Lately I’ve noticed some concern over the intermittent tendency to portray Occupy Wall Street, and other insurgent movements, as somehow “neither left nor right”; recently, we can see Matt Taibbi engaging in this rhetoric, and Richard Seymour found it cropping up at Occupy London. This is, I agree, an annoying rhetorical tic; maybe even a dangerous one. Digby, in the link above, attributes this framing to a quixotic desire to escape political conflict; others suggest that it reflects an unwillingness to confront the class struggle at the heart of populist “99-percenter” rhetoric. Maybe, but I suspect it’s also something else: less a product of wrong ideology than of an impoverished political vocabulary, which is the inevitable consequence of the decline of the left and of political consciousness generally. This decline has produced widespread confusion about the difference between, on the one hand, the way political partisanship operates in contemporary politics, and on the other hand, the importance of actual contests of political ideology. In such a period, morbid symptoms appear.

To summarize the thesis: ordinary people hate partisanship, and elites hate ideology. Hence the elite is constantly attempting to misrepresent the latter as the former. And the masses sometimes respond by repudiating ideology when they mean to reject partisanship.

By partisanship, I mean adopting positions or taking actions based purely on what is immediately advantageous to your “side,” party, or faction. (On the far left, this usually goes by the name of “sectarianism.”) When Republicans denounce a health care plan that they were promoting a few years before, just to make the Democrats look bad, they’re being partisan. When Democratic-aligned lawyers go from vigorously denouncing Bush’s imperial presidency to giving legal cover to Obama’s death squads, they’re being partisan. A lot of people find this kind of behavior objectionable, because it is so transparently cynical and unprincipled, motivated by the desire to win tactical — and personal — advantages even at the expense of larger ideals and strategic objectives — that is, at the expense of ideology. What this sort of partisanship ultimately amounts to is the conviction that politics is about winning power for its own sake, rather than using that power for some larger purpose. The Wall Street protests seem to have drawn a decent number of people who were disengaged from the political system, perhaps from a revulsion at this kind of cynical partisanship, combined with a vague ideological intuition that neither side of the mainstream partisan divide is actually pursuing anything that is in their interest.