I thought I knew what I was going to do when it came time to vote in my state primary this year. I live in a closed primary state so must vote in the democratic primary if I bother to vote at all. After spending most of my adult life (since Bill Clinton's presidency at any rate) as a registered independent, I registered Democrat in 2016 to vote for Bernie Sanders. I was happy to vote for Bernie in 2016, and in 2020, and I've remained a Democrat in hopes that I could vote for him again in 2024, but alas that was not to be. Nevertheless on the theory of "Not Me. Us", in order to cast a protest against Biden's bid for re-election (just the latest Democratic Party example of what's wrong with this entrenched oligarchic duopoly and with electoral politics in general as practiced in this incredibly dysfunctional shambles of a country), I was content to vote for the 2024 challenger whose platform most closely adhered to Bernie's. That would be Marianne Williamson for those who missed it. Not a perfect substitute for Bernie by any means, just the only substitute-- and an adequate one.
When Williamson suspended her campaign after dismally poor showings in the first 3 primary states (see my explanation here for why this was not a surprise), Michigan had not yet happened. Before Michigan, as long as I had a preference, I saw no reason to consider changing my plans simply because my candidate stopped campaigning. But in Michigan, the push for voters unhappy with Biden's continued support of Israel's slaughter of Gazans under a pretext of "war against Hamas" to vote for "Uncommitted" in the primary registered enough votes (over 100,000 or 13%) to send two Uncommitted delegates out of 117 for the state to the Democratic convention, wildly exceeding anyone's expectations. It was the first alternative option to give Biden a run for his money in his party's primary. Moreover, occurring as it did in a battleground state, it appeared to have had the demonstrable in-the-moment effect of changing the national conversation around Israel which to that point had been content to pretend that any dissent among rank-and-file Democrats toward Biden's support of Israel's assault on Gaza was not a threat to his re-election.
The question for me became, do I stick with my original plan to cast a rather ineffectual vote for Marianne Williamson's platform as a faint protest against Biden's re-election in spite of a lack of support congealing around her ? Or do I sacrifice the expression of a desire for a new direction for the country embodied in the rich multi-plank platform that Marianne Williamson is running on in order to join a groundswell of support for voting "Uncommitted" for the single issue of Gaza? Should my symbolism be an almost whimsical expression of my individual desires or should it reflect solidarity with a growing number of people on a single issue that I care deeply about-- and in a way that for a moment appeared to be making a difference?* This remained the question even after Marianne Williamson, inspired by the success of "Uncommitted" in Michigan, unsuspended her campaign following Super Tuesday. While I was never able to fully commit, I was leaning rather precariously toward solidarity.
And then something pissed me off. It started with watching a fairly recent appearance of Marianne Williamson on Briahna Joy Gray's Bad Faith podcast, in which Gray sought Williamson's response to a rather unhinged rant against her by Norman Finkelstein on Sabby Sabs' show. While Gray's selection of clips from the interview did not clarify Finkelstein's vehement and visceral objection to Marianne Williamson, Gray implied it had largely to do with Williamson's stance on Israel. While she condemns Hamas's October 7 attack on Israeli civilians unlike Finkelstein (both deplore the violence, but Finkelstein, for well-explained reasons, refuses to condemn it) Williamson, like Finkelstein, has been for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza from the first day of Israel's response. Finkelstein, like Williamson thinks a single state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian crisis is unachievable and that a two state solution must be sought to bring an end to the conflict. (I, being a naïf, have not abandoned hope for a single-state solution.) The distinction that makes the difference for Finkelstein appears to be in Williamson's hope for a place for Israel in whatever peace that comes. In the interview with Briahna Joy Gray, Williamson refused to call herself a Zionist in spite of her preference for Israel to continue to exist. But was this rather common attitude of Williamson's toward Israel (particularly for her and Finkelstein's generation) the primary source of Finkelstein's rage against her? While I share his anti-Zionism, I believe in Williamson's sincerity in the hope for peace between Israelis and Palestinians and forgive her honestly come-by feelings for the Israel of her imagination.
The snapping point for me came a few days later watching a podcast I was unfamiliar with of 2 rather pleased with themselves self-labeled dissidents in which they were commenting on another episode of Bad Faith-- this one a conversation between Gray and Finkelstein apparently from mid-October of last year in which the latter at the end of what appeared to have been a pleasant and fruitful conversation on the topic of Gaza ventured to offer an unsolicited opinion on Gray's apparent continued intention to vote for Marianne Williamson in her primary that he knew she would not like to hear. Gray would not have it. In trying to rush an end to the conversation before things got heated, Gray protested that she could not understand why anyone would have problems with someone voting for Marianne Williamson in the Democratic primary and Cornel West in the General Election. She did not give Finkelstein space to explain himself, but the self-proclaimed dissidents discussing the incident by whose auspices I was watching the exchange between Finkelstein and Gray did not hesitate to conjecture that Finkelstein's objection (especially in light of events in Gaza) was that Marianne Williamson was an unserious flake, a dilettante who didn't know a thing about Israel-Palestine let alone about winning a campaign and therefore must have been in it, as a disgruntled ex-staffer publicly surmised, just to sell books. The glee of two self-styled "leftists" in dismissing Williamson as a valid prism for Gray's prerogative to use her primary vote as a protest while neglecting to advocate for anything to do instead was the smugness that may have pushed me over the edge.
Honestly, what is with the so-called left? Everyone has a bitter, dismissive criticism, and no one has a vision. When someone shows up who does, leftists fall over themselves to see who can be the most apathetic toward it. No one bothers to explain themselves anymore. No one bothers with persuasion. Every correct position has an admission price of a priori knowledge of its correctness. Everyone agrees that electoral politics is bad, but almost no one concludes that something needs to be done about it, other than abandoning it to the wolves. This isn't even about Marianne Williamson anymore. It's about what is the plan for our immediate future.
There’s a theory that things like patriotism, nationalism, fundamentalism, racism, sexism, etc. etc. etc. are lizard things lying around waiting to be exploited by lords and chancellors and what not who use them to appeal to splinters of society to keep society in splinters which is how they get and hold power. Donald Trump for instance is quite adept at this tactic. Once splintered by these things it’s very hard to get people back into the whole. But it can be done by finding common causes. Bernie Sanders was uncommonly good at this. I don’t know if people really appreciate what Bernie Sanders did-- my guess is he didn’t fully appreciate it either. It was just easy and natural for him when he needed it to be. The secret is that we always need it to be. Even those splintered people. Their vision of themselves is busted, it’s filtered down into a very narrow beleaguered fragment of humanity where they see the people on the immediate outside of their small warrens as threats and the very distant and removed people who keep them and other like warrens fragmented from their neighbors as their only hope.
Those purists on the “left” who exclusively obsess themselves and try to obsess you with the flaws of Marianne Williamson and Bernie and AOC and Sam Seder and &c while totally ignoring / downplaying / promoting the dysfunctions of Donald Trump, MTG, MAGA, Jimmy Dore, Alex Jones -- it’s not like they’re always wrong those motherfuckers. The issue I have with them is that they can’t do nuance or gray or rethinking / parsing / analysis. It can’t be the case, for them, that both Bernie Sanders betrayed the left (which I do not believe but just for the sake of argument) and that Donald Trump is not the alternative. It can’t be the case that Bernie Sanders betrayed the left but a person can be on your side and disagree with you about that. It can’t be the case that when it came to the general election Bernie thought Joe Biden was a lesser evil worth supporting over Trump and that Bernie should have won the primary anyway. This is what makes them so annoying. It’s a virtuous obtuseness. I have noticed recently that when someone bumps into me accidentally my first thought is, “They must be so embarrassed that they didn’t know I was in their way.” But 9 times out of 10 when I bump into someone accidentally their first thought is, “Watch where you’re going!” Maybe people are just naturally too stupid and selfish to form solidarities! But that’s what’s so extra annoying about those motherfuckers who think their purity (“You bumped into me! I didn’t bump into you!”) is itself a virtue.
As for what I'm doing in the primary? None of your business!
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* In the meantime, while Biden's support of Israel continues to weaken his already feeble case for re-election, the Democrats seem to have saturated their capacity to learn from the "Uncommited" vote and in any case to have absorbed whatever power it might have once had into its rationale for staying the course in Israel.
