone’s No. 3 issue is immigration, and they’re on the right on immigration, but their No. 1 issue is jobs and their No. 2 issue is health care, we want to convince them that we’re so good on No. 1 and No. 2 that they’ll vote for the Commie bastards anyway.
It’s interesting that Trump thinks that his appeal is based on cultural and racial issues. His closing message in 2018 was not “Hey, struggling guy in Ohio, I improved your pocketbook.” It was “The Muslims are coming” or “The immigrants are coming.” His message in 2020 will likely be the same. I think it’s at least worth paying attention to the fact that he thinks that’s the way he can win those voters.
This is typical of this kind of right-wing populism. It’s pretty slippery. What he’s primarily pointing to is the idea that something was lost. Obviously, we need a counter to that. Part of it is speaking to a loss but in a different way. You want to talk to people about the fact that jobs have been lost. The unions have been devastated. We just want to point to different villains, which, of course, is a dangerous thing. But at least as far as Sanders or A.O.C. and this crop of left-wing politicians that emerged the last couple of years, I don’t see them as doing it in a way that fuels the right. I see them as doing it in a way that is helping to neutralize those on the right, keep it where it is, which is a minority authoritarian movement that’s going to cause a lot of headaches, that’s going to be around for a long time, but we’ve just got to keep them to their thirty-five or forty per cent, and we need to win over the rest.
What have you made of the Jeremy Corbyn experience in Britain? Labour recently said that it wanted to end the principle of the free movement of people in any Brexit deal, and Corbyn hasn’t generally been strongly against Brexit. I wonder how you think he’s dealt with that, and if it’s given you any pause about how socialist or left-wing policymakers sometimes deal with these issues.
Even foregrounding the question of freedom of movement seems to be playing on the terrain of the right. Any voter that is going to vote on the issue of immigration and opposition to freedom of movement as a primary thing is not going to be won over. I think it’s counterproductive even at that political level.
So to synthesize what you’re saying about Corbyn, and Sanders, too, who sometimes seems like he’s in favor of more restrictive immigration policies than some on the left—you want them to neutralize the right by talking about economic issues without engaging in any of the cultural demagoguery. Is that fair?
Yes, I want Sanders, instead of just saying, “Oh, I’m against open borders,” in this very negative way, to just say, “Immigrants are coming here because they want to construct America, and they’re working hard. I’d rather have them in the country than people like Donald Trump.” I just can’t imagine the Democratic electorate would be turned off by that. I can’t imagine it would be a poison pill. That’s the one thing that I see a lot of people on the left have been consistently prodding Sanders on, and he has showed a capacity to evolve on certain things. I do believe that if he were in power, you would see something like amnesty for people already here, and you would see a more humane immigration policy.
Is Donald Trump a neoliberal?
This is a complicated question. Neoliberalism to me means the movement to use the power of the state in order to decrease the power of labor and to deregulate and restore the profitability of firms in the seventies and eighties. Since then it’s become the dominant economic consensus in the U.S. You still have a very strong aggressive state, but you don’t expand social welfare. You make sure things stay deregulated, and so on. In that sense, Trump is with the neoliberal consensus, but I think the term has been used as a pure pejorative to the point that it’s losing its analytical value.
In terms of weakening Wall Street regulations or watering down regulations via Cabinet agencies, or not expanding the welfare state, I don’t think those really fit as a description of the Obama Administration, but maybe you do?
I think the Obama Administration represented a centrist consensus within the Democratic Party, which said that the best way to preserve the welfare state was to insure that the economy was humming and growing and that, broadly, the interests of corporations were served because corporations were the ones generating the wealth that Obama wanted to use in order to sustain and expand social programs like Obamacare. But he, in the construction of the social programs, shied away from the creation of big universal programs that would have required more political struggle and actually might have been impossible to enact under his Administration. Would I call that neoliberal? I mean, maybe. I probably have many times in short columns and things like that, but I’m not sure how much analytical value it has.
If you watch what the Trump Administration is doing at the Environmental Protection Agency or the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, talking about it as neoliberal seems to miss what’s going on to me because it seems noticeably different than what we—
I don’t think there’s a strong contingent of capital that’s calling for some of the things that Trump is doing. In other words, it seems to me that neoliberal policy would be deregulation that capital demanded, whereas Trump seems to be operating in his own ideological direction—it seems like with a degree of autonomy that I would have to reconcile with Marxist theory. [Laughs]
It seems different than what we’ve seen in the past from either Republican or Democratic Administrations to some extent, no?
There’s definitely been a big departure in certain ways. I think there has been a continuity with Republican Administrations as far as tax cuts and so on. But things have definitely gotten worse, and worse faster than they did under Obama. Obviously, we opposed a lot of Obama’s policies, but there’s no point in saying it’s all the same, because it absolutely isn’t. If push comes to shove and I were in a swing state in 2020, of course, I would vote for anyone in the Democratic field over Trump. I think that’s common sense. It should be hegemonic on the left.
When Sanders was refusing to release his tax returns, you had a series of tweets in which you wrote, “People obsessed with tax returns are narrowly looking for personal corruption as a sign of capture. Politicians serve capitalist interests because they administer a capitalist state dependent on private profits and favorable market conditions to survive and fund programs.” And “Candidates aren’t literally bought by elites, they structurally represent capitalist interests. Bernie is an exception.” Can you explain this?
I was trying to make a broader point about the way in which the interests of businesses exert themselves in government, which is not through direct bribery or coercion or lobbying but more often than not through the dynamics of the economy itself. Things I said, like Bernie is an exception, undermine that point. So I wouldn’t stand by all of that. I would say I agree with my underlying point, but I do want to see Trump’s tax returns. I’m glad that Bernie released his tax returns, too, so I guess I should say that as well.
Corruption occurs in noncapitalist countries, too.
Yeah, of course. But corruption to me isn’t a widespread issue. The conversation often is about Trump only being in power to enrich himself and make his business more profitable. Or back in the Iraq War days, it was, “Dick Cheney only did this war just to make money for Halliburton.” On the one hand, as a populist thing, they’re attacking the right enemies, so maybe it’s O.K., but, to me, it just isn’t the way society actually works. That was the point I was making, but I do think you’re right. There are other levels of corruption that don’t have to do with the things I said that we should obviously be on guard for, and that’s why we need transparency in government. If you’re running for public office, we should know your finances.
Before we go, the Jacobin coverage of Venezuela was more positive during the Chavez regime and earlier in the Maduro regime. Has the way in which that situation has gone downhill made you think any differently about any conception of socialism, or about signs that people should be on the lookout for in leaders that you or other people on the left missed?
There was a lot of debate in the Latin American left about certain things that Venezuela was doing, as opposed to Bolivia and Ecuador. One is, Venezuela seemed to be breaking with some of the “neoliberal consensus” more than Bolivia and Ecuador, but doing it through using oil rents, and I think in the long run that probably created some more macroeconomic instability. In Bolivia and Ecuador there was a more conservative approach on some of the macroeconomic stuff, and that enabled them to create more stability in the long term.
You undermine a lot of the gains of your programs for workers if you’re also going to expose them to hyperinflation. That doesn’t make me some deficit hawk or austerity type to say that. I think there were macroeconomic mistakes. There was obviously, at times, an extremely right-wing opposition in Venezuela. There was a lot of political instability, some of it coming from the United States. I think as a whole, the mentality of the left has been to say that we in the U.S., a country that has been the perpetrator of so much injustice in Latin America and so many interventions, don’t have a right to critically look at states.
I meant that the way Chavez used rhetoric was more important than some people on the left maybe thought. Do you think that it’s worth paying attention to things like this and that we probably shouldn’t be totally surprised by how it played out?
When we were analyzing Venezuela, we analyzed it mostly through the populist tradition, saying that Venezuela was a manifestation of left populism. Maybe this is kind of an academic cop out, but I think some of the rhetoric Chavez was using, some of the approach from his government, the fact that he did have a segment of capital on his side, the fact that he would have all these military officers and a segment of state bureaucracy on his side, the fact that there wasn’t an active labor-backed party in Venezuela and whatever else, meant that we interpreted it all as, Hey listen, this is definitely redistributive. This is vaguely left. This guy seems good, so it’s good. This is a social movement if he says it is.
I guess the underlying point of your question is, Might creating this kind of polarization of us versus them, and pushing very hard to destabilize the country lead to that outcome? Burke had that one line, I’m paraphrasing very brutally, that the only thing worse than existing tyranny is a failed revolution against that tyranny. I think we always have to be on guard with what happens when our revolutions fail, because often it leads to a counterrevolution on the right or a situation of political paralysis. That can’t stop us from trying to make change, but I think a lot of the lesson of the last hundred years is to pay attention to unexpected outcomes and to construct policies in a way that makes sense.
You talk about Sanders a bit at the end of your book. Is it fair to say that in your mind Sanders is a good democratic socialist, and Warren is a good social democrat?
I’m not sure if I would call Warren a social democrat, but in my mind she’s definitely the second-best in the field. I think the gap between Sanders and Warren and the gap between Warren and the rest of the field is equally significant. I think a lot of the things she’s proposing are great. I think she’s pushing the policy debate in a really good direction.
Does any part of you ever think that someone like her being President, given how the government works, would actually be more effective for the left than someone like Sanders?
I see your argument. Let’s say you have a scenario where the world ends in eight years, and you’re talking about what can get passed within this next eight years. Then you would say that maybe Warren has certain skills that might be useful administrating the state. Maybe those skills exceed those of Sanders.
In my mind, thinking about politics over ten, fifteen, twenty years, someone with the strength and moral clarity of Sanders, with the ability to attract people to him and create a movement around him, can really create the conditions in which we’re not just writing policy but we’re changing the conditions in which policy is written. Does that make sense? I think Sanders is better at changing the conditions in which policy is written and being uncompromising in certain things in a way that is actually useful in the long term.
Isaac Chotiner is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he is the principal contributor to Q. & A., a series of interviews with public figures in politics, media, books, business, technology, and more.
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário