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jonathan chait
I Don't Think Jonathan Chait Read the Book on 'Solidarity' He Reviewed
The New York Magazine pundit spent 2,900 words criticizing a book with no resemblance to the one which prompted his piece.
May 19, 2024
Earlier this year, progressive philanthropist Leah Hunt-Hendrix and organizer Astra Taylor published Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea. I’ve admired both Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor for years now (full disclosure: I’m a fellow at Revolving Door Project, and Hunt-Hendrix’s organization Way to Win has been among its many funders), but hadn’t gotten around to reading their book. That is, until last Friday, when New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait suddenly wrote an impassioned critique of it. Chait’s piece, titled “In Defense of Punching Left,” fervently pushes back against censorious groupthink dressed up as political strategy, a dangerous conflation which he attributes to Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor.
“Solidarity provides the lengthiest and most serious case I’ve seen for why liberals should withhold criticism of the left,” Chait claims. He argues that “while they urge liberals not to criticize the left, they do not make any similar demand that leftists withhold criticism of liberalism. The requirements of factional quietude run one way.” Chait claims that Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor “misunderstand my job description” with their critiques of his brand of punditry, before solemnly declaring that “Liberals have serious differences with leftists over both strategy and first principles, and those distinctions shouldn’t be subsumed into a popular front.”
Chait’s piece confused me. This didn’t sound like either Hunt-Hendrix or Taylor, both of whom I know to have worked in coalition with center-left liberals on multiple issues. Out of curiosity, and with a rare block of free time, I bought a copy of Solidarity and read it over the weekend. Then I reread Chait’s 2,900-word piece and compared.
To put it simply, Chait is arguing against a book that doesn’t exist. He either didn’t read Solidarity or is too self-centered to take in any information which he cannot relate back to himself (or perhaps both). In any case, it’s a disservice to his readers, New York Magazine, and the quality of our public discourse.
To put it simply, Chait is arguing against a book that doesn’t exist.
According to Chait, “‘Don’t punch left’ is the core tenet of Solidarity,” a maxim which he calls “a growing, if not yet universal, norm of movement discipline. [...] when disagreement arises within the progressive family, the liberal’s role is to accept critique from the left without returning it.” There’s really no other way of saying this: “Don’t punch left” is not “the core tenet” of Solidarity. It’s just not what the book is about. At all. Instead, the book is an attempt to coherently define the titular concept and theorize what a society built around it would look like. Structurally, it’s one-part intellectual and movement history, one-part sociology, and one-part philosophy.
Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor trace the origins of “solidarity” to the Latin “obligatum in solidum,” a form of communal debt in the Roman empire. (Taylor, notably, is a co-founder and lead organizer of the Debt Collective, the United States’ largest and most militant debtors’ union.) They discuss the French solidarist movement of the 1850s, which helped formulate our modern understanding of the word, before analyzing contemporary sociopolitical movements. The book then critiques elite philanthropy, while arguing how to make the best of a bad system; envisions a reformulated welfare state built firstly around listening to the public’s demands; applies similar principles to global trade policy, emphasizing a lens of decolonization; and finally touches on the spiritual and soul-feeding aspects of building a solidaristic community.
Virtually none of it is about how liberals need to pipe down and praise leftists more. I don’t think intra-elite discursive norms come up at all, except in passing. As far as I can tell, Chait only got the idea that the book’s “core tenet” is liberal-policing from one-half of one paragraph of a Washington Post feature about the book, in which Hunt-Hendrix mentions Chait and his contemporary Matt Yglesias as examples of public figures whom she hopes read the book’s fourth chapter on conservatives’ “divide-and-conquer strategy.” That chapter mostly discusses organized right-wing efforts like the Southern Strategy, not the topic preferences of contemporary pundits.
This may come as a shock to Chait, but I don’t think that Hunt-Hendrix or Taylor think about him—or figures like him—very much at all. Their book’s actual argument is that individuals, and even groups of individuals cohered around a common identity, are not the protagonists of history. To Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor, it’s only when dedicated groups of people stand up, sacrifice, and risk blood and teeth for other dedicated groups of people, who then return the favor, that society advances and complex problems can be solved. The point is mutual interdependence, in all its messiness and beauty. By contrast, Chait’s singular focus on the nobility of liberals standing up to leftists not only has nothing to do with the book’s argument, it’s self-centered in a way directly opposed to the real thesis of Solidarity. Chait doesn’t seem to realize this.
This may come as a shock to Chait, but I don’t think that Hunt-Hendrix or Taylor think about him—or figures like him—very much at all.
So what does Chait have to say about Solidarity? Well, he hinges plenty of analysis on one quote, in which Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor write “Too often, liberals seek to legitimize their positions by punching left, distancing themselves from social movements to make themselves appear reasonable by comparison, which only strengthens the hands of conservatives and pulls the political center to the right.” This quote is from page XXXIII of the introduction. Yes, this quote is before the title page of the book! It’s also the only entry in the book’s index for “liberals/the Left, danger of popular passions of.”
He likewise claims that Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor “have no apparent sense of what liberals believe” because they contrasted, in their words, Democrats’ “growing progressive flank pushing to redistribute wealth, tackle climate change, and further racial and gender justice” with “a corporate wing clinging to the increasingly unequal status quo.” This quote is on page XVII of the introduction. Notably, Chait says it’s wrong to imply liberals hate change and love corporations…but Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor never said they were talking about liberals. The fact that Chait self-selects into the “corporate wing clinging to the increasingly unequal status quo” says much more about his view of where he is within the party than the authors.
His final characterizing quote from Solidarity is “If conservatives wield a scythe, demonizing different groups with sinister and destabilizing abandon, their liberal counterparts prefer to use garden shears, perpetually trimming solidarity back to manageable, and certainly not transformative, proportions.” That’s from page 94, which is the second page of chapter four, the chapter which Hunt-Hendrix specifically said Chait should read in her WaPo interview. To reiterate: it’s a chapter about racist violence, regressive laws, and industrial deregulation, not about pundits criticizing non-profit organizations.
The only other part of Solidarity which Chait addresses directly is one quote about education reform. By “one quote,” I do not mean that he focuses on something Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor wrote themselves. No, instead he spends five paragraphs lambasting the authors for themselves quoting one sentence of a 504-page Rand Corporation report (Chait doesn’t name the highly pedigreed source) about an old Gates Foundation initiative called the Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching (IPET).
In Solidarity, Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor use the quote to help illustrate Gates’ failed education initiatives, which are just one example in a wider chapter about the chauvinism of philanthropy. Rand wrote that IPET—essentially a standardized testing regime—failed because “the near-exclusive focus on TE [teacher effectiveness] might be insufficient to dramatically improve student outcomes.”
Chait stretches this example within an example into five paragraphs, castigating an apparent conspiracy of teacher’s unions for scaring “some of the experts” (which ones?!) away from “breaking ranks with the left.” To his credit, he notes that his wife works “at a nonprofit firm whose clients include both traditional and charter schools." According to her online bio, she "led policy for a D.C. charter school group."
I can’t tell you how strange it is that the most sustained policy discussion in Chait’s piece is about his own policy preferences, which are completely tangential to any of the ones in Solidarity, a book which argues for the total reorganization of American domestic spending and trade policy. There is truly so much to talk about with this book — and, if one disagreed, so much to criticize! I thought the book was good, but Chait might not have. It’s a shame that his own intellectual laziness foreclosed the kind of high-minded, nuanced debate which Chait claims the left won’t allow these days.
It’s also hard not to see this, at least to some extent, as a male intelligentsia dismissing out of hand the work of two women writers. And that fits a broader theme, since what they are writing about, Chait misunderstands at a pretty basic level.
Chait advises Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor to spend less time organizing protests—“the primary form of political activity” for leftists, according to Chait—and more time persuading moderate or cross-pressured voters. “Persuasion, though, plays little role in their understanding of politics,” Chait writes. Apparently Bernie Sanders won multiple presidential primaries, and Squad members knocked off establishment Democrats, primarily via protests.
If Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor didn’t want to persuade people, then I don’t know why they wrote a 300-page book in the first place. Solidarity argues that everyone benefits from movements that uplift everyone—for example, Hunt-Hendrix writes about being a wealthy heiress-turned-class traitor, and argues that ending economic inequality would actually help the (currently) rich too. In other words, Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor are saying that anyone, including current moderate and cross-pressured voters, would benefit from joining progressive movements. Chait’s advice only makes sense if he takes the labels “moderate” and “cross-pressured” as static fixtures, rather than political orientations that can be changed through (gasp!) persuasion.
He also warns that “when conservatives use well-organized factions to steamroll over the preferences of a majority, we call that ‘minority rule.’ Electoral politics, for all its shortcomings, is a more democratic method for resolving differences than bringing bodies into the streets.” Protests can also “create legitimacy problems even within the progressive movement itself,” Chait claims, because “every cause is framed as a matter of absolute moral urgency.”
There’s a lot to unpack here. First of all, the “well-organized factions” in conservatism are located in Congress, C-Suites, and national media outlets, to say nothing of terrorist militias. They can “steamroll over the preferences of a majority” because they already have institutional power, and are willing to kill people if they lose it. Progressives don’t and aren’t, which is why they turn to protest, as Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor painstakingly reiterate multiple times: “regular voters have virtually no impact over public policy in the United States, largely because they lack the economic resources required to sway elected officials accustomed to pandering to big donors,” they write, citing a classic Cambridge political science study. All of this is before one factors in the electoral college, gerrymandering, Senate disproportionality, and all the other parts of the American system that lock the preferences of numerical majorities out of power.
Moreover, Chait’s argument about intra-progressive prioritization again makes me wonder if he actually read the book. Through countless examples, Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor show that across American history, movements which challenge established hierarchies either succeed together or fail together. This is, again, what the word ‘solidarity’ means. It’s when one cause double-crosses their would-be allies that the betrayed movement crumbles, followed shortly by the betrayer.
In this respect, Chait’s column is helpfully clarifying. He is straightforwardly declaring that he will willingly and gladly break ranks whenever it is convenient for his personal pet causes—that he does not believe in the virtues of solidarity. I’d warn the good people of the NYMag Union that Chait is a scab through and through, but well, they already know.
It’s clear that Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor believe in solidarity because they care deeply about other people. They want all of humanity to flourish, and they don’t need any credit or kudos to act toward that goal—improving the world is its own reward. It’s hard to come away from “In Defense of Punching The Left” thinking the same is true of Chait.
Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated the publication date of the book. That error has been corrected.
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The Return of Lesser Evilism
With Trump on the other side, Democrats can be lazier than ever this election
Jun 22, 2016
Jonathan Chait of New York magazine wrote a column about Ralph Nader earlier this week using interesting language. Noting that it's now been 16 years since Nader ran for president and garnered enough dissenting votes to help elect George W. Bush, he wrote (emphasis mine):
"That is enough time for Nader to confess his role in enabling one of the most disastrous presidencies in American history, or at least to come up with a better explanation for his decision. Instead, Nader has repeated his same litany of evasions, most recently in an interview with Jeremy Hobson on WBUR, where he dismissed all criticisms of his 2000 campaign as 'fact deprived.'"
Nader refuses to confess! What is this, the Spanish Inquisition? Fetch the comfy chair!
It would be foolish to argue that Nader's run in 2000 didn't enable Bush's presidency. Though there were other factors, Nader's presence on the ballot was surely a big one.
But the career Democrats of the Beltway and their buddies in the press have turned the Nader episode into something very like the creation story of the Third Way political movement. And like many religious myths, it's gotten very tiresome.
The Democratic Party leaders have trained their followers to perceive everything in terms of one single end-game equation: If you don't support us, you're supporting Bush/Rove/Cheney/Palin/Insert Evil Republican Here.
That the monster of the moment, Donald Trump, is a lot more monstrous than usual will likely make this argument an even bigger part of the Democratic Party platform going forward.
It's a sound formula for making ballot-box decisions, but the people who push it never seem content to just use it to win elections. They're continually trying to make an ethical argument out of it, to prove people who defy The Equation are, whether they know it or not, morally wrong and in league with the other side.
Beltway Democrats seem increasingly to believe that all people who fall within a certain broad range of liberal-ish beliefs owe their votes and their loyalty to the Democratic Party.
That's why, as a socially liberal person who probably likes trees and wouldn't want to see Roe v. Wade overturned, Nader's decision to take votes from the party-blessed candidate Gore is viewed not as dissent, but as a kind of treason.
The problem with this line of thinking is that there's no end to it. If you think I owe you my vote because I recycle and enjoyed To Kill a Mockingbird, you're not going to work very hard to keep it. That's particularly true if the only standard you think you need to worry about is not being worse than Donald Trump, which is almost the same as no standard at all.
This is why the thinking within the Democratic Party has gotten so flabby over the years. It increasingly seems to rejoice in its voters' lack of real choices, and relies on a political formula that requires little input from anyone outside the Beltway.
It's heavily financed by corporate money, and the overwhelming majority of its voters would never cast a vote for the nut-bar God-and-guns version of Republicanism that's been their sole opposition for decades.
So the party gets most of its funding without having to beg for it door to door, and it gets many of its votes by default. Except for campaign-trail photo ops, mainstream Democrats barely need to leave Washington to stay in business.
Still, the Democratic Leadership Council wing of the Democrats have come to believe they've earned their status, by being the only plausible bulwark against the Republican menace.
This sounds believable because party officials and pundits like Chait keep describing critics of the party as far-leftists and extremists, whose platform couldn't win a national election.
Dissenting voices like this year's version of Nader, Bernie Sanders, are inevitably pitched as quixotic egotists who don't have the guts to do what it takes to win. They're described as just out for 15 minutes of fame, and maybe a few plaudits from teenagers and hippies who'll gush over their far-out idealism.
But that characterization isn't accurate. The primary difference between the Nader/Sanders platform and the Gore/Clinton platform isn't rooted in ideology at all, but money.
The former camp refuses to be funded by the Goldmans and Pfizers of the world, while the latter camp embraces those donors. That's really all this comes down to. There's nothing particularly radical about not taking money from companies you think you might need to regulate someday. And there's nothing particularly centrist or "realistic" about taking that same money.
When I think about the way the Democrats and their friends in the press keep telling me I owe them my vote, situations like the following come to mind. We're in another financial crisis. The CEOs of the ten biggest banks in America, fresh from having wrecked the economy with the latest harebrained bubble scheme, come to the Oval Office begging for a bailout.
In that moment, to whom is my future Democratic president going to listen: those bankers or me?
It's not going to be me, that's for sure. Am I an egotist for being annoyed by that? And how exactly should I take being told on top of that that I still owe this party my vote, and that I should keep my mouth shut about my irritation if I don't want to be called a Republican-enabler?
The collapse of the Republican Party and its takeover by the nativist Trump wing poses all sorts of problems, not the least of which being the high likelihood that the Democrats will now get even lazier when it comes to responding to their voters' interests. The crazier the Republicans get, the more reflexive will be the arguments that we can't afford any criticism of Democrats anymore, lest we invite in the Fourth Reich.
I didn't vote for Nader in 2000, and I don't have a problem with anyone arguing this coming Election Day that we shouldn't all do whatever we can to keep Donald Trump out of office.
What's problematic is the way Beltway media types are forever turning postmortems on the candidacies of people like Nader or Sanders into parables about the perils of voting your conscience when what we're really talking about is the party's unwillingness to untether itself from easy money. This is how Chait sums up Nader (again, emphasis mine):
"Nader goes on to defend his idiosyncratic belief that people are under no obligation to consider real-world impacts in their voting behavior. Vote for a third-party candidate, write in a candidate, follow your own conscience: 'I think voters in a democracy should vote for anybody they want, including write in or even themselves. I don't believe in any kind of reprimand of voters who stray from the two-party tyranny.'
"Why should people vote for candidates at all? Since, by definition, the person we most closely agree with is ourselves, why not just write your own name in every time?"
Ugh. Hey, Jonathan: Voters don't want candidates who agree with them about everything. They just want one who isn't going to completely take them for granted. If that's become too much to ask, maybe there's something wrong with the Democratic Party, not people like Ralph Nader or Bernie Sanders.
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