Proletarian Voters?

 The "dirtbag" stream of the Left seems to be taking a victory lap after the results were finally announced in the Senate Democratic primary election in Michigan yesterday. They view Dr. Abdul El-Sayed's win as a vindication of the whole macho, aggro, "up yours" brand of politics they have been wanting to see take over the Left for a long time. 

"Chuck Schumer Eats Shit," was Ken Klippenstein's headline yesterday, responding to these events. So much for that "now is the time for everyone to come together and focus on the general election" speech that El-Sayed gave yesterday. 

Chuck Schumer, for his part, immediately endorsed El-Sayed after he won the primary, even though he hadn't been his preferred candidate. Schumer did what any good party leader would, that is to say, who sees the threat of another Republican majority under Donald Trump as a bigger concern than any political or stylistic differences currently dividing Democrats. 

What's less clear is that El-Sayed shares the same sense of priorities. "Sometimes he shows a little more joy in fighting Democrats than Republicans," as one Democratic strategist told the New York Times yesterday. 

If the message from the disaffected "dirtbag," Bernie bro branch of the left to the rest of the Democratic coalition is indeed "eat shit," then it's not at all clear that they see Donald Trump and the Republicans as a bigger problem than the "Establishment Democrats" they spend so time and energy fulminating against. 

As I discussed in the previous post, my big fear for years has been that the American Left will end up recapitulating all the mistakes of the German Left in the early 1930s. 

As Arthur Koestler wrote in his political memoirs, he could never understand why the Communist Party in Germany expended so much more breath and ink denouncing the Social Democrats—whom they smeared as "social fascists"—rather than linking arms with them to defeat the real fascists: the Nazis.

Couldn't they see that there was a straightforward moral hierarchy here? Whatever their differences with the Social Democrats, weren't the latter obviously better than the far-right alternative? 

"I had qualms about the Party line," Koestler writes in his contribution to The God That Failed; "—why, with Hitler ante portas, could we not come to an understanding with the Socialists? Why did we persist in calling them 'Social Fascists,' which drove them mad and made any collaboration with them impossible?" 

Why—in other words—at exactly the moment when a coalition was most needed to defeat Hitler, did they keep telling the SPD to go and "eat shit"?

Koestler's instructor in party doctrine "explained, with great patience, that the Party desired nothing more than to establish a United Proletarian Front with the Social Democratic masses, but unity had to start at the base, not at the top. The Social Democratic leaders were traitors[.]"

This seems to be roughly the attitude of the "dirtbag" far-Left backing El-Sayed. When accused of not keeping their eye on the prize of defeating Trump and of fracturing Democratic unity, they say that they are the only ones who can defeat Trump, and that they will both unify and expand the Democratic coalition by bringing in more disaffected voters who are furious at the "Establishment." 

This, indeed, appears to be El-Sayed's official theory of the case. As he reportedly told Michelle Goldberg earlier this week: "I have an alternative hypothesis [...] That people so hate the establishment on both sides of the aisle that they were willing to hold their nose and vote for Donald Trump twice, because if this really was a moderate state, Donald Trump is no moderate."

"[...] People are really pissing mad, really, really pissing mad [...] They don’t trust Democrats because they don’t feel like Democrats are actually going to fight for the things that Democrats say they want to fight for[.]"

On this theory, if you are angry enough against the "elites" and the "Establishment" of both parties you will activate the enthusiasm of your own base and bring in angry Trump voters from the other side who have just been looking for a "fighter"—and so the unity will "start at the base, not at the top," as Koestler's instructor in Party discipline told him. 

It's a bit of a problem for this theory, though, that rural voters, working class voters, and voters of color in Tuesday's primary largely voted for Haley Stevens—whereas El-Sayed's support primarily came from affluent college-educated white areas of the electorate. In other words, El-Sayed's opponent did much better among the demographics who were more likely to be disaffected Trump voters in 2024. 

This, unfortunately, seems to be true across the country. Progressive and DSA-backed candidates draw their biggest support not from the angry, overlooked, disaffected rural or proletarian voter with a high school education, but from people with graduate educations in well-heeled suburbs or coastal metropolises. 

There's nothing historically novel about that problem, of course. The phenomenon of the "parlour socialist," as Orwell put it, is as old as socialism itself. ("[W]e're all Socialists nowadays. But I don't see why you have to give all your money away and make friends with the lower classes," as one of them puts it in Orwell's Keep the Aspidistra Flying). 

But a lot of the DSA-aligned candidates just think this must be due to the fact that rural Michiganders and Wisconsinites haven't received the Gospel yet. Once they hear the good news, they will come around. 

As Michelle Goldberg wrote in the Times yesterday: the current democratic socialist candidate running for Wisconsin governor, Francesca Hong, "is a particularly stark example of the left-wing populist tendency to overestimate the popularity of its own positions. When I interviewed her earlier this year, I was unnerved by the way she either didn’t see or wouldn’t acknowledge that many of her views, regardless of their validity, are fairly marginal."

"[...] She thought that people in small towns and rural areas have a natural affinity for socialism because of the way neighbors took care of one another. 'There is this element of mutual aid and community care that is a big part of democratic socialism, that we aren’t always making that connection,' she said,"—in Goldberg's telling. 

I am reminded of the ex-Bolshevik locked up by the Stalinist secret police in Koestler's Darkness at Noon: "Our will was hard and pure, we should have been loved by the people. But they hate us. Why are we so odious and detested?" 

For generations, the populist Left has been proceeding on the simple assumption that their economic policies promote the class interest of the proletariat. So, if they could just get past all the "false consciousness" and capitalist lies and propaganda told against them, they could convert a bunch of the people currently voting for nationalist, right-wing, or fascist parties to their banner instead. 

They therefore see the recent victories of progressive or DSA-backed candidates in primary elections as proof that as soon as democratic socialist ideas are fairly presented and laid on the table as an option, people rally to them. 

Again, though—what about the evidence from polling and election returns that the people responsible for these recent electoral successes are not in fact working class Democratic voters with high school educations, but relatively well-off and well-educated ones? 

The populist Left has a way of simply not hearing about this—or if they do—choosing not to believe it. 

Ryan Broderick argues in a recent edition of his Garbage Day newsletter: "You’re going to no doubt see all kinds of posts this week claiming that Piker and socialist creators like him are not only small and irrelevant, but also coastal elites that are only watched by coastal elites. As if voters in a state like Michigan don’t have the internet. As if working class people couldn’t possibly watch completely free livestreams on their phones or whatever."

Well, okay, so Broderick has demonstrated that working class voters have the technological means and capacity to access the views of DSA-aligned candidates and "dirtbag Left" Twitch streamers—which I never doubted. 

What he has not proved, with any use of polling or any reference to election returns, is that these voters agree with or want to vote for what they can hear and see from these sources. 

Why are Piker et al. "so odious and detested" among the very demographics whose "class interest" is supposed to most align with their agenda? Maybe because they know that historically, Stalinist and totalitarian regimes of the sort that Piker et al. occasionally flirt with endorsing were not actually good for the working class at all. 

As Koestler points out in The Yogi and the Commissar: Stalin's government banned labor unions, confined workers to a particular factory, prosecuted people for desertion if they left their posts—in short, imposed a level of ruthless labor discipline that the most dictatorial capitalist boss could only dream of. "Labour legislation," he writes, "attained rigors which surpassed those [...] in both Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany." 

These historical Marxist-Leninist regimes were not in fact worker's paradises—they were, in E.E. Cummings's immortal phrase, nothing more than "joyless experiments in force and fear." 

Lord knows there is a lot to be said against the current state of American capitalism. But there is even more to be said against Mao's China or Stalin's Russia. People who routinely make off-hand "tankie"-sounding references praising Stalinist or Maoist regimes need to provide some account of how their own version of socialism differs from it—but often they simply repeat the "democratic" in democratic socialist and assume it speaks for itself. 

And then they go back to offering winking praise of Mao and knowing jokes about North Korea. 

I quote again Koestler's realization from Scum of the Earth, which every tankie streamer and DSA-booster today ought to 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."

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CODA: "Three Months"

 Donald Trump is historically unpopular.

All of his signature policies have been disasters for the country and have negatively impacted the daily lives of ordinary people. 

The Democratic Party is reportedly six points ahead nationwide on a generic ballot.

All Democrats have to do to win the midterm elections in November is to somehow not destroy ourselves in the next three months. 

That's it! That's all we have to do. Just not self-destruct. Just "not choose not to be," to quote G.M. Hopkins—

—which, as he pointed out, is the one thing any of us can do when all else has failed. 

Just not choose not to be!

But it's less clear by the day that we will manage even that much.