Essay: On Mea Culpas, the Populist Alliance & the Young American Left (Link)
On Mea Culpas, the Populist Alliance & the Young American Left
Recently while sh*tposting on Twitter, I found myself committing the cardinal sin of leftist social media usage; that’s right my snickering friends, I waded in to some online community drama without understanding the context like a chump-ass herb. This was of course extremely foolish, as the internet was only too happy to remind me over the course of the next few hours; talk sh*t, get bit I guess and rightly so. Let’s get into this awful muck together, shall we?
The issue at hand involved a sort of half-engaged dispute between popular congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and popular political analyst and comedian, Jimmy Dore. In light of the high profile of both individuals involved here, this dispute was then predictably being re-waged across most of left wing Twitter for hours on end after it initially burst forth. I don’t want to waste too many words detailing the intricacies of the argument, especially since so many others online had already done so by the time I arrived to the discussion (without having done my homework,) but the skinny here is that Dore was calling on Ocasio-Cortez to use her considerable influence and the recent political gains for what many still consider “the Sanders Left,” to force a public vote on Medicare for All. The congresswoman refused and in what seems like a misstep regardless of how you feel about that decision, wonkishly argued that progressives in government needed to spend their influence in more productive battles to control committee appointments and accrue minor concessions.
Given the nature of the online left community, this roiling debate rather predictably split along anti-establishment against progressive coalition lines all over social media. Of course like all really stimulating, and truly viscous online shouting matches among what passes for the American left, there are reasonably good arguments on both sides; including the fact that a Medicare for All vote has precisely a snowball’s chance in hell of passing, and that it might genuinely help more people to fight for a winnable $15 federal minimum wage in America. Acknowledging this, while also factoring in the intense amount of backlash progressives can expect from the mainstream neoliberal wing of the party for even calling a vote on Medicare for All, and observing the simple concept that if you’re going to get steamrolled anyway, it’s probably better to get something instead of nothing in the interim, one might reasonably side with Ocasio-Cortez under normal circumstances.
The problem of course is that these are not normal circumstances. First and foremost we are in the darkest hours of horrifyingly lethal pandemic and simultaneously facing down both an outgoing and an incoming administration that simply and collectively do not give a flying f*ck how many people die so long as Wall Street is making bank. It has become cliche to say that in terms of Covid deaths, America is experiencing a new 9/11 every single day, but while repetition may render the phrasing tiresome, it does not render the statement that the ruling class’s heartless response to this virus amounts to murdering thousands of innocent people every twenty-four hours, any less painfully accurate. People, particularly poor people, are quite literally being exterminated by American capitalism and its subservient governments, even as you read this. And so, from a political perspective and frankly just a humanitarian standpoint, now would be a really good time to demand universal healthcare and publicly f*cking dare the machine to say no.
Furthermore it cannot be forgotten that the American left has just come off an election cycle that featured endless and heinously dishonest smears from the liberal establishment, all kinds of shady f*ckery in the early primaries and an open ruling-class plot to stop Bernie Sanders from winning the Dem party nomination; and I’m frankly being very generous in that interpretation by not going further into just how crass and anti-democratic all this nonsense was here. This was followed by a presidential campaign in which the Democratic Party’s neoliberal leadership seemed quite happy to throw left-aligned activists resisting fascist street gangs, and racial justice advocates in the Black Lives Matter movement to the wolves, simply to appease angry white conservatives who predictably didn’t vote Democrat anyway. On top of all this, and again, I’m really only touching on the tip of the iceberg here, Biden’s victory has lead to a round of “how does my butt-hole taste” neoliberal triumphalism that has shut left-leaning candidates out of influential positions in the incoming administration.
In other words, and expressed as bluntly as I can possibly state the issue: rich neoliberals are straight up killing the labor class and every shred of evidence available says cooperating with them to keep the peace isn’t going to change that in the slightest. Joe Biden hasn’t actually been inaugurated yet and even a child can already see that the left, including the electoral left, is at war with Bidenism, will remain at war with Bidenism and will face down a Democratic Party mainstream in 2024 that is every bit as prepared to lie, cheat, and smear its way to a victory over young people, the marginalized, and the left, as they were last time.
Understood in context then the supposed “safe choice” becomes choosing to lose and maybe even perish, while the seemingly risky choice of forcing a floor vote on Medicare for All, becomes a declaration of war against the party’s (ruling) right wing; a war that is again, going to happen whether democratic socialists and progressives in government want it to, or not. Although there are certainly a number of reasons I wish anyone but Jimmy Dore had made this argument (more on this below,) it’s fair to say on the whole that he was, and is, correct. Right now the people need a champion, not a negotiator, and I sincerely believe that any politician prepared to genuinely and relentless fight for the survival of the labor class, can ultimately win their hearts and carry their votes in the coming election cycle – even if that person were to lose every single hopelessly rigged battle against neoliberalism along the way.
As I mentioned however, I was completely unaware of this context when I chose to put my foot in my mouth by not so much saying the wrong things, but choosing the wrong time to say them. Logging on Sunday evening, I saw a number of prominent left wing accounts (including many professionals in the boutique left-aligned media) vociferously defending the progressive bonifieds of Jimmy Dore. If I had bothered to hunt around a little, I would have realized that all of these people were responding to extremely uncharitable attacks on Dore, some of which I personally would have to qualify as smears in retrospect, from the collaborator center-left. Clearly (if you bothered to look) this torrent of flak was designed primarily to tamp down calls for a vote on Medicare for All from the larger left, by attacking and discrediting the man who’d just spoken them directly; regardless of the context, this is unquestionably dirty pool and thus mouthing off about why Jimmy Dore is kinda bad, in the middle of a disingenuous social media dog-pile, was the absolute worst thing I could have done.
Now look, I didn’t write this column to slag Dore and I’m also not here to make excuses, but given his way-longer-than-reasonable support of reactionary Islamophobe Tulsi Gabbard, and his general willingness to platform reactionaries and reactionary ideas if they can be pitched as anti-establishment, I was (and remain) really not comfortable with pretending Jimmy f*cking Dore is a paragon of leftist resistance. And so, I pushed back in my own uniquely charming manner and immediately walked into a buzz-saw of frustrated, confrontational leftists whose position I ultimately agreed with, even though I didn’t realize it at the time. I’ll own that one; my timing was piss poor, I let the team down and I’d like to apologize both to my readers and to Jimmy Dore himself – although I’m hardly expecting him to read this.
And it’s at this point that I’m supposed to tell you that I said the exact opposite of what I should have said, but the truth is I really can’t. Oh for sure, I should have kept my big mouth shut and saved my criticisms for a day when they’d be less useful to fake-left collaborators in the larger progressive political sphere. To be honest with you, I’m also pretty disturbed by the cult-like following Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is cultivating in the soft left and their fawning, relentless support of her actions, even when she fails to deliver mere rhetorical support to important left wing positions; if her pie-eyed supporters would rather fight leftists than try and coax her to fight for the people, I want nothing to do with them in the long run. At the end of the day however, I also have to acknowledge that if I were a democratic socialist politician eyeing a potential Democratic Party run for president in 2024, I wouldn’t want to be publicly associated with a genuinely problematic loose cannon like Dore either.
Okay, I get it, that’s not what you wanted to hear. I’ll pause for the groans.
Maybe right now, you’re rolling your eyes because you’re tired of hearing the words like divisive and problematic, and I can’t say I blame you; we’ve just come off a five year period where not wanting people to die from treatable illness because they don’t have health insurance is somehow “divisive and problematic,” and yeah, I’m getting pretty damn sick of that insipid bougie nonsense too. Of course, we must acknowledge that attaching Dore’s name to the project would automatically arm the neoliberals with every dumb or reactionary thing Jimmy has ever said in the upcoming fight against conceding any ground to the left, but maybe we shouldn’t be basing our strategy around what liberals think, since we already know they’ll call everyone on our team problematic racist sh*tlords no matter how hard we try to jump through their hoops. If it’s to be war regardless of what the left does, maybe nobody cares what ghastly Dem party muppets think of Jimmy Dore.
The problem is, it’s not liberals I’m worried guys like Dore are going to alienate and drive away from the democratic socialist movement, or for that matter left wing politics in general. The simple truth is that Jimmy Dore is a loud, angry, first-wave Gen-Xer who frequently mixes reactionary positions into his otherwise radical leftism, and his (seemingly) sincere political belief that we need to drop “identity politics” and focus on an alliance with an anti-establishment right against the neoliberal regime, is toxic and will mean a funeral march for the larger left. I’m not accusing Dore of being a racist or a bigot, but he’s also the kind of guy who thinks “woke” is an insult and like most Youtubers, his in your face posture, along with his willingness to broadcast “anti-establishment” right sources and positions, tends to attract a certain small but extremely vocal percentage of people who are bigots and racists, but also want healthcare. Of course Jimmy Dore is by no means alone in this position, or even the worst offender in our little online pinko community, but this is an active (albeit minority) tactical position and ideological strain in the online left, and I believe adopting, or even just broadcasting that position more widely from the left, would ultimately be fail and ruin for us all.
Yeah, that’s pretty intense; but let me try to explain why.
As someone who has lived through both moments can attest, this “left-right whatever, put our social opinions aside and get the establishment” logic produced a general theory of organization that was largely adopted in the North American branch of the anti-globalization movement and then again in the same places, during the Occupy Wall Street movement. Despite the sincerest intentions of organizers, and I don’t believe either movement was in any way racist or bigoted by design, this methodology when put into practice largely succeeded in producing a primarily white, male and conspiratorial protest core that was very easy for the “liberal” center to isolate and marginalize; before sending in the murderpigs to crack heads, and thereby destroy the resistance entirely.
Although there were clearly outlier cases, by and large both movements failed to attract African Americans, Latino people, women, and other marginalized groups and I’m just going to go out on a limb and suggest it might be because we were standing shoulder to shoulder with cracker “anti-war, anti-banker” reactionaries who watch a lot of Alex Jones. Although I can testify from direct experience that both movements had a solid, left wing and even openly anarchist core, we scared the sh*t out of marginalized people who would otherwise have agreed with us, because of a small minority of people who shouldn’t have been invited to the party in the first place. I mean for f*ck’s sake folks, even Adolph Reed Jr., a man who has come to embody the intellectual core of the (perhaps unfairly labeled) “class reductionist left” wrote back in the nineties that it was absurd for the left to get into bed with racist militias and cracker anti-statists just because we both hate “the system.”
The simple truth is that the future of the American left is a broad, multi-racial, multi-gendered core of aggressively anti-capitalist, anti-murderpig and anti-racist, dissident resisters. Right now it is young, under thirty-five mostly, and it finds covertly-political expression in movements like “antifa” and Black Lives Matter. It is openly feminist, trans-inclusive, eager to learn about non-binary gender identities and warmly celebrates gay, lesbian, bisexual and asexual lifestyles. They’re furthermore not merely conscious of the advantages of neurodiversity, but also actively harnessing neurodivergent thinkers and speakers in an ongoing battle for justice, not peace, or at least not a passive peaceful co-existence with reactionary, abelist, and conformist ideology or behaviors. Like older leftists, they vociferously oppose neoliberal economics, forever wars and the routine violations of civil rights that occur in the American police state. Amazingly however, their commitment to smashing unequal hierarchies in economic forms is matched by their commitment to smashing patriarchal social hierarchies in such a radically transformative way, it sometimes snatches my breath to see it working in action. Furthermore, having recognized the inherently supportive relationship between capitalist exploitation and white supremacy, the majority of them are, or are becoming, avowed socialists as opposed to capitalists who merely desire stronger regulation and a robust welfare state.
It is however in their intersectional understanding of both modern class dynamics and the horror of climate apocalypse, that this young, “new left” core has transformed the nature of American leftism the most in my opinion. While as the survivors of neoliberalism folks in my generation are keenly aware of the forms of labor class organization our parents failed to defend, and seek to recreate them as a buttress to a larger left wing politics, these kids have grown up on McJobs in the service industry and even the gig economy. Raised by care industry staff, horrifically underpaid teachers and gendered social workers, they’ve shattered the “blue collar vs white collar” dynamic of our conversations about the professional, managerial class. This also leaves them with a radical new, multi-racial, non-white majority understanding of what “the working class” really is and what representing them actually means; an aggressively modern, reality-based position that discards the failed practice of chasing reactionary white hardhats in the dwindling manufacturing sector and the thoroughly colonized suburban core.
Arguably even more transformative for the larger left has been and will continue to be, the understanding of how to stop the climate apocalypse this younger, hungrier left brings to the discussion. Taking the objective truth that continuing to do capitalism is utterly incompatible with a healthy planet that can sustainably support eight billion people to its logical conclusion, they have embraced holistic and indigenous caretaker ideas about human societies, what constitutes an exploitable resource and the staggering consequences of failing to protect the natural world. Frankly the importance of this development cannot be overstated because in doing so from a socialist, anti-racist, anti-patriarchal perspective, they have quite naturally become anti-colonialist on a level that threatens to explode the white supremacist, hyper-extractive economic keystones this whole sick machine we call the Pig Empire is running on. Facing down certain death and destruction, these kids have decided to fight for the whole bag of marbles, and I believe they are without question, correct in choosing that strategy.
In light of all this, the bald and ugly truth here is that the majority left-wing portion of the anti-establishment alliance guys like Dore and those in his ideological circle are trying to promote, is completely compatible with this radical, visionary leftism coming up in the younger core behind us. The extremely vocal, but numerically inferior “anti-establishment” or “populist” or “moderate libertarian” right, whatever the heck those labels actually mean in practice, is clearly however not compatible with this new mass program, at f*cking all. Now obviously I can’t speak for the larger American left, and I’m not trying to here in this essay. But if I have to choose between a strategy that I know has failed twice and alienates pretty much everyone in our community under the age of forty, and a vibrant, youthful dissident movement that has already forced some minor concessions on the climate crisis issue (by putting feet on the ground, as opposed to yelling on Youtube might I add,) I know which direction I think we should choose immediately – and so do you.
Look, Jimmy Dore might be a great guy, he’s certainly got a large platform online and I know from personal experience that watching him tear strips off crypto-conservative Democratic Party ghouls and lanyards is viscerally satisfying. An American left that features guys like Dore in a constant flak-generating, oppositional position is probably better for the experience, although it would help if he’d stop pretending independent or libertarian populism is a thing that we should be exploring more in response to neoliberal f*ckery. He is not however suited to be the face of anything, he shouldn’t be partnering with our political candidates on initiatives we consider meaningful, and ignoring these truths is just going to scare away the kind of people we need to be bringing into our core organizations if we want to actually defeat capitalism and win.
So, for the second time this article Jimmy please let me say that I’m sorry, but even if the larger American left declares war on neoliberalism right now, over this Medicare for All proposal, I still think you should sit this project out, and maybe even consider re-branding as more socially left before you rejoin the discussion. In the end, it’s a class war and the collaborators on the “populist” right have already chosen their side whether they know it or not; foxhole fighting demands solidarity, or we will, like so many American left wing movements before us, be buried together in the pet cemetery of Turtle Island liberalism.
You’ve gotta get left-er, or you’ll get left behind my good man; same as it ever was.
– nina illingworth
