From the end of the Carter administration to the birth of the Obama era, Sunday mornings were an occasion for readers of the New York Times to engage with the linguistic persnicketiness of columnist William Safire in the pages of the weekly Magazine. Safire, an ad man from way back, wet his political feet writing speeches for the Nixon White House, producing most memorably the improbable phrase "nattering nabobs of negativity" written for the mouth of Nixon's Vice President, the subsequently disgraced and dismissed grifter, Spiro Agnew to speak in a speech criticizing the press for slacking on the propaganda front in its coverage of the Vietnam war and Nixon presidency. The New York Times hired Safire following his departure from public service in the spirit of demonstrating its conservative bona fides as the culture wars of the Carter era were heating up. In acknowledgement of the popularity of Safire's frequent strategy of critiquing the views of political foes by roasting instances of poor word choice from their public utterances, he was given the weekly "On Language" column in the Magazine which ran from 1979 until a month before his death in 2009. As a prominent exponent of prescriptive grammar with his weekly column, Safire did a great deal of damage to the image of linguistics in popular culture. For one Sunday only I'd like to revive the tradition.
Because I don't have enough to do with my time, I recently watched a 3 hour debate and discussion on the agita surrounding the recent Force the Vote controversy that has been fracturing the left (over whether Progressives in Congress should have leveraged support for Nancy Pelosi's re-election as Speaker of the House in order to force a floor vote on Medicare for All or faced cancellation from the online left). The participants were Sam Seder, host of the Majority Report and critic of FTV and Briahna Joy Gray former press secretary of Bernie Sanders 2020 and current host of the Bad Faith podcast on the pro-FTV side. Gray's co-host Virgil Texas served as ostensible moderator and comic relief. At the outset of the debate, Gray cautioned the partisan frequenters of the podcast to tender questions in the spirit of 'camaraderly' debate. I knew what she meant and wouldn't have given it another thought if the word hadn't returned for 2 more appearances, once by Seder and once more late in the podcast by Gray. Seder's use which came minutes after Gray's first was telling - he paused and visibly agonized as he hunted for a synonym, came up blank and gingerly mangled the word, placing it in a context that made clear he was using it as a noun ("there was a spirit of ... you know... camaraderily" he says at around the 3:12 mark). In contrast, Gray used the word both times as an adjective. I didn't know if it was a word, but I felt if it wasn't it needed to be. Sure enough, googling it, I discovered it is a word ... in German: kameradschaftlich.
In English, not so much.
The difference between William Safire and me (setting aside ideology, success, fame, bank account, vital signs, etc) is that while he would use the occasion to proffer correct alternatives to the neologism (I imagine his list might include amicable, friendly, sympathetic as possibilities, providing him with an opportunity to discuss the shades of meaning of each) I would advocate for Briahna Joy Gray's coinage. Moreover, I would suggest a feature of it would be the flexible orthography that its nascence lends itself to: is it camaraderly? Camaraderily? Comraderly? Comraderily? You decide and we'll promise not to mock your decision in a spirit of comraderily.
As for the debate itself, ironically, it didn't take long for the camaraderliness of the proceedings to degenerate into a bit of open-fisted brawling. I am a fan to varying degrees of all 3 of the participants. I confess my sympathies going into the proceedings had gelled a bit more firmly on the FTV skepticism side of the debate. After listening to the discussion, I am, if not persuaded, a bit more understanding of the FTV side as I'd hoped. In terms of the performance of the participants, the mere effort to meet face to face was perhaps the winner of the evening. Seder started out strong but I felt got bogged down in making a case for abstaining from the FTV effort on the basis of its ostensible leader and mascot, the irascible bad faith actor, Jimmy Dore with whom Seder has a history. In truth, Dore's centrality to the FTV side was like it or not a polarizing distraction from the aims of the campaign. The necessity of confronting one's feelings about Dore at the surface of things was, to those who find him an overbearing ignorant prick, a deterrent to conveying its mission of grappling appropriately with the urgency of action on public healthcare. Seder likened participation in FTV to getting into a car with a reckless drunk driver behind the wheel. To Gray, the anti FTV side was, instead of replacing the driver, advocating destroying the car. Seder floundered a bit at length on the matter of the "ask" of FTV (the spinning sound at the use of a verb as a noun is coming from William Safire's grave), suggesting that rather than confirming that Medicare for All would lose in a floor vote, progressives could have demanded a laundry list of procedural changes and committee appointments-- things likely to produce results in the right direction. Gray reiterated that FTV came with a list of demands other than Medicare for All which included much of the wonkish arcana that Seder was proposing. Seder was also not able to fully articulate the negative consequences of Pelosi calling the progressives' bluff should they follow the FTV strategy. On the whole Seder offered little but weak tea in answering the question of what to do to get healthcare for 15 million who have lost it since the outbreak of COVID-19. (It's not his fault. No one knows how it will happen.)
Where Seder excelled I think, is in telling the news that we have recent history demonstrating that Centrist Democrats do not pay any price for opposing Medicare for All -- its name is Joe Biden (and Kamala Harris) and it was inaugurated on Wednesday. This being the case, there is a flaw in the original logic behind Force the Vote which was supposed to shame progressives into forcing action on it, thereby forcing centrist House Democrats into either voting for it as polls show close to 70% of their constituents want or exposing their opposition and thereby opening themselves up to punishment at the polls in 2 years. As Seder suggests, given the certainties that a floor vote would fail and an already clear idea of who the opposition would be and the price they would likely pay for it (i.e., nada) it's not clear that forcing the vote would succeed at being anything other than performative theater. This is not to say that Medicare for All is doomed; merely that potentially eroding the growing progressive base in the House by opening progressives to electoral vulnerability over their unwillingness to perform under FTV pressure in districts where their very support of Medicare For All was instrumental in getting them elected in the first place might not be the most effective way of making it happen.
This fine point highlights a fundamental difference in orientation that seems to separate a good portion of the FTV side from the skeptics. Many FTV-ers, Dore and Gray among them, advocated abstention from voting Democratic in November as a way of punishing the Democrats for collaborating to defeat Bernie Sanders in the primaries when he was surging, and Biden in particular for his repeated promise to veto Medicare for All if it should come before him as president. To this point, the discussion turned at the end to Seder's objections to 3rd Party Presidential politics, in particular the Green party strategy. Here I think Seder demolished the Greens, chiding them for squandering millions of dollars in small contributions from their members to run foolhardy serially unsuccessful campaigns at the presidential level that serve mostly as outlets for disgruntled progressives rather than focussing first on winning local or congressional elections to build actual power on the left. There's a striking, tragic parallel in Gray's support for FTV and for Green party presidential candidates in the last two elections following Bernie Sanders' campaign suspension in the primary of each: the willingness to fail performatively whether in presidential politics or quixotic hacktivism for the benefit of Democrats who could not care less and seem to do just fine in spite of it.
I've said it before and I'll say it again, if FTV or its contrarian offshoots make Medicare For All happen, I'll be thrilled to be proved wrong about their prospects. As for the Gray - Seder debate, at the end of the day, there did appear to be a camaraderly meeting of minds about the need for different prongs in the progressive pitchfork. The will to permit another actual prong to exist on both sides is, alas, at the present moment, as yet forthcoming.
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