Primary Season

 I sometimes feel I must be the last Democratic voter in the country who has not been obsessing over the primary election in Michigan. I have no strong feelings about who should win, and mostly just want this contest to be over so we can focus on what seems to me the bigger issue here: namely, that Donald Trump and a supine Republican majority are dismantling our democracy.

When I awoke this morning to see that the race was still deadlocked, I let out a groan: this—the lack of a resolution—was the only possible outcome I distinctly did not want. 

Ever since 2016, I've been wondering when we can be done with intra-party fighting and get around to focusing on Trump. In that primary season, I preferred Bernie. But when he lost the primary I said—okay, well Clinton is the candidate, right? And as much as we may dislike her, she's better than the alternative. Time to link arms in a Popular Front! 

It didn't happen. 

2020 rolled around. I backed Elizabeth Warren in the primaries. Democratic voters around the country felt differently. So I said: okay, well, Joe Biden is our man. I'm all for him! 

He won that race; but the next time around, the Left seemed more furious at him and Harris than they were fearful of the specter of a potential Trump return. I heard progressive voters swear up and down that they would sit out the 2024 election as a protest over Gaza. I said: "you all have no idea what a Trump re-election would mean!" 

Here we are in 2026—a mass pardon for January 6 rioters, the weaponization of the entire executive branch—including the Justice Department—to persecute Trump's political foes, multiple foreign invasions and wars of aggression, extrajudicial killings, mass deportations to secret prisons abroad and the growth of sprawling administrative detention camps on U.S. soil later... and who, I ask, was right? 

As Hunter S. Thompson warned leftist voters in the 1972 race, the country wasn't just looking at "four more years of Nixon, but Nixon's last four years in politics—completely unshackled [...] If he wins in November, he will finally be free to do whatever he wants [...] It conjures up images of Papa Doc, Batistia, Somoza; jails full of bewildered 'political prisoners'[.]"

"There may not be much difference between Democrats and Republicans;" Thompson wrote, "I have made that argument myself [...] But only a blind geek [...] could miss the difference between McGovern and Richard Nixon. [... T]he difference is so vast that anybody who can't see it deserves whatever happens to them if Nixon gets re-elected[.]"

The same goes for anyone on the left in 2016 who couldn't see the difference between Clinton and Trump, or who still—even with a whole Trump presidency then under our belts—couldn't see the difference between Harris and Trump either, in 2024. 

A foundational political text for me throughout my life has been Arthur Koestler's contribution to The God That Failed. In particular—Koestler's description of his time in Germany in the early 1930s—watching as the Communist Party preferred to split the Left rather than unite to defeat Hitler; watching as one half of the German left devoted more ink to attacking Social Democrats than the Nazis. 

Every time in the last decade of Trump-centric American political life that I've seen the left coalition arguing with itself rather than keeping their eyes glued to Trump, I have feared that history was repeating itself. 

Of course, some progressives will argue that they are the ones best positioned to defeat Trump, and that taking down the "Democratic Establishment" is simply part of what it takes to achieve this. 

I have never really followed this. I don't know why everyone was so mad at Chuck Schumer last year. There are only so many things a party can do when it's in the minority—all the more so when one of our two legislative chambers has a 60-vote threshold for most legislative business. 

For a while the argument was that Schumer ought to shut down the government. And eventually he did. And it kinda worked (to my surprise). 

So why are people still mad at him again? 

Progressives and DSA-backed candidates insist that they would actually be more "electable" than Establishment "mods," if they could only make it past the party "gatekeepers" in the primaries. 

This seems at best like an untested hypothesis—since they have only won so far in party primaries within the safest Democratic congressional districts in the country. 

As evidence, though, they point to the failure of "centrist" and "Establishment" candidates in the 2016 and 2024 general elections. 

But the Matt Yglesii of the world would say that Harris lost in part because her positions on policy issues were actually to the left of the "median voter." 

So to run candidates even further to the left next time around would be hurting, not helping. 

It's the bane of my political existence too, but it's quite possible—for all that—that what the David Shors of the world have been saying all this time is actually true: politicians can't just win by "mobilizing" their own "base," but have to actually persuade a few of those mysterious "swing voters"—whose psychology makes so little sense to the rest of us. 

As James Russell Lowell laments in the Biglow Papers:

 [E]very fool knows thet a man represents

Not the fellers thet sent him, but them on the fence,—

Impartially ready to jump either side

An' make the fust use of a turn o' the tide,— 

The simple truth is that the positions reflected in the DSA platform are not those of the median voter, at least if you believe the polling. 

And so even if "Medicare for All" would be a better policy than some public option or ACA-reform package favored by more Establishment-lane candidates—it will make no difference if the people holding these views can't win over enough voters to get a majority in either chamber in the first place. 

My own view is that progressive candidates might be more right on health care than the "mods"—but either policy agenda would be far preferable to another Republican majority; so if DSA-backed candidates can't win—what difference do all their disagreements with the "Establishment" amount to anyway? 

Some progressives seem to think that you can win a general election in this country despite—or perhaps even because of—having unpopular and deeply polarizing views. 

After all, it worked for the Trump administration. The whole country right now is being run by a gang of Groyper fanatics whose political beliefs seem entirely derived from Neo-Nazi message boards. These are not popular views with mainstream Americans either. 

It has been said that the full package of beliefs reflected in the DSA platform would probably be endorsed by only about 2% of Americans. But progressives willing to bite the bullet on that can fire back—with some validity—that the full package of weirdo Stephen Miller white nationalist beliefs is also endorsed by only about 2% of Americans. But somehow, they're the ones running the country. 

And indeed—doing polarizing, provocative, and outrageous things seems to work in the far-right's favor. Every horrible headline, every news cycle provoking gasping, agonized commentary from establishment pundits, just win them more attention. There's no such thing as bad publicity, they say. 

In her recent interview with Ezra Klein, Maggie Haberman describes how members of the Trump White House would do things like deliberately set snuff-film videos of extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean to the music of liberal artists—in the hopes of eliciting a shocked and appalled reaction from the latter. 

"[T]hen that's another news cycle for them," Klein observes. 

"Correct," Haberman replies. "One of the things that Jared Kushner used to tell people in the White House last time was that he would describe what he called Trump rules, and one of them was: Controversy elevates message."

Well, even the great Saul Alinksy said that if you want to get your point across, you have to "polarize the issue." 

I just don't think he ever intended his advice to be used to promote extrajudicial murders of Trinidadian fishermen. 

A lot of progressive candidates, then, seem to think that they can capture and wield that same kind of energy—except for the Left. If "Controversy elevates message," they say, then arguing that DSA positions are nominally unpopular misses the point. 

After all, as David Shor has explained, a lot of Trump's statements and views are unpopular on the merits; but they always drive attention, and somehow people are just left at the end of it with a hazy impression that Trump is against the people they are against and is fighting on their side. 

If it works for Trump, why couldn't it work for the Left? Why shouldn't we stir up controversy with outrageous and hyperbolic versions of our own policy positions and reap the rewards?

And indeed, some progressives appear to be trying to put this theory into practice by experimenting with a kind of Groyperism of the Left. A recent New York Times write-up of a DSA Summit sounds like a meeting of the New York Young Republicans—except instead of Nazi jokes they are making Stalinist ones. 

Much as Gen Z GOP operatives will say in public: "how dare you call me a Nazi?"—and then "joke" in their "private" chat groups about firing up the cremation ovens and the gas chambers—so too, DSA members denounce any comparison of their views to Stalin as red-baiting in public—but then go to their summits and make a bunch of tankie references and North Korea puns. 

The DSA, let us recall, was actually founded to be a specifically democratic socialist counterweight on the left to totalitarian Stalinism and Soviet-aligned Communism. 

And in a recent interview designed for the educated public, the founder of Jacobin reassured his interviewer—Ross Douthat—"My tradition on the American left is very aware of Stalinism, of authoritarianism, of its threat."

But then, these DSA members get behind closed doors with one another and put a hat on a stuffed stag and call it "Deer Leader." A reference to the Kim dynasty, you see, that has been starving and tyrannizing over the subject population of North Korea for generations, har har har. 

I'm not saying no one can ever get away with a North Korea joke. The Kim family's rule is pretty bizarre and flamboyant and lends itself to parody. 

But I am saying that if people out there fear that your party is a trojan horse for Stalinism, then hinting and giggling with each other behind closed doors about how yeah, actually, we might be Stalinists, is kind of a bad look—in much the same way that MAGA Republicans making jokes about being Nazis is a little too on-the-nose. 

But of course—again—some people will say that the outrageousness is the point. "Controversy elevates message." It worked for Trump. Let's make it work for us!

I am skeptical, however. To be sure, I see how this dynamic works for the Right. But that, in my view, is because the Right can appeal to the political Id. Its fundamental pitch is to a kind of basic selfishness, aggression, and fear of outsiders that exists in all of us: A god-almighty devil singing small,

Who would like to shout and whistle in the street,

And squelch the passers flat against the wall; to quote John Davidson. 

Since this right-wing Id exists in every human heart, more or less, I see how "polarizing" messages that shock the Superego might nonetheless succeed in stirring something atavistic in the median voter. (The "appeal to the pre-rational, totemistic mentality," as Koestler put it.)

Where, by contrast, is the Id-appeal for the Left? 

People often argue that a sufficiently populist left could succeed in stirring the Id of the average voter too, because it would motivate them to take out their fury on the rich. The Left too can appeal to a kind of self-interest, after all—at least for people who have so far been left out of the advantages of capitalist society; namely: class interest. 

But even that small move from racial tribalism to broader class-consciousness or "worker internationalism" requires a level of abstraction and lateral expansion that elevates the message above the pure Id. 

It requires some basic lesson in solidarity: we have see that, instead of turning on each other or blaming other poor people and workers, our true class enemy is... etc. 

Even to make this small logical step requires the intervention of higher order reasoning. It takes a word of admonition from the Superego. 

Whereas the Right doesn't even need to do that much. They can just say: our group should win, and devil take the hindmost. 

There is a sense, then, in which fascism to many people just sounds like a good time (especially if they fancy themselves to be a member of the dominant in-group and the future "master race"). 

Whereas—where's the joy in North Korea? Becoming a Stalinist Orwellian state just sounds like a bleak, grey, high-rise bummer. 

Socialists are simply not as good at having fun, as Orwell himself was among the first to observe. 

The Left, then, has just never had as much success with "pure Id" style appeals, because recognizing a shared class interest across racial and national groups already requires some impulse higher than mere Id. (My own preferred solution, then, would just be to accept that we are a Superego party of rationality and conscience, and lean into it—since all people do have these features of their personality too, as much as they all have an Id; but we seem to be moving in the opposite direction at the moment.)  

Koestler provides an example in his Scum of the Earth. He describes an incident in which Blum's Popular Front government in France sought to appeal to farmers by increasing their subsidies. This, in Koestler's telling, just made them hate him more, because they concluded that "Blum and his Jews" evidently have money to burn, and so must be holding out on them. 

Apparently group hatred proved to be much more effective at activating the political Id than "class interest," yet again. 

Koestler concludes, in words that today's DSA supporters should heed: "I had imagined I knew the proletariat—now I realise that those I met at Party-meetings, in C.P. cells, etc. were exceptions [...] In three weeks I have learned more about mass psychology than in seven years of Communist busy-bodying. Good God! In what an imaginary world we have lived." 

This is why, as Ernest Gellner argues in Nations and Nationalism, class struggles in industrialized countries never seem to amount to anything unless they are given some "national" or "ethnic" dimension. 

To be sure, Marxist revolutions have succeeded in taking power in pre-industrial countries—where they then often proceed to operate as merely a strategy for forced industrialization on the most brutal terms. 

But once modern economic development sets in, in Gellner's telling, people tend to imagine that they will be beneficiaries of the new social mobility—unless they can convince themselves that there is some other ethnic group hogging all the spoils who have artificially boxed them out. 

"It was the social chasms created by early industrialism, and by the unevenness of its diffusion," he summarizes, "that made [nationalist conflict] acute. Those social chasms were probably no worse than those which agrarian society tolerates without batting an eyelid, but [...] they occurred in a context which in other ways encouraged hope and the expectation of equality, and which required mobility. Whenever cultural differences served to mark off these chasms, there was trouble indeed. When they did not, nothing much happened." 

I was asking a friend the other day why "Eat the Rich" populism on the Left never seems to work quite so well with American voters as right-wing racist populism. Why can't we just substitute "billionaires" and "oligarchs" for immigrants and racial out-groups in our political demonology, as so many on the populist Left try to do, and manage to ride this hatred to our own demagogic success? 

My friend replied: "It's because everyone in America thinks they are just temporarily embarrassed millionaires." It may not be the reality of social mobility that prevents economic populist revolution—but the illusion of it alone can sometimes suffice. 

This off-the-cuff theory from my friend tallies with Gellner's account. So long as people feel that there is social mobility that includes "people like them"—people belonging to their ethnic and racial and cultural group—"nothing much happens." There is no populist revolution. It is only when the social struggle can be given a national or ethnic dimension that the upheaval amounts to anything—because people see a racial "other" as monopolizing the rewards of capitalist competition and boxing them out. 

The notorious historical example would be how the Great Depression in the '30s never generated a new socialist revolution in the advanced industrial countries—but gave rise instead to antisemitism and extreme nationalism. 

In his immortal parody of the Horatio Alger narrative, A Cool Million (published in the midst of the Depression), Nathanael West depicts the rise and fall of the demagogue Shagpoke. 

The latter starts out preaching the virtues of capitalism because it allows any man to rise from rags to riches through "hard work" alone. When Shagpoke is inevitably disappointed in these expectations, however, he turns not against capitalism, but against "the Jews." 

"'Anti-Semitism is the socialism of the stupid,' the phrase once went," as Gellner writes. "though it was not conspicuously echoed in the days of the [...] Polish purges of 1968"—when a nominally "Marxist" government in the Soviet bloc persecuted and expelled Jewish intellectuals on the suspicion of being "Zionists." 

If any of what Gellner and Koestler and I have said above is true, I do think it's a little troubling that the defining issue of this Democratic primary season has been Israel. 

Could this be a round-about attempt to capture the one appeal to the baseline racist "Id" that the Left might possibly have in its arsenal? The one group-hatred it can exploit for its own ends? 

If it's really true that "class struggle" never seems to amount to anything until it can be given a racial or ethnic dimension—then might not the Left be feeling its way toward making this election a single-issue Israel campaign, because talking about "gas prices" and "affordability" has in fact proved not to be a sufficiently galvanizing, Id-based issue, and this is the one point on which the Left can actually approximate to something like racial and nationalistic politics? 

Before we go too far down that train of thought, let me say that on the merits I actually agree with the "progressive" position on this issue, more or less. I absolutely support ending military aid to Israel. I would have endorsed ending military aid to Israel any time in the last twenty-plus years of my politically-conscious life—if anyone had ever taken my vote on the subject. 

Israel is unambiguously an apartheid state at this point, and they are committing at least an ethnic cleansing in the occupied territories and southern Lebanon. Meanwhile, as Noah Smith has observed—even from a purely realpolitik standpoint, Israel has not been a helpful ally to the United States lately.

Why would we still be spending taxpayer money to support their wars, which have been waged with a total absence of proportionality and humanity, have no end in sight, have been harming our interests in the region, and which Israel seems anyway to be perfectly able to prosecute on their own, since they are a nuclear-armed power, and their current leadership has suggested becoming a "Super-Sparta," and all that. 

There doesn't seem to be any rational case for sending them military aid at this point, that I can think of. 

Let me also add, to pro-Israel politicians who accuse progressives of being weirdly fixated on the issue, that this argument cuts both ways. I can see a case for making our U.S. politics less about Israel one way or the other—but a "let's just not get involved" approach would, if anything, tend to require not providing military aid to Israel. The argument that we should send future rounds of aid, by contrast, would require an explanation for why U.S. taxpayers should care more about Israel, not why they should care less about it...

Having said all that, it is indeed weird and eyebrow-raising that Israel looms as large as it does in our politics, especially at a time like this. 

I think future historians will struggle to explain why, at the precise moment that a right-wing would-be autocrat was remaking the U.S. federal government, prosecuting his critics, consolidating media, stripping hundreds of thousands of their legal status, waging "mass deportation" campaigns, fighting multiple dead-end wars of aggression and imperialism abroad, and enriching himself to the tune of billions of dollars—the main issue people were talking about on the Left was something happening in another country on the other side of the world. 

Huge segments of the progressive Left in this country do indeed seem genuinely much more interested in arguing about the state of Israel's democracy than our own. And that's odd. 

I would be okay with us calling a truce on the matter and saying—as Matt Yglesias has long recommended—"okay, let's just focus a lot less on Israel and put their actions into the same mental category that we do other horrendous humanitarian situations around the world over which we have little direct control or ability to influence the outcome," such as the appalling civil war in Sudan.

But such a truce would require action on the part of the self-described "pro-Israel" Democrats who support military aid too, as I said above. A truly "neutral" position on the Israel-Palestine dilemma would mean not spending any U.S. taxpayer funds on aiding Israel's military—but this is precisely the position that has already been labeled as the "extreme" Left or progressive position, not the neutral one. 

This is part of the reason why, as Noah Millman wrote earlier this year on his Substack, "'why are you so obsessed with me?' is never a very compelling form of response to criticism [... and] one could also invert its valence." 

If part of the "moderate" argument against the "progressive" position on Israel, after all, is that progressives are too "obsessed" with the country, then they need to agree to stop advocating for an active U.S. role in supporting Israel, and embrace genuine neutrality. 

Millman caveats his point too, however, by noting that: "That doesn’t mean [people who make this argument are] wrong that there is a kind of obsession in play, nor about the nature of the obsession."

And here too, I basically agree with him. 

There is an "obsession" involved on the "progressive" side of this issue too, and while it can't just be reduced to pure anti-semitism, it's not solely about an altruistic concern about Palestinians' human rights either. 

I can't escape the feeling that having tried and failed for the umpteenth time to get a left-wing populist movement going, the Left has sensed on some inchoate, gut-instinct level that they will never be able to gin up the political Id with purely race-neutral and universalistic appeals to class-interest. Those things require the Superego. 

In order to get a little bit of that Id action that has worked so well for the MAGA Right, they need to sprinkle in just a hint of nationalistic and ethnic flavor. And the only thing they have lying close to hand is the tinge, the consciously-denied aroma that always hangs over any argument about Israel, of anti-semitism. 

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em, the thinking seems to go. If the Right always seems to win by appealing to atavistic racism and group hatreds, let's see if we've got any of those in the left-wing toolbox. 

If the Right can gin people up and get them excited with covert Nazism, what kind of swastikas do we have in our attic? 

But if the only way to beat the Nazis is to become Nazis ourselves, then there is nothing left to choose between them, and I for one choose neither.*

For Koestler too, this was the last straw. He was disappointed enough in the Communist Party in 1932 when it sabotaged the rest of the Left and thereby enabled Hitler to take power. But then there was the glorious Popular Front period, when it seemed like they had learned from their mistakes. 

But then, mere years after this, came the Hitler-Stalin Pact. That's when Koestler said: "okay, I'm out."  

"F]rom then onward I no longer cared whether Hitler’s allies called me a counter-revolutionary," as he wrote in his memoirs. 

So too, if the only way the Left can think of to defeat the Right is to become ever more like them—

...in order to beat

The enemy, model ourselves on the enemy,

A howling radio for our paraclete, as Louis MacNeice put it—

—then we've undermined the whole reason we were fighting them in the first place. 

Better far, as Dwight Macdonald writes in The Root is Man, to let one's "end [...] be congruent with [one's] means, so that he could view the situation with clear eyes and a whole heart, free from the befuddling and stultifying evasions and compromises which the Progressive must resort to in such a situation."

__

*Fortunately—for now—we're not there yet, and everyone should absolutely back any DSA-approved candidate in their district if they are the only alternative to the GOP; I'm just saying that we could get to that point where there is nothing to choose between them, if we go too far down this road.