The failure of progress
See note for November 24, 2024, at end of post.
A book I relied on heavily in my Ph.D. program, even as I worked on my dissertation, was Charles Lemert’s Social Theory, an anthology of historical essays critically and crucially dealing with social inequality. I found it priceless and as I read through it, I noticed that Lemert wrapped around those essays a narrative of ‘progress’ and its unfulfilled promises of a better life for everyone.[1]
Along the way to this ‘progress,’ Lemert noted, we were giving up the old, the familiar, and the comfortable.[2] Great old buildings still stand in downtown Pittsburgh, but much of the old housing in and around the city has been abandoned to blight. The forests that still permeate the area are rapidly being cut down to make way for ever more McMansions. And I still love to see the classic cars that some folks invest ungodly amounts of effort and money keeping running. A giant old church still stands in the East Liberty neighborhood but is abandoned and crumbling. An old synagogue, not that far away, is being converted to community space and ‘affordable’ housing.
At the time, I was focused on the social inequality and, important as it is, I forgot about Lemert’s narrative.
Now in 2024, Donald Trump has won re-election to the presidency. In a salient essay, Nesrine Malik points to the unfulfilled promises of ‘progress.’ It is progress, but mostly only for the rich: Sarcastically, she writes, “The problem is not a rapaciously capitalist system that has resulted in broken healthcare provision, a legislature captured by rich lobbies or deregulation that has stripped workers of their statutory rights and consequently created an epic transfer of wealth to a billionaire class. The problem is the undocumented immigrants, the enemies within the bureaucracy who tried to bring Trump down, the diversity extremists. If you are the Democrats and all you have to counter this powerful vision is a lot of nice values and dancing ‘joy’ but no material proposal to radically change people’s lives, you haven’t even brought a knife to a gunfight – you’ve brought Oprah Winfrey.”[3]
As Malik notes,[4] Kamala Harris, Trump’s opponent, never offered a coherent plan to redress economic inequality. Worse, Joe Biden, the incumbent, whom Harris serves as vice president, minimized the pain workers felt from inflation.[5] My groceries are costing two or three times what they did before and my landlord keeps threatening to raise the rent while I’ve been stuck in the gig economy making far less than minimum wage.
There was a time when a single income could be expected to provide well for a family and send the kids to school. It was a time before ‘no-fault divorce,’ when contraception was still legally frowned upon, and queer and transgender people were invisible. It was a time of unchallenged and unapologetic racism and sexism. Cars had no seatbelts, big motors; they burned a lot of gas, and spewed a lot of pollution.
All that is correlation, of course, but what have we got with artificial intelligence idiocy, entirely reliant on huge databases and statistical analysis?
When I read Lemert’s narrative, progress hadn’t quite failed yet. Malik points out that it has. Her prescription is for the Democrats to abandon neoliberalism.[6] But neoliberalism is a moral imperative for neoconservatives, and with Biden’s brain-dead support for genocide in Gaza and Lebanon,[7] we see that it is neoconservatism that is the drug that Democrats are hooked on.
And in the meantime, I finally have an explanation for why the right is winning the culture wars: From a working class perspective, it was better, not so much when Trump was president before, but when a bunch of marginalized groups “knew their place.”
Marginalizing people won’t solve the problems of economic inequality. I’ve long insisted that social justice has to be justice for everyone, not just whoever is in fashion at the moment to displace cis-gender heterosexual white wealthy males on top of the social hierarchy. That’s a problem the political left has had a lot of trouble getting its head around lately[8] and Malik misses that larger picture.[9]
But she reminds[10] me of Lemert and what we have lost.[11] And now we are losing it all.
Note, November 24, 2024: This post has been edited for clarity and to add to existing citations.
[1] Charles Lemert, ed., Social Theory, 4th ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2010).
[2] Charles Lemert, ed., Social Theory, 4th ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2010).
[3] Nesrine Malik, “Behind Trump’s victory lies a cold reality: liberals have no answers for a modern age in crisis,” Guardian, November 18, 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/18/donald-trump-victory-liberals-modern-crisis-neoliberal
[4] Nesrine Malik, “Behind Trump’s victory lies a cold reality: liberals have no answers for a modern age in crisis,” Guardian, November 18, 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/18/donald-trump-victory-liberals-modern-crisis-neoliberal
[5] Matt Bai, “What Biden did that infuriated people,” Washington Post, November 8, 2024, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/11/08/biden-failure-lost-voters-trust/; Abha Bhattarai and Jeff Stein, “Americans deliver message to Democratic Party: The economy isn’t working,” Washington Post, November 9, 2024, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/11/09/democrats-election-economy-inflation-harris-biden/; Pamela Brown, “Why, As a Black Woman, I Will Not Be Voting for Kamala Harris,” SOS with Pam Brown, October 25, 2024, https://pamelaannbrown.substack.com/p/why-as-a-black-woman-i-will-not-be; Don Leonard, “Trump voters said they were angry about the economy – many of them had a point,” Conversation, November 11, 2024, https://theconversation.com/trump-voters-said-they-were-angry-about-the-economy-many-of-them-had-a-point-239039
[6] Nesrine Malik, “Behind Trump’s victory lies a cold reality: liberals have no answers for a modern age in crisis,” Guardian, November 18, 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/18/donald-trump-victory-liberals-modern-crisis-neoliberal
[7] David Benfell, “Get ready to fight, kids,” Not Housebroken, September 9, 2024, https://nothousebroken.substack.com/p/get-ready-to-fight-kids; David Benfell, “Kamala Harris, the neoconservative,” Not Housebroken, September 11, 2024, https://nothousebroken.substack.com/p/kamala-harris-the-neoconservative; David Benfell, “Neoconservatives, neoliberals and the conflation with Democrats and Republicans,” Not Housebroken, October 15, 2024, https://nothousebroken.substack.com/p/neoconservatives-neoliberals-and
[8] David Benfell, “Not my left,” Not Housebroken, November 12, 2024, https://nothousebroken.substack.com/p/not-my-left
[9] Nesrine Malik, “Behind Trump’s victory lies a cold reality: liberals have no answers for a modern age in crisis,” Guardian, November 18, 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/18/donald-trump-victory-liberals-modern-crisis-neoliberal
[10] Nesrine Malik, “Behind Trump’s victory lies a cold reality: liberals have no answers for a modern age in crisis,” Guardian, November 18, 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/18/donald-trump-victory-liberals-modern-crisis-neoliberal
[11] Charles Lemert, ed., Social Theory, 4th ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2010).