Have a voice in your own future
Brian Beutler cautions against lefties shooting themselves in the foot in 2024:
The 2000 election turned out as it did in part because a small but decisive number of voters convinced themselves the major parties were fundamentally similar and similarly unappealing. (Plus the whole Supreme-Court-stopping-the-count thing.)
The consequences have shaped the entirety of my adult life; for people of a certain age—my age and just a bit older—the lessons against complacency and collapsing important distinctions have proven lifelong.
To see something very similar happen based on similarly lazy thinking in 2016 was a history-repeating trauma. One fateful hinge point ought to have been enough to create a whole oral tradition and stigma against falling into the same traps. Casting enough protest votes to hand Republicans a slim electoral-college victory against the popular will, only to watch them wreck the country, ought to be prime Fool Me Once material—the kind of thing that should be off the table for decades, to say nothing of twice more in two decades.
“Is our children learning?” is now folklore as a result of 2000, and still an operative question for the left.
But here we are in 2024 staring down the real possibility that it will happen again just like it did eight years ago, and 16 years before that. It’s even possible to imagine that enough Biden-2020 voters will defect or stay home to hand Trump outright victory.
Part of the reason this madness is on the table is that as the progressive movement has matured, it has overtrained activists to think of politics as little more than a series of high-stakes leverage standoffs: Condition support for candidates on a particular set of policies, threatening their electability if they dissent, and discipline officeholders by leveling similar threats whenever they veer from those priorities.
Beutler is referencing Joe Biden and Gaza. He’s appalled by what’s happening there and by his veering from “strong-if-wary support to reluctant or resigned support.” But:
I thus align myself with politicians like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, and thinkers like Mehdi Hasan, who dispense withering criticism, but also consider the whole picture, and prioritize harm reduction above all else.
Strategy on the activist left sometimes feels to me like a self-defeating “until your face turns blue” or “hasten the revolution” arrangement. Beutler concurs:
In American elections, progressives threatening to withhold their votes for Biden are playing the spoiler just like Manchin—except instead of coming up empty on an infrastructure bill, we’ll get Donald Trump. Some leftists will claim to prefer that outcome and were just waiting for a pretext to oppose Biden. They imagine, wrongly, that they’ll have more clout in the political system if he loses. Others are happy to let Trump burn the whole place down, “after Hitler, our turn”-style. This essay is obviously not for them.
People canvassing our neighborhood are over-concerned with having a doorstep response to the Gaza War. This week, one father lamented that his kids say they won’t vote because Biden-Gaza. Being lefties, canvassers want to arrive armed with a curated set of talking points for beating back that argument. That’s a waste of time and effort.
My response? Fine. Don’t vote for Joe Biden then. Go to vote the rest of the ballot. There will be over three dozen Democrats running on our fall ballot, from governor down to the school board. The GOP council of state slate in North Carolina is a cavalcade of Christian nationalists and MAGA election deniers crazier than any I’ve seen. Standing up to them are Democrats committed to public service, to equality and justice for all, to preserving the environment and ending gun violence. They are making personal sacrifices to serve their communities. There are a state supreme court seat and district court seats on the ballot, state legislative seats and city council and county commission races that will impact your life and your children’s for years to come. Don’t abandon your advocates because you’re pissed off about Gaza and Joe Biden.
What will objectors really do with the presidential race when they get into the voting booth? Guess.
And remember the dedicated election officials putting their necks on the line in the face of extremist threats so you can have a voice in your own future.
There are quite a lot of them. Hundreds of thousands, in fact.
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