The following story is co-published with Freddie deBoer’s Substack.
I’ve been a Democrat-critical leftist for a long time. Even if I were generally susceptible to ordinary human insecurity, I would be inured to all of the usual rhetoric because I’ve heard it so much. And so the response in email and comments to yesterday’s post didn’t surprise me much. Liberals hate socialists more than they hate fascists; that’s been true my whole life and I suspect it will always be true. That I was also explicitly making an appeal to the self-interest of moderate Democrats was almost universally ignored. There was, of course, a lot of the usual mendacity involved — people claiming that I was telling other people not to vote for Kamala Harris, which is simply a lie, or that I said I would never vote for a Democrat, when I explicitly said I would do so if I was in a swing state. Again, it’s all par for the course and if I have one superpower in life it’s being unmoved by liberal sanctimony. You do not have the juice.
That said, I do regret being abrasive yesterday. Everything’s really tense right now, obviously. But that isn’t an excuse for being a bad host. Sorry about that.
Here’s the real problem, though: Out of hundreds and hundreds of respondents, almost no one actually made an affirmative case for the Democrats and their agenda. The number of people who said some version of “I hear you, but I think Harris’ policy positions are more progressive than you think, here’s why” was in the single digits. The number of people who simply laid out the same litany of tired, rage-filled screeds that I’ve been hearing since 2000 was immense. Stop and think about that, for just a minute — what does it say that when challenged from the left, Democrats don’t bother to make the affirmative case for the Democratic Party? It’s hard to think of a better symbol of the existential brokenness of the Democrats, of their status as an anti-party, than hundreds of angry Dems who are willing to say anything to get my vote for Kamala Harris … except why she’s actually the candidate who fits my values. That’s the bizarre scenario for the Democrat-skeptical leftist in the 21st century; Democrats think that getting your vote is essential, constantly tell you how important your vote is, act like getting your vote could turn the tide of world history. But they’re not willing to actually appeal to you to get your vote! That’s the one thing they won’t do, try to engage in respectful persuasion. Because sneering at lefties always comes first.
Why did I receive so many more arguments attacking Stein, who I don’t care about, than I did arguments that the Democrats are actually good? Is that not bizarre? Does it not signal that you don’t actually think the Democrats are good either?
I will say it again: It literally cannot be true both that lefties are too small in number for the Democrats to be worth appealing to and that so many in number that we can blow a presidential election. Both cannot be true! If there are enough of us to cost you a presidential election, then by definition you need to actually appeal to us for our votes. If you don’t care about our votes because we’re supposedly so irrelevant, you can’t then turn around and get mad when we don’t give them to you. This is all really basic stuff and it amazes me that so many otherwise thoughtful people are so driven by resentment that they can’t stop and ask themselves if what they’re saying makes sense. Surely, if the stakes of this election are as high as you say they are, and if every vote is as precious as you say it is, then maybe you should try to convince the skeptics to vote the way you want? Maybe the Democrats should try earning those votes? Why does the imperative to attack the left always trump every other concern? And, more importantly, how many years of this shit can we sit through before you realize that the endless, reflexive, rage-choked anti-left sentiment among Democrats hurts the party even in terms of passing a moderate agenda?
The Democrats are embarrassed by their own values.
The Republicans are a political party with a malevolent leader, a horrifying agenda and an ugly founding philosophy. But they are a political party. They have a set of moral and democratic values, they use them to derive policy positions, and they run candidates who proudly extol those values and policy positions to secure votes with the intent of then enacting an agenda once in power. That’s what a political party does. It has values, it holds them proudly, it articulates those values as a policy agenda, it argues for the superiority of those policies, and its electoral outcomes are the product of how well it does all of that. The Democrats, in contrast, are not a political party. They’re embarrassed by their own values, they’re scared to articulate a positive policy agenda, they assume the country hates their vision of the future, they attempt to hide their most basic philosophical commitments, they spend more time moving toward the opposite party’s ideological direction than trying to move the country toward their own, and in general they’re an embarrassing collection of self-loathing squishes who are correctly perceived by the country as standing for nothing. Until that changes, our system will always be susceptible to the appeals of demagogues like Donald Trump. Because, as stupid as it sounds, unapologetic and self-confident evil will always beat shiftless and apologetic lesser evil. That’s just how human beings function. Why would you vote for a party that hates itself?
A country with a two-party system that includes a far-right party and a center-right party is a country that will inevitably move in a far-right direction. And not Jon Favreau nor Gail Collins nor Matt Yglesias nor Jon Chait nor the New York Times editorial board nor Hillary Clinton herself nor any other of the tongue-cluckers have a response to that fact. Because they’ve assumed away any possibility of positive change; they know they’re stuck. That’s the other thing almost nobody did yesterday: articulate any path for the country to get better. You can’t, because better can’t emerge from this rotten system. And until liberals and Democrats are willing to make a radical break from a scenario that allows conservatism to win even when Republicans lose, we’re all stuck. Maybe today marks the end of the Trump era. And then you’re staring down a Vivek Ramaswamy presidency in four years. Because Democrats stand for nothing. You can get mad at me. Or you can change the party.
The post If the Democrats Want To Win, Someday They’ll Need To Give People Something To Vote for appeared first on Truthdig.
