A Merely Defensive Battle

 Staying in my parents' condo this summer, I happened to see on the wall a framed photo of Chicago's Grant Park—taken during Barack Obama's 2008 Election Night victory celebration. My family and I were in an apartment overlooking the park that night, and we heard the cheers go up across the city. Seeing the photo cast my mind back to the scene—from what was probably the best summer and fall of my political life. 

I happened to graduate high school and start college that same year—in the same city where Obama held his election night victory rally (and where he had resided as a law school professor before running for office as Illinois's junior senator). I had seen Obama speak on the campaign trail. To me—and everyone else—he represented the end of the long night of the Bush administration and a chance for both racial healing and social progress for our country. 

That summer and fall was probably the most hopeful I've ever been about the future of the country. And it was probably the proudest I've ever felt to belong to a political party. Looking back on that night in Grant Park in 2008, I think of a line from Vachel Lindsay—about another inspiring political campaign over a century earlier—"we were fairy Democrats, and this was our day," as he said of Bryan's campaign on a "Free Silver" ticket.

Even in that fairy tale summer, though—there were warnings, for those who listened. I attended the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly that year, and the denomination's annual Ware Lecture—a storied institution—featured Van Jones (speaking before his CNN career, not to mention his stint in the Obama White House before his temporary cancellation for some off-kilter remarks on 9/11). Jones's message for us liberals on that occasion: "1) You're about to win; and 2) You're about to mess up."

He was right. We did win. And—we did mess up. We always do. We messed up in part by being imperfect. Obama accomplished many things during his time in office. But he also alienated parts of the Left by carrying on some (but not all) of the legally dubious aspects of the War on Terror. "Obama's drone strikes" became an easy target for the anti-Establishment Left, as well as a comfortable way to feel morally superior to those normie Democrats. 

And the most infuriating about the holier-than-thou Leftists—Greenwald, et al.—was, as always, that they weren't wrong. 

The heady days of the "fairy Democrats" were over. 

But the righteous Leftists "messed up" too—just as surely as the normie Democrats did. They messed up why spiraling so deeply into their hatred of imperfect Democrats that they lost sight of the bigger problem: Republican authoritarianism. The same Republican authoritarianism that had tortured people and disappeared them to black sites under Bush—and which is now disappearing people to unknown fates in South Sudan and other countries. 

Obama—for all his flaws—at least shut down the Bush torture program. He at least ended the extraordinary renditions (even if he kept up the drone strikes and never did manage to close Guantanamo—in part because of the blockheaded interference of Congress). 

The same pattern repeated itself with Biden. I criticized him while in office as loudly as any righteous Leftist. I condemned him for maintaining Title 42 and for illegally shutting down asylum access outside ports of entry. 

But I wasn't so blinded by my disappointment in Biden that I ever allowed myself—even for a moment—to think that Trump would be no worse. Of course he would be worse. And lo, he has been. 

Biden may have partially shut down asylum—but he also offered humanitarian parole to millions of immigrants (and Democrats have paid for it ever since in the polls). He may have maintained weapon flows to Israel during the Gaza war—but he also sanctioned extremist settlers in the West Bank who have been inflicting lawless mob violence on Palestinian civilians. 

Whereas Trump—our Republican commander in chief—has disappeared 238 innocent people—without charge or trial—to indefinite confinement in a Salvadoran prison known for torturing its inmates. He has dropped eight people in South Sudan—without any due process or chance to make a case for protection under the Convention Against Torture—and they have now effectively disappeared. The New York Times reports that their families and attorneys have not heard from them since the U.S. Supreme Court allowed Trump to turn them over to the South Sudanese authorities. 

Are they missing? Are they dead? Will we ever know? 

It should not be hard to realize that this atrocity is worse than anything Biden or Obama ever did—or than just about anything any elected Democrat would do. A Republican in the White House is worse than a Democrat in the same place. 

And yet, many an anti-Establishment leftist stayed home last November, rather than cast a vote for the Harris ticket. 

Many on the Left say they reject the choice of the "lesser of two evils." They want an actual good to run for office. They want to roll the dice on a Leftist candidate—a "real progressive," etc.—even if it risks losing a national election. 

What's the point of just living from one defensive battle against authoritarian evil to the next? they want to know. We need something to inspire us. 

In Arthur Koestler's Scum of the Earth, he recounts his correspondence with a French Leftist who makes this same argument. Koestler's book describes the summer and fall of 1939, when Stalin signed his pact in blood with Hitler, and France capitulated to the Nazis shortly thereafter—certainly the worst year in the twentieth century, and quite possibly the low point of all modern human history. 

Koestler discusses at length in the book the mental acrobatics that Communist Party sympathizers were forced to resort to in those months, in order to explain Stalin's new tactical alliance with Hitler. 

Koestler's Leftist correspondent is disappointed, to be sure—as all the anti-Fascist Left had good reason to be—with the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. But he also half-heartedly defends it. He says that the bourgeois democracies are too corrupt and beholden to the capitalists to be worth preserving anyway. And as for Poland—how could one get excited about defending a country from aggression that was itself under the control of an antisemitic, quasi-authoritarian conservative regime? 

One is reminded mightily, in reading this back-and-forth, of the debates we have in our era. The anti-establishment Leftists will admit—if pressed—"sure, Trump is bad; Trump is a fascist." "But"—they will then add—"aren't the Democrats nearly as bad?" Or: "Sure, Putin is terrible and authoritarian—but look at Ukraine's Azov battalion, etc. Can we really get so hot and bothered about defending such a flawed democracy?"

And so, the anti-Establishment Leftists say—we have to stop trying to mobilize people merely to fight against Trump and Putin. Let's ignore those rightist authoritarians—and instead concentrate our fire on the normie Democrats and their Establishment candidates. Let's focus on getting rid of people like Andrew Cuomo, and running more people in elections like Zohran Mamdani—edgy left-wingers who will inspire the young people. 

This is what Koestler's Leftist correspondent says too: "Yes, we know what we are fighting against. But what are we fighting for? [.... C]an one fight without a banner to fight for?"

To which Koestler replies—as we all must today—"Yes, [emphasis added]"—because: "repeatedly in history men have had to fight a merely defensive battle, to preserve a state of affairs which was bad against a menace which was worse." 

This—in sum—is all I've been trying to tell the Leftists—throughout the last full decade now that Trump has been a candidate for, or occupant of, high office in this land. Every single time he runs, they say: meh, he's bad; but so are the Democrats. They ought to run Bernie. They ought to run Mamdani. They ought to run someone inspiring. Biden? Harris? Too normie. Who cares about them. I'll stay home. It's not enough to know what we're against. I need to know what we're for. I want to vote for something." 

And I say, in response—with Koestler—sorry, people. You are in fact obliged to settle. You have a moral obligation to choose the lesser of two evils. 

And if you protest against this—you are in no worse a position than other humans throughout history, who have often had to make such a choice. 

Time and again, as Koestler rightly observes, people have had to fight to preserve a flawed society—and what society is not flawed?—against the menace of forces who threaten to turn it into something far worse—far more barbarous. We are merely in another such a situation now. 

The days of the "fairy Democrats" are long gone. They will not perhaps come back. But I will always be willing to shoulder the burden of fighting on behalf of the Establishment Democrats; the boring Democrats; the normie Democrats—since it has always been clear to me, from the moment Trump came down the golden escalator in 2015—that he is infinitely worse and more dangerous than anything they could possibly throw at us. 

I, for one, do not consider myself too good or pure to be willing to wage a "merely defensive battle" on behalf of a flawed multiracial democracy against fascist authoritarians and white nationalists. Indeed, I say—bring it on.