I have now had decades of dumb arguments with Grumbling Liberals kvetching about the “purity politics” of Very Noisy Leftists refusing to vote for Democratic Party candidates. These days, GLs have escalated to blaming The Left for producing the Trump regime.
I share GLs’ exasperation with VNLs crowing about “holding the Democratic Party to account” by refusing to vote. I have had decades of arguments with VNLs about how that doesn’t work, how in our first-past-the-post system, the savvy voter casts a ballot for their preferred candidate in primaries then for the lesser evil in the general election.
But the rest of the GL rap is bizarre.
The VNLs assert that they speak for a bloc of leftist voters both big enough to sway elections and coherent enough to have meaningful political interests. But GLs kvetching about VNLs draw a bunch of bizarre conclusions from that premise.
- Why focus so much interest on the foolishness of VNLs in particular? Why not grumble about the much bigger bloc of non-leftist non-voters? Or, y’know, Republican voters?
- Why fault the VNLs, rather than fault the Democratic Party for refusing to address VNL’s interests? Even if those interests are dumb, isn’t the Democratic establishment being at least as foolish leaving those votes on the table?
- Why fault the VNLs — and the handful of progressive back-bench electeds they like — who have not held actual power? Shouldn’t we fault the people who did have power? The movement-conservative-neoliberals who controlled the Republicans 1980-2015? The Clintonian-neoliberals who have controlled the Dems since 1992?
All that said, I do not believe that GLs accept VNLs’ premise about a leftist voting bloc.
They have been telling me for decades that they do not believe in that bloc. They told me that there are too few to be worth pursuing. They have told me that non-voting leftists are too fickle and won’t show up at the polls even if Dems try to get them.
More importantly, the VNLs’ premise is wrong. The evidence has overwhelmingly demonstrated that the VNLs (and netroots progressives of the ’00s like me) were wrong. The VNL bloc is neither big nor coherent, much less both. It’s a non-issue.
Those VNLs don’t know what to do to win political power back from the fascist regime in power. Neither do I!
But I do know that the current Democratic Party establishment cannot do it. If they could, we would not be here. GLs’ talking about how VNLs need to get with the Dem establishment’s program are wasting time and energy. It ain’t gonna happen.