"Everything
meaningful that's ever happened in the world, any change, any improvement comes
about because of optimism. The pessimists don't get anything done. They're
naysayers. You have to see the potential for change. And you've got to see it
not in terms of the moment but in terms of the long view, the long haul."
-- Mel Leventhal
Mel Leventhal was involved in the civil rights movement in the deep
South in the mid-1960's. He was part of Martin Luther King's inner circle, but
because he was white in 1965, he was being pushed out of that circle by
increasingly vociferous black racists. In the second half of the 1960's, black
nationalists began to get publicity. They began to penetrate the inner circle
of King's nonviolent movement. Leventhal describes how at one meeting, blacks
simply told him to shut up. King listened to him on technical issues, since
Leventhal was a law student, but the blacks made it clear they didn't want him
in the meetings anymore. He left. He complains that historians now ignore the
whites who were involved.
I read his testimony in a book edited by the Left-wing
professional interviewer, Studs Terkel. This was his last interview book. He
was 91 years old. He died at 96. He had a long and successful career. The
Leftist media loved him. He wasn't that unique as an author. He was a good
interviewer. He asked good questions, and he let people talk. Then he edited
their transcripts, and he made them sound coherent. There is always a market
for a good interviewer who can do this. Terkel made a long career out of it.
The title of the book caught my attention: Hope Dies Last.
It was published in 2003. I just happened to spot it at the library over the
weekend. Terkel begins the book's introduction with this statement. "Hope
has never trickled down. It has always sprung up." That is a profound
observation.
With the exceptions of two retired generals -- one of them dropped
the A-bomb on Hiroshima -- one conservative congressmen, and Arlo Guthrie,
everybody interviewed in the book was a Leftist. What I found interesting about
the book is this: most of them had given up faith in the federal
government. They were local activists. Terkel had been one of them long
ago. He was a contemporary in Chicago of the legendary activist, Saul Alinsky.
He was basically of the same mold. He believed in local activism, not grand
world-changing projects. So did Alinsky. Alinsky really did not trust the federal
government late in life. Given the careers of his two most famous disciples,
Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, it's pretty clear that he was right not to
trust the federal government. His two most prominent disciples became part of
the establishment. They got rich. They accomplished little in the way of
systematically Leftist change.
Terkel was part of the 1930's Left. He was a great promoter of
trade unionism. Of all the Leftists' lost causes, trade unionism has to be the
shining example. Membership peaked at 25% of the American labor force as
members, and that was in 1953. It was always based on
government coercion by the National Labor Relations Board: forced negotiations.
The workers who were kept out of the above-free market wage union jobs wound up
in below-free market wage jobs. They were hired by those companies that had not
been unionized, and who had the pick of the litter of the excluded workers who
were not allowed into the unions. The unions discriminated against them. This
was especially true of blacks.
The labor movement was never really about labor in general. It was
about handpicking certain industries and certain unions. They got preferential
treatment from the government. Trade union workers would never admit this, but
that was always the economics of trade unionism. The broad mass of workers were
discriminated against by the combined efforts of the National Labor Relations
Board, the particular union, and the protected industries that had a working
arrangement with the unions.
By 2003, the percentage of workers in the American labor force who
were members of trade unions was down to about 10%. Most of these worked for
the government. In private industry, trade unionism by 2003 was basically
invisible.
So, in his last hurrah, Terkel went out to interview a lot of
members of the union movement. They were still filled with hope. Yet it was
clear by 2003 that trade unionism was an utterly hopeless cause.
Trade unionism had been gutted by the combined forces of Ted
Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson by promoting the Immigration Act of 1965, which was
signed into law in 1968. This made it possible for low-cost immigrants to
compete against union members across the country. Nothing did more for the
anti-union right-to-work movement than low tariffs and open borders. The
Democrats promoted both policies. The Republicans did not have the votes in
Congress. So, the trade union movement was sold out by the establishment
Democrats at the national level. I always regarded this as fitting and proper. The
feds giveth, and the feds taketh away. I saw what was happening at the time,
but the leaders of the union movement, committed as they were to the Democratic
Party, rarely talked about it in public. There was never any organized
political opposition within the union movement to the Democrats in Congress who
sold them out.
LOST CAUSES AND REPLACEMENT CAUSES
As I read these interviews, I thought to myself: "These
people devoted their lives to a lost cause, yet they still sing the old songs.
They still sound optimistic. They are having zero impact on the economy. They
are marginal politically. But they voice great optimism."
He interviewed Pete Seeger, the folksinger. Seeger always baffled
me. He had been a Communist until the early 1950's. He admitted this at the end of his
career. He was famous for his banjo. He had this printed on his banjo: "This
Machine Surrounds Hate and Forces It to Surrender." You would be
hard-pressed to find a more anti-Communist slogan. He got groups of mostly
college-age students to sing at his concerts. He and fellow Leftist Guy
Carawan were the only folksingers who ever successfully got
people to sing along with them. Others tried and failed. I liked his music,
beginning in 1950 with the Weavers. I bought a few of his albums. I knew he was
harmless. Communism was a philosophy based on the mandatory nature of bloody
revolution as the only way to bring salvation to the social order. It was
violent to the core. It was a religion of revolution, as I showed in my 1968 book on Marxism.
Seeger was a cheery peacenik.
In 2003, Marxism was dead and buried. There was no hope left
inside Marxism. It was finished. So, what did Pete Seeger talk about? He talked
about his work to clean up the Hudson River. He talked about his propaganda boat, Clearwater.
As he said, the river was cleaner than when he built the boat and started the
propaganda campaign. He had optimism. This was legitimate optimism. He wasn't
talking Communist revolution, and he never had. He was just trying to stop
industrial polluters and cities that were dumping untreated waste into the
river. I was certainly in favor stopping people from using the river as a dump.
I used to live a few blocks from the Hudson River in 1973. Seeger never
understood that this was a matter of property rights. The problem with the
Hudson River is that nobody owns it. So, institutions use it as a free dump. He
called on the two state state governments to intervene and stop it. But with
two state governments involved, New York and New Jersey, coordination
politically is difficult.
Seeger had shifted his allegiance. He went from Marxism, which he
never really believed in, to anti-pollution, which he did believe in. There, he
had some success. There were a lot of other people who believed that the river
was polluted and ought to be cleaned up. These were not ideological Leftists.
They were people who bought property on the river. They wanted the value of
their property to go up, which it surely did after the river got cleaner. A
clean river made the property values go up. He had a cause worth fighting for.
He does mention that the rising property values had made it impossible for
working-class people to live close to the river. They sold out to people with
more money. Surprise, surprise.
He interviewed Jerry Brown. Now, there's an establishment guy! He
was governor of California from 1975 to 1983. He is governor today. If ever
there was a non-working-class guy, it is Jerry Brown. His rhetoric is
working-class, but his background and career were entirely political all of his
life, beginning with his father, who was governor of California when I was in
high school in California. He is a lawyer. I can surely understand why he had
hope.
Most of the people interviewed in the book were still clinging to
the dying remnants of the causes of their youth.
In the case of civil rights, there were lots of victories,
1956-1975. Blacks are allowed to vote now. Nobody burns crosses on their front
lawns. But the tax-funded schools they are taught in are substandard. The black
family has disintegrated. Crime rates are high in ghettos. Drug addiction is an
epidemic. Politically, they are better off. Socially, they are worse off. They
traded the birthright of a stable family for the mess of pottage of the right
to vote. And most of the time, most of them don't bother to vote, as Hillary
Clinton discovered in 2016.
He interviewed a few young people in their early 20's who had
signed on to continue these lost causes. There was the white girl in her early
20's who was going door-to-door for a union to organize black women who were
running tiny day cares. There was no "oppressing business." These
were just women trying to get by in life by taking in a few dollars a day from
other working-class women who needed somebody to babysit their kids. It made
the white girl feel good about herself, but if she looked at what she was
doing, and she had a nickel's worth of economic understanding, she would have
understood that she was not going to organize most of the tiny day care
operations inner-city. These were one-women operations.
Hope dies last. To keep it alive, sometimes it must be refocused,
as Pete Seeger learned.
KNOW WHEN TO FOLD 'EM
It takes good judgment, meaning wisdom, to decide when to drop a
lost cause. Optimism is crucial to every cause, but if optimism is retained
beyond the reasonable plausibility of the success of the cause, then the
optimist may wind up pouring his dreams down a rat hole.
Almost everything that the Left has promoted has either failed, or
has been co-opted by the establishment, or has blown up in their faces. The
working-class movement of the 1930's went belly-up when the working class
joined the middle class and disappeared. That transition was in full operation
by 1953. That was when trade union membership began to decline.
I am a great believer in optimism. I'm also a great believer in
being sensible. It is one of the great challenges of life to know when to drop
a lost cause. I have stuck with mine: developing a systematic theory of
Christian economics. But I have made a lot of money along the way, so it is
something of an avocation with me. I never used it to put food on my table. It
was my calling, not my job. I have been willing to quit jobs that I could see
were not going to pan out.
I have adopted a general rule: fund a pet project for three years.
If the project cannot get self-sustaining in three years, it is time to
reconsider the project.
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For "Lost Causes on the Right," click here: https://www.garynorth.com/public/17078.cfm
