The End of Liberal Institutionalism

Excessive belief in institutions is a proven failure.

Look away, baby, look away. (Photo: Getty)

You have to hand it to right wing ultracapitalists. They really know how to stick with a plan. All those decades of writing checks to the Heritage Foundation, writing checks to the Federalist Society, grooming law students, funding conferences, lovingly building an entire intellectual and professional ecosystem ideologically vetted cadres ready to penetrate government and destroy it from within… it’s all paid off. They are reaping the fruits of their labor now. The rest of us are in a very scary place, but you have to admire the persistence of the horrible people that got us here.

“Let’s do what’s best for the very rich above all” is not an effective political message in a democracy. So the very rich have long worked to both conceal the message, and undermine the democracy. The Republican Party exists to serve the interests of the rich, but its long marriage of convenience to religion and racism have tied all those qualities together in a package. Voting rights must be suppressed, the electoral system must be designed in a way that creates power imbalances that can be exploited for the cause of minority rule, and levers of power must be found that can most effectively advance the agenda of unrestrained capitalism, along with enough Christian nationalism and regressive race-baiting to bring along a large enough coalition to support the whole project. Here we are. Here we are! Take a good hard look at the landscape they have now produced, my friends.

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The Supreme Court’s ruling to discard the Chevron deference will allow right wing judges to sweep away rules made by federal agency experts, at the behest of business. The ruling to grant the president immunity from prosecution for things that most of us have long assumed were obviously crimes will throw open the door to a fully dictatorial presidency. Furthermore, the 6-3 right wing court that produced these rulings is the end product of decades worth of Republicans who become president despite losing the popular vote, Republicans who wield an unrepresentative amount of power in Congress due to the stupid inequalities of power inherent in the design of the Senate, Republicans who more or less outright stole a Supreme Court pick from Obama simply by being more politically cold-blooded, and an extensive menu of voter suppression tactics designed to marginalize the votes of minorities. The right wing had a vision, and it has executed that vision successfully, with great ruthlessness, even though that vision is terribly unpopular, in a vacuum. If you are looking for a case study in the masterful and unscrupulous wielding of power, look around. We are all living in it.

Instead of just wallowing in how bad this all is, I want to pull back and try to make a point about what the rest of us need to take from all of this. By “the rest of us,” I mean anyone who believes, however softly, in the project of progressivism. Liberals and “the left” have many serious differences that we discuss a lot, but here I want to loop all of us into a big group that wants to see this country move over time in a leftward direction (no matter how slight). That means more protection for the rights of those who are persecuted, economic reforms that promote equality rather than inequality, a better social safety net, a government that puts checks on the most powerful groups and protects the least powerful and provides quality public goods and services to all. The group of people that believe in these things to one degree or another constitutes the majority of American adults. Right now, we are being outmaneuvered. Why?

There is a large contingent of people on our side who believe in American institutions. They believe in the promises in the Bill of Rights, they believe in the structure of the American government, they believe that the institutions of the American legal and political system will, over time, deliver justice. They believe that the wisest path to lasting movement towards their ideals is to respect and work within the institutions. I am not trying to caricature their beliefs here, or smear them, or suggest that they can’t tolerate protest. I want to speak to the most noble part of the liberal institutionalists: to those who genuinely want a better world, and who genuinely believe that guiding America’s institutions down that path is the best way to get there, because our institutions have been painstakingly built and designed to be somewhat democratically accountable and are strong machines that can be commandeered and used for the public good. They believe that our institutions—especially Congress and the Presidency and the Courts—operate according to certain rules that provide a certain level of accessibility to all of us, and that they should be respected, and that they are where the real action is, and that our attention should be on them at all. They are the people who, when bad things happen, will tell you to vote.

What I want to say is this: Those people have been proven wrong. The evidence is in. Enough is enough. Open your eyes and look at reality. The true believers in institutionalism had a theory of power that turned out to not be true. Contrast their beliefs with the right wing’s own theory of power that produced what we are now seeing: Utterly cynical weaponization and manipulation of institutions, zero respect for their rules or underlying purpose, and an absolute willingness to do whatever is necessary to win, while changing your story as needed along the way. This does not just mean being crafty and trying to win elections with misleading stories and gerrymandering and making it hard for the other side to vote. It means looking with a cold eye at the American playing field and calculating where the most promising path to power is and then exploiting it to the utmost degree. The right wing has placed so much focus on the courts because their agenda is unpopular. They know that they are engaged in an attempt to solidify minority rule. Even in our creaky and unfair and half-bullshit democracy, they will always have a challenge selling “protect the Koch brothers fortune at all costs” to average voters. But by solidifying their hold on the Supreme Court, they have made that a moot point. They have purchased themselves a workaround. Which is now delivering them their purchases, unfortunately for the public.

The rule of law.

Let’s be very clear about where we stand as progressives. We find ourselves in a situation where, absent any fundamental changes, we may have 20 years of a right wing Supreme Court that will systematically invalidate progressive laws that it doesn’t like. It has just effectively neutered the ability of federal regulatory agencies to check corporate power. The right wing has installed over everything below a god-like council to simply do what they want. Anyone whose response to all of this is “vote” is, I’m sorry to say, a fool. Even if we capture Congress and the White House and advance a great set of progressive rules, those things can and will be rolled back by the courts. Not every single one, everywhere, in every instance, but enough that the idea of a legislative path to the promised land has been put on ice for now. And what if we captured the White House and tried to use the newfound imperial presidency powers to move left? The Supreme Court will find that those powers are actually illegitimate. This is the trap we are in.

Laws are made up. They are made up by people in service of larger goals. What’s real are not the laws, but the goals. The ideals. The corporate powers that want to be free to maximize their profits no matter what the public harm understand this quite well. The liberals who believed that the laws are real, that the laws will save us, that Trump or Clarence Thomas or Mitch McConnell can’t do that because it contravenes the word and spirit of the law need to admit that they were wrong. Belief in the ultimate fairness of institutions is a sucker’s bet. You can’t win a game of checkers against someone who will just smash the board when they’re losing.

The progressive project must think clearly about power. That does not mean that we need to become utterly cynical cheating lying cutthroat bastards because that is what the other side is doing. That means thinking about our ideals, and looking at the true state of the playing field now, and doing what must be done to get where we need to go. Pretending that the American system is robust enough to withstand Donald Trump and this Supreme Court and that all we need to do is vote and get back to decorum in Congress is a stupid and discredited idea and the more that the leadership of the Democratic Party voices this rote bullshit the less they deserve to be followed. I am not rushing right into “revolution in the streets” here. I am not even going to bring up “abolish the Senate and the Electoral College” right now. I am trying to meet the crestfallen liberal institutionalists where they stand, in the real world. Here are two very concrete things that should become, today, immediately, the standard position of any progressive: Getting rid of the filibuster, which allows a minority to thwart the will of the majority in the Senate; and either expanding the Supreme Court (best) or putting term limits on the Supreme Court (not as good, but better than nothing). There should not be a single day’s extra discussion about these things. They must become rock solid planks of the party platform. In the long run of history, after many of Joe Biden’s positive accomplishments as president have been dismantled and erased by right wing courts, it will become clear that his inability to get to the right place on those two issues was one of his administration’s most deadly miscalculations. Why couldn’t Biden see where all of this was leading? He was too much of an institutionalist.

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The electoral political wing of the progressives need to focus on those types of reforms, which are going to be necessary if they want any of their other great ideas to come to fruition without being overruled by the robed council of destruction. The legal wing of the progressives needs to catch up to what the Federalist Society has accomplished. But what about everyone else? What about me, and all of you, and all of the people all over this country who are politically engaged and care mightily about these issues and are probably feeling some level of despair? Think about the landscape of power. The right wing, which represents business interests, has money on its side—its agenda is pro-capital, and therefore amounts to a business investment by corporate America. It will always be well funded. The progressive side works for people. When we recognize that all of our people power is being thwarted when we funnel it all into the inadequate institutions of electoral politics and law, it becomes more clear that we need a separate power center that sits outside of those things that can exercise people power effectively in a way that cannot be so easily shut down by the courts.

That thing is organized labor. I know that I am something of a broken record on this point. I wrote a book about it and I write about it and I repeat this over and over. But I repeat it because it is true. The Democratic Party-led effort to funnel all progressive energy into electoral politics has failed. The frustrating years to come, in the wake of these Supreme Court rulings, and possibly with another Trump presidency, will reveal just how foolish that effort was in the first place. We need a strong institution that sits outside of electoral politics, that is not at the mercy of right wing courts, that has its own inherent form of power that can be exercised on behalf of the public good, that will naturally work towards progressive goals. My friends, that is the labor movement. That is the place where you, a regular person, have a form of power—labor power—that cannot be taken away by any unjust law or corporate expenditure. You have it because you work. Solidarity and labor unions allow you to exercise it. The combined forces of labor unions can produce a force significant enough to balance out the right wing’s own power, in a way that our captured institutions cannot.

You, the despairing progressive, need to unionize your workplace and join this fight. The wheezing and cautious institutions at the top of the labor movement need to recognize the stakes of this contest, and stir themselves to invest massive amounts of resources in organizing the millions of new workers who sit outside of the reach of unions now. And—most relevant to the topic at hand—the Democratic Party itself needs to recognize how much its own fate is tied to the fate of the labor movement, and to act accordingly. I am not going to go on at length about this, although I could. I just want you to know that the grim outlook for one set of institutions does not mean that all hope is lost. It means that we need to lean into other institutions that can still be effective.

That’s what the right wingers realized a long time ago. That’s how they got the upper hand.

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• Related: The Left Is Not Joe Biden’s Problem. Joe Biden Is; Who Is Your Enemy, My Brother?; The Real ‘Third Way’ Is the Labor Movement.

• Want to organize your workplace but don’t know how? Contact EWOC and they will help you. You can also read my book. If you still have questions, you can email me.

• Speaking of independent power centers that sit outside of crumbling established institutions: The publication that you are reading, How Things Work, is independent media. It is supported solely by readers like you, and nothing else. For many years I was a journalist and I got a salary. Now, I get paid purely by readers who choose to become paid subscribers to this site. (It’s very affordable!) If you enjoy this publication and would like for it to continue to exist, please take a moment to become a paid subscriber now. Together we will make the promised land. Thank you.