Heightening the Contradictions and Missing the Point
The following is an excerpt from Jan Dutkiewicz and Andrew Norris’s essay, “What Cass Sunstein Gets Wrong About Marxism, Sanders, and American Politics: Heightening the Contradictions and Mising The Point.” A full version can be found on Public Seminar.
Dutkiewicz is a former Heilbroner Center Graduate Fellow.
“More importantly, by using the specter of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin to score cheap political points at the expense of honesty, Sunstein does serious disservice to public scholarship at a time when academic scholarship should be deployed accurately to address our seemingly endless social problems.
It warrants briefly dissecting Sunstein’s various assertions before returning to the question of Marx and Lenin. First, consider his claim that Russian meddling in the 2016 election stemmed from the fact that, as “the most powerful nation from the former Soviet Union, whose leaders were schooled in the Marxist tradition, [it] is borrowing directly from that tradition in its efforts today.” To call this conjecture is being generous. That some Russian higher-ups were educated in the Marxist tradition likely has much less bearing on any disruptive intervention into foreign affairs than pragmatic, Machiavellian realpolitik. “Lenin would have been proud,” muses Sunstein. Maybe. But to imagine that something like, say, Pizzagate was a Marxist strategy strikes us as perhaps even more absurd than Pizzagate itself.
Second, Sunstein correctly notes that Donald Trump, when faced with criticism, “tries to provoke unrest and discontent” and “creates demons and scapegoats.” He contrasts this to how previous presidents dealt with “periods of acute difficulty”: Kennedy and Reagan were charmers, Nixon and Clinton (apparently) were centrists, Bush Sr. and Obama took concrete actions. Given that Trump’s entire presidency has been a period of difficulty, it is not surprising that he has employed a diversity of diversionary tactics to deflect critique. These might sow division, but certainly not in the Marxist-Leninist sense. If anything, the notion of “heightening the contradictions” in the sense of putting the squeeze on common people and confronting them with the direness of their plight was better applied to the Obama-era GOP’s Congressional intransigence on budgetary spending, as Paul Feldman argued in The American Prospect back in 2014, than to Trump’s efforts.
Third, for good measure, Sunstein includes Bernie Sanders in his story, arguing that the Senator from Vermont is an old hand at this strategy, with his claims that “the interests of good, decent ordinary people are sharply opposed to those of powerful and supposedly evil actors (such as ‘the banks’).” Such critique, Sunstein believes, results in “a Manichean view of American society.” The problem here is that American society is already Manichean: 1% of the population controls almost 40% of the nation’s wealth. “The banks” have been complicit in scandals ranging from the subprime crisis to Wells Fargo setting up fraudulent accounts in its clients’ names. Socio-economic inequality and the outsized power of the business elite are a grave problem in the United States and the world. The success of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century speaks volumes to the traction of this issue (Sunstein had qualms with Piketty as well.)”
