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Just Win Baby

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Sam Adler-Bell’s essay urging the left to avoid its all-too-typical purity politics and embrace a strategy of winning is the best thing you will read all day. A couple of choice excerpts.

Hegemonic contest means being unafraid to engage with political structures and symbols that already exist. On this view, running in Democratic primaries is better than insisting on our own ballot line; changing the meaning of the American flag is better than burning it. It’s not that the Democratic Party is good or burning flags is wrong. Rather, it’s that the Party’s infrastructure and the flag’s symbolic potency are both too useful to cede to our opponents. As Max Berger, an organizer with “All of Us” recently told me, “The left will never control America the country if we can’t take control of ‘America’ the idea.” Donald Trump and Steve Bannon have a definition of America—who’s in it and who’s out. So do the Clintons. We need our own.

Building political power is not just a matter of telling the right story. It involves organizing, building numbers. On this front, Smucker offers some concise, practical advice: “Develop a core and a broader base; build a culture and a system of plugging new members into meaningful and capacity-building roles; maintain an outward focus so as to avoid insularity, and engage with existing infrastructure [and networks] rather than constantly starting from scratch.” This last point is crucial. We can’t recruit a mass movement one-by-one. We should think of our organizations as vehicles for mobilizing existing blocs, allowing people to take action as teachers, as union members, as Quakers, as students. These blocs will be compelled to take action with us if we have presented a compelling enough counter-narrative: a story about the world we want, an inclusive “we” in which they see themselves, a vivid “them” in which they see their enemies.

And we’ll have to offer them both a compelling moral vision and a believable strategic agenda for achieving it. In the words of historian Katrina Forrester, “Feminist and progressive politics can’t survive on defensive strategies alone.… A vision of a better life matters just as much.” The wisdom the left has to offer the Trump resistance is exactly this: that fear will not sustain us. “Fear might get people in the door the first hour,” I recently heard organizer and educator Mariame Kaba say, “but you’re going to lose them in the twelfth hour.” We need an alternative vision, a shared purpose, and a plan.

There are those who believe that articulating—and forcing the Democrats to articulate—an unapologetic left vision will divide the opposition. But history (including the history of the Tea Party) suggests the opposite strategy: the best way to obstruct the ruling party’s agenda is to intransigently embrace the values of the base. What’s more, the notion that a purely defensive strategy is adequate suggests that the hegemony that preceded Trump was acceptable. It wasn’t. The problem with a resistance movement organized exclusively around opposition to Trump is not only that such a vision is not sustaining; the problem is that America wasn’t “already great.”

The whole thing is fantastic and true. Leftists wearing their politics like a tattoo, showing off the individual righteousness while refusing to engage in the dirtiness of building winning campaigns is a strategy for losing.

It’s also why Bernie Sanders is an unacceptable candidate for the Democratic nomination in 2020. I love much about Bernie but a winning campaign in 2020 requires a few things. First, it requires the left finding a candidate that brings multiple factions of the Democratic Party together. Given that Hillary partisans hate Bernie (or more accurately they hate BernieBros) nearly as much as Bernie partisans hate Hillary, Sanders is not the candidate to unite the party. Not at all. Moreover, of any major figure in the Democratic Party, Sanders is the most old-school leftist that speaks really well to angry white men, but badly struggles to understand why the concerns of people of color and women are as important as the class war and, more importantly, struggles to communicate with those voters. This is why the idea that Bernie would have easily defeated Trump makes no sense. Not only does it assume that somehow the Republican hate machine couldn’t adjust to a socialist who has said many inflammatory things over the years, but even if Bernie would do better among white men in Scranton and Erie, he probably can’t get even the depressed turnout of black voters in Detroit and Milwaukee. Saying Bernie would have won is just a self-fulfilling fantasy. Maybe he would have, maybe he wouldn’t have, but it’s far from obvious and all saying this serves is to relitigate the primary in a way that justifies your own position.

No, the leftist candidate in 2020 needs to be someone else. Elizabeth Warren is fairly obvious the best choice as she probably would unite the party like no other. Keith Ellison would be a fascinating candidate. Perhaps more likely would be the left getting behind someone like Kirsten Gillibrand running a really progressive campaign. The great fear of course would be the left settling on someone else, calling Gillibrand a hopeless neoliberal, and we relive 2016 all over again, even after seeing 4 years of Trump. In fact, I don’t think there’s much evidence that won’t happen, especially if the left doesn’t take Adler-Bell’s advice to heart. The movement has to be big, it has to unite a lot of different kinds of people, and it can’t primarily about making sure you are happy with a candidate’s purity.

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