Writing in the Washington Post this week, Olivier Knox left no doubt that the left wing of the Democratic Party will be held responsible for the party’s loss of Congress in the 2022 midterm election and even – whispered in sotto voce – the return of the Great Satan Donald Trump in 2024. Unable to be good children and just play along, the thinking goes, progressives like Reps. Alexandria Occasion Cortez and Pramila Jayapal have undermined President Joe Biden’s popularity and agenda by insisting on sticking to their principles and advocating for their policies.
“The White House on Monday unambiguously blamed some of President Biden’s political woes on Democratic ‘infighting’ that is delaying his domestic agenda,” Knox wrote, “an unusually candid admission as the party heads into a midterm-election cycle in which it fears a drubbing come November.”
The warning is dire, but it is hardly original; at fairly regular intervals over the last few years, the DNC, the party’s congressional leaders and, at least since last January, the Biden Administration have never missed an opportunity to blame the Democratic left for their failures. The most recent manifestation of what can only be called a neurotic projection came earlier this month, when Terry McAuliffe lost what was supposed to be a safe gubernatorial election in Virginia, and New Jersey governor Phil Murphy just barely sqeaked-by with a victory in a state that still remembers Chris Christie (and not fondly).
Clinton-era revenant James Carville blamed the “woke” Democratic left in the most explicit terms. “We’re letting a noisy wing of our party define the rest of us. And my point is we can’t do that,” he said. “I think these people are all kind of nice people. I think they’re very naive, and they’re all into language and identity. And that’s all right. They’re not storming the Capitol. But they’re not winning elections.”
This is hardly an original opinion from Carville, who has made a career of whingeing about how not everyone agrees with him that the disastrous Clinton-Blair-Obama-style third-way neoliberalism that contributed to the rise of nationalist neototalitarianism around the world was a good idea. But the DNC, the Democratic congressional leadership, and President Biden – who was, after all, promoted as a kind of Clinton-Obama mulligan in the 2020 election – do believe it. Consequently, the canard of progressive “wokeness” scaring of the mythical white, working-class moderate voters whom establishment Democrats fantasize are the key to power, has become the party’s go-to excuse.
(It might be worth remembering at this point that the white, working-class voter is, for the most part, no “moderate,” even as Sen. Joe Manchin might understand the term. Joe Sixpack threw in his lot with Magaist neototalitarianism in 2016, and again in 2020. It behooves us to acknowledge that, even after the human and economic catastrophes of the Trump administration, almost half of all American voters, and a significant majority of white Americans voted for the incumbent president. Indeed, even after the January 6 insurrection, they voted for the Trump-endorsed Glenn Youngkin’s white-anxiety message.)
What the blame-the-left narrative fails to acknowledge – indeed, what it means to obscure – is that President Biden’s Clinton-Blair-Obama-style third-way strategy is an abject failure. Not only did it fail to attract the mythical white, working-class voter, but it could barely even convince corporate-funded conservatives in the Democratic party like Sens. Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema to go along, no matter how much the president trimmed it down. Moreover, in paring the Infrastructure and Build Back Better bills down to slivers of embarrassment, President Biden and his “agenda” tasted like nothing so much as near-beer in this month’s elections.
So, the White House is griping about the president’s unpopularity, and blaming the Democratic Party left and progressive voters and activists, and darkly warning that they had better step into line – and soon – because the Magaists will win next year and in 2024 if they don’t. And should that happen, we will all know who is to blame.
The thing is, as my friend Robin Leigh notes, “not Trump” is no more an effective pitch to progressives who, after all, have their own political aims and agendas that might occasionally coincide, but are not coextensive with the goals of centrist neoliberals, than it was to moderate Republicans in the 2016 primaries.
“’Lesser evil’ arguments work during elections, when your options are limited. I made them myself,” she observed in a social media post. “But their shelf life is short, and they expire the second a choice is made. You can’t silence dissent by arguing that it could have, potentially, in theory, been worse.”
In the context of American electoral politics, she is undoubtedly right. At this moment in American history, the electoral choice is between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, abstention – and nothing else. There is no viable third party, and I am skeptical whether one is even possible as political parties are currently constituted, so voting for one is either abstention or magical thinking.
While I do understand how one can abstain “on principle,” and I do not like to see things in terms of moral absolutes, there is an argument to be made that making a positive choice to vote Democrat is an ethical choice and that, while abstaining might satisfy personal principles, it is ethically little different from voting Republican. That is the basis for the “lesser evil” argument. As a Holocaust survivor I once knew suggested many years ago: if the choice is between a bad option, and a bad option with greater suffering, choose the one with less suffering. In electoral terms, the suffering might be borne by strangers, but it is suffering nonetheless.
As Robin wrote in Red Letter two days after this month’s elections, “we can ease suffering. We can bandage wounds. We can learn the difference between bad and worse. Refusing to do so because of some misguided sense of ideological purity isn’t just intellectually bankrupt — it is grotesquely cruel.”
Yet, the ethical calculus of “the lesser evil” only obtains when there is a choice of limited options, as in an election. The calculus is different at other times, and it includes ensuring that voters have a better electoral choice than simply minimizing harm the next time they go to the polls, and advancing goals and principles within the instrument that we have available to advance them: the Democratic Party. And the only way to do that is to fight like hell for our principles and to not give in to the indifferentist, status-quo blandishments of neoliberal ideologues like Carville, and technocratic Clinton-Blair-Obama-style third-wayism.
It is, perhaps, a weakness of the American left that it must position itself as the ethical critique of capitalism, constrained within the manifestly inadequate instrument of the Democratic Party. Despite the theatrical fantasies of some of our more apocalyptically-inclined comrades, this often means holding our noses, stepping into line and pulling the lever every few years. But it is certainly a fact of the Democratic Party that, for all of the gravitational pull toward the do-nothing center in search of the mythic Joe Sixpack, it needs its left-wing caucus and progressive voters. The results of November’s elections, in fact, bear this out and, judging by the vituperation its establishment leadership has been flinging at the left in recent weeks, the Democratic Party knows it, too.
Time to hang tough.
***
Photo courtesy of Whitehouse.gov.