Just my luck that all the progressive DSA-backed candidates I found most annoying or wrongheaded seem to have won their primary campaigns this cycle; whereas I was finally starting to warm to Francesca Hong in Wisconsin—and now she's the only one that's lost.
Hong was an interesting case since she seemed to get backlash from all sides.
"Moderates" and party establishment types predictably warned that her views were too far left to win a general election—and perhaps they're right about that.
But interestingly, the newly rampant left populist rebels seem to have wanted to disavow Hong as well. They criticized her for indulging in what they saw as "woke 1" identity politics, instead of hewing to the new preferred talking points.
Translated, I think this means that she was supposed to have gotten the memo that we only care about class war and Israel now; whereas Hong dared to talk about issues like police, prisons, deportations, and race.
When grasping for an example of Hong's alleged "wokeness," after all—most left-wing populists of the formerly-Platner-supporting variety would point to Hong's criticism of Thanksgiving, which she said caused some people "pain" in our "communities."
Okay, but hasn't it?
The left populist critique of Hong seems thus to boil down to: hasn't she heard? We don't talk about Native Americans and their tortured history in this country anymore. We only care about gas prices and Israel!
Oddly enough, then, both the establishment centrists and the left populists seem to agree that Democrats are only supposed to talk about "pocketbook issues" from now on (as E.J. Dionne pointed out yesterday)*.
Except that the populists add one special carve-out for the sole identity-based issue they still care about: Israel (and I've suggested before what unfortunately might be behind that).
On this one topic, the left populists still practice "cancel culture" like it's "peak woke" all over again—except only against Jewish politicians who support ending military aid to Israel and agree that Israel's actions in Gaza are very very bad and indefensible but who don't use exactly the preferred verbal formula to denounce them.
On everything else, meanwhile, the "moderates" and the left populists are basically on the same page at this point: talk about class, talk about affordability. Don't drag us back into the "culture war" by bringing up all these other issues that are just a real bummer and an electoral loser.
But it seems to me that police, prisons, deportations, and racial injustice—even if they are indeed bummers—are also all things that still haunt our society. We're going to have to figure them out at some point.
To be sure, I never thought simply "abolishing" police and prisons was an answer either; but it's not like police brutality and killings and hideous prison conditions improved the moment our culture got bored with "wokeness" after the summer of 2020.
ICE violence is worse than ever, meanwhile.
And the conservative right is actively dismantling as we speak all the gains of the civil rights movement from the past sixty-plus years—including the Voting Rights Act, and even things as basic as anti-discrimination protections for Black workers.
Trans people aren't suddenly going to stop existing either, no matter how inconvenient both "mods" and "populists" suddenly seem to find their presence in our society.
Even if we wish "identity politics" would go away as issues, then—escaping them is not an option for people whose lives and freedom are in fact being circumscribed on the basis of their identities—by our current far-right political rulers.
If the objection to Hong really just boiled down to the fact that she talked about these groups and cared about their rights, then I'm with Hong, even if it means losing elections. Better to serve in heaven than reign in hell.
If the alternative, after all, is for the left to start doing its own version again of "tough on crime" and "tough on the border" rhetoric and "to beat / The enemy, model ourselves on the enemy," to quote Louis MacNeice—then woe, woe, unto us!
Julian Benda writes in his book The Treason of the Intellectuals that it is the duty of society's "clerks" to proclaim the values of peace, love, and fraternity, and other spiritual ideals—and it is the duty of politicians and the state to tell them to go drink hemlock.
Hong's crime in the eyes of the "mods," the political consultant class, and the post-Platnerian populists alike appears to have been above all that she dared to talk about these unrealizable transcendent ideals of social justice.
And she has been sent to the hemlock for it. She "took the bitter drink," as John Dos Passos put it—the fate of all prophets and reformers who care about higher things—
Like that other Wisconsinite of yesteryear, La Follette—similarly denounced for being behind the times and missing the memo about his party's new priorities, after he kept opposing the war that Wilson had decided the country needed.
As Dos Passos recounts in The 42nd Parallel (volume one of the U.S.A. trilogy), Wilson denounced La Follette as a member of a "little group of willful men expressing no opinion but their own," when he refused to vote for Wilson's armaments bill.
La Follette was "peak woke," in other words. He was dragging the party down with all his "woke 1" hangups about peace and international fraternity—"haranguing from the capitol of a lost republic" (Dos Passos) instead of moving with the times.
It's the fate of all those who fail to move on in this fashion, and keep harping on the betrayed values of the past, to be turned into pillars of salt.
Count me with these outdated characters, then—for they are the salt of the earth. As Anna Akhmatova wrote of their original:
Who will grieve for this woman? Does she not seem
too insignificant for our concern?
Yet in my heart I never will deny her,
who suffered death because she chose to turn. (Kunitz/Hayward trans.)
__
*Dionne in his column also suggests a long-overdue "synthesis," which I endorse, to get past the division between those John Ganz has called the "anti-alarmist" progressive left and the resistance liberals like me who think we really should be alarmed about Trump and his agenda.
"[T]he left typically argues that while Mr. Trump is dangerous, he is more symptom than cause of the country’s problems," (ak.a., the "anti-alarmist" position); "More centrist Democrats tend to insist that the Trump catastrophe is unique in our history," writes Dionne.
The "synthesis" he offers is to recognize that, one: "The left is correct that Democrats need to offer voters far more than an end to Trumpism and a restoration of the earlier status quo," but also that, two: "Mr. Trump is [...] also singularly corrupt, incompetent and dangerous to democracy."
In other words, as Arthur Koestler once put it: "[T]o defend our system against a deadly threat does not imply acceptance of everything in this system, does not imply giving up the long-term fight to improve it," but at the same time, "our criticism of the shortcomings of this system does not free us from the duty to defend it, despite its ambiguous grayness, against the total corruption of the human ideal."
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