I have now had decades of dumb arguments with grumpy liberals kvetching about the “purity politics” of loudmouth leftists refusing to vote for Democratic Party candidates. These days, grumplibs have escalated to blaming The Left for producing the Trump regime.
I share grumplibs’ exasperation with loudlefties’ crowing about “holding the Democratic Party to account” by refusing to vote. I have had decades of arguments with noiselefties 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 grumplib rap is bizarre.
The loudlefties 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 grumplibs kvetching about loudlefties draw a bunch of bizarre conclusions from that premise.
- Why focus so much interest on the foolishness of loudlefties in particular? Why not grumble about the much bigger bloc of non-leftist non-voters? Or, y’know, Republican voters?
- Why fault the loudlefties, rather than fault the Democratic Party for refusing to address loudlefties’ 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 loudlefties — 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 grumplibs accept loudlefties’ 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 loudlefties’ premise is wrong. The evidence has overwhelmingly demonstrated that the loudlefties (and netroots progressives of the ’00s like me) were wrong. The loudlefty bloc is neither big nor coherent, much less both. It’s a non-issue.
Loudlefties don’t know what to do to win political power back from the fascist regime in power, or they would have done it. Fair enough; I don’t have answers either.
I do know that the current Democratic Party establishment cannot do it. If they could, we would not be here. Grumplibs’ talking about how loudlefties need to get with the Dem establishment’s program are wasting time and energy. It ain’t gonna happen.
What is to be done?
I finally spat out this post because of yet another discussion in which my interlocutor wanted to tell the Left “you are the reason we can’t have the things we both want”, saying that an untapped left voting bloc could swing elections. If I am wrong and that does exist, it is both dumb and offensive to imagine that hectoring them more about how All This is their fault will deliver their votes to Dems.
Vote Blue No Matter Who is right both on the merits and in pursuit of leftists’ own interests, and I have not been shy about telling my left comrades that any other strategy is foolish and irresponible. The fantasy that leftists withholding our votes will compel the Democratic Party to reach left is one of loudlefties’ persistent delusions — along with the significance of our voter bloc, the ease of enacting our policy agenda, the appeal of that agenda to the public, and the relevance of the Dem establishment’s moves against us in the big picture. But it as rude as it is logically absurd for the Dem establishment to punch left to keep us out of power for two generations … and then fault the Left for the results, rather faulting actual power players of the Dem establishment.
Aside from alienating the Left, this nonsense lets the Dem establishment lazily avoid a strategic reckoning they damm well need to do.
I grant good reasons to think that Clintonian triangulation was the best possible strategy in the 1990s to counter the capture of the Republican Party by movement conservatism, as demonstrated by Actual Bill Clinton.
That case gets weaker looking at the ’00s & ’10s. Obama campaigned to the left of his actual governance, and made countless moves which compromised the strength of progressive organizing. Are lefties like me right to suspect that this squandered an opportunity to break the neoliberal consensus? Only a fool would feel confident that they understand the political dynamics better than BHO.
But I am certain that at this point we have nothing to learn from the dynamics of the 1990s. We face a MAGA fascist Republican Party, not movement conservatism. We face fragmentation of the entire information environment, not Fox News rivaling mainstream political journalism. Triangulation is very bad under these conditions.
I have my own informed guesses about what the Democratic Party should do. I’m open to alternatives. I am certain that the Clintonian playbook will not work. HRC’s candidacy in 2016 would have crushed a movement conservative candidate like a bug, and her failure shows how that playbook fails in our current environment. I would like to find loudlefties’ proposals more persuasive than I do; I support a lot of them on the merits.
Advocates for a Democratic Party agenda of Restoration — “return to stability and normalcy” — point to Biden’s victory in 2020 as their template, but 2020 was a unique moment. The course of Biden’s administration and the collapse of voter enthusiasm for him which undercut Kamala Harris’ candidacy in 2024 demonstrates that Just Be Normal cannnot win elections; voters do not see that as either possible or desirable for the Republic. We face a national institutional crisis at least comparable to the moment which gave us the New Deal, if we are lucky; if not so lucky, Fort Sumpter.
To save the Republic, we need a popular front uniting the liberal establishment with leftists. The Democratic party has the obligation and opportunity to reach out for one.
Sibling post: against dumb anti-liberal leftist antifascism.
No comments:
Post a Comment