Column: Leftist Policy Didn't Lose. Marxist Electoral Theory Did.

[RandySF]

What lost unequivocally, was a certain brand of anti-partisan class revolutionary electoral politics rooted in industrial-era Marxist theory. Zack Beauchamp’s excellent analysis at Vox is essential reading on this topic, but the upshot is that regardless of leftist policy, a strain of Marxist theory since the late 19th century has posited that the left can usher in a socialist utopia by uniting the workers of the world–and that any cultural divisions within the working class that get in the way are the product of false consciousness and manufactured consent to prevent the proletariat from arising together to overthrow their capitalist chains. In keeping with this tradition, leftists who subscribe to this ideology see the hyper-partisan divides of the modern era as the ultimate artificial divisive construct, and are adamantly hostile to a political reality in which suburban middle-class professionals (regardless of race, gender or culture) dominate the party of the “left” while blue-collar rurals (again regardless of race, gender or culture) dominate the “right.”

Accordingly, this perspective informs a Marxist electoral paradigm that 1) is explicitly hostile to the Democratic Party as it currently exists; 2) assumes that there must be a big mass of independent voters and non-voters to the left of base Democrats on economics and open to revolutionary politics; 3) attempts to minimize cultural divisions and negative partisanship in favor of winning over large swaths of theoretically culturally conservative but economically progressive politics.

Unlike leftist policy more broadly, this theory of the electorate has utterly failed. First, it turns out that in Democratic primaries, most voters actually like the Democratic Party! Second, as a bevy of political science studies have already shown for years, “independents” are something of a misnomer: they are a divided group that tend to vote almost exactly like partisans, but simply don’t choose to affiliate officially with a party. They aren’t in any significant sense to the left of base Democrats. Third, whatever the secret formula is for turning out voters under 45 in large numbers, the Sanders campaign didn’t find it. Certainly, Sanders won voters under 45 decisively (with Warren coming in a consistent if distant second), but didn’t turn them out in anything like the numbers needed to win. It is possible that a more explicitly generational politics might have done so, but Marxist constructs tend to eschew generational politics as yet another distraction from working-class solidarity politics–despite the fact that a “working-class” Baby Boomer who bought a suburban house in 1995 is much likelier to be financially stable than a “professional managerial class” Millennial struggling to pay rent in an urban studio apartment. Fourth, culturally conservative whites did not cross over in remotely the numbers leftists might have hoped.

Marxist theory leftists have a range of excuses for all of this–all of them unpersuasive. There is nothing surprising, immoral or even unsavory about moderates who were fractured and losing to a candidate consolidating 30% of the vote, uniting to beat a candidate with only 30% of the vote. Cable news wasn’t exactly friendly to Sanders or Warren, but that didn’t stop Sanders from winning the first three states–nor did it have even a fraction of the effect that the Clyburn endorsement and moderate consolidation did. Finally, Marxist theory proponents like to argue that their strategy would work in a general election if only the Democratic Party would let them win the primary. But this ignores the reality that Justice Democrats like Randy Bryce did win their primaries in many areas all around the country, only to lose their general elections. And while many leftists argue that Brexit politics are somehow not comparable to American politics around immigration and globalization (they are), the reality is that Corbyn’s experience does provide a sobering test case for how persuasive class revolutionary politics is in winning over white working class neighborhoods in a contest with a far-right xenophobic clown candidate. If the future really does come to socialism or barbarism, cultural conservatives have made it quite clear that they will be perfectly content with barbarism until they reach their deathbeds.




https://washingtonmonthly.com/2020/04/11/leftist-policy-didnt-lose-marxist-electoral-theory-did/

[greenjar_01]

1. Blerp-de-derp

HeY LoOk aT tHiS MaRxIsT tHeOry!



FOH.

[Hortensis]

2. The Democratic Party is the nation's left (liberal) party.

The Republican Party is the nation's right (conservative) party.

The vast majority of people on this planet falls into one of the two major personality types, liberal or conservative. Each of our parties has a few members of the other's persuasion, but for the most part these days we've become separated out liberal OR conservative to the point of alienation and dysfunction.

What the Democratic Party is not is far or extremist left since virtually all of those are antagonistic to the Democratic Party, deny our ideals, call us conservative, and trash our goals. They've always aspired to take over the power of our party, being unable to create a power bloc of their own, but are far too small in numbers to ever succeed.

(The Republican Party's leadership, otoh, has become taken over by hard-core to extremist conservatives of various types, white power, religious, libertarian, fascistic, etc.)

[msongs]

3. marxist theology evolved in a lily-white society where a brown person was extremely rare nt

[Hekate]

4. And where women were expected to serve in support roles, & not have needs that differentiated ...

...them from men. I refer to needs like distinctly different medical care, child care, and elder care. Equal minimum wage pay hardly begins to address these issues, and they fall to women nearly 100%.

[The Magistrate]

5. The Man Is Quite Right, Sir

The 'further left' traditionally take as their chief immediate enemy parties and political figures of the center left, rather than parties and figures of the right. This is because a strong center-left party balks any possibility of revolution. It will have the allegiance of most working people, because it will bring them real benefits in their lives, and by doing so, will shut off influence of the 'further left' by making it clear measures well short of the desperate expedients the 'further left' prescribes for improving the lot of working people are not necessary.

Because center-left parties do uphold the present order of society, the 'further left' sees them as obstacles to its desires quite as much as any reactionary party on the right. Thus you have the 'not a dime's worth of difference' line that views our two major parties as interchangeable. Since the 'further left' cannot comprehend how working people could possibly form an honest attachment to rightist parties, their view comes to be that center-left parties are their chief obstacle to mass support from working people, and they imagine that if center-left parties are broken, they will inherit the mass support of working people, and thus become predominant. Then it will be the time to deal with the reactionary right, but until it is the 'further left' which has undisputed leadership of working people, the reactionary right cannot be dealt with properly.

Properly, here, indicating a policy guided by the slogan quite popular in the radical salad days of the sixties and seventies: 'What's the solution? Revolution!' Few nowadays on the 'further left' dream of an actual, barricades and snipers and car-bombs sort of armed revolution, but they do envision a complete overthrow of existing economic and social arrangements. One of the things they fail to understand about working people, and people on the lower rungs of the economic scale generally, is that people who have not much but do have a little are extremely reluctant to put the little they have at risk, and they know that in turmoil and tumult that little will be at risk. There are strains of the 'further left' which do have some understanding of this, and their view is that working people must be made to lose that little they have now, and lose it to the unmitigated predation of the reactionary right. Only then, when they have nothing to lose, will working people be ready for revolution under the banner of the 'further left'. This provides such people still another reason to oppose and demolish center left parties, as these do mitigate the suffering the right would impose on working people, and so are the chief force in balking revolution. These elements view an initial triumph of the reactionary right as an essential step in their own program to achieve revolution, and so are actually quite pleased by the reactionary right achieving political success at the expense of center-left parties.

[tblue37]

6. E.g., Susan Sarandon. nt

[Crunchy Frog]

7. I am not a political moderate, and consider myself to be pretty far left.

However, I am also a political pragmatist, and once my candidate of choice Liz Warren was out, my plan was to support whichever candidate was running most strongly against Sanders.

As it turns out, my primary vote for Biden will be merely symbolic.

I could never support someone that I felt would lose in a landslide to Trump, or any other Republican. However much you may love their policies, they're just not going to be enacted if they can't win, and four more years of Trump would be a global catastrophe.