Americans love to witness history, and recently 'history' seems be conspicuous everywhere. With the events unfolding in the Arab world over the course of the past two months, history's relationship to its witness is perhaps more acute. To witness history is to witness a set of happenings that have yet to accrue a clear set of political and conceptual meanings. The question is never what history 'means', but rather what it will have meant. This "will" of history's future meaning, however, is not yet 'here.' This, if anything, is for me what defines that sloppy but somehow necessary platitude: "we are witnessing history."
Some pro-labor demonstrators in Madison have taken to making signs analogizing Gov. Scott Walker to one Hosni Mubarak. This could easily be read as the exact sort of hyperbolic analogizing that so singularly defines the "Tea Party," which wouldn't be entirely wrong. Yet, the signs could also be read in terms of their anxiety. The question in Madison, both like and unlike that of Cairo, is not what "this history" will "mean," but rather whether "this" will have been "history" at all.
The answer to this question still remains to be seen. But it will depend in large part on whether these events create an opening for something new in the American political imagination. As many have pointed out, defanging public sector unions has a clearly beneficial purpose if you’re a Republican. Forget ideology. Of anyone I’ve read on the subject Hendrik Hertzberg is the most lucid and edifying on this point:
Of the five biggest non-party organizational contributors to political campaigns in 2008, the top two were unions, both of them pro-Democratic and both composed partly or wholly of public-sector workers. The other three were pro-Republican business groups or PACs. In 2010, after the Supreme Court threw open the cash sluices in the Citizens United case, only one union made it into the top five, and it came in fifth. And from now on, thanks to five Justices, corporate campaign spending will be literally limitless.
So, the politics of self-interest couldn’t be clearer here. Gutting unions is the clearest path to gutting the cash flow to the Democratic Party, particularly its genuinely progressive (and genuinely shrinking) left flank. There’s more where this came from, if Governor Walker was so concerned with Wisconsin’s budgetary problems, he probably wouldn’t have afforded steep tax cuts to Wisconsin’s business elite, etc. This game is easy to play, and its not unimportant. The ‘facts’ (as we Americans also love to say) “are on our side.”
But is ‘History’ with us too? If you ask President Obama, who’s job it is to know that history has sides and to determine for the American public which side is the right side, the answer would be this:
“Some of what I've heard coming out of Wisconsin, where you're just making it harder for public employees to collectively bargain generally seems like more of an assault on unions…And I think it's very important for us to understand that public employees, they're our neighbors, they're our friends.”
Interpreted as an impassioned plea, this comment is a wonderfully acute signal of the extent to which the right still defines the parameters of political rhetoric in this country. Union members are important, not because UNIONS are important, but because union members, however quaint or bizarre their organizational makeup, are “our neighbors and friends.” One must wonder, even if the protests in Madison succeed in defeating this pernicious legislation, whether we are moving toward something like a “union community.” Like “the black community” and “the gay community” the unions, however different they may seem, are in fact neighbors and friends, not so different from regular Apple-Pie baking, vanilla ice cream scooping, “American families.” The language of identity politics is not of zero historical import here, and I don’t mean to belabor the rhetoric. The point is that identity politics language, the language of difference tolerance and acceptance, has all but usurped the formerly central place of a struggle for basic economic justice on the American left.
The question facing the ‘will’ of these events is in this sense a question of political language. Will unions simply regain the right to “Be Different” in the manner of so many Apple computers, or will some notion of economic fairness re-enter the realm of the acceptable in American public debate?
There was a time when Apple Pie was union pie. Even if that ascendency is over, which it probably is, some sense that the ‘solution’ and ‘the market’ are not synonymous in the case of Wisconsin is brewing.
Forget Tea Parties for a moment, lets see if this coffee percolates.
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