krebscycle

Adolf Reed specializes in sharp attacks on arguments nobody has made. Even  Larry Summers has been calling wealth inequality a danger to the social fabric for at least 20 years, but Professor Reed denounces:

 a contention that the lesson from Trump’s victory is that it’s not practical, or moral (the two are difficult to distinguish in this argument) to focus on increasing economic inequality and intensifying upward redistribution as the basis for left political appeals and instead that the necessary strategy should center on intensified mobilization of nominally oppressed groups, mainly nonwhite, and women as a generic category on the basis of opposition to the disparate distribution of goods and bads in the society among groups so identified and in support of the principles of diversity as generally understood in left-of-center political discourse.

He doesn’t cite anyone making that “contention”  for a good reason: that’s not an argument anyone serious has made. From 2018:

Former vice president Joe Biden is worried about the hollowing out of the middle class, income inequality and the lack of opportunity that Donald Trump tapped into to win the White House — and he has some ideas on how to make things better. In a speech at Washington-based think tank the Brookings Institution Tuesday, Biden proposed a number of solutions that have been floated by the Democratic party’s most progressive members, like offering free college to everyone and banning tactics used by employers to keep workers from being paid higher wages.[…] Biden pointed to statistics showing that wages stopped growing in tandem with productivity in the late 1970s. He noted that the two measures remain far apart — which means other solutions are necessary to drive wages up. “The bargain has been broken,” Biden said. “Folks in the middle class are in trouble. It’s not just their perception.” CNN

But once he has conjured up imaginary opponents, Professor Reed  can berate them for the ideas he has invented for them:

As the argument has progressed, a de facto alliance between ostensibly progressive identitarians and Wall Street Democrats has come together around asserting, along with Paul Krugman and others, that “horizontal inequality”—i.e., inequality between statistically defined racial/ethnic groups—is a more important problem than “vertical inequality,” characterized as inequality between individuals and households. That distinction instructively makes class and class inequality disappear, which is consistent with the trajectory of American liberalism across the more than seven decades since the end of World War II.

Well “identitarians” even sound wrong. But class and class inequality only disappears if you have a racial justice analysis that is as cartoonish as Professor Reed’s class analysis. It’s certainly possible to believe that class and race are deeply intertwined in US history without deciding that one of them is the magical key to all understanding and the other is a subordinate (“superstructural” as the Marxists say) phenomenon. Here’s what Krugman, who is cited, really had to say:

 One way to think about the Sanders campaign is that it was based on the premise that if only progressives were to make a clear enough case about the evils of inequality among individuals, they could win over the whole working class, regardless of race. […[

Group identity is an unavoidable part of politics, especially in America with its history of slavery and its ethnic diversity. Racial and ethnic minorities know that very well, which is one reason they overwhelmingly supported Hillary Clinton, who gets it, over Sanders, with his exclusive focus on individual inequality. And politicians know it too.

And, Krugman makes a good point with his use of “inequality among individuals” instead of “class inequality”, because the class identity of working class Americans appears to mean more to marginal academic theorists than to voters. As Krugman noted, and as we’ve seen now twice, Sander’s attempts to bring disaffected white working class voters into his campaign sputtered. Maybe all those Tea Party people who attacked Obamacare waving posters of Obama’s photo with a bone in his nose have priorities that don’t include Medicare For All. But even Krugman is not claiming that class inequality is unimportant, he’s just saying you can’t win elections by pretending that class transcends race in America when it clearly does not. The problem is not that Krugman is trying to minimize class inequality, the problem is that Professor Reed refuses to admit that racial politics overrides class identity for many white Americans.

Let’s just see  the implications of this terrible identitarianism Professor Reed battles against:

Moreover, in a sort of mission creep, opponents of what they decry as a “class-first” position increasingly have come to denounce any expressions of concern for economic inequality as in effect catering to white supremacy. This tendency, which Touré Reed has argued rests on a race-reductionism, has surfaced and spread within the newly revitalized Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), as even many among those who consider themselves socialists object to the organization’s selection of Medicare for All as its key political campaign on the ground that pursuit of decommodified health care for all is objectionable because doing so does not sufficiently center antiracist and anti-disparitarian agendas. I submit that there’s clearly a problem when anti-socialism is defined as socialism.

Medicaid for All legislation in the US Congress proposes to make the Federal government the single payer (note that word) to fee-for-service mostly profit based providers.  According to Professor Reed, this watered-down remedy “decommodifies” health care  in some mysterious way even though, you just need to look at how much decommodification the 50 year old Medicare program itself has produced (less than none) to have some doubts. .  You’d hope that these revolutionary socialists could at least ask for something like the UK NHS i(which is also completely compatible with class inequality and “commodification”) instead of a public subsidy of an unworkable monopolistic fee-for-service system, but they don’t need to. Because the purpose of the “left” as someone recently noted, is not to win reforms but to win arguments.  Professor Reed is not all that interested in the details when he has a rhetorical point to make.