‘Red Pill’: Lessons for the Left

By SALLY HERRIN

‘Red pill’ is favored ‘alt right’ code (as in the ‘alternative’ white supremacist, anti-government far right) for waking from the dreamy lie that was liberal democracy.

Like Marx who thought revolution led to the end of history, many economists were persuaded by the global reach of western culture after World War II of a general progression towards liberal democracy for the nations of the world.

The ‘red pill’ is famously the central moral choice in “The Matrix” movie franchise. The ‘blue pill’ lets you sleep, contented as larvae, and be used in vile ways, while the red pill wakes you to a dangerous reality, other people and the chance to fight.

Bizarrely, the alt right seems to have broken their red pill in two, though, and only eaten half. What the one hand of liberal democracy has given, the other hand—capitalism—has taken away. But you don’t hear the alt right repudiating capitalism, the other half of that red pill.

Today we turn not to the sins of the right, though, but instead to lessons for the left. US Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) said, “All the wardens of high culture [comedians, scholars and newscasters] in this country, they love to make fun of Donald Trump, to mock him, to ridicule him…his hair, the color of his skin, the way he talks … What I don’t think they realize is that out here … in the heartland … when we hear that kind of ridicule, we hear them making fun of the way we look, and the way we talk, and the way we think.”

This sounds a bit like pot-and-kettle trash talk (Yo. You’re black!) after all the mockery and ridicule heaped on President Obama, not to mention women on the left—Clinton, Pelosi and Warren—and before them all: Al Gore.

But the serious nature of the culture war in this country means we need to grow past playground-level social skills. Just because the other side behaves badly does not mean the rest of us get a pass. I’m not calling the nation’s comics to lay off. Frankly, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and the comic renaissance they’ve sparked have offered the greatest antidote this country has to Fox and toxic talk radio—preserving and protecting sanity and a sense of humor for many Americans. But being angry at Trump supporters for being afraid isn’t going to solve anything and sure won’t elect progressive candidates this fall.

The moneyed class never forgave FDR nor forgot his class treachery. Today the 1%, not content with dismantling or weakening every New Deal law or institution created to housebreak capitalism, has set in motion—in the hearts and minds of walking wounded American workers stranded by the new global economy—the one thing Roosevelt warned that we really must fear: fear itself.

Trump knows how to trade on fear and he does. Immigrants are animals (worse, says Sarah Huckabee Sanders) and the places they come from are open latrines. Countries with tough gun laws are awash with blood and knives. China and the heaviest taxes in the world are to blame for the loss of American jobs. The rise of anyone not white and Christian is a threat. For the right-wing base, all this free-floating fear justifies harsh and even cruel immigration policies, the denial of climate change, the wholesale arming of the US population (pretty much unrecognizable as the Founders’ “well-regulated militia”) and John Bolton’s coming regime change in Iran.

Meanwhile Trump’s opposition faces fear of our own—fear of the damage Trump can do to government itself, fear of irreversible damage to climate, water and land as the mission of the EPA goes under the bus, fear of reckless adventurism promised by military build-up, fear of damage to democracy and to civil society, fear even of nuclear war. People like to say that hope is just as contagious as fear. Don’t you believe it. Creating fear is easy. Hope takes a lot of hard work.

Trump’s election was our red pill, or it better be. Eight years of relative grace under President Obama allowed many of us to believe in a brave new world. A man of color was elected twice—and he saved the country from the Great Recession! The U.S. signed the Paris Climate Accord. A new era of identity politics brought the evolution of fluid gender and #Black Lives Matter. Sure, a retrograde Congress hauled desperately on the brakes, trying to stop the soul train, but we had history and the angels on our side, as we believed.

In fact, the election of Obama, like the election of Trump, was a sign that people in this country are desperate to shake things up. Three decades of Reagan, Bush and Clinton administrations left a lot of folks out in the cold.

For 30 years post WWII, throughout Western Europe and North America, per capita output grew faster than ever before or since, under the economic policies—restraining capitalist speculation and other abuses which had tipped the world into chaos and war—of the UN’s “Bretton Woods” accord. Real income rose rapidly for Europeans, American unemployment was down by two thirds, and income inequality dwindled across the developed world. But in 1973, to counter inflation, Nixon effectively ended the post-war social contract by decoupling the American dollar from gold.

Arab nations had benefited from the high dollar, to which many other currencies were and are pegged. The oil sheikhs, already seething over US complicity in the Yom Kippur War, embargoed oil sales to the US. The price of crude oil quadrupled. In the panic that ensued, laissez faire and free trade economics got a toe-hold again, and the rollback of restraints on business began that got us where we are today. By the early nineties, per capita income in the developed world was down by half what it had been from 1950-1973, and income inequality worldwide had come roaring back. Between 1970 and 2010, the real median earnings of US working men in their prime were DOWN by four percent, and US women’s earnings, which had been rising, also declined.

Job loss in this country has been largely trade-induced—nearly two and half million jobs lost to China in the first decade of this century, and 16 percent lower wage growth for US workers who fail to finish high school. ‘Increased purchasing power’ sounded like a blessing, but cheap merchandise proved to be a blue pill overwhelming our closets and landfills, and—as a substitute for economic security (i.e., jobs)—this mess of pottage has been a very bad bargain indeed. The left needs to get real right now, because we are riding a populist moment—people are angry and they are not going to take it anymore.

So, enough already, with the shock and dismay. Let the whizz-bang that is Trump spew sparks and smoke. Stop talking about personalities. Voters like candidates with gumption and unapologetic big ideas. Let’s start with a national minimum wage, parental leave and Medicare for all. An expanded program of national service would lift many boats—rebuild US infrastructure and keep people off welfare and opioids and out of jail. Such a program could offer participants earned benefits for every year served, a year of education or training or the equivalent in a small business grant.

Bread-and-butter issues bring working people together. The American people want a new social contract and will have one, come what may. Will we follow Russia, Hungary, Turkey, Venezuela into oligarchy and fascism, or look to the left towards Northern Europe and communitarian democracy?

(Thanks to Caleb Crain, whose book review, “Masters of Doom: Is capitalism a threat to democracy?” in The New Yorker, 5/14/18 was a red pill for me.)

Sally Jane Herrin, Ph.D., is a Lincoln, Neb., writer, educator and advocate for progressive agriculture, trade and energy policies. This also appeared in Nebraska Report.

From The Progressive Populist, July 1-15, 2018

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