I’ve been rereading Dave Van Ronk’s memoir The Mayor of MacDougal Street (2006). Van Ronk was a musician best remembered for his fingerstyle guitar and his interpretations of blues music, although he thought of himself as more of as a jazz musician manque. He was one of the core musicians of the 1960s Folk Revival, though he never hit it big like his friend Bobby Dylan. Van Ronk was also a serious leftist. He started out as an anarchist, joined the IWW, and wound up as a Troskyite. In his memoir, he reflected on the politics of the 1960s:
“I was encouraged by a lot of the changes that were happening in the 1960s, but as an orthodox leftist I was also a very strong critic of the student movement and the New Left. Of course, I agreed with a lot of their stances — I was strongly pro-civil rights and strongly antiwar — but most of those people were not really radicals, just a bunch of very pissed-off liberals. They had no grounding, and indeed no interest, in theory, and their disdain for studying history and learning economics infuriated me. The core problem with the New Left was that it wasn’t an ideology, it was a mood — and if you are susceptible to one mood, you are susceptible to another. They wanted the world to change, but essentially it was a petty bourgeois movement that had no connection with what was really going on. The working class at least has some power — if the working class folds it arms, the machinery stops — and as for the ruling class, its power is obvious. But what power does the middle class have? They have the power to talk: yak, yak, yak. To interpret, reinterpret, and re-re-reinterpret. And that is the history of the New Left in a nutshell.”
Interestingly, I feel the current Republican party actually does have a serious theoretical grounding. I disagree violently with the Republican party’s economic policies, but you have to admit that they are firmly grounded in Milton Friedman’s economic theories. Even if today’s Republicans have drifted away from Friedman in some respects, still a great deal of their agenda — doing away with Social Security, privatizing the National Park System, getting rid of the Post Office, etc. — comes straight out of his work.
Who on the American left offers any theoretical grounding to compete with Friedmanism? If Dave Van Ronk were still alive he’d no doubt advocate for Trotskyism, although to my mind that’s a non-starter in 2025 America. Personally, I’d vote for William J. Barber’s Poor People’s Campaign. However, I suspect Barber’s Christian affiliation is a dealbreaker for many of today’s pissed-off liberals; plus it has proved difficult to get pissed-off liberals to focus on poverty as a central issue.