The limitations of bourgeois left liberalism in the art, literary, and academic worlds have never been more apparent. Bernie Sanders was a few primaries from the presidency after dominating vote tallies in the first three states. That moment was ecstatic; for a brief window of time it really felt like we were going to break free of the shackles that we have been chained up in for decades, despairing in the dungeon of neoliberalism. Then, it all fell apart. We made it to the top of the ladder only for the guards of establishment politics – Barack Obama, Joe Biden and the corporatist wing of the Democratic Party - to slam their boots on our fingers as we made our last strides towards the top. Hope squandered, we are all Laura Palmer, slipping deeper into the abyss, falling “faster and faster.” Capitalism will reign. To rework a Zizek classic: it’s the end of the world, and I still can’t imagine the end of capitalism.
Though I hesitate to call Bernie’s candidacy a failure, it’s much harder to call it a success: what does it matter how much the “overton window” has shifted if in the end the left is irrelevant and workers have no power? It took about two seconds for the Jacobin crew to start citing meaningless statistics about how so many voters are supportive of Bernie’s policies, from medicare for all to a green new deal. But who the fuck cares? Working class people don’t believe those policies are even possible, and they think we are obnoxious. It seems like all the left can do is opiate itself with platitudes about “shifting the conversation” while real power and real emancipatory politics feels further away than ever. Why do we keep losing? I could give you a million reasons, but for right now, I want to aim my venom at a specific segment of the so-called “progressive body politic” because it’s a segment I have to deal with often in my capacity as an “art world figure” and it’s a segment that I hate more than I hate the reoccurring blemish on my chin.
Now, the consolidation of the corporatist wing of the Democratic Party was indeed unprecedented and will be remembered as a historic disaster for the country. But the role of Elizabeth Warren as a wrecker candidate this election cycle also can’t be minimized. Liz is a vampire of the left. She feeds on the lifeblood of the movement, bathes in it, and vaingloriously cannibalizes its ideas, without truly adhering to or even espousing any rigorous left ideology. She’s always been like this. She is an archetypal neoliberal, changing her branding according to the market’s drift. When Reagan ruled the markets, she was a Republican. Now that left liberal woke scolds hog the marketplace of ideas, she has adjusted herself to that new reality. She has very little beliefs and principles that aren’t totally beholden to the market.
But this didn’t prevent countless allegedly smart people of the creative Professional Managerial Class from being glamoured by the Warren grift. As Aimee Terese has pointed out countless times on her What’s Left podcast, Warren was doing the DNC’s work from the beginning: splitting Bernie’s base and sucking the air out of the room. When CNN talked about medicare for all, for instance, they always mentioned Elizabeth Warren first, despite her wishy washy and ultimate non-support of the policy. This gave permission to identitarian left liberals to support her over Bernie whose class first, social democratic, labor politics are aesthetically offensive to the self-described “progressive” professionals who nevertheless don’t have class interests at stake in Bernie’s policies. They like Bernie, they would say, he moved the conversation, they’d applaud. “But he doesn’t get anything done.” The conversation never moved past that. Never mind that most of Warren’s policies were convoluted nonsense that would never make it to a house vote. Never mind the fact that “breaking up Amazon” is hardly Americans’ number one priority when most of them don’t have fucking health insurance. Never mind the fact that this woman had just released a DNA test to “prove” that she is .00000000000000000000001 percent Native American. They ate it up. Not even “Big Structural Bailey” could break these people’s faith in Liz Warren’s carefully constructed albeit hollow and gutless political brand.
This put Bernie in a remarkably tenuous electoral position. Instead of spending last year gunning for normie Democrats, he had to waste time earning back the votes of the upper middle class bourgeois progressives that Warren siphoned away. To do this, he had to switch some of the very positions that made him such an electoral powerhouse in the first place. For instance, Bernie’s previous immigration policies called for an ethical border, but shunned “open borders” as a "Koch Brothers idea.” Which it is. Illegal immigration depresses wages in jobs that mainly go to poor white men, black men, and legal immigrants. Angela Nagle pointed this out in an article, The Left Case Against Open Borders, that ludicrously became a controversy on the left and lead to Nagle’s withdrawal from the Internet after she endured an onslaught of woke twitter’s vicious punitive tactics. Nagle wrote: “Acting on the correct moral impulse to defend the human dignity of migrants, the left has ended up pulling the front line too far back, effectively defending the exploitative system of migration itself.”
But to whip the support of woke culture warrior snob AOC, whose hypothetical endorsement of Liz Warren would have been disastrous for Bernie’s image as progressive standard bearer, Bernie introduced a radical immigration policy that effectively eliminated ICE and ended for profit detention centers, which is good. But it also decriminalized illegal immigration outright. How do you sell that to millions of voters living below the poverty line? You don’t. They vote for someone else. The result? Bernie’s rural white support that was fundamental to his success in ‘16 cratered, Warren’s upper class white libtard base refused to break with her, Joe Biden has emerged as the nominee and we are all fucked.
Throughout all of this I’ve been stunned just how many people in the supposedly “radical” literary and art worlds failed to understand the opportunity that Bernie represented for marginalized poor and working people. An opportunity that Liz Warren, a market obsessed, strategically dense, and electorally underperforming senator, could never represent. When I pointed out Liz Warren’s myriad flaws; her total lack of interest in foreign policy, her pretending to be a Native American, her policies all essentially functioning as milquetoast Bernie policies; I was told that I was a “white man,” “a misogynist,” “a toxic art bro,” etc.. Bernie wasn’t without his art world support of course, there was a massive Artists4Bernie listserv signed by industry stars ranging from Kara Walker to Nan Goldin to Jordan Wolfson. But Warren really duped some supposedly smart people.
And what this proves is that in most cases, it doesn’t matter how progressive or “radical-minded,” someone thinks themself to be... Their class interests will always override their beliefs. Because Bernie is firmly rooted in labor politics, a politics that doesn’t place a moral burden on the needs of working people, these “radical thinkers” can easily dismiss him on meaningless and vaguely anti-semitic terms: he’s loud, he yells, he’s pushy, etc.. Instead, the bourgeois left liberal views the world through a sphinx of the political and the personal. They don’t have a direct stake in this fight, they don’t need Medicare For All, so politics becomes no different than a preferred fashion brand: a marketing technique for signifying your own identity.
What we have with Liz Warren is a classic Barthesian myth. What is the myth of Liz Warren? Big structural change. Bank regulations that magically alleviate poverty, or something… What is the reality we are left with once that myth has been deconstructed? A left politics for upper middle class Americans who talk a big game about equality but don’t actually have any material stake in the successes or failures of labor politics. Marx believed radical emancipatory politics could only be harnessed by conjuring the rage of the working class. We must harness the collective disdain of having to wake up early and break your back for a wage. Most people in the art world have never experienced that. The bourgeois can never be expected to stand with the working class.
As a brief example, I will point to the poet and author Eileen Myles. Though I’ve never been overtly interested in their work, there are artists and writers that I am deeply invested in and a fan of, like Chris Kraus and Dennis Cooper, that have celebrated them for both radicality in language and innovation in thought. Eileen Myles has been celebrated not just for literary achievement, but for radical politics. We have another myth to deconstruct on that latter point.
Myles and I tussled on twitter here and there throughout the primary, and I especially took issue with their insistence on labeling Bernie Sanders “mediocre.” I am fine with someone admitting that they don’t agree with his platform, but where I grew frustrated was that Eileen was making these claims with a kind of implied moral authority. The old “Bernie Bro” myth. Bernie is an old white sexist. All the typical anti-Sanders junk that mainstream media hacks have been spiking voters’ veins with for years now. How can Bernie be mediocre when he has literally energized an entirely new base of voters that actual have sets of issues that they care about? That he has received the support of America’s poorest voters, throwing him the last notes of their paychecks to finance his candidacy? Well, Myles is part of a coterie of feminist artists of a certain era, namely the eighties, that has coopted the aesthetics of feminism to attempt to make the case that having a female president is the utmost important thing. Pussyhat feminism. Boomer brain. A woman leader becomes more important than our grotesque horror show of a prison system being reformed… More important to have a woman president than it is to stop treating healthcare as a commodity, essentially paying massive insurance corporations to function as medieval executioners of the contemporary working class… Even more important than having a president who think it’s wrong that middle easterners grow up looking more at the hazy glow of American napalm in the sky than they do the stars that illuminate the galaxies around us…
Myles ran for president in 1992, and actually had a fairly broad and substantial program. Their campaign used the Zoe Leonard poem I Want a President which demanded “a dyke without health insurance” for president, and a slew of demands and beliefs. There was at least some lip service played to political goals; they weren’t real of course. It was a marketing scheme. But that’s for a different article.
But something has happened to this generation in the intervening years. It’s not that complicated: they got rich. Or at least, exceedingly comfortable. They’ve learned to limit their expectations, and few of them seem to acknowledge that the material conditions of today are vastly worse than those that they endured rising in their professions in the eighties and the nineties. Myles now has seemingly two criteria for a presidential candidate: is a democrat, has a vagina. Myles pretty infamously endorsed the evil lizard queen of corporatist democratic politics Hilary Clinton for president in ‘16. In the Buzzfeed essay Hilary Clinton The Leader You Want When The World Ends, Myles totally overlooks any of the myriad questions about Clinton’s record on Wall Street, or her symbiotic relationship with the military industrial complex, or her nebulous understanding of the truth. Explaining their preference for Hil-Dog over Bernie, Myles says, “So I think part of the reason I believe in Hillary Clinton or the efficacy of putting her in the Oval Office is that I think she might bring it on a little slower, and otherwise all I feel is a toboggan slide with either one of those men, Bernie and Trump,” they continue. “I voted for Hillary last time too. I’m sort of a fan of a limited effect, a small definable margin you can build on and keep going.”
There you have it: limited impact. Someone who is actually marginalized, truly living under the dominion and oppression of capital, doesn’t have the luxury to settle for baby steps towards emancipation. Is that what Victor Hugo warned us about in les Misérables? That the aristocracy and ruling class should address and harm reduce extreme inequality so that the working class doesn’t rise up and institute a “limited effect?” That an artist so respected thinks so conventionally, so in sync with contemporary bourgeois norms, is depressing. Myles and her ilk talk about racism and sexism and homophobia until the chickens come home to roost, but as Chris Hedges says, “Class is the little word that the elites want you to forget.” Eileen Myles is an elite. Marilyn Minter is an elite. Jerry Saltz is an elite. They are comfortable, well-salaried, living in luxury. Their disdain for Trump isn’t rooted in any kind of manifestly different style of governance that Trump has espoused or engaged in. As Jeremy Scahill pointed out in a smart essay for the Intercept recently, Trump’s presidency has been less dangerous than W Bush’s was, and his immigration policies are only slightly more cruel than Obama’s were. But Obama was dignified, wasn’t he? He spoke like a man of sophistication. He used rhetoric that Eileen Myles could relate to. Obama’s symbolic role as the first black president blotted out the reality of his policy decisions for those superficially and aesthetically engaged in politics. A return to bourgeoise norms is the only political goal held by the art world left liberal.
Bernie Sanders was the real deal, and his presidency could have been more meaningfully impactful for more working Americans than any since FDR. But he’s also an old white man. He refuses to make ludicrously hollow gestures to the woke elite, and certainly won’t be putting “he/him” in his twitter profile. The eighties icons are now the power players in the creative industries, but their class interests are diametrically opposed to the industry bottom feeders. If we truly want the creative industries to thrive, we must oust these dinosaurs. And I don’t just mean leftists. I want an art world full of political disagreement. I want left-wingers. I want right-wingers. Art can’t be a political tool, but it can be a mirror to the society at large. And currently the people at the top of the political food chain preach a woke, identitarian-driven, class-averse politics that speaks to the absolute minority of constituency. It’s not that I think art should be political, it’s that so many artists posture as political and that their politics are dull and painfully limited. I want radicalism now. I want debate, now. Otherwise, the art world is just an insular network of people deciding what politics are allowed to be held and discussed. An ouroboros of agreeability.
