Sunday, September 10, 2023

Status ¿Qué?

Briahna Joy Gray had a lively-- and frequently outright tense-- debate recently with Kyle Kulinski and Krystal Ball on the topic of Cornel West, Biden and Trump.  Full disclosure, since I live in a solidly Blue State, while I intend to work for Marianne Williamson in the Democratic primary, in the unlikely event that she loses the primary and Joe Biden is ultimately renominated as the head of the Democratic Ticket next year,  with Cornel West as the Green Party nominee, I am considering voting third party for the first time since 2000.*  If I lived in a swing state, in a contest between Trump, Biden and Cornel West, things would have to be pretty hopeless with Joe Biden for me not to do my part to thwart the only other likely winner by holding my nose and voting for the Democrat.

As for the debate participants, I am a bit agnostic about the latter two.  My introduction to Gray was as press secretary for Bernie Sanders' 2020 campaign, an office that I thought she excelled at.  While I ultimately did not join her in withholding my vote for Biden in the general election following the concerted effort by every Democratic rival, following Bernie's third consecutive win with his resounding victory in the Nevada caucuses, to pull out of the primary race and back Joe Biden-- ultimately succeeding in forcing Bernie to suspend his campaign prematurely as the pandemic began to rage-- I did not fault her.  But in late 2020 into early 2021 (and waaaaaaayyyy beyond) I found myself souring a bit on her political wisdom for her promotion of the vile Tulsi Gabbard backing "jaggoff" Jimmy Dore while clinging stubbornly to his failed initiative to use withholding of support of Nancy Pelosi's re-election as Speaker of the House as an opportunity for House progressives to force a floor vote on Medicare for All,  long after it fell on its face immediately before the January 6 Capitol riots.   After its failure, BJG and the Force the Vote contingent, rather than regroup on the mission of building solidarity on the left and among single payer sympathizers for applying pressure on the still narrowly democratic congress and senate to push through Medicare for all (and certainly not alone in dropping the ball),  chose to continue to use the failure of Dore's hashtag cause as a cudgel with which to club those who took issue with the tactic.  Beyond that narrow sectarian rift, although I was a huge fan of her regular Feel the Bern podcasts throughout the Bernie campaign, I began to find her obtuse debating style on her own aptly named Bad Faith podcast almost exclusively with those of the left that she disagreed with on seemingly the wrong side of almost any dumb, inflammatory, diversionary twitter controversy you could name (Kyle Rittenhouse, the courting of fascists for a red-brown alliance, the outing of a doxxing, anti-trans TikTok troll, any of many infractions of members of the squad) an almost guaranteed turnoff.

In the debate at hand, while all participants seemed to agree with each other (and with me) about Biden's lack of appeal as a candidate in and of himself (Kulinski's cataloging of leftist "wins" that exceeded his expectations, impressive as it was, still at best barely offset the extent of bad that he has effected as surely as he was expected to), Kulinski and Ball started off by asserting that, his failures and disappointments aside, what he had accomplished so far-- including near the top of his achievements unprecedented strengthening of the Labor Relations Board (never mind his selling out of the railway workers last winter) and cutting drone strikes to 10% of Trump's record while exiting from Afghanistan (before imposing sanctions on Kabul and digging in on Ukraine)-- nevertheless demonstrated an objective rationale for preferring Biden above Trump.  Right off the bat Gray lost me by actually defying Kulinski and Ball, in a field that includes Ron De Santis, Vivek Ramaswami, Nikki Haley, Tim Scott, Asa Hutchinson, Mike Pence and Chris Christie, to define where the stopping point would be for declaring the Republican challenger worse than the Democrat.  With the question turned back on her about how bad the Republican had to be for Gray to concede that siding with the Democrat as a means of forestalling the Republican's win would be the option most likely to lead to hoped for outcomes, Gray similarly demurred to conjecture.

The tell for me is when Krystal Ball who seemed unable to get Gray to frame electoral politics as a means of advancing one's goals rather than as a contest of voter approval of one over another interchangeable professional politician (in Ball's words, "It's not about whether you're a Democrat or Republican; it's about how do you advance your goals.") asked Gray whether Joe Biden's defeat of any Republican challenger, versus Cornel West bringing the Green party to 5% in order to secure federal matching funds in future national elections was a more important outcome for the advancement of progressive goals, Gray adamantly dug her heels into the primacy of getting the Green Party to 5%.  This is not political strategy-- this is some combination of wishful thinking and biting your nose off to spite your face. (Ball reminded us that Ross Perot's Reform Party achieved the threshold in 1996 only to have Pat Buchanan all but assure the death of the party four years later with less than 1% of the popular vote in 2000, deflating the premise).  After all, why place your eggs in the basket of a party that refuses to be built?  Why not make your goal the commandeering of a party with actual power that stubbornly clings to the outdated neoliberal habits of an aging leadership that refuses to yield its reins?  Which goal is less realistic?  Which outcome has the best chance of making change that has material benefit to the 99%?  Or is the ultimate object of electoral politics just providing opportunities for voters to express their electoral purity every 4 years?

Deep into the conversation, the crux was reached.  According to Gray, Biden's triumph over the Republican will do nothing to advance what Gray believes "will be the ultimate path for leftist progress in the United States which is breaking the corporate duopoly."†  To this end, Gray is placing her hopes with the Green Party and other third party and independent efforts outside of the two major parties, and aiming to join forces with the Libertarian Party -- to date the entity that has had the most success (and money) in advocating for and to a small extent bringing about the elaborately low-concept tweak of Rank Choice Voting§ across the country.  This the participants agreed was a prerequisite to Green politics transcending the pursuit of the elusive 5% and beginning to achieve real power.  (Building the party from the ground up by building local power across the nation rather than from the top down by mattering only every 4 years in presidential contests does not seem to be on the table.)

Asked by Kulinski and Ball how, absent Rank Choice Voting in all but the very fewest districts, focussing on achieving the modest electoral goals of parties that have no hope of winning squares with the project of advancing the panoply of progressive goals, Gray said "I do think there is a failure to recognize the extent to which there is a validation that takes place of the status quo that people are trying to negotiate as they reckon with real gains that the Biden administration has effectuated."  I will confess the accusation that those who vote for the Democrat to avoid the Republican are validating the status quo hits my ears as blaming the victim.  It cruelly overlooks the dysfunction of the system that perpetually leaves voters with two terrible choices  one of which is going to win.  Some of us on the left have had it with the dysfunction and will not be party to it.  The rest of us are working with the cards that were dealt us, and it is "not even wrong" to say that the personal choice to try to mitigate what is guaranteed to be the least optimal choice in the general election as though lives depended on it -- because they do!-- represents an acquiescence to the status quo. 

To this point in the debate, I was prepared to write Gray off and declare Kulinski and Ball the winners on merit.  But at the end of what is accessible to non-subscribers of either podcast, Ball asked Gray-- shades of 2016-- hypothetically if on election night 2024 Joe Biden wins, does she rue that it wasn't Trump? or does she breathe a sigh of relief that it's Biden?  Gray's shockingly honest answer deeply instructed me:  

I don't care.  They're not my party. This gets characterized as a privileged position, that you don't care who wins, Trump or Biden.  My experience is that people who have been taking this position -- this is just anecdotal-- tend to be people who are at the lower end of the economic spectrum who do feel that their lives aren't meaningfully different under a Trump or a Biden and who would rather rock the boat and throw a monkey wrench in the machinery if there's even a fracture of a sliver of a chance that it has some outcome different from what they've been experiencing for their entire lives.

My reaction on transcribing her words reminded me of how I felt listening to a Revolutionary Blackout episode in January of this year in which I was apprised how even my modestly non-destitute struggle in America 2023 to participate in bringing about meaningful change is counterrevolutionary to those who are fighting for their lives.  By the force of her words, my eyes were at least temporarily opened once again to the dire stakes of scores of actual people that my hermetic lifestyle, impoverished and underwater as it is, permits me to overlook.  I'm grateful for the service, because it clarifies for me what my mission truly is.  

Recognizing that my neurotic, compulsive ineffectual stewardship of our dysfunctional electoral system as though it is doing any good is anathema to those who truly seem to lose either way due to circumstances beyond my control, I make it my mission to work to somehow unite my revolution with that of Briahna Joy Gray's informants from the Revolutionary Blackout underground.  I don't yet know how to get there, and it is premature for me to ask those opposite this gulf in the left to cooperate with me in the project of a total left reunification.  But I know where I need to head, and for that I'm grateful for this most instructive debate.

 ~~~~~

* While I expect Cornel West to be the candidate who most closely aligns with my own goals in the General election, I would only use the privilege of being able to vote for him without contributing to the loss of the lesser evil of the two main party candidates-- for me, that would be Biden if it were between Biden and Trump-- as a safe way of augmenting the signal of mass disapproval on the part of the electorate of the duopoly's menu.  The fact that some voters have this privilege over voter's in unsafe districts is yet another flaw in the electoral process.  I don't fault anyone anywhere for voting for the 3rd party candidate of their choice (as long as it's Cornel West).  As for helping the Green Party get to 5% for the sake of matching federal funds -- I couldn't care less!  

† I'm bound to remind anyone who reads footnotes of long-winded blog posts in dark corners of the internet, that if the United States used universal sortition as its method of selecting our leadership, all of the foregoing would be moot.

§ From my perspective, Ranked Choice Voting does not mean the duopoly is crushed and the Green Party wins.  It means Joe Biden wins because more Greens made him their second or third choice.  Rather than dredging a majority from polling the extent of voters' toleration for the self-selected slate of choices, see previous footnote.

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