Recollections of the 2020 Election - Part 2: Dumping the Blue Banner
Arguing against the structures of the existing Democratic Party mainline in August of 2020
The election now in the hands of the fates, the first question is where do we go from there — wherever there is — and how can we try and make a case for a better politics. I’ll lay out here that, after years of push to the right, the way forward is to the left. And while we can discuss at length why we need a labor left in American politics, we have to start with why the existing “Left” should be called out for what it is: an active impediment to political progress in the face of an increasingly radical right.
“Atlas” Should Shrug Already
Whoever wins the election, there needs to be a plan for moving forward; particularly because, if you’re like me, you spent these last few years in awe of the impotence of our only advocates against the worst excesses of this administration. From “wearing the same color” to Twitter slams to stern injunctions, Democratic politicians seem to have leaned into the highly performative #resistance of their most outraged partisans.
And, if we can be more earnest, even meaningful push back to the Trump administration’s efforts have been flimsy — from getting Trump to sign a temporary hold on a zero-tolerance policy for family separation at the border, to ongoing and heretofore politically meaningless investigations into his finances (though, jaded as I am, I’ve yet to give up hope that any of the findings from these may be employed in the election …). (*** 11/3 Update: Sigh … I should have given up hope. ***)
To avoid a full recount of the Trump years, I’ll just say that the limits of established, political class liberalism, with all its affectations of civility and performative put-downs, have been thoroughly explored. The game is up. And though it may offer some as yet unproven benefit come election time, expanding this tendency into a grand coalition between moderate Democrats and country club Republicans isn’t going to save us from the broader, material trends underlying broader American political discontent.
And yet, political inertia works against us here. For despite massive disruption within their ranks, Democrats continue to be the only party even close to the political left (Left, from here on) permitted to win elections by virtue of our first-past-the-post, rigid two-party system.
Worse still, for someone without any cultural, religious or (let’s be real now) financial incentives to vote right wing, America is a one-party state but with all the dysfunctions of a two-party state. No, there won’t be “People’s Police” sent to your house in the night to disappear you for posting against Pelosi, but — just like in a one-party state — the challenges that a Leftist who wants to win at the national level faces include elections against the political opposition, but also the leadership, structures, and closed-door proceedings of their own party.
An Aside: You’ve Got to Play for the Winning Team
For the rest of this piece, let’s hold as a simplifying assumption that a member of a third party cannot win a national election in the United States and that a Leftist considering running or supporting a candidate in an election is running or supporting a candidate as part of the Democratic party. Why? Tendencies and history.
There are large structural impediments to third party success (from the voting system, to financing, to simply who sits on the elections boards). Famously, even when popular former President Roosevelt ran as a third party, he split the vote between him and the incumbent Republican Taft and handed the victory to Democrat Wilson.
And, historically, a candidate, running not as an independent but as a formal member of a third party, has not won a national House or Senate election to be a representative of a mainland United States jurisdiction since the 1920s (Socialist Party of America) and 1940s (Farmer-Labor Party of Minnesota), respectively. I’m being very specific here, so city-level Trotskyists, Puerto Rican Progressives, state level Greens, and independent Vermont Socialists don’t count. And why should they? They are key anomalies in a system that has yielded 99%+ two party Congresses for almost 80 years.
Further, the likelihood of a third party winning has only gotten worse in the wake of the various Red Scares, the mass influx of money into politics, widespread misinformation about capital “S” socialist candidates, and the trend toward primarily voting against candidates rather than for them (and its ensuing impact of forcing candidates into the Democrat or Republican parties at the highest level of politics). Lastly, it’s worth noting that, despite the GOP being far more in favor of moving to the Right than their opposition is when it comes to moving to the Left, further right parties like the Constitution Party also hold very little power — though this could reasonably be because their interests are fairly well represented in both the Trumpist and even TEA Party wings of the GOP.
The Party of Power
When you control the party apparatus, you have power and power confers special abilities upon those who wield it:
1. The Right to Rule
Unlike many parties in the European party systems, the Democratic Party leadership is made up of its highest ranking legislative or executive members, elected by its legislative caucuses. The average Democrat, outside of a successful Presidential election, cannot and has never voted for the leader of their party. Nor can they often raise sufficient opposition to the voting leadership since, to have a seat at the table, you have to win an election at the national level, something that may work in a singular case like that of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but is untenable across multiple districts without massive financial support. As such, lasting dynasties far exceeding the term of any one President can be put in place, with (as we see now with Mitch McConnell in the Senate) far more power than any President can muster in the realm of domestic politics. Additionally, as expected, this structure places powers firmly in the hands of the national leaders of party — a deliberate decision made in the era of FDR to smash unruly local party machines that opposed parts of the New Deal — making opposition outside this system a limited venture at best.
2. The Power to Punish
A critical role of governance is ensuring its own continuation and therefore, when challenged, power must be used to punish those who would dare to try. And, while not strongly diverging from civility to openly condemn their younger, more diverse up-and-comers as faithless wreckers, Democrats have sought to restrict insurgent influence in more subtle ways. Why set policies forbidding progressive candidates outright when you can blacklist supporters that work to primary incumbent Democrats? Why crowd out candidates when you can write progressive voting districts out of existence with gerrymandering? And notably, all of this presumes that when progressives do get elected, they would be allowed to exercise any kind of power in the first place, without internal rebuke for bucking the party line.
3. Dominance of the Discourse
While the most loyal Democrats online make no secret of how much they cannot abide progressive wreckers and their “dirtbag”, “vulgar”, “brocialist”, mean-to-us-on-Twitter supporters, powerful Democrats can work in a far less brutish way to discredit their challengers. This can be seen primarily in the way media discourse surrounding progressives is used against them.
Consider the creation of the “Bernie Bro”. Spawned from the Hillary Clinton campaign, the claim is simple: that Bernie’s supporters are overwhelmingly white college-aged men, who push pie-in-the-sky policy and often cannot hide their misogynist misgivings toward a woman candidate. And, despite vocal push back from Sanders himself and many members of his campaign staff who do not fit this mold, the claim has stuck, being reinforced in print and TV press pieces for years now.
While we can and should acknowledge when claims of harm are being made and take them seriously, the great challenge with the charge of rampant “Bernie Bros” is that it persists precisely because it is so easy to make (even in bad faith) and difficult to challenge.
The benefits of running wild with the claim are obvious, especially for socially liberal, economically centrist Democrats. Why on Earth would someone like Hillary Clinton yield in an ideologically clear way that their goals aren’t as good for their minority, LGBT, and female constituencies (who would overwhelmingly benefit from bolder increases in the social state) as those of someone like Bernie Sanders? Why not use every avenue to keep yourself afloat, including spreading the idea that socialists represent a white male “gentrifying” force in the Democratic Party?
Comment from a user illustrating the above | The Wonkette
Additionally, consider the following about the claim:
It is something that is easy to claim demographically. As a reminder: Most of America is still white and white people are the constituency Democrats do the worst with. Unless you can get more people to vote, getting more white votes is a must-have to grow the coalition.
It is something that is hard to disprove practically (“your idea would never get passed and doesn’t center [XXX] voices, so it doesn’t matter if your health plan would, on paper, cover more people”).
Further still, it makes debates easier to manage. When you’re discussing policies you’d never pass to garner support among key voting bases, why not propose the woke but politically impossible? Slave reparations and subsidized abortions for transgender federal inmates inbound! In this instance, the goal is not to substitute social policy for sweeping economic policy — it is instead to undercut the economically left wing by focusing on identitarian issues, where the gap between a Leftist and a Democrat is smallest, and using the rough similarity (exemplified below by an “isidewith” result) to undercut the truly transformative nature of those policies.
If these results are to be believed as presented, the Democrats are far closer to being Leftists than they are to being Republicans. A cursory look on economic and foreign policy dating back even twenty years reveals the shocking similarity underlying the Dem and GOP foundational assumptions on economics and their willingness to engage in foreign interventionism. It is also hard to discern the extent to which this is a failure of the test to include economic policies beyond the trite “sliding scale on the size of the welfare state”.
It is primarily in this way that Democrats undercut shifts to the left on the larger political stage.
Why Should We Care?
In part two of this series, I have laid out the exact issues underlying the Democratic party as an institution and how it, by design, restricts movement to the left as a matter of doctrine. However, there are key questions this piece did not answer: most notably, why is this a bad thing? Why is a substantive political Leftism something that we should pursue? And, if these ideas are crucial to us moving forward as a nation, why hasn’t a new party overtaken the Democrats like happened to older parties in American politics?
While I’ll go in depth in the third entry of this series, the brief answer is that a nation beset by failings in its political center, free market capitalism (with varying levels of welfare state), will cause people to look to the Left or look to the Right for solutions, as both provide reasons for the failings of an existing system of capitalism to generate equitable prosperity. However, the absence of a major Left player condemns us to only go Right and, as the next piece will discuss, the Right’s tendency to enforce the failings of an existing system of capitalism often seriously penalize specific groups in society and lead to further antagonism. Our political system is out of balance and, as demonstrated above, its not just the Republicans contributing to the overall problem.
Post-Script: A Hopeless Hill for the Republicans
As I was writing this, an Axios piece was tweeted out by the GOP’s twitter account claiming, in contrast to some of what I’ve written here and much of what I plan to write, that Biden was not a centrist. I’ll just link my piece here going in-depth, but for those who wish to be spared the wonk-on-wonk violence depicted, I’ll simply say this. The gradual progression of policy that accompanies the gradual progression of the problems we face does not point to any kind of radical shift to Leftism. FIN.