“Liberal” Think Tank Caught with Hand in the Cookie Jar. By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, May 23, 2013.
The Secret Donors Behind the Center for American Progress and Other Think Tanks. By Ken Silverstein. The Nation, May 21, 2013.
Mead:
Yet the
clumsy incompetence of CAP management aside, there’s a bigger problem here that
The Nation doesn’t want to confront.
The American Left, whose soul and conscience the magazine purports to be, wants
to give Washington politicians more and more influence over the economic reins
and resources of the country. This inevitably drives more money into the
political process and creates more incentives for exactly the kind of behavior The Nation deplores.
The
problems of the American Left are much deeper than amateur-hour leadership of a
think tank. Left politics in America are caught in a trap. The Left doesn’t
pose a serious threat to the broad contours of the capitalist system in the US;
the Constitution and public sentiment block any real shift in American politics
away from liberal market capitalism. Thus the Left oscillates ceaselessly
between a futile politics of “purity” with no prospect of ever affecting
anything important and a toxic “partnership” with the powers-that-be—a
relationship in which it is inevitably manipulated and abused.
The
chief function of the American environmental movement, for example, is to paint
green lipstick on corporate pigs like Solyndra or the ethanol scam. The Nation is right to chide the Center
for American Progress for becoming the servant of corporate interests rather
than an opponent of them; what it misses is that this relationship describes
the limits within which the movement as a whole is bound to operate.
There
is no actual or potential social or political basis in America for genuinely
anti-capitalist politics. Those who try to convince themselves otherwise are
indulging in the kind of petty bourgeois self-deceit for which Karl Marx
reserved his fullest and most biting contempt.
For an example of the Left’s “futile
politics of ‘purity’” that Mead refers to, see: Letter to “The Nation” From a Young Radical. By Bhaskar Sunkara. The Nation, May 21, 2013. Also Bhaskar Sunkara video, Beyond the Welfare State. See also Jacobin, left-wing magazine edited by Sunkara.
