Their conclusion that Netanyahu bears primary responsibility for the situation in Gaza, because he delayed a ceasefire, requires the premise that he should have accepted a ceasefire allowing Hamas to remain in power.

A ceasefire without defeating Hamas incentivizes Hamas and other groups to kidnap Jews around the world as bargaining chips.

They themselves note at one point:

“But Hamas still wanted the guarantee of a permanent truce, not just the possibility of one — they wanted to survive the war and remain in charge of Gaza”

However, the article does not analyze this point or its implications. As such, the authors appear unconcerned with Hamas remaining in control of Gaza.

In another telling point they write of Israel attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities and of the political deals necessary to achieve it:

“Above all, it highlighted how Netanyahu has instrumentalized war — whether in Gaza, Lebanon or in this case Iran — in part to stay in office."

“Above all”!

Israel set back an existential threat and advanced the global common good of restricting nuclear proliferation!

That should at least tie with Netanyahu’s political survival as a highlight.

While noting Hamas has some responsibility, they conclude:

“as the conflict turned from an existential battle into a war of attrition…it was Netanyahu who dragged it out. It was Netanyahu who refused to plan for a postwar power transfer, and it was Netanyahu who repeatedly delayed reaching a cease-fire”

They never even try to show Netanyahu had a chance to defeat Hamas and refused it in order to advance his political survival. Thus, they reinforce the stance that Hamas’s goal of staying in charge of Gaza is acceptable from their perspective.

By making the failure to reach a ceasefire proof of Netanyahu’s fault—while acknowledging that a ceasefire implies Hamas’s continued rule—they implicitly accept Hamas’s continued governance of Gaza, along with the risk of incentivizing more hostage-taking.

Iran's linchpin dealt a decisive blow. Putin's regime--the enemy of so many people's and friend of so many tyrants--licking its wounds and taking in its first Syrian refugee. The end of a regime whose evil knew no bounds.

This moment is worthy of celebration.

But what about...?

Free Syrians should be able to celebrate after almost 14 years of fighting for their freedom (on top of almost another 50 years of Baath dictatorship).

The world abandoned them in their hour of need but now refuses to let them celebrate in their hour of victory. Warnings overshadow their triumph. The final prison is still not opened, yet the concerns pour in.

But the victory of freedom for any is a victory for all of humanity.

Yet let's clear the air a bit: the problem of Islamic radicalism is real, but the fall of the Assad brings the possibility of solutions, not more problems.

• Assad cultivated jihadism: releasing extremists from his prisons while jailing and slaughtering the civilian opposition.

• Syrians in areas that HTS (the former AQ group) controlled have often protested their rule, including organizing for elections.

• In short, with Assad gone, the greater possibilities for self-rule open up alternatives to Islamic radicalism—alternatives that were impossible under Assad’s tyranny.

What are we celebrating?

Freedom.

It's so easy to take for granted. And that is right in its own way. When civil society's working, it should just be like oxygen: there, available, the background that lets you live but not the thing you worry about.

But Syrians couldn't take it for granted.

Listen to the voices from the first protests of 2011:

• Sana recalled her husband returning from his first protest in tears: “Anyone who doesn’t live this moment cannot consider himself alive.”

• Cherin, a Kurdish mother: “Your voice gets louder… You shudder and your body rises and everything you imagined just comes out. Tears come down. Tears of joy, because I broke the barrier… I am not afraid, I am a free being.”

• Rima vowed: “I would never again let anyone steal my voice.”

Wendy Pearlman, who gathered these stories, always began with “What was your first protest like?” because it was so moving to hear the answers.

As the years dragged on and massacres mounted, the world’s silence became a cruel mockery of their courage.

Yet that dream didn't die.

Their voices rise again to shout "huriya"--freedom!

Celebrate a Free Syria. Because while the world gave up on them, they refused to surrender their dream.

If one judges the outcome of a war based on the ratio of deaths, that would imply the goal is revenge: seeking an eye for an eye.

But we shouldn’t want a war for revenge.

If the goal of a war is self-defense, then that war has to be judged by whether and how it achieves that aim.

This is why the International Committee of the Red Cross’s work on international humanitarian law describes proportionality as being violated if it “would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated.”

Think about it.

If Israel paused the Iron Dome, more of its citizens—innocent civilians—would die. 

But would that make the conflict more just?

That’s absurd.

Yet that’s precisely what’s implied by the all too common refrain about the ratio of deaths between Palestinians and Israelis.

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It is the goal that matters. Not the ratio.

The stated goal of Hamas is to kill Jews and that is what they did on 10/7.

The just goal in response to such an atrocity is to end the ability of Hamas to attack again.

“But what about the civilians harmed in those defensive actions?”

I recommend Michael Walzer’s “Responsibility and Proportionality in State and Nonstate Wars” for those who’d like to read an extended discussion of that question.

If Israel is attacking a force launching attacks hiding among civilian areas, “the primary responsibility for their deaths then falls on the…militants who were using [the civilians as human shields].”

That does not mean the IDF has no responsibility to minimize and to avoid civilian deaths, even when Hamas is deliberately hiding among civilians. And there will be difficult decisions and debates as to how best to do that.

Hamas doesn’t have debate about that.

And as Walzer goes on to say:

“It is a central principle of just war theory that the self-defense of a people or a country cannot be made morally impossible.”

When people bandy about international law to criticize Israel, step back and ask yourself: are they making self-defense impossible?

There are some things that can never be justified, because they cannot create a military advantage toward a just end.

Acts like those of Hamas on 10/7 cannot be justified, because the murder and kidnapping of the innocent, the rape and torture, cannot possible advance a just goal.

Whereas many of the things Israel is condemned for, such as sieges and bombing in civilian areas, may be tragically necessary when fighting an enemy that hides in civilian areas and so must be judged in that light.

It is an injustice to try to restrain Israel from necessary actions to end the ability of Hamas to terrorize the innocent.

And that is what we’re seeing with explanations of the Hamas massacre of 10/7 that blame Israel as the “root” cause. Even if (forgive me assuming this for the sake of argument) Israel as a state were fundamentally unjust, that does nothing to explain the evil that was committed that day. Nothing.

Unless you think Palestinians are not capable of morality.

The liberal denial of original sin

The Catholic understanding of “original sin” is not that of a “stain” on us, but that humanity does not exist in a condition of choosing the good without a struggle against the possibility of choosing evil.

Quite simply, we are all capable of evil, and if I look into my heart, I know that of myself and shudder.

Yet the tendency for liberals is to deny personal responsibility. 

Crime, poverty, etc. are by default the fault of the structure of society, not the individual. With things like poverty that can be true: people can be born into conditions that are all but impossible to escape. But to extend that to the act of committing evil against other human beings, to absolve them of moral responsibility because of the “context,” is to treat them as an animal, incapable of human dignity.

In theological terms, it is to say they cannot be an “image” of God.

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It makes no sense to absolve terrorists of their moral responsibility while holding Israel morally responsible for everything it does

This leads to positions that are not fully rational and so do not make any sense when spelled out.

During the Second Intifada, in the face of suicide bombings targeting civilians, I thought only a greater evil—the “context” of the society—could drive someone to do something so unfathomably evil.

Yet I held Israel morally responsible for collateral damage to civilians taken in its self-defense.

Writing it out like that sounds wretchedly stupid—because it is. But it was an ideological confusion that led to that intellectual failure. While aiming to side with the weak against the stronger, I held Israel to one, higher, standard and Palestinians to another, lower, moral standard. It was, in that sense, bigoted against Palestinians.

We’re seeing this play out when Jewish Voices for Peace says “the root of violence is oppression" in response to 10/7.

In the name of being pro-Palestinian, they’re saying that Israel alone is capable of morality and thereby denying humanity to Palestinians. Whatever Israel has or has not done in the past, the people who carried out the atrocities of 10/7 are morally responsible for those actions. Unjust actions cannot force you to kidnap and murder children. Nothing can remove morality from you.

For this kind of liberal thinking, the more evil the act, the more evil the larger “context” must be. So while an act like 10/7 will cause some to sit up and rethink, it will cause others to burrow their heads deeper into the sand of blaming Israel alone. They will think they are good for protesting Israel while ignoring the radical evil of 10/7.

We must be clear that a naive liberalism that denies personal responsibility for evil actions is dangerous.

Then I saw what Assad did to Syrians—and to Palestinians in Syria.

Assad targeted for extermination every community that protested his rule and that included Palestinian refugee camps in Syria.

Studying that war on civilians showed me the difference between Assad’s total war, which aimed to destroy civilian life, and Israel’s wars of self-defense, which had tragic civilian casualties—but whose deaths were not the goal.

In Syria, Assad attacked civilians so much that many moved to be closer to the frontlines of the military conflict because it was safer there. In Syria, civilian life moved underground to evade the bombs—so Assad used chlorine gas (which sinks because it’s heavier than air) to kill them there or drive them aboveground. Hospitals were targeted day after day to render them dysfunctional. People were starved to death. Everything was reduced to rubble.

Israel is accused of carrying out such crimes, yet with an infinitely stronger military than Assad’s, it hasn’t destroyed civilian life in decades of “attacks” to the extent a few years of Assad’s attacks did.

And that’s because destroying civilian life isn’t its goal.

And now that Israel is increasing its bombing of Hamas targets in Gaza, it is warning civilians to leave targeted areas, rather than targeting them on purpose as Assad did.

10/7 showed what targeting civilians looks like.

Excuse me for this horrible counterfactual: The IDF has the capability to respond by going house to house to kidnap Gazan children. But they’re not and they won’t.

They won’t because it’s wrong.

And because Hamas wouldn’t accept the exchange: Hamas wants to exchange innocents for terrorists, life for death.

What Syria also showed me is that virtually no one in the international Palestinian solidarity movement protested against Assad’s attacks on Palestinians—and almost all of them even defended Assad. 

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They defended Assad despite him killing far more Palestinian civilians than Israel did (and he displaced the majority of Palestinians in Syria). Again, more important than the numbers is the goal behind them: Assad intended to kill civilians. The IDF did not. Yet they still did not protest Assad.

Why? 

Look at the protests since 10/7.

Do they condemn Hamas? No. 

If they’re for Palestinian lives and rights, why not? Do they think Hamas helps their cause?

Did the protests clarify what they mean by “resistance”? No—but some explicitly embraced the paragliders as a symbol and the massacre of 10/7. 

If they don’t protest when Assad massacres Palestinians and then continue to call for “resistance” without qualification after 10/7, it is not Palestinian lives and dignity that drive them. 

It is hatred of Jews.

And I’m ashamed I was ever a part of it.

I still stand for treating all lives with dignity. However, the obstacle to Palestinians living in peace and prosperity isn’t Israel—it’s the rejection of peace with Israel.

All those who care about Palestinian lives should hope Hamas is destroyed and that the hateful ideologies that allow them to exist are overcome.

Syria made me confront the realities of what happens when there’s a clash between the two global powers (of course, Russia is not Stalinist anymore, yet the analogy works both because a chunk of the left still aligns with Putin and because the same problems entail) but "the international working class" isn’t able to make its own mark. The consequence of a vacuum of American power in Syria is more bombed hospitals and no working class. The "third camp" exists only as an ideological fantasy, a path to ritual purity perhaps.

Tied to this is the stance of the Marxian left which sees democracy as a fraud and a trick (which is needed to ignore or belittle the stakes in such power clashes).

It’s taken me too long to realize that that was not Marx’s argument and that political democracy and civil society are foundational to social democracy and economic gains insofar as the possibility for “the international working class” (for anyone) to organize requires democracy and civil society (freedom of speech, freedom of organization).

The fact that those things are not simply tricks should be obvious when looking at the history of the US as compared to Stalinist countries, none of which saw a single successful social movement, except the ability to finally overthrow them once American power had weakened Russian imperialism enough.

Q: “But what about XYZ that the US did?”

A: "Yes, that is unjust. The question isn't whether the US or any other democratic country is flawless, but that there is the possibility of doing something about it."

On a parallel track, it took me a while to realize the problem with how most deal with “hypocrisy" (why should the US help Syrians when it did XYZ wrong thing, says the leftist).

There’s a kind of moral disgust in us at seeing words contradict actions, but the obvious moral response should be to encourage the “hypocrite” to do better, not to mock them for doing something good (or more: they arguably have more of a responsibility to do the good thing, not less).

Worse, if a doctor tells you not to smoke and then smokes themselves, they’re a hypocrite, yet the Stalinist doctor in this analogy tells you to smoke but knows better for themself. But somehow it seems that the first kind of hypocrite comes in for more of a moral thrashing because we expect more from them.

A similar category error comes in when “America” is compared to an ideal standard, but then with Syria, China, Russia, etc. it becomes solely about consequences and “context.” This is not an argument for abandoning either ideal standards or taking contextual views. However, they should both be held in mind and applied consistently and self-consciously.

There's an interesting critique of the left that it focuses too much on empathy at the expense of effective policy.

There is definitely truth to this. In the past I would've resisted the idea of mandatory treatment for the mentally ill because it would feel wrong, as it would be coercive and rely on the police. But it could be working in NYC and should be explored as an option.

So I do see a problem in my own past with empathy trumping effectiveness.

But that can't be the whole story, because no one could have been more empathetic than the people of Syria demanding the freedoms and in return being targeted for annihilation by Assad.

The left did mobilize in response to Syria once.

It mobilized in response to Assad's gas attack in 2013. They mobilized to make sure nothing was done about it. They cheered when Obama said nothing would be done, that Syrians would be left alone to be slaughtered.

Why?

Syrians were inconvenient victims.

This is proven by the left being willing to protest for them as refugees. Because then they are passive and can be used to score points against American and European governments the left wants to be seen as rebelling against.

As refugees, as passive victims, the Syrians were acceptable victims.

As people demanding the rights we so often take for granted, as victims of Assad, Iran and Russia, they were to be ignored and silenced. It was wrong for them to ask for help, because that would make America look good if it did something.

That couldn't be allowed.

Syrians needed to die to keep the left's self-image intact, their blood sacrificed on the left's altar of purification from the sins of American power.

So no, I don't think it's empathy that drives the left.

I knew the trend and took steps to resist it, but now I understand what undergirds it and why it is positive and to be embraced:

First, a sense of responsibility can increase with age.

• This can crudely be reduced to having an accumulation of things and wanting to preserve those things and as such dismissed as contemptible.

  • That dismissal is itself contemptible (if perhaps excusable in the young).

    • It is not "Marxist" in that Marx's point was precisely that "things" are important to expanding the powers of life.

    • Most importantly, on a human level, it undermines the very kind of solidary that Marxism--if it were to work--would require.

• I resisted having things to lose to resist the trend, but thankfully I could at least care about other people having things to lose (more on how Syria in particular changed my thinking later). As such, I had a basis to rethink my theory when it conflicted with reality, even if it took decades to happen.

Second, only with the accumulation of knowledge can come a decent grasp of history.

• History is one of the domains most improved with accumulated knowledge.

  • Math and physics breakthroughs come from relatively young wunderkinds. Historical insights do not.

• Related to a growing sense of responsibility, a growing awareness of the vissicitudes of history strengthens one's sense of the trade-offs, compromises, and twists and turns as compared to a Manichean flattening of the world to pure and impure, good and evil.

• This is, of course, worsened by an education system that is designed not to educate.

  • Contrary to the progressive idea that this is explained by the education system's roots in industrialization, to a large extent it is due to the influence of 'progressive' ideas (like the now infamous attack on phonics--which, wistfully, might lead to a reevaluation of other such ideas, like the attack on memorization or having to learn things like history rigorously).

  • In relationship to Marxism in particular, while I was educated in Mississippi and the leftist idea is that educational institutions are dominated by conservative ideas, the truth is I was not forced to confront the reality of Soviet totalitarianism in my education.

    • The United States ended the rule of Soviet totalitarianism, initiating one of the largest and most significant expansions of freedom in history, yet the historical memory of that is not preserved and nurtured (contrary to Chomsky's ideas of American empire and propaganda).

Increasing conservatism with age is not antithetical to the desire to improve the world. Rather, it can help one develop a more nuanced and compassionate worldview, that can recognize the value of both individual responsibility and collective solidarity in working for a better future.

1) Jeremy Corbyn's electoral wipe-out combined with the lack of critical reflection on why that happened. (Corbyn was the head of the British Labor Party. He not only lost the 2019 election, he lost the working-class constituency that he and the Sanders movement claim to be uniquely able to reach.)

2) Sanders' rift with Warren and his followers harassment of her and her campaign. As I wrote in my case for Biden: "If Bernie supporters cannot even work with his closest ally Warren, why should anyone expect them to build a strong coalition for the general election?"

Trying to find the best pro-Sanders arguments

After Corbyn's loss, I started to look at the best arguments for Sanders I could find. Just why did they say he could beat Trump and why were they so sure?

What I found was a mixture of falsehoods, out-of-context and heavily selected facts, and arguments that didn’t prove anything (more small donors!)—all held together only with a heavy dose of wishful thinking.

Now, predicting who would do well in an election is difficult, and Biden winning does not confirm that it was predictable. However, he was laser focused on defeating Trump and polls suggested most voters thought he was best positioned to do so as well.

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The 2018 election indicated Biden’s approach was better than Sanders—yet no leftist seemed to care

The sheer inanity of the arguments I encountered for Sanders led me to revisit the 2018 election. I'm chagrined it took me till then (~Jan 2020) to do so, but it turns out that the lesson I had learned in 2018/2019 that AOC, etc. could take on and outperform establishment Democrats was...incomplete.

Democrats took back the House in 2018 and in that battle, Biden-endorsed Democrats won, while zero of the multiple Sanders-aligned candidates flipped Republic seats. 

And again the question was: Why wasn’t anyone talking about this? 

The thing that turned me against the left electoral approach the most wasn’t any particular data point, but the consistent substitution of wishful thinking in the place of analysis. That approach to life cannot win!

The New York Times didn’t care about electoral strategy either

The New York Times Editorial Board wrote of Biden that "he emphasizes returning the country to where things were before the Trump era." This was a media fantasy. It wasn't based on what Biden said, it wasn’t based on what his policy proposals were nor was it based on on an informed understanding of his political history. It was the "cool kids" looking down on the boring old guy. He wasn't hip. He wasn't "in."

In that regard, they didn't treat the election much differently than Jacobin magazine’s misunderstanding of Biden and the election: "what'll get me credit with my friends?" Their set of friends is just slightly different.

They noted most Democratic voters wanted Trump removed--and that Biden's "central pitch to voters is that he can beat Donald Trump.” Yet they then said in effect, “That's way too hard to figure out, so we’ll just ignore the main thing.” 

They shrugged their shoulders at analyzing who might be best to beat Trump. An utter failure. Shameful. Irresponsible. 

In the interview with Biden, Biden asked them: "Who among the prospective candidates is going to enhance the prospect in Georgia." They interrupted him and never returned to the claim that he could. They did not ask any other questions to examine if he was indeed the best candidate to beat Trump.

Biden's last words to them?

"Thank you. I’m going to beat this guy."

It wasn't pride.

It was analysis. He had studied the question. They hadn't.

He was right.

Answer: The same way much of the left believes the Democratic Party rigged the primaries against Bernie (the DSA called the 2020 primaries "virtually illegitimate”).

Or how they blame everyone not accepting their favored policies or their chosen candidate on "the media.”

Has Bernie renounced his followers engaging in these conspiracy theories? 

No. He said that 2016 was “rigged” against him. He's mirrored Trump’s attacks on the media, twice claiming The Washington Post gave him unfavorable coverage because he had criticized Amazon, just as Trump claimed unfair media coverage against him was due to a conspiracy, not an investigation of the facts.

Trump’s conspiracy claims of a stolen election led to the violence of January 6th by convincing people they were robbed and there was no other option. Bernie tells people that everything could be better with no trade-offs necessary: we could all have free healthcare and higher wages.

What’s stopping us?

The system. The media. It’s all rigged. Everything's against us.

So he's telling his supporters there is no constructive recourse to change the system, that persuasion and voting don't work, so how can anyone be surprised they would turn to harassment?

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Bernie should consider that when you think everything is a conspiracy, you’re probably the problem.

Trump and Sanders both assert that when they lose, it’s not because people choose not to vote for them, but because something happened to prevent it. Trump’s version is fraud. Bernie’s is “the establishment” did…something.

In the 2020 primary, the media narrative was that Biden’s campaign was dead. Biden was being outspent by Bernie and by Bloomberg. Where was the “establishment”?

“One of the things I was kind of not surprised by was the power of the establishment to force Amy Klobuchar, who had worked so hard, Pete Buttigieg who had really worked extremely hard as well out of the race.”—Bernie on Super Tuesday

Did they also force people to vote for Biden in states where he had no field offices and little to no ad money?

It doesn’t make sense.

The inner logic is:

1. People want my policies (me),

2. People didn’t vote for me,

3. Therefore, there's a shadowy force making people vote against me.

The simple solution is that the first premise is wrong: they didn't want you.

People voted for Biden because his message was we need to beat Trump and improve our society. Amy and Pete dropped out in recognition of that.

Responding by claiming there's a magical establishment blocking progress can only encourage divisiveness and violence.

“But Bernie supporters haven't engaged in anything like January 6th.”

Correct—and until January 6th, Trump supporters hadn't either. It takes time to build up to such a significant event. If it hadn't been for Covid, there was a strong chance of a violent riot from the left at the DNC in 2020. But whatever the case is, we don't want to encourage things getting to that point.

That's how I used to argue.

In the Federalist Papers, James Madison stated the need to “break and control the violence of faction”. He specified that is a concern even if—or perhaps better, especially if—the “faction” is a majority. Contrast what Robespierre would say: “the people are good, and…their delegates are corruptible; …it is to the virtue and sovereignty of the people that we must look”.

Until the rise of Trumpism, I accepted the interpretation of Madison’s approach as being concerned with the preservation of entrenched wealth and the curtailing of “the people” to prevent progressive change. Trump’s elevation to the presidency required the institution of the Electoral College, rather than a strict majoritarian principle. However, the Republicans won a majority in the House of Representatives (and while the number of seats they won was increased by contra-majoritarian things like the federal system, they did win more votes overall). Of course, there are too many counterfactuals to even imagine how people would have voted in 2016 if there had only been the House and no constraints, but to imagine Trumpism or something like it could never elect the majority of the candidates is seriously short-sighted.

In the kind of electoral system most leftists want, Trumpism would've been unconstrained in 2016.

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Consider:

• How much more strongly Republicans in the House supported Trump than ones in the Senate.

• How the House overturned the ACA but the Senate stopped it.

• How House Republicans stormed a secure information room on October 23, 2019 with the Senate generating intelligence reports considered to be fair and above board.

In sum, the representatives most exposed to the people were the most corrupted by passion.

Further, without judicial review, initiatives like the Muslim ban would have been carried out without restraint. The left should reflect on this before continuing to delegitimize the Supreme Court.

When I read Robespierre declare for the fatherland and contrast the “peasant” Rousseau to the “academician” Condorcet, I hear Trump (see Report on the Principles of Political Morality, February 5, 1794). His evidence against Condorcet was that Condorcet criticized him. So opposition to himself is conflated with monarchial conspiracies. To speak against the policies of the leader is to speak against the “virtue” of the forgotten people. Robespierre had the power to punish such dissent, Trump would like it.

If the left stands with Robespierre in these matters and against James Madison, it is paving the way for Trump or something worse.

That presents a dilemma for a leftism which opposes the use of American military power but also is concerned about a country of 37 million human beings becoming subjected to the rule of an organization that stands against any, and possibly literally every, value any leftist would endorse.

But if the rule of the Taliban is so inimical to anything a leftist would value, why is this a dilemma at all?

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For President Biden, as president he is obligated to weigh all kinds of prudential matters, such as cost and the national interest, as opposed to taking a stand purely on the moral concern for the lives of the people of Afghanistan. But what leftist is willing to say the people of Afghanistan should be subjected to such rule simply because of the cost?

Most have simply refused to confront the stark choice the withdrawal presented: American power backing up a weak, but real, civil society—or the rule of the Taliban. The national leadership of the DSA wrote: “The collapse of the government in Afghanistan and capture of Kabul by the Taliban showcased the destruction caused by US interventionism.”

The US intervention, however flawed, offered a respite from the rule of the Taliban. This the DSA national leadership cannot confront, because it wants to both oppose American power and to think it is absolved of any moral responsibility for the return of the Taliban to power.

Rep. Barbara Lee, retweeted by Rep. AOC, implied the US is responsible for the rise of the Taliban in the first place. That’s not true, but worse, if it were true, the conclusion should then be that the US has even more responsibility to stay and to do something about it.

Another example: Ben Rhodes said: “Look at the countries in which the war on terror has been waged…Afghanistan. Iraq. Yemen. Somalia. Libya. Every one of those countries is worse off today in some fashion.” 

Afghanistan was better off without the rule of the Taliban. People returned. They’re fleeing again now.

I ask again: What is the dilemma here? There could be prudential reasons it was necessary to withdraw, but then the decision would be tragically necessary, not simply “courageous,” as Rep. AOC described it.

So the question remains: why is this a dilemma for the left? Why could the left not express the simple moral solidarity of wanting Afghanistan to be free of the rule of the Taliban?

The answer is partly historical, given the left wasn’t always quite so one-sided, but the dilemma strikes me as so stark and obvious that something deeper is going on here.

Perhaps the left doesn’t value what it claims to value. Perhaps ideological abstractions like anti-Americanism demand leftists be for the withdrawal, and so lives are sacrificed on the altar to prove how righteous they are.

Most telling: they will be more angry at me for saying that than they are at the extinguishing of civil society in Afghanistan and Hong Kong and other places outside the American defense umbrella.

Biden won. Trump lost—and in defeat has proven yet again just how important his removal from office was. His attempt to overturn the election results demonstrates that the constraints of democratic rights—such as the free press and free association—and competitive elections themselves might not have survived a second term. And yet the Democratic Socialists of America did not only not endorse Biden, but made a show of not helping vote Trump out.

Such a political mistake, on such a fundamental issue, destroys any basis for confidence in it. While the DSA does not reflect the political priorities of the majority of its membership, who almost certainly voted for Biden, the activist minority that dominates it determines its character—what the DSA represents as an organization to the public.

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I had hoped that a decisive Biden victory—and the predictable actions of Trump in such an eventuality—would drive home to substantial parts of the organization that another course would be necessary. In particular, I had hoped that the two public figures most associated with the DSA and most widely respected within it—Bernie and AOC—might themselves look at the results and become a rallying point for changing course. Bernie, to his credit, has—in the main—demonstrated a constructive approach to engaging the Democratic Party since his endorsement. However, such actions seem to have had no effect on the DSA, perhaps buttressed by the failure of AOC to likewise pursue a constructive approach—a point which I’ll elaborate on later.

The DSA is politically dead

Of course, the DSA will continue on. It will be able to live as a parasite off the discontent and resentment that is inevitable in any society short of paradise, attracting those alienated from it, and—instead of helping them learn to engage constructively—encourage their worst habits. But as a political organization—an organization capable of building enough support to govern—it is finished. It cut itself off from that when it refused to participate in the central and essential political task of voting out Trump.

Their approach can help you feel good—like you are doing the Lord’s work. You can present yourself as a pure, holy warrior, standing above the fray. You can do that, and you will harm all the causes you claim to care about.

The 2020 election results prove—again—the leftist electoral strategy is a loser

The expectation created by some polls of an absolute tidal wave in 2020 hid for many the extent of Biden’s accomplishment. He built the largest and broadest coalition in US history, winning the Electoral College with the votes of Republican suburbs without giving them a single policy concession. To have refused to have been part of this, to look at it with scorn or cynicism, is to demonstrate that one is cut off from any possible constructive engagement with society.

But—these leftists will say—it was mostly a vote against Trump, and therefore it had nothing to do with Biden. Of course, the size and shape of the 2020 election cannot be understood without that all-important context, but does that mean just anyone could've beat Trump--or that someone could've done better? No, it does not.

One of the surest demonstrations to me of the political dead end that the DSA is in is how willfully all elements are ignoring the reality of the election results. This is abetted by the fact that a large swathe of media pundits are engaging in that same ideological falsification. From columns in the Washington Post to the New York Times to left Twitter there’s this idea that Biden could have done better if he had adopted the progressives’ strategy (even though he generally outperformed them in their districts, whereas the Democratic House candidates who did outperform Biden were the some of the most moderate, see https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-strongest-house-candidates-in-2020-were-mostly-moderate/). (I didn’t expand this point on it not just being the Squad. One example I had saved for reference: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/17/opinion/latino-vote-democrats-election-2020.html. But mainly what this points to is something I didn’t analyze adequately in 2021, which is that while the Squad as elected representatives provide the starkest examples of this kind of polarizing ideology, it is far from confined to them.)

It’s been a sort of consensus of the US left that if only the Democratic Party ran someone more “left”—someone like, say, Bernie—it would do better in elections. But sadly, the supposed corporate establishment (or something, the mechanism here is never actually specified or analyzed in a rigorous way) intervenes to substitute these moderates, these centrists, these damnable neoliberals who just lose!

Bernie’s strong showing in the 2016 primary gave new life to this claim, which required ignoring that a chunk of his support turned out to be just people that hated Hillary Clinton and went on to vote for Trump—and also ignoring that it should be easier for a leftist to win a Democratic primary than the general election. The cognitive dissonance between the belief in the leftist electoral strategy being all-powerful and the reality of Bernie’s failure led to the unfounded claims that the DNC rigged the primary against him.

That did not happen—and if you’re wondering how Trump supporters could be so delusional, perhaps take a second look at how common the rigged claims were, with Sanders himself at times claiming that it was rigged.

But let’s be generous and assume for a moment that the evidence from 2016 was inconclusive—that this electoral strategy was a new thing and needed time to get off the ground. However, if you think the left electoral strategy is the way to go, it’s probably better not to examine the more extensive evidence of the 2018 midterms—and that is indeed what most did. AOC stole the show of newly elected Democrats in 2018—but her claim to fame was unseating an incumbent in a primary in a district that, as Pelosi later said, a water bottle with a D next to it would win in the general (Pelosi referred to her own district in that way as well).

And that is all the Justice Democrats and similar groups won—many primaries, but only four general elections that were not competitive and that in a wave election in which the Democratic Party as a whole flipped over 40 seats, taking back the House majority at a pivotal time to stymie Trump. But the Justice Dems and other Sanders-aligned PAC’s failed to flip a single one of those seats. 

The minimum conclusion to the results of 2018 should’ve been “Something’s not quite right with our electoral approach” but instead we got…more of the same and 2020 just adds to that evidence. Despite Bernie essentially running for the 2020 Democratic primary for four years (yet never finding the time to talk to Rep. Clyburn in that time), it was Biden that accomplished what Sanders claimed only he could do--increase turnout appreciably in the primary as an indication of how he’d perform in the general.

Indeed, it is Biden that vindicated most of what the left professes to want about elections. We want money to not matter, just the message—and Biden winning the primary proved that to be possible, as for a key period of time, “Mr. Sanders spent more than twice as much on digital and television ads alone as Mr. Biden spent on his entire campaign operation — his payroll, his ads, his consultants, his events” ( from https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/21/us/politics/biden-sanders-fund-raising.html). 

No Justice Dem or similar candidate got more votes than Biden did in their districts. In fact, of all the Minnesota Candidates, Rep. Omar had the biggest deficit compared to Biden but somehow her messaging and campaign strategy were attributed as being essential to Biden’s victory there (https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1325181753204461569). Based on what? The fervent belief that it must be true, or else they’d have to rethink their approach, which takes work. Again, if one wants to understand how Trump supporters exist in an alternate reality, look at the Squad’s post-election analysis.

The Squad is Trump’s best friend

Ridiculous you say? First, it’s just a fact. You can consider what to do with that fact, but not liking it doesn’t change it. Consider the following:

Trump’s main line of attack on Biden was that he was Bernie. For a supposedly weak candidate, one would think Trump’s campaign could’ve come up with something else—which he did try to do by coercing a foreign government to make up information on Biden. (For all the claims Trump secretly feared Bernie the most, he never tried to coerce a foreign government to make up dirt on him). The Trump campaign also tried to convince people that Biden had dementia, which was pushed most heavily in March by Bernie supporters (see for instance Jacobin magazine https://jacobinmag.com/2020/03/joe-biden-gaffes-democratic-presidential-campaign-trump).

Biden’s team’s research during the campaign “discovered that the real concern for many people wasn’t Mr. Biden’s age, or his health per se, but whether he was an easily manipulated tool of the radical left” (from https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/06/technology/joe-biden-internet-election.html). But mainly just stop, take a breath, and think about it: Do you think that associating the Democratic Party label with “defund” and “socialism” could not possibly cause people to vote for Trump? 

Consider those with family in Cuba or who know refugees from that dictatorship, consider them hearing Bernie praise Castro for his literacy programs when he could have said that teaching people to read while controlling what they read is not praiseworthy (see Masha Gessen’s excellent column). Or consider Venezuela’s self-proclaimed socialist regime has led to the “largest-ever refugee crisis in Latin America and one of the largest in the world” (https://disasterphilanthropy.org/disasters/venezuelan-refugee-crisis/), but the DSA sent a friendly delegation to Maduro (https://www.cfr.org/blog/democratic-socialists-america-embraces-maduro-dictatorship) without a word of criticism of his political repression or disastrous policies.

Are AOC and Bernie breathing fire about Venezuela or Cuba not truly representing the socialism they want?

No.

So why shouldn’t voters be concerned that maybe that is what they want?

A dangerous spiral

Since the left electoral approach can win primaries but not competitive general elections, two important conclusions follow regarding how they hurt the Democratic Party and the political coalition it represents:

1) They can cost the party seats (by winning a primary but being unable to win a general election that someone else could), and

2) By winning safe general seats and getting media attention, they can increase national polarization—giving Trump a second lease on life electorally.

I have no easy solutions to end with, but to find those solutions, we have to face these problems. The DSA will not, though I hope some in the Squad might still come to reflect on them.

They will stop listening to you.

They will turn to anyone—even a charlatan—who presents himself as their friend.

And that is why Trump has a chance at reelection.

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Biden isn’t for defunding the police—but the party is associated with that position for a reason

“But!”—you protest—“Biden isn’t like that. He’s against abolishing the police.” Of course, and that’s why he won the primary and general election. But that’s not the whole story.

He’s also the leader of the Democratic Party, and when the Democratic governor of New York runs an election campaign that refuses to address the fear of crime until the polls show her Republican opponent closing in, that sends a message to people. The message is: 

The Democratic Party doesn’t care about your safety.

When voices branding worrying about crime as racist are rising in the ranks of the party and seem to be its future, that sends a message too. The message is that whatever Biden may say, he won’t last and you are the enemy of the Democratic Party.

When people say, “It doesn’t matter what we say, because ‘they’ are going to say XYZ anyway,” the message is that they won’t even try to talk to you, that your concerns aren’t valid. And then they wonder why people won’t listen to them. (See ‘s The Fox News Fallacy on this point.)

Confront the moral blackmail

The question remains: How has the Democratic Party become associated with such an extreme minority position?

We could examine the history of the Democratic Party and crime, talk about the ideological capture of different liberal organizations, or look at how social media encourages the angriest voices—but the core dynamic is the moral and emotional blackmail involved: if you say this, we designate you as a bad person.

That pressures the majority of the Democratic Party to become a silent majority. Because we don’t say, “No, I disagree” to such extremist voices, it means that they aren’t only the loudest voices but also often the only voices other people hear.

Confronting the emotional blackmail will feel difficult, but if you’re worried about Trump returning to the presidency, if his policies anger you, then take that emotional energy and say: “I disagree. I care about people’s desire for safety.“

Cui bono—who benefits?

Who benefits from dismissing concerns about crime as racist? 

It doesn’t benefit Black people, who are victims of crime. 

It won’t end racism. Rather, making people feel their safety is at odds with being anti-racist undermines the fight against racial injustice.

Lumping being concerned with crime with being racist benefits a handful of people and organizations for whom it is an easy way to receive positive attention and gin up donations.

On the other hand, there isn’t much benefit for those who call this out—at least in the short term. It’s easier to stay silent, as I have for too long, in order not to confront their emotional blackmail.

But if we take seriously the need to keep Trump from returning to the Oval Office, we cannot be silenced by this moral blackmail. We can’t let an extremist position define the stance of liberals and progressives. We must speak up.

In my first newsletter, I made the case that socialists should support Joe Biden over Bernie Sanders in the primary. The core of my argument was that this election is a referendum on authoritarianism and that Biden was the candidate most focused on that and most likely to be able to defeat Trump in the general election to do that. I argued that Sander’s campaign was weak on that and on the closely linked issue of racism:

Bernie’s running the same campaign from 2016 — or really the same campaign he’s always been running. One which also leads him to downplay problems such as the rise of Trumpism, racism, and other forms of oppression, pivoting immediately to economic inequality every time. This is the same approach that led him to say of “segregation forever” George Wallace: “at least he is sensitive to what people feel they need.”

After I wrote the piece, Sanders canceled his trip to Mississippi, promised to speak on racism in Michigan but didn’t follow through, and finally, it came out then he never even talked to Rep. Jim Clyburn because he was sure he couldn’t get an endorsement. Maybe, but maybe you still reach out because you might learn something or build a relationship despite disagreement.

In response to the Trump campaign clearly relishing the opportunity to run against Sanders, some Bernie supporters would say, “Well they’ll just attack Biden as a radical leftist too.”

And they’re right.

Trump is attacking Biden as a radical socialist.

But it’s not working precisely because it’s Biden and not Sanders, and more than that, it shows just how limited their arsenal against Biden is, in that they’re confined to running the playbook they had prepared for Sanders. Their other play against Biden was to pressure another government to make something up, which led to Trump’s impeachment and failed to coerce the Ukrainian government.

As I wrote in a follow-up piece, the Biden coalition is on its way to victory. To Sanders’s credit, he is a part of that and his speech to the convention was exactly what he needed to say. At the same time, forces he empowered — such as his former press secretary — are literally indistinguishable from Trump’s war room (and I do mean literally literally — look up charges of Biden being “senile” for a sad record of such collaboration). Any full evaluation of Sen. Sanders will have to take all of that into account.

Back to the matter at hand, the main reaction I saw from DSA circles to my argument was: How could supporting Biden possibly be socialist?

If people had argued that this election wasn’t about authoritarianism that would be one thing (and some — to justify sitting on their hands — are still trying to make the case that democracy isn’t at least potentially at stake in this election), but that wasn’t the general argument, just an assumption or assertion that it wasn’t properly socialist to care about the fate of democracy.

I’m working on a more in-depth history and theory of the relationship of Marxism to liberal democracy, but at the risk of simplifying, how do they expect socialists to be able to organize without the right to assemble and to speak and to write? What efforts to improve the conditions of the working class and poor do they expect to be successful if Trump is able to blast through the remaining rules and norms that are hindering his outspoken desire to lock up and carry out violence against anyone who disagrees with him?

There’s an attitude on the left that “democracy” is just a lie, that it’s not cool to stand up for the defense of it. This attitude can — ironically, tragically — only have been cultivated in a democratic society, in which we’ve been able to take certain things for granted. The Egyptian revolution won the right to assemble and protest in 2011 — in conjunction with a revived working-class movement. That cleared the way for it to organize independent unions. Sisi, through massacres, mass arrests, and repression, was able to roll most of that back within six months.

Democratic rights can be achieved, but they can also be lost. Point to all the limitations of American democracy you like — and recognize that if Trump stays in the White House, those limitations and failures will become the norm, rather than the exception.

Thinking that it’s impossible to imagine a socialist case for Biden in this election means refusing to consider the centrality of democratic rights to the socialist project. It also requires reducing it to economics and to ideology. Richard Crossman once wrote against the fallacy that ”that economics are the determinant factors in social change and that, if we achieve economic justice, we automatically secure human freedom.” (This may burn the ears of some that think they’re Marxists, but while the materialist conception of history looks for the ultimate cause in the mode of production, it is not economic reductionist.)

To claim that a socialist must have supported Bernie, who sometimes says the word, is to make it a team sport, or at best, to reduce it to a kind of pure ideological struggle, in which it matters more to you that people agree with you than that you actually advance the conditions for a movement that can improve society.

In 2016, Bernie saw economic anxiety, but the boring liberals of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Tim Kaine saw the specter of fascism. Because Bernie’s ideology that tends toward economic reductionist limited his ability to accept that, he undermined the struggle to stop Trump from taking power in 2016 — and in 2020 ran a divisive campaign that empowered some who, as already noted, are effectively working for Trump’s reelection. Sanders himself pulled back from the brink, but the ideas about what leftists should do and what socialism should be that undergirded his earlier errors are still pervasive — a part of the “common sense” of the left — and I hope to address that more in future articles. But for now, I’ll close by echoing Biden:

We cannot move forward if we do not remove Trump and his enablers from office with the largest possible vote in November.

Comment and let me know what you think. Sign up for my Substack to keep in touch.

Disclosure: I noticed a new Christian socialist publication had only published articles criticizing Biden, so I pitched writing a column arguing that the left should support Biden. An editor said they would consider such a submission, but then I never got a response to this draft, which has been slightly edited since then. It was written in May so may feel partly out of date, though the main issues are the same.

The pandemic puts the choice before us November 3rd in stark relief: Trump is killing people. Amidst reports that the federal government was confiscating supplies seemingly only from “blue states”, the governor of Maryland hid the tests she procured (link). Echoing his praise of the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, he’s called the anti-lockdown protesters, who surrounded the Michigan state capitol with weapons, “very good people.” He and the Republican Party are willing to reopen the country with a sabotaged testing regime, even to the extent of trying to overrule governors who disagree with them.

On the other hand, Democratic Party governors and local officials — along with some state-level and local Republican officials — have followed the recommendations of medical experts and are saving lives. Mistakes were made and will be made, but they weren’t and aren’t being made consistently and systematically based on personal or partisan interest, nor by an explicitly racist ideology. As well it should not be forgotten that the Obama administration not only handled its response to Ebola better, it did so in a way that provided key aid globally, whereas Trump’s response is to accerberate global tensions (and was simaltaneously racist toward Chinese people while solicitious toward the authoritarian government of China, which delayed his administration preparing for this threat).

And yet a debate roils the left on whether supporting Vice President Biden is a bridge too far. I find a curious double standard when it comes to any evaluation that is able to find that Senator Sander’s compromises are palatable but Biden’s are beyond the pale. Michael Gibson’s article repeats a common one: cancelling Biden for the 1994 crime bill without noting that Bernie voted for it as well — partly because of the Violence Against Women Act which was only there because Biden initiated. it. Gibson’s article calls Biden “the (!) architect of mass incarceration,” but does so by linking to an article that explicitly says, “The 1994 law didn’t really cause mass incarceration.”

My point, though, is not an overall evaluation of that specific bill — that would be a different article. For the purposes of reflecting on this election, I want to make two points.

First, would it have been better if the Republicans had more influence in writing that bill? That, after all, would be the upshot of withholding one’s vote due to arguing or implying that that bill — or other actions — are so bad such that the left should withhold their vote.

Second, for that bill or any other decision one questions, I suggest looking at the balance of forces: what were the votes in Congress and what were their prospects for reelection?

The Tea Party showed us what that looked like negatively. However astroturfed it was (and I think that’s exaggerated), it was a significant and passionate movement that forced elected officials to take different positions — or replaced many of them if they didn’t.

The anti-Trump “Resistance” — for all that it evokes eye rolls about “wine moms” from some parts of the left — has shown us the positive side of what this looks like. For all the evil Trump has been able to inflict, he’s been held to only one major bill (the tax reform), his attempts to repeal the ACA have been halted, and his worst actions have been confied to his use — and abuse — of executive power.

Brandon Massey argued to the contrary, stating that Speaker Pelois’s resistance has only been so much theater: “She approved Trump’s military budget (the largest in history)… and allowed cuts to Obamacare….” The latter point is just factually wrong. The so-called “Cadillac tax” referred to in the linked article was opposed by labor unions and repealing it was not tied to healthcare cuts. The budget point assumes what it needs to prove. The linked article notes that earlier the House had passed a bill, “which sought to rein in Mr. Trump’s authority on policy after policy.” Pelosi did not stick with that bill for the simple reason that the Democrats only control the House. Is Massey proposing that the Democrats should’ve forced another government shutdown whatever the consequences? And again the question is: Would withholding votes from the Democratic Party improve this situation?

Massey went on to write: “Pelosi has not resisted Trump in any meaningful way.” The single most consequential action available to Speaker Pelosi is impeachment — and she used it, initiating a process that could have and would have removed a dangerous person from the presidency, if not for the clearly partisan and personally motivated voting by the Republican Senators, Senator Romney excepted.

One of the charges thrown at Biden in particular is his relationship with segregationist senators. Gibson, for instance, wrote that “Biden’s career in the Senate…has been marked by repeated partnerships with the most noxious racist politicians on both sides of the aisle, including…outspoken segregationists.”

One would think reading this and similar comments that Biden worked with them and was friends with some of them because of their racism and segregationist views. Gibson, as have many other leftists, offhandedly refer to Biden giving Strom Thurmond’s eulogy — but what did he say there?

Biden said: “I went to the Senate emboldened, angered, and outraged at age 29 about the treatment of African-Americans in this country, [with] everything that for a period in his life Strom had represented.” Biden told a story about John Stennis, a segregationist senator from Mississippi. He said the first time he met, Stennis asked him why he ran for the Senate and without thinking, Biden replied: “Civil rights, sir.” Almost two decades later as Stennis was about to retire, Stennis referred back to that conversation and pointed to his conference table, telling Biden it was around that table that they ”planned the demise of the civil rights movement.” Biden described the moment in the eulogy:

Then he looked at me and said, “And now it’s time, it’s time that this table go from the possession of a man against civil rights to a man who is for civil rights.”

And I was stunned. And he said, “One more thing, Joe,” he said. “The civil rights movement did more to free the white man than the black man.” And I looked at him, I didn’t know what he meant. And he said…, “It freed my soul; it freed my soul.”

I would suggest leftists who see Biden as a bridge too far pause and reflect on the support of people like Representative Jim Clyburn — “We know Joe. But most importantly, Joe knows us” — and the Black voters who were the backbone of his campaign. Biden entered political life because of civil rights, and he reentered it because of Trump’s praise of white supremacists in Charslottesville.

While Biden’s message is often portrayed as a return to the status quo, that is not what he says or promises. In his “Soul of the Nation” campaign stump speech, he says we have to beat Trump so that we can “take the next step forward…to give the marginalized, the demonized, the isolated, the oppressed a full share of the American dream….[and] root out systematic racism.” (Link)

The struggle for justice rolls on. Whatever limitations the Democrats and Biden have, I submit that it’s “our” job (the movement’s) to convince people of the issues and to organize them to exert their power, such that politicians are either empowered and enabled to do better because of a stronger bargaining position — or compelled to do better at the risk of being replaced. Withholding votes won’t do that, and Trump’s reelection will make it immeasurably harder, if not tragically impossible.

The historic victory of resistance “wine moms” and Black voters 2018 should not be underestimated. In the 2014 midterm, 35 million people cast a vote for a House Democratic candidate. In 2018, 60 million did. They’re motivated and focused on the goal of defeating Trump — not to to turn back the clock, but so that we are able to move toward justice. These are the voters that surged the 2020 primaries to vote for Biden (link). Whatever differences one has with them or with the Democrats, I think the place of a responsible left can only be right there with them, shoulder-to-shoulder, working for the common good, for love, and for justice.

Comment and let me know what you think. Sign up for my Substack to keep in touch.

The about section of my Substack page is misleading: “I’m focused on the global rise of fascism and authoritarianism, and I’m particularly looking at the weaknesses of the left in understanding and confronting that rise.”

What’s misleading about that?

I recently wrote this piece detailing problems I see in the left (a broad, imprecise term but meaning both those that see themselves on the far left of the Democratic Party and especially those who see themselves outside of it) — how the left has been siding with authoritarianism abroad (recently, most egregiously, in its defense of Evo Morales’s attempt to institute a personal dictatorship through military massacres of civilians) and in the US (through its equivocation and sabotage of the only effective means to remove Trump from office: the largest possible Democratic Party vote in November).

More common is the seemingly pragmatic compromise of someone who agrees with that type of leftist critique but says, “Hold your nose and vote for Biden.” I’ll take it, but I have two fundamental problems:

1) This is an emergency. One can take that position and still be dedicated to going all in for a massive blue wave, but it’s common to use the “hold your nose” stance as a cover to focus on spreading ”critiques” (more often a mix of misunderstanding, misinformation, and disinformation) that can only have the effect of driving down turnout. If you’re not all in, you’re failing in your duty to the country and to the world.

2) I think that kind of left critique is theoretically mistaken at its core — and dangerously so. In other words, I see the stance of “The Democratic Party is evil, but a lesser evil than the Republicans” as a problem, not because it’s “too” leftwing, but rather, a failure to be consistently “left,” if one defines leftism as having a commitment to liberal democratic rights.

So again, what’s misleading about my claim to be focused on the rise of authoritarianism and how the left is weak in dealing with it?

When I raise these concerns, I’m harassed and told that I’m not a real leftist. While I haven’t changed my positions because of that, I have become quieter, less active. I feel shame, so I wrote that about section to try to cloak myself in writing about something everyone claims to be concerned about (fascism) as if a label could decide the argument or end the vitriol.

What’s misleading about it is that I was afraid to say what I know to be the truth: it’s not that the left is weak in resisting the erosion of democracy, a section of it is aiding the erosion of democracy. And such views are becoming more common, more normalized. While most individual leftists would say they’d have nothing to do with such views, the publications and organizations they support are spreading them nonetheless (for examples, see my aforementioned article).

So, what am I doing here on Medium?

I’m going to try to write about this divide in the left in relationship to liberal democracy: to understand it and — perhaps — to change it.

Comment and let me know what you think. Sign up for my Substack to keep in touch.

What project exactly? That very question is part of the reason why such a project is necessary. Mounk talks about philosophical liberalism and a free society, but in the inaugural town hall talked about how those terms have their limits. He notes—and I agree—that “The primary threat to liberal democracy is posed by the populist right.” However, the big caveat that this is not just a right-wing problem. And that idea—that there’s a tendency on the left that needs to be combatted—is what Levitz objects to.

While Levitz perfunctorily acknowledges there are some illiberal tendencies, he asserts, “The idea that The Nation is sympathetic to authoritarian leftism, meanwhile, is facially absurd, while the DSA’s commitment to democracy is reflected in both its name and tactics.”

Let’s unpack that.

While not decisive, the reference to “Democratic” in DSA’s name is not really a strong point of evidence, since anyone familiar with the new wave of active DSAers would know it’s common to view the past of the organization either with indifference or with contempt, dismissing them as “libs” with a curl of the lip. If it weren’t difficult to change the name and to agree on a new one, I’d bet anything he last convention would’ve in a heartbeat. 

Of central importance, however, is that on the most important democratic question facing the country—the removal of Trump from office, the convention mandated that no one other than Bernie could be endorsed, and the national leadership body both mocked impeachment and refused to even consider encouraging members in swing states to vote for Biden. While many, if not most, individual members will likely vote for Biden, I do not know of a single chapter that has taken the position that Trump needs to be removed from office. Saying “I’m for democracy” and refusing to take the most consequential action available to you in its defense is not evidence that there isn’t a problem on the left to worry about.

And this isn’t just a matter of position on how to vote, but how that position is argued for. Jacobin published this piece by one of its staff writers repeating disinformation that Biden is “experiencing rapid cognitive decline.” This is one of Trump’s only attacks on Biden, and when one sees selectively edited videos on twitter purporting to demonstrate this, one can never tell if it’s from a rose twitter or MAGA account.

As for The Nation, some of its own writers and supporters were so concerned about its articles denying that the Russian government intervened in the 2016 election that they wrote a letter to the publisher saying, “To emphasize this particular angle in Nation coverage over the conduct of the Trump administration is a dereliction of our responsibility as progressive journalists.” Lest one think this was just a one-off complaint based on some political disagreement or an isolated event, one should examine Alexander Reid Ross’s thorough review of the pro-Russian disinformation ecosytem here.  Note especially:

By building a bridge from the political margins to the mainstream, The Nation continued to make pro-Russia disinformation palatable to larger audiences interested in the merging of left and right. Through [Aaron] Maté,The Nation became one of the last sites connected to the public assertion that Russia did not meddl[e] in the 2016 elections….

Jacobin, for its part, would not want to be left out and wants us to believe the MAGA version of “Russiagate” (now “Obamagate”), which is that “the real conspiracy” is that the Democratic Party and “deep state” colluded with Russia to sabotage Trump (see, for example, this piece headlined “Democrats and Mainstream Media Were the Real Kremlin Assets”). I guess the commutation of Roger Stone’s sentence is a victory for justice in that view, rather than yet another abuse of power and de facto admission of guilt from Trump. 

When such views are given prominence in two of the most-read left publications, then I think there’s reason to be concerned.

Left authoritarianism

If Jacobin and The Nation are willing to come to the defense of Putin, is Levitz willing to admit there might be a problem? But we haven’t even gotten to what they do when the authoritarian government claims to be socialist. 

Take Venezuela and Bolivia. While both publications publish a range of views—and some invoke that general principle to defend their publishing Trump-enabling disinformation on Russia, I have not found pieces in either defending the democratic rights of people in either state. The DSA’s official statements not only evinced no concern for the democratic rights in either country but expressed solidarity with the authoritarian governments without a word of criticism (on Bolivia, on Venezuela.)

In both cases, the government trampled on the constitution they had created (which had already been changed to give the presidents more power, such that if they had been right-wing, US-aligned governments these same publications would have mocked the US as hypocritical for having such undemocratic allies). Yet it was only the constitutionally-based resistance that these publications labelled as a “coup.” 

And this goes beyond just the question of constitutionality. After virtually every civil society group had abandoned Morales—including the main trade union federation—the only institutions left to defend him were the police and military. The military called on him to resign and he did. To call this a military coup by focusing on that fact in isolation would mean the Egyptian military’s call on Mubarak to resign in 2011 was just as evil. 

After all, what would it have meant for Morales not to have resigned? Given the split with civil society and his rejection of constitutionally-constrained power, it could only have meant relying on military repression. The parallel here would be Sisi’s massacres and repression of civilians in 2013, which in the course of a few months destroyed the ability of civil society to function. That is what Morales staying in power would have meant and could only have meant. But Levitz doesn’t see a problem that needs to be dealt with when calling for that is a common, if not hegemonic, position on the left.

The role of Russia

While positioned on the “left,” the case of the Morales and Maduro governments isn’t separate from the question of Russia’s global project to undermine liberal democracy. To chose a particularly distasteful example, those three governments all signed a letter defending China’s government’s “remarkable achievements in the field of human rights” and explicitly defended China’s concentration camps as being “vocational education and training centers.” I’m sure the Uyghur Muslims would feel much better if they understood the arguments of the DSA, Jacobin, and The Nation.

Sarcasm aside, the role of Russia is important to understand, not just as an issue in and of itself, but because it’s serving as an organizing center to bring together leftists and rightists to undermine the global liberal order (see this article, for instance, but for more in-depth work, check out Tim Snyder, Casey Michael, and the work by Alexander Reid Ross I cited, along with his other work on this). These aren’t just random twitter accounts or isolated incidences. In fact, someone with these views just led the British Labour Party for four years.

Corbyn and Sanders

If Levitz isn’t alarmed as what some of the left is doing, then I think he should look more closely at Jeremy Corbyn’s record. Corbyn never met an anti-Semite he didn’t like—as long as they said “I’m criticizing Israel”—yet he somehow never found a serious word to say against Syria’s Assad, who actually did to the Palestinians there everything people like Corbyn claim Israel is doing to them. (While it’s common on the left to dismiss the charges about Corbyn and anti-Semitism, I have yet to see a rebuttal to this thorough and careful report: “Institutionally Antisemitic: Contemporary Left Antisemitism and the Crisis in the British Labour Party.”)

And to take just one other example: when Russian agents attempted a political assassination in Britain, Corbyn asked the government if they had sent the poison to Russia so they could test it. When it’s a US or British war crime, Corbyn never demands similar levels of evidence before issuing a condemnation, much less does he demand that they themselves should be the judge of the evidence against them. 

This is not the place for a full analysis of Corbyn, but I hope I’ve indicated there are reasons to be concerned. Bernie Sanders is not as ideologically hardened as Corbyn, but displays some of the same tendencies that undermine liberal democracy.

During the campaign, Sanders said that the reason the Washington Post was critical of him was that he criticizes Amazon for not paying taxes: “I wonder why the Washington Post, which is owned by Jeff Bezos, who owns Amazon, doesn’t write particularly good articles about me. I don’t know why.” He later claimed that they timed a story to make him look bad before the Nevada causes (link). Why they would’ve waited till then instead of releasing it before Iowa makes no sense, but more importantly, he had no evidence or argument to make such a claim.

Many people probably don’t have a problem with him saying all of this, but I think that itself is part of the problem. This generic, evidence-free attack on a media institution undermines democracy. Nancy L. Rosenblum and Russell Muirhead, in A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy, do an important job of explaining how such conspiracist attacks degrade liberal democracy. Sanders can so, “Oh, of course I support the free press” but the damage is done. Trust is eroded, and the likes of Trump are further empowered.

Why a project like Persuasion is necessary

Levitz states that “there is no sizable progressive constituency arguing for the abolition of liberal democracy.” I hope I have demonstrated the problem of confining the definition to explicitly advocating the end of liberal democracy, but I do agree that there is no sizable constituency on the left committed to this goal, explicitly or implicitly. But this is exactly why a project like Persuasion is needed, because these other tendencies—illiberal, conciliatory toward Russian imperialism, authoritarian populism, etc.—are increasingly dominant in left publications and institutions despite not having a constituency. Corbyn didn’t win election to head British Labour because he’d pal around with Putin and anti-Semites, but despite that.

I also don’t think he lost because his program was “too left’ or something like that. Levitz interprets Mounk as advocating for  “the middle ground between reactionary right and radical left.” Opposing authoritarianism should be a leftist value, but as the Cold War showed, that can necessitate a fight within the left. During World War 2, it was the socialist Norman Thomas who warned against the sanitized picture of the kindly “Uncle Joe” Stalin and warned of Stalin’s imperial designs on Eastern Europe (see Gary Dorrien’s “Norman Thomas and the Dilemma of American Socialism” in Economy, Difference, Empire). And as Peter Beinart’s The Good Fight ably recounts, it was leftists—socialists, former socialists, and union leaders, all committed to the expansion of the New Deal—who founded Americans for Democratic Action to wage the fight against conciliating Stalinism—with the New York Times criticizing their project as unnecessary.

With a global wave of authoritarianism and a global left that inconsistently resists it when it’s not outright defending at least parts of it, I think something has to be done. What does Levitz think?

This is certainty not a call for complacency. A second Trump term is a threat that cannot be overestimated, and as such, however low the chances are, it requires the utmost effort to prevent. More importantly though, every vote still counts, however certain victory is. Remember the chants about the popular vote in 2016? It would’ve felt worse and he would’ve had more political capital if he had won the popular vote as well. Similarly, the largest possible Electoral College vote and popular vote count will drive the stake deeper into the heart of Trumpism. The higher the vote the more the remaining Republicans in the Senate will be afraid to filibuster or otherwise obstruct legislation. It will flip more states so that gerrymandering and voter suppression strategies can be overturned. So every vote counts. Register yourself and your social circles. Make a plan to vote and encourage everyone else to. Find a group to donate time or money to. It all matters.

The fundamentals for winning are in place

While the polls—including of battleground states—are strong and steady, most important in my opinion is looking at this in the context of the 2018 midterm elections. In 2018, Democrats turned out 60.5 million voters, as compared to 35.6 million in the 2014 midterms and only 2.4 million short of Trump’s 2016 turnout. Crucially, as I wrote in my first newsletter, Democratic voters flipped half the counties that had voted for Obama then switched to Trump, indicating their ability to flip the Electoral College, not just run up the popular vote.

Democratic Party voters are motivated and focused on the goal of defeating Trump—not to to turn back the clock, but so that we are able to move toward justice. And importantly, these are the voters that surged the 2020 primaries to vote for Biden (link). Leaving aside a full autopsy of the Sanders campaign for now, his strategy required bringing new voters to the polls, but Biden was the one to increase primary turnout. As the NY Times wrote in the linked article, “The key demographics that helped Democrats flip congressional seats in 2018 — suburban college graduates and black voters — went for Mr. Biden.”

Trump only won by less than 80 thousand votes spread over three states. That’s it. Yes, his core base will stick with him, but he can’t win an election just with them and he’s given up on trying to appeal beyond his base.

A stolen election?

However, Trump was, after all, impeached for trying to strong-arm the Ukrainian government into making up dirt on Biden. If not for the whistleblower, who put integrity ahead of their personal interests, it might have worked. While that ploy didn’t, Trump is clearly willing to do anything to win and has called on foreign governments to interfere in the election. And given his conciliation of such dictatorial regimes—and his weakening of US power, they certainly have every reason to. So the question isn’t whether he will try, but will it work?

If this were going to be a close election—close in terms of number of states won or the vote by which they are won, I would be more concerned. But if someone were to hack voting systems, every precinct touched increases the chances of getting caught. And if Biden’s win were as close as Trump’s was, cries of “rigged” and legal challenges from the White House would be more worrisome. But when the Republicans have to worry about Texas flipping, such charges will not stick beyond his core base.

Not a return to the status quo

There’s a common misconception that Biden represents to a return to normalcy before Trump. Given the danger of Trump, I’m disturbed if anyone is dismissive of that, but at the same time, it’s critical to dispel this misconception—one shared, as my first newsletter pointed out, by both the mainstream New York Times and leftists like those around Jacobin magazine.

A key part of this myth was reinforced by irresponsible writers and publishers wrenching Biden saying “No one's standard of living will change, nothing would fundamentally change”completely out of context. Media outlets and commentators presented this as if Biden was saying his plans for the country as a whole were for nothing to change. To the contrary, at the same meeting he said that “people feel like they’re being completely left out and they are” and that income inequality has to be addressed. 

His message was addressed to the wealthy at that fundraiser. He said they had so much money he could increase their taxes to implement social programs and they wouldn’t feel it. Referring to taxes exemptions for the rich being about $1.6 trillion, he said that “I could take about $400 [billion] away, and it wouldn’t change your standard of living one tiny little bit.” So the headlines just as easily could’ve been “VP Biden promises to close 25% of tax exemptions for wealthy to combat inequality” but instead they were “Biden promises nothing will change.”

More fundamentally though, people accepted this spin because of the perception that he’s “pale, male, and stale”—part of the “establishment.” On an episode of The Shop, Hasan Minhaj contrasted the new “woke” generation to the establishment. Whoopi responded strongly, saying, “stop listening to the media” and “don’t down the people whose shoulders you’re standing on” (clip). She refers specifically to the fight against apartheid, and here’s a clip of Biden angrily denouncing Reagan’s veto of an anti-apartheid bill. 

But it’s likely the only thing many people know about Biden and apartheid is that he mistakenly referred to being arrested in South Africa. This was presented as him being forgetful or trying to claim credit for something he didn’t do. On a visit, he refused to use the whites-only entrance at an airport and was stopped by police and taken to a room against his will. Technically a “detention,” not “arrest,” but not a distinction typically enforced so strongly. Did anyone worry so much about whether Sander’s one civil rights arrest was actually an “arrest” or not?

Many would have you think media bias was solely against Sanders and perhaps the only reason he lost. That needs a more thorough analysis but ask yourself if your opinion of Biden is shaped by a media slant and your own information bubbles to such a degree that it’s out of touch with what his record actually is. Whoopi’s anger at Hasan’s flippant position is information that should encourage us to rethink our positions.

An Anti-Racist New Deal

This jaundiced view of Biden has caught much of the left out of step with the truly massive changes coming. Instead of being part of a coalition to enact them and perhaps strengthen them, much of the left is busy grousing or threatening to sit out the election.

While Biden always represented more potential progress than he was given credit for—and more ability to get actual progress done than Sander’s promises ever could have, the pandemic and the George Flyod protests have both made more necessary and more politically possible even larger changes. He and Rev. William Barber of the Poor People’s Campaign talked about that on Biden’s podcast, explicitly invoking the example of FDR and the New Deal. In other words, Biden isn’t being dragged to the left, he’s stepping with consideration into every available space opportunity presents him.

The New Deal of the 1930’s was limited by the power of segregationist Democrats, yet it was still the most significant change in this nation since the end of Reconstruction. One can see the Great Society initiatives of the 1960’s and the civil rights bills as an attempt to address those deficits, but those steps forward were immediately hit with a wave of reaction and in significant ways, we have not moved forward since.

I boldly claimed at the beginning of the article that Biden and his coalition will oversee the most significant changes since Reconstruction, and I will expand on that in future newsletters. For now I’ll just note that we have a unique opening to take bold steps toward redressing racial, social, economic, and other forms of injustice. Biden and the coalition around him are committed to doing so and are capable of doing so. I encourage you to volunteer at https://joebiden.com/ or with whatever group you prefer. Democracy must be defended, the basic functioning of government restored—and the opportunity to move toward justice seized. We can do it. We must do it. And I believe we will do it, for ourselves and for future generations.

At the same time—but not unrelated—pro-Assad forces in Syria are escalating their genocidal-scale assault in Idlib. The borders are all closed now, there’s nowhere else to forcibly displace people to within Syria, the situation is dire. Follow the situation and get involved via the Save Idlib campaign. In the US, contact your representative. I hope to write more about this—and how it’s connected to what I write about below.

Thanks for reading—and please reach out with thoughts and critiques. One of the reasons I’m trying out an email newsletter is to see if there can be more constructive conversation outside the hothouse of social media.

A Socialist Case for Biden: What Jacobin and the NY Times both don’t get

I’ve been a leftist for twenty years and I’m committing to help Biden win the primary. The vision of a just, democratic and socialist world guides me, and I’ve followed it and the data to that conclusion.

This election is a referendum on authoritarianism. And critically, looking at the second terms of other authoritarian rulers recently (for example) shows that the second terms can be significantly worse—and Trump, if re-elected, will be taking office on the back of an acquittal by the Senate, which even more means anything goes. Neither the NY Times nor Jacobin (or similar left-y publications) seem to care about that or take it into consideration.

And that’s the first point in Biden’s favor. That is the focus of his campaign, while Bernie’s running the same campaign from 2016—or really the same campaign he’s always been running. One which also leads him to downplay problems such as the rise of Trumpism, racism, and other forms of oppression, pivoting immediately to economic inequality every time. This is the same approach that led him to say of “segregation forever” George Wallace: “at least he is sensitive to what people feel they need.” (For those that think this is out-of-context, more on that later.)

Both Jacobin-types and the NY Times mistakenly think Biden sees Trump as an “aberration” or that’s he’s campaign about “merely restoring the status quo” (quoting the NYT endorsement). On the contrary, Biden, in his speech at the National Baptist Convention, said:

“It’s literally a constant battle for the soul of this nation. It’s been a constant push and pull for more than 240 years between the American ideal that we’re all created equal and the harsh reality of racism [that has] long torn us apart. The honest truth is that both elements are part of the American character. … It’s always a fight.” (video)

So he’s addressing here that this is something that’s part of the country’s history and has to be continually fought. It’d be more accurate to say Sanders sees Trump as an aberration, given that in his NYT interview he attributed Trump to disillusionment with the establishment and to low wages and continually implies that if economic inequality were fixed, that would be enough.

Biden went on talk about how to “take the next step forward…to give the marginalized, the demonized, the isolated, the oppressed a full share of the American dream….to root out systematic racism.” (video) This is not a message about restoring the status quo, but about defeating Trump so that we are able to take a step forward.

Besides misunderstanding Biden, the NY Times and Jacobin also share a light-minded approach to the question of who can win the election. In their endorsement the NYT shrugged their shoulders on this question. Jacobin has run several articles attempting an argument as to why Sanders—and in their view only Sanders—can win the general, but none of them stand up to the slightest scrutiny.

While I want to be clear that this is not an argument to hold your nose and vote for Biden because he is electable, the best information I’ve been able to find strongly suggests he is the best candidate to beat Trump.

First, it is essential to remember that the Electoral College decides the contest. Sharing a poll that shows Bernie somewhat ahead of Biden in the national polls (leaving aside the fact most of them show Biden ahead) means nothing really—Hillary won the popular vote. Jacobin ran an article that engaged this point, but did so by cherrypicking data.

They write: “Targeted polling of Obama-Trump voters shows Sanders and Joe Biden with a significant edge over Elizabeth Warren in Michigan and Wisconsin; while Biden still seems strongest in Pennsylvania, the differences are small.”

The difference they characterize as “significant” over Warren is about 10 points, but when Biden is 15 points ahead of Sanders in PA, it’s “small” suddenly—in the same sentence! Worse, the article links to a poll that—when it looks at likely voters in six potentially key swing states—finds Sanders winning in only one of them, but Biden winning five of them. That seems “significant”—or essential really, but they don’t talk about that. If one is concerned with making the best possible case and acting responsibly at a time of a grave political crisis, then one would engage such information.

Then they write: “the real kicker is that in the 206 counties that went for Obama in 2008 and 2012 and then Trump in 2016, Sanders has out-fundraised all of his competitors — by a long shot.”

That’s not “the real kicker,” given there is no reason to think fundraising in those counties for a primary relates to winning them in a general election in any meaningful way. Particularly given that there just was an election in 2018 and Sanders-aligned candidates won zero elections (outside some safe blue seats), whereas so-called “establishment” candidates flipped several seats in those pivot counties, winning over half of those counties back (link). I feel embarrassed discussing such a shoddy article, but it’s from what’s probably the most read leftist publication in English.

More on the 2018 elections later. While we’re talking about the Electoral College, consider this article which points out that ”based on the current RealClearPolitics average of state-by-state polling, Biden is the only candidate among the Democratic frontrunners – including Sanders – who is leading Trump in enough states to win the Electoral College” and that “as of Dec. 31, Biden stands at 322 electoral votes compared to Trump’s 166, with 50 electoral votes falling into the toss-up category.“

Of course now some are saying to themselves how we can’t trust the polls. The NYT endorsement shamefully just shrugged its shoulders on that point. The idea that 2016 showed polls don’t mean anything is profoundly mistaken—and hypocritical on the part of those that’ll share them when they do favor their chosen candidate. However, it is true that polls aren’t set in stone. How might they change? (And I’ll note again on the anti-poll point, that qualitatively speaking, what the election is about is a referendum on Trumpism—and Biden is the one making his campaign about that.)

Many leftists look at Biden and see a weak candidate. They watch the debates and just know his numbers will drop. I know, because that’s how I looked at him at first. At the same time, Trump, the GOP and Russian state disinformation operations have been hitting Biden with whatever they can find. A Florida senator who isn’t up for reelection anytime soon is running ads in Iowa to attack him. Trump is getting impeached because he committed crimes to try to undermine Biden’s candidacy. (Some leftists view impeachment as the elite protecting one of their own when it’s actually about protecting the integrity of the election.) He was VP when the Republicans wanted to hit the Obama administration with everything they had. And yet Biden’s poll numbers are still strong.

What’ll change if he becomes the nominee? The attacks are already coming full bore, but on the positive side, Obama, the most popular politician in the country, can get out and campaign for him with a synergy he probably wouldn’t have with another candidate—and which might not even be welcomed by Sanders.

On the other hand, no one has attacked Sanders all-out yet. Hillary ran light against him, trying to hold together his voting bloc for the general (a responsible concern that his campaign did not evince then and still—even after the rolling crisis that is Trump’s rule, does not evince today). In today’s primary, partly because many of the candidates mistook Twitter for reality and catered to parts of Bernie’s base, and most importantly because most of them to their credit are treating the need for unity against Trump as essential (the starkest exception is fascist-aligned Tulsi Gabbard—whom Bernie helped promote into the national spotlight and was appointed to the Sanders Institute and whom he has yet to distance himself from), no one is launching a wholesale assault on Bernie. Further, both Trump and the Russian state’s campaign promoted Bernie in 2016—and still are. Recently, Trump has started to attack Bernie—precisely because such attacks will help Sanders in the primary: “President Trump’s advisers see Senator Bernie Sanders as their ideal Democratic opponent in November” (NY Times, see also). Some are touting the leaked audio to say Trump “really” thinks Sanders would be a difficult opponent. What he actually says is that Sanders would’ve been the most difficult VP choice for Clinton because Trump won “20%” of Bernie’s voters. I suggest Sanders supporters might think twice about trying to make use of that quote, given its premise is how many Bernie voters switched to Trump.

So Biden’s numbers are where they are now, despite the right hitting him with everything and Sanders’s campaign hitting him with some low blows too. Sanders’s numbers are more of a ceiling than a floor, given that if he became the nominee the gloves from the right would come off and he has many weaknesses (additionally in general, left populism loses to right populism—more on the specific example of Corbyn later).

The 2018 election

The idea that Bernie would’ve won in 2016 and would win in 2020 takes a hard hit when we look at 2018. The leftist idea that the Democrats lost in 2016 because they picked a so-called establishment figure over the progressive led many to predict 2018 would be a wipeout because most of the candidates were not Sanders-aligned candidates.

The Democrats flipped 41 seats in 2018—and astoundingly for a midterm got almost as many votes as Trump got in 2016. Importantly, 21 of those flipped seats are in potential swing states.

How many seats did Sanders-aligned candidates flip? Zero.

As noted before, of those counties that voted for Obama and then switched to Trump, most were won back—but none were won back by Sanders-aligned candidates, who did run in some of them. Most of the candidates who flipped those swing-state seats were endorsed by Biden, none were endorsed by Sanders and now—because they’re looking at how to defeat Trump in 2020 from on-the-ground in those districts, many of those victors are endorsing Biden (see).

To look more closely at the 2018 election in potential swing states in 2020:

One candidate in a potential swing state (Colorado) that Sanders endorsed won—in the relatively safe, already blue 2nd district. Candidates he endorsed in Florida (also endorsed by Our Revolution (OR) and Justice Democrats (JD)), Iowa (also OR and JD), Penn. (JD and OR) and Wisconsin (one in each sate) all lost in the general. In Iowa’s third, the primary candidate he endorsed (along with JD & OR) lost to Cindy Axne, who went on to flip the district and has now endorsed Biden. Cindy got 20,000 more votes than the 2016 candidate. Sander’s Iowa candidate got a little more than 4,000 votes over the 2016 total. His endorsed candidate in PA got 76 more votes than the Democrat in 2016 (yes, 76). Randy Bryce (endorsed by Sanders, JD—and Biden) in Wisconsin got 30,000 more votes than the 2016 election.

The Justice Democrats endorsed two candidates in Arizona—one went on to win a safe seat, the other lost in the primary to Ann Kirkpatrick, who went on to flip the seat, increasing the votes by 25,000, whereas the Justice Democrat in the safe seat (who was an incumbent) got 32,000 fewer votes. Now, one should note in 2016 the seat was uncontested, but a key premise of the Sanders argument is that his approach can win independents and Republicans and new voters that others cannot. In FL’s 27th, their endorsed candidate lost in the primary to Donna Shalala, who went on to flip the seat with Biden’s endorsement. Their candidate in GA failed to flip the 1st, whereas Democrats where able to flip the 6th—in a district that had been rated “safe” for Republicans in 2016 and had a bigger absolute and relative vote deficit in 2014 than the 1st had.

In Michigan’s 11th, JD’s candidate (also endorsed by Brand New Congress (BNC)) lost to Biden-backed Haley Stevens who went on to flip the seat, increasing turnout by nearly 30,000 votes. They had two MI candidates in the general, and neither won.

In the crucial Nebraska's 2nd Congressional District, the JD-endorsed candidate saw a decline in 16,000 votes from 2016.

In PA, which was one of the three states to give Trump the Electoral College, Dems flipped four House seats—none were from JD-backed candidates. JD had one candidate in the general—the candidate Sanders backed in the 11th that gained 76 votes from 2016. Their candidate lost in the 7th’s primary to Biden-backed Susan Wild, who flipped the seat.

While Democrats were only able to win one House seat in Texas, it was not one of JD’s 4 candidates (three of whom BNC also endorsed) in the general there that did that.

While the Democrats flipped three seats in Virginia, the two OR backed candidates did not succeed in winning their general elections and neither significantly impacted turnout.

I haven’t finished doing the raw vote totals comparisons between 2016 and 2018 (and then one would want to control for various variables) but it’s striking that in an election that saw a vast increase in the number of Democratic votes, the only Sanders-endorsed candidate to drive up vote totals like other candidates was Randy Bryce, whom Biden also endorsed [*This last sentence is wrong: I conflated the fact that the Sanders-aligned candidates did not do turnout better than other candidates, which is what their expand the electorate argument claims, with the claim they did not do as well as them. They did not do as well as some of them, but did better than others. But they did not do as well as their strategy claims they did and they did not flip any seat.]. The key argument of the Sanders wing is that they can reach voters the so-called establishment can’t. Well, why didn’t they in 2018? They lost in primaries to candidates that went on to win the general, and when they won a primary, they lost the general. This doesn’t prove the cause of their loss is their alignment with Sanders, but it does contest the idea that the Sanders approach can win over new voting blocs to swing the Electoral College.

The Corbyn disaster

What made me take another look at a lot of this was Corbyn’s absolute wipeout in the last election. Before that loss—in which he lost seats Labour had held for decades (and the same kind of rustbelt seats Sanders can supposedly win)—his example was one Sanders supporters pointed to to draw inspiration from and to suggest what Sanders could do here. Now that he’s lost, it’s suddenly “irrelevant.”

The loss wasn’t because of his economic populist program, similar to—but to the left of—what Sanders’s essential offer is. It wasn’t because of it, but it was in spite of it, because of the two issues of Corbyn himself and of Brexit.

Starting with the latter point, Labour thought it could offer a magnificent economic program and ignore the elephant in the room: Brexit. Sanders doesn’t ignore our elephant in the room—Trump—in the exact same way, but in everything I’ve seen from him he says defeating Trump is important and then immediately pivots to his one note: economic inequality. As I said in the opening, he’s running the same campaign now he ran in 2016—or really, the same he’s been running his whole life. But it’s not just that he’s hitting the same note and ignoring the elephant in the room, it’s that his very approach seeks to find excuses for white racism, like when he wrote that "Wallace has got to be given credit for having...the insight to raise the issues which touch the core of many people's lives" (document). This will undercut his ability to compete with Trump.

Secondly, Sanders’s campaign displays some of the same limitations of Corbyn’s: an inward looking doctrinaire leftism that can rally a choir of thousands to ecstatic heights and then resoundingly loose an election of millions. Similarly, they share a tendency to see any disagreement as an existential betrayal that then justifies harassment. This led to concerted racist and sexist harassment by Bernie supporters when the Working Families Party endorsed Warren, resulting in this letter about that harassment from Black leaders (link). And we’re seeing that sexist harassment with Bernie supporters tweeting snake emojis at Warren and demanding “Never Warren.” (This came after the Bernie campaign released an anti-Warren script to volunteers: link.) On their own, these are all reasons to be deeply suspicious of supporting his candidacy, but they also parallel the Corbyn campaign’s detachment from the reality of its electorate. If Bernie supporters cannot even work with his closest ally Warren, why should anyone expect them to build a strong coalition for the general election?

The NY Times ran an article on this and contrary to the continual claims of bias against Sanders, their theme was noting a disproportionate amount of harassment from his supporters while noting that he condemns the bullying. However, they could’ve and should’ve rightly noted that this supposed distinction between the campaign and supporters is belied by many of his hires, especially that of David Sirota (on Sirota, see also on other instances of harassment as compared to supporters of other campaigns.)

The official Bernie campaign just this month sent a Trumpian out-of-context video of Biden around, falsely claiming he supported Republicans in cutting Social Security (link).

Further, his campaign must bear some responsibility for the loss of 2016, but he hasn’t taken responsibility for those failures, and is displaying those same features now. What do I mean?

He refused to stop campaigning in the primary even once it became impossible for him to win. While Hillary’s campaign tried to pivot to dealing with the new and unique threat of Trump, it was hampered in this by the continued primary campaign: “Eager to begin the general election, she began speaking against Trump after the March 15 primaries…but she quickly dialed back the effort when Sanders made clear he wasn’t going anywhere by kicking off a winning streak the next week” (link; the headline of this article is irresponsible and misleading in that it is not substantiated by the evidence it offers and is flat-out contradicted by its own evidence in parts, but it is a useful compilation of these events nonetheless). When asked this time around if he’d do keep campaigning again, instead of saying, “I had my reasons last time for staying in, including thinking it would help defeat Trump. I see now that wasn’t the case,” he complained about being asked! (link)

Second, there was the disruptive behavior of his delegates at the DNC, which is reason enough to want the fewest such delegates at this year’s convention. (More on some of those specifics later, such as the “rigging” charge.)

Third—and most critically, there are the Bernie or bust and Jill Stein supporting types. While Sanders has not engaged in that himself, he has hired some of them for top positions in his campaign and does not disavow the support of such groups.

All of this points to some of the similar weaknesses that destroyed Corbyn’s campaign existing in Sanders’s.

The danger of populism

Why did Corbyn lose? The true believers still say that he didn’t really—it was a “conspiracy” by the media and powerful, dark, sinister forces, so we—thank goodness—don’t have to rethink anything. Leaving aside the Corbyn-Sanders claim that their approach—and only their approach—can win, I want to focus on the tendency to attribute loss to the “establishment,” the “media” or—well, we’ll get to that in a moment.

It is one thing to have a progressive, leftist, socialist critique—and another to delegitimize, well, everything. What’s the difference? I’ve seen it especially around the Syrian revolution, where if I share an article from the NY Times a leftist might just refuse to read it or engage with it. That’s not critique in the sense of reading while being aware of bias, etc.—it’s something completely different and very dangerous. It means a movement will continually get more isolated, stuck in spiral of confirmation biases, unable to respond to disagreement and—because there needs to be some point of reference—become a cult of personality.

This is what the Fox News-Trump information bubble is—and it’s what the Sanders-Twitter bubble is becoming. So you get these myths, like that “the DNC rigged 2016 and we have to watch out for 2020.” When you ask for evidence, you can never actually get any—none that stands up to scrutiny at least. And Nina Turner, a campaign co-chair, just said—apparently referring to this myth—that “if the DNC believes it is going to get away in 2020 with what it did in 2016 it has another thing coming” (link). Sanders himself said in 2019 that “Some people say that if maybe that system was not rigged against me, I would have won the nomination and defeated Donald Trump” (source).

There’s a recent book on this issue by Nancy L. Rosenblum and Russell Muirhead called A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy. In it they particularly warn about “claims that strike at the heart of regular democratic politics” such as charging there are “rigged elections.” They argue that political representatives are the “first line of defense” and give the example of a Republican senator who backed off a conspiracist claim in the face of counter-evidence but then immediately added: “it’s a real possibility.” The authors correctly point out: “This falls short of disavowal…. And the conspiracist purpose has been achieved. Doubts are planted….”

To take another example, let’s look at that Jacobin article again. They write: “The truth is that Democrats genuinely like Bernie: he has the highest favorability rating in the primary field…. Yet among the Democrats most concerned with beating Trump, Sanders currently trails.” Why the difference between favorability and electability? They say that “A hostile party establishment and an unfriendly media appear to have convinced many voters….”

Wait, how does that make sense? If the evil dark forces are manipulating people, why would they be manipulating them to favor Sanders on the one hand but think he can’t win on the other? (Answer: the authors are just making stuff up to confirm their biases.) But leaving aside how nonsensical the claim is, note how easy and simple it was for them to turn to the image of a “hostile..establishment and…unfriendly media” for relief from data that challenged their beliefs.

Again, this generic delegitimization of the media as-such is dangerous. It’s dangerous and irresponsible and yes, Trumpian, when Sanders says “We have pointed out over and over again that Amazon made $10 billion in profits last year. You know how much they paid in taxes? You got it, zero! Any wonder why the Washington Post is not one of my great supporters…?” and then the next day says: “And then I wonder why the Washington Post, which is owned by Jeff Bezos, who owns Amazon, doesn’t write particularly good articles about me. I don’t know why.”

I guess he doesn’t actually know why given that Bezos does not control the editorial line of the Post. I’ve been wary of making too simplistic Trump-Bernie parallels but this one is too exact, given Trump keeps trying to punish Bezos’s business interests because of the Post’s coverage. The simplistic equation of ownership of the media to media bias is conspiracist and dangerous. Again, I’m not saying a specific and substantiated critique of particular media outlets is conspiracist—I always read with a critical eye. But this charging of the Post being biased because he criticized Amazon on taxes is an example of conspiracism.

There’s something else conspiracism always does that I alluded to earlier, and that’s empower anti-Semitism. (I’m guessing some reading this will look for an easy-out so they don’t have to challenge their ideology and take that out-of-context to claim I’m saying Sanders himself is anti-Semitic. I’m not saying that and didn’t say that. The point isn’t that Sanders or anyone on his campaign is anti-Semitic, but that spreading a conspiracist approach will end up empowering it.) We did see that with Corbyn’s campaign however. Of course, his supporters deny that—and claim that the charge itself is proof of a conspiracy. I’ll point to two resources on this for those that want to read further:

* The report “Institutionally Antisemitic: Contemporary Left Antisemitism and the Crisis in the British Labour Party”

* The podcast ”Corbynism: The Post-Mortem”

The danger of no-win politics and the myth of Biden being a centrist

In 1964, Bayard Rustin wrote an article called “From Protest to Politics” in which he argued that part of the civil rights movement had adopted what he labelled a “no-win” policy that designated liberals as their “main enemy” rather than extremist Republicans who would roll back civil rights and other gains. He noted this was partly rooted in substituting militancy—“a matter of posture and volume”—for strategy.

The vociferous split of Bernie’s base with Warren shows just how much posturing is determining things rather than strategy.

The idea that Biden is (or that Hillary was in 2016) a centrist or moderate is part of this no-win ideological approach. Rustin wrote: “We need to choose our allies on the basis of common political objectives. It has become fashionable in some no-win Negro circles to decry the white liberal as the main enemy (his hypocrisy is what sustains racism); by virtue of this reverse recitation of the reactionary's litany (liberalism leads to socialism, which leads to Communism) the Negro is left in majestic isolation, except for a tiny band of fervent white initiates.” To define Biden as a moderate is to insist on a left that exists in “majestic isolation.”

It is also to insist on not winning, since, as Rustin notes, numbers are needed to win and more, in this particular case, Biden’s policies could feasibly get through Congress, whereas Sanders’s will not.

On healthcare, Biden’s public option could at least plausibly pass Congress and be signed into law, whereas Bernie’s Medicare for All will not. For that reason alone, that makes Biden’s approach to healthcare more progressive: if one wants to improve the lives of people that is. Even leaving aside the Congressional calculus, there’s the problem of Bernie’s approach setting the ceiling for healthcare benefits, a particular problem for union members who have bargained for better coverage and one Randi Weingarten, national president of the American Federation of Teachers, pointed out (Bernie has a website page that purports to address the relationship of union health insurance to M4A—it’s easy to write a list of things one wants, harder to demonstrate there’s a legal and enforceable way to make it happen, and yet harder to still to demonstrate a viable path through Congress). Weingarten argues strongly against pitting the different paths to universal coverage against each other and we would do well to listen to her.

On climate, nuclear power is an absolutely necessary ingredient. While subject to various fears and distortions, France’s fast roll-out in the ’70’s—and its safe and effective record since of drawing 75% of its power from nuclear—proves it can be done, whereas Germany has started shutting down its nuclear plants and so is burning more coal. Bernie and Warren are not only against expanding nuclear power, but are also for dismantling existing plants. Biden could be stronger on the nuclear power issue, but he doesn’t have an ideologically driven position that conflicts with reality and inhibits making meaningful and realistic progressive on fossil fuels.

To return to Rustin’s argument, he wrote that “From this [sense of how difficult change will be] they conclude that the only viable strategy is shock; above all, the hypocrisy of white liberals must be exposed.” We see that in the Sanders-wing’s approach. As Jon-Erik G. Storm wrote of a particular Sanders supporter Jeet Heer, “Heer doesn’t want to win. He wants to beat them [the ‘centrists’].” This explains how they can be so fervent that their way and their way alone can win elections in the face of all contrary evidence, because the true enemy is really “liberalism”--not the reactionary right.

In other words, “Bernie or bust” is normally spoken of as a promise—only “we” can win. But it actually functions as a threat: “Bend the knee to us or we will destroy you.” As Storm also wrote: “What I suspect isn’t that Heer thinks that a Grand Coalition [of the center and left] would strengthen Trumpism or demoralize Democrats, but that it would weaken leftists and their current grip on the Democratic party and make it less likely that the kind of policies he advocates for will come to pass.”

My point isn’t that I agree with Biden on policy in general. For instance, I disagree with Obama’s approach to Syria, which abandoned the revolution and appeased the forces carrying out the first genocide of the 21st century. Biden looks set to continue that approach. I disagree with that, an issue I see of supreme importance—ethically and strategically for its ramifications for global politics. And I do worry Biden’s tendencies there and on related global issues such as Iran will weaken his chances in the general election—but it’s not as if the rest of the field is better (though Buttigieg to his credit tweeted: “America's leaders can no longer watch in silence as Assad and Russia attack innocent Idlib civilians. Inaction is a stain on our collective conscience. The international community must use all available tools at its disposal to stop this massacre and provide humanitarian aid.”). And Sanders is far worse, epitomized by his aforementioned relationship with fascist-aligned Gabbard.

So my emphasis isn’t so much that I agree with Biden on policy, as that the Sanders approach to areas of disagreement is destructive and self-defeating (no-win). Barney Frank put it well when he said:

“It’s a matter of how you go about things. It is their [Sanders-aligned] view that the only reason that their platform isn’t being adopted is the political timidity, maybe the malign influence of money. The notion that there is significant political opposition among many people, including maybe a majority on some issues, they disregard that and denounce other Democrats, saying they don’t have the courage. It’s not the courage. We don’t have the votes sometimes."

Many want to blame Trump on the limitations of Obama and the Democrats. But take the key issue of infrastructure—a big infrastructure push could’ve made a difference in the rustbelt and might’ve affected the 2016 election. But as Frank says, it wasn’t a limitation of courage—they didn’t have the votes to get past McConnell. So we don’t need to yell populist conspiracist stuff about “the malign influence of money” but we do need to work harder on getting those votes. The Tea Party did that work and successfully shifted things to the right. The Resistance to Trump did tremendous work in the midterms and shifted a lot back--and we can do that further with constructive and strategic, rather than conspiracist, progressive organizing.

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