Seattle Is Being Blamed for the Rise of Socialism and Sanders in the US

Karl Marx in Seattle's Pioneer Square... Charles Mudede

A day after Danny Westneat claimed that the US political mainstrea m is being Seattlelized (which is, if I understand Westneat correctly, is the raw confrontation between the radical right and the radical left), the conservative journal National Review posted this article: "Seattle Is Socialism’s Laboratory, and It’s Not Pretty." It's written by Christopher Rufo, and the basic idea is that Seattle politics has become so extreme that it's impossible for a civil discourse that includes centrists on the left and right. From the National Review: "...black-bloc activists and Antifa militants intimidate any potential opposition by disrupting events, vandalizing homes, and even orchestrating death threats against political adversaries." The implication is that Seattle could become the whole of the US for the right. We are the laboratory for a political future that has anyone who does not agree with extremists like Kshama Sawant nailed to the cross.

As if this were not enough, Seattle has a black African commentator who is Marxist and providing Seattle's left with a theoretical framework to conduct vicious attacks on the right. This commentator is, of course, the present writer. Rufo quotes me: “'We are in the 21st century. We are in one of the richest cities on earth. And yet, the old war between those who employ labor and those who sell their labor is still very much with us.'" Now this story comes at around the same time Bloomberg reported that "people working in the information sector in the Seattle area earn... about $279,000 a year." Which turns out to be a stunning 56 percent higher than what, on average, is earned by those on Wall Street. And here we have the kind of stuff that gets people in red states red hot. First, those fly-over-us coastal cosmopolitans are socialists (meaning, they want lots of free stuff): and next, they are earning all of the money (most of the job growth is in urban areas). Let's give a few moments of thought to these rural grievances.

The first and very last thing we must understand is that the correlation between the rural mindset and the GOP is limited to white voters. It is not there for rural blacks and Latinos. This fact must ring some bells, the loudest of which is that the rural commitment to the GOP is not purely economic. But if such is the case—if the opinion among rural voters about the awfulness of rich/socialist city people is not at all united, then what is it going on here? Why do white rural people vote overwhelmingly in the direction of the right? Because of Jesus? Because of abortions? Because of Judgement Day? Those who know anything about US history (how it was founded, how it accumulated capital by very primitive/violent means) will not spend much mental effort determining that it is racism.

Voting patterns in the deepest of red states, say Mississippi or Alabama, make this abundantly clear. Rural blacks vote left. And if this were not indeed the case, then why does the GOP spend so much energy and time suppressing rural votes in these red states, and why are we really building a wall? So, what exactly is the composition of the left in the US? In truth, it is an alliance between minorities (be they rural or not) and cosmopolitan whites.

As the French economist Thomas Piketty pointed out in his long 2018 essay "Brahmin Left vs Merchant Right: Rising Inequality & the Changing Structure of Political Conflict" (PDF), the alliance is not old but developed in the 1980s. In the 1960s, educated whites were in fact aligned with the right, with the business party, the GOP. At that time, the left was simply the working classes. But in the 1980s, white voters in the middle and lower classes began to identify Christianity with the interests of the business classes.

But in truth, this identification was not made possible by Christianity, because, as I said before, black Americans in the rural areas are also profoundly Christian. No. What the rural whites do not want to admit is that their political feelings were not captured in the promotion of religious issues and ideals, but in the historically formed ontology of racism. Not Jesus, but the pagan myth of whiteness is what directs their voting. In structural terms, something similar happened in France. Those committed to the faith of Islam actually vote with white elites in Paris. For them, as with black Americans and Latinos, religious beliefs, even very conservative ones, do not present a barrier to engaging with leftist politics. Indeed, they make the connection between what is written in the Bible or the Koran and what the right denounces as socialism: help the poor, feed the needy, and so on.

Indeed, it is said in the Bible that it takes a hell of a lot of work for a rich person to be accepted into heaven (the eye of needle). In my entire time covering local politics, I have not heard Kshama Sawant say something as radical (as polarizing) as that.