The first response to be made to the question posed above is the obvious one: the overwhelming responsibility for the Trump presidency lies with the Democratic Party. It was the Democratic Party, or more precisely, the elites in control of it, who engineered the nomination of a candidate widely and justifiable detested for her role in implementing policies which destroyed the lives of countless millions here and abroad. And it was the same elites who undermined the candidacy of Sanders, whose calm, informed, and articulate advocacy for the 99% would have been the perfect foil for, and, according to all available evidence, would have competed much more effectively against, the deranged billionaire who is currently plunging us into a new dark age.

But, as any child or parent knows, the fact that the primary responsibility lies with one person does not mean there is no more blame to go around.

And while some will lose their temper when it is suggested to them, it is apparent to anyone who followed politics over the past few months that the left, or at least significant elements of the left, needs to accept its share.

 

Did the Left Oppose Trump?

That might seem paradoxical. If the left is to blame, that must mean that it did not actively oppose what was possibly the most dangerously reactionary presidential candidacy in the nation’s history. But that many leftists either recommended or condoned not voting in swing states where the outcome of the election was decided is abundantly clear to those of us who attempted to argue against them. Not only did we encounter intense resistance from many quarters, even highly respected leftists urging opposition to Trump were ridiculed as “Clinton supporters” and “Democratic Party hacks” for doing so.

Furthermore, as was also apparent, some leftists went beyond failing to oppose Trump. Some actively endorsed him as preferable to Clinton.

Included among those who did was Rosa Brooks who took to the mainstream journal Foreign Policy to argue for Trump as “a peace candidate.” Others making the anti-interventionist case for Trump included Consortium News’s Robert Parry as well as veteran left journalist John Pilger, longtime critic of U.S. militarism William Blum, and physicist Jean Bricmont. A second category of left Trump endorsements derived from those who took on faith Trump’s populist pseudo left rhetoric. Among those doing so was well known economist Michael Hudson who predicted that Trump would initiate a “class war of Wall Street and the corporate sector of the Democratic side against Trump on the populist side . . . tak[ing] on Wall Street, reinstat[ing] Glass-Steagall [and] put[ting] American labor back to work on infrastructure.” An even more forthright endorsement came from Walker Bragman in Salon, whose “Liberal Case for Trump” notes that Trump, having been “consistently to the left of Clinton on trade [and] medical marijuana,” could reasonably be expected to “run to Clinton’s left on the economy.” Also conferring credibility on Trump as a stealth progressive was Vijay Prashad who held out the possibility that Trump would appoint Bernie Sanders Commerce Secretary.

Left Trump endorsements were generally arrived at from cherry picking a few superficially reasonable positions from the stew of contradictions, incoherence, and lies which was the Trump campaign. But even the most charitable assessment could not have failed to notice that the bulk of what Trump was offering was simply abhorrent. When the worst could not be ignored, Trump’s most retrograde and frightening statements did not serve as a warning. Rather they were deployed within a jiu jitsu that turned them back on Clintonite neoliberalism and the Democratic Party. Thus, Trump’s policies on immigration were inevitably counterposed to Obama’s two million deportations. Trump’s global warming denialism was counterpoised to Clinton’s having sold fracking as Secretary of State and Obama’s “all of the above” energy policy. Trump’s connections to racist hate groups would be dismissed with a reference to the Clintons’ role in fomenting the Superpredator myth and in the mass incarceration policies of the 90s.

These comparisons would form the basis of the widely shared sentiment among the left that it “was under no obligation to support Hillary Clinton,” the title of a statement circulated by 74 members of the Democratic Socialists of America published in In These Times. Along similar lines, Political Scientist Alex Gourevitch accuses Clinton of having failed in her “responsibility for making [her] case to [the] citizens.” Insofar as that is so, “we have no responsibility to vote for them,” according to Gourevitch. In highlighting the concept of obligations and responsibility, the DSA members and Gourevitch performed a useful service, though not that which they evidently intended. By pointing to the uncontroversial fact of Clinton shirking her responsibility they were, consciously or not, shining a light on their own. As noted above, just because X is mainly responsible does not imply that Y is not. The gap in logic is plenty familiar to any parent: “It was all Jimmy, Billy or Hillary’s fault. Don’t blame me.”

We wouldn’t accept that excuse from our own children and we shouldn’t accept it from ourselves either, particularly when the consequences may have been the end of the capacity of the planet to sustain our species.

 

Anti-Bernie Bernie or Busters . . . for Trump?

Whether they would express it by voting for Trump, a third party candidate or not voting at all, those pledging to withhold support from Clinton would join what would become known as the Bernie or Bust movement. Their membership in it, however, was problematic in an important respect: Bernie or Busters were former Sanders supporters who were retaliating against a primary process manipulated by party elites to insure the victory of its pre-selected neoliberal candidate. Many of those opposing Clinton, on the other hand, were not Bernieites at all in that they had opposed Sanders from the beginning.

Among those with a longstanding hostility was the familiar alphabet soup of Maoist, Leninist and Trotskyite sects for whom Sanders’s brand of socialism was fundamentally fraudulent. Granting themselves the exclusive right to define who is and who is not a socialist, Sanders would be rejected by them on this no true Scotsman basis. Also in the anti-Sanders camp were Greens who, correctly or incorrectly, assessed that Sanders’s success within the Democratic Party posed an existential threat to their brand as the 3rd party alternative to the Democrats. Their preferred denigration of Sanders was as a “sheepdog” doing the bidding of the party elites by herding the left back into the fold. The notion, predicated on the assumption that Clinton and the Democratic Party actively welcomed Sanders’s attacks on Clinton’s service to Wall Street, her longstanding support for jobs destroying trade agreements, her failure to support a $15 minimum wage and her voting for bankruptcy reform, by now hardly passes the laugh test.

Other attacks emanated from high traffic websites such as Counterpunch which ridiculed “St. Bernard” and his cult of Sandernistas often recycling the David Brock manufactured epithet, the now notorious Berniebro smear. Somewhat more substantive was the moral witness critique of leftists such as Chris Hedges and David Swanson who denounced Sanders’ failure to advance a sufficiently forceful repudiation of U.S. imperialism and militarism. Stripped of its unctuous sanctimony what their position reduced to was the familiar “the lesser evil is still evil” posture. This was accompanied by the unspoken moral sanction that those supporting Sanders were participating in evil. Whatever its academic or ethical merits, highly questionable as noted here, it now seems rather incredible that a lesser evil defense was required of the most substantive and effective challenge to neoliberalism ever to have assumed a viable organizational form.

As we know now, and was apparent then, by previously working to remove Sanders from the field, anti-Sanders leftists were helping to eliminate the candidate who would offer the strongest competition to Trump. Sanders, after all, based his candidacy and indeed his entire political career on opposition to the greed, immorality, and shamelessness of the billionaire class — a fact reflected in polls showing him doing far better than Clinton in a head to head match-up with Trump. By advocating opposition to Sanders in the primary, those on the left doing so made a de facto investment in a Trump presidency, one which they would double down on by supporting Bernie or Bust following Sanders’s defeat.

 

Ends and Means

The problematic status of anti-Sanders forces in the Bernie or Bust coalition raised an additional question. The primary reason for the Bernie or Bust rejection of Clinton was her central role in advancing regressive neoliberal policies. But for the anti-Sanders Bernie or Busters this could not have been the reason. They had, after all, rejected Sanders candidacy, one which was at its core based on a fundamental rejection of neoliberal premises, on taxation, education, Wall Street bailouts, Social Security and on virtually every major issue. If they were not trying to advance the movement to challenge neoliberal austerity by restoring a significant government role in regulation and social welfare what were they trying to achieve by their opposition to both Sanders and Clinton?

Part of the answer, provided in a recent Counterpunch piece by Andrew Levine, was that they were not attempting to achieve any tangential benefits for the traditional working class constituency of the left. Rather their immediate objective was purely political, namely, according to Levine, to create mass defections from the Democratic Party with the main beneficiary being the Green Party and its standard bearer Jill Stein. With sufficient numbers, the Greens could secure a 5% vote total thereby qualifying them for federal campaign funds in subsequent elections.

Of course, the Greens missed the mark by a factor of five and Levine uncategorically (albeit uncharacteristically) admits that he was wrong in suggesting that this goal could be reached. Given that Levine has, apparently, little experience with the Greens, it is understandable that he would fail to recognize that it never had a chance. As Adolph Reed trenchantly noted in his critique of the “if we build it, they will come” theory of politics assumed by Green Party supporters, the Greens have repeatedly demonstrated their lack of political and organizational capacity. Now moving into their fourth decade without a single state level official, a scant 130 local office holders of the nearly 1 million positions potentially available and an almost totally dysfunctional local infrastructure, it was eminently predictable that Stein’s showing would be an embarrassment.

Furthermore, had the mass defections actually materialized, it is a safe bet that no serious or useful activist infrastructure would have resulted from attempts to join what is essentially a Potemkin quadrennial party incapable of maintaining, organizing or mobilizing the energies of those who attempt to enlist and function within it.

Presumably, in the absence of the Greens succeeding, what Levine and others probably had in mind in their attempts to induce mass defections was that even if those exiting the party weren’t able to find a viable organizational structure in the Greens, the pressure for a new party to emerge would eventually develop so that one would have to come into existence. How or when Levine doesn’t say, nor does he provide any indication of being interested in the discussion which others have had on the subject.

A longer term objective was also political in that it involved demonstrating to Democratic elites that their anointed neoliberal candidates would face certain defeat from defections by the party’s left wing. While it is impossible to know how they will respond to Clinton’s defeat, if the past is any guide, they will not take this as any kind of lesson. Defeats of centrist neoliberal candidates Mondale, Kerry and Gore were assumed to have resulted not from their having distanced themselves from the New Deal liberal base of the party, but from having embraced it. That this remains their guiding philosophy is consistent with the name most frequently mentioned as the preferred candidate of party elites, a loyal servant of the Wall Street wing of the party, New Jersey Senator Cory Booker. Booker’s promotion signals little change other than the recognition that neoliberalism must be invested with a sufficiently multicultural hue to insure requisite turnout from those African American who conspicuously failed to support Clinton.

What this shows is that if neoliberalism is repudiated it will not derive from party elites having had their hand forced by Bernie or Bust or similar threats. Rather it will result from precisely that which the anti-Sanders left opposed, namely the development of the Sanders forces both within the Democratic Party and within the independent organization which Sanders set up to advance his agenda, OurRevolution. By repudiating these efforts, the left functions as an obstacle to progress.

 

Third Parties: Strategy vs. Tactics

A particular instance where left unity or the absence of it could tip the balance is apparent in the first major test the Sanders bloc is now facing, its attempt to install Keith Ellison as DNC chairman. If it succeeds against the vehement opposition of the party establishment this could lead to the beginnings of a shift in the institutional mechanisms of the Democratic Party. Will it? No one knows. However, the fact that Sanders regards it as promising should not be dismissed. Sanders assembling a network of 13 million supporters blindsided much of the left, but it did not come as that much of a surprise to those who know of his decades-long record of political victories. His having done so is a testimony not only to his longstanding commitment to a progressive program supported by a large majority but, more importantly, his understanding of what is required to build political capacity and political organization. While deference to leadership needs always to be combined with appropriate skepticism, Sanders has provided solid grounds for faith in his political judgements, particularly compared to those of his left critics whose track record of actual accomplishment is underwhelming to put it mildly.

The anti-Sanders left which rejects on principle any attempts to work within the Democratic Party will be necessarily AWOL from this and all subsequent struggles within the DP. They will argue that as one more iteration of the Sheepdog strategy where activist energies are channeled into a party that has served as “the graveyard of social movements,” an obstacle to all but the most superficial political reforms for decades. For them, it can’t be reformed but must be undermined with a new party built on the foundations of the old.

In this they assume that they are advancing a long term strategy, but in doing so, they are making a category mistake. As Michael Lighty of the Nurses Union wisely observed, political parties should not be fetishized as part of a strategy but rather should be seen as a tactical vehicle through which particular objectives can and cannot be achieved. In certain circumstances, pushing for minor party candidates can achieve important gains, forcing concessions from the major parties. In very rare historical circumstances, the potential for a radical reorientation of an existing party structure is possible with an opening provided for a minor party to assume major party status.

Having said that, it should be clear that, for reasons mentioned previously, we are not in one of those periods. There is no third party on the horizon that has even the beginnings of a significant political capacity or organizational structure. To pretend otherwise, as elements of the left do, is to foment an illusion, either out of ignorance or opportunism, one which will impose significant costs on the credibility of the left and on the progress of the movement itself.

 

Conclusion: Is there a Path Forward?

It will be noticed that the question posed in the title goes unanswered in the above. That is as it should be since it is unknowable whether the combined forces of the anti-Sanders and/or anti-Clinton left have sufficient numbers and sufficient influence on other voters to have made a difference in the three main battleground states, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Furthermore, to engage the question is a diversion from the topic which should be on the minds of everyone — probably a large majority of the population — whose sympathies can be defined as “left.” How is it that we have been excluded from participation in the political process by the bipartisan drift towards neoliberalism and what is about the tactics and strategies we have adopted that have insured that our efforts to respond have been so feckless. What we have seen over the past few months, as discussed above, provides many of the reasons why, for those who are able to face up to the facts.

In the weeks following the debacle it has been routine to ignore or dismiss those who have attempted to issue criticisms or even mention how the left conducted itself during the presidential campaign as uselessly settling scores or convening what is reflexively and lazily referred to as “another circular firing squad” on the left. All this more than a little contradictory and disingenuous when it comes from leftists who regard the capacity for issuing “a ruthless criticism of all that exists” to be at the core of their politics, provided, it seems, when it does not apply to themselves.

But worse than that, to fail to ask questions is suicidal.

If any serious opposition to the now dominant reactionary right and the neoliberal center is to emerge, it must be directed towards the most promising paths to political power. If the left refuses to learn from its mistakes it is sure to proceed down yet another dead end, with catastrophic results not just for ourselves but for the species.

Writing a few days before the election, Huffington Post Columinist Ryan Grim broke a longstanding taboo by advancing what I will refer to (with apologies to my linguist friends) as Grim’s Law.

The pundit, according to Grim, is “endowed by (the) creator (with) the inalienable right to be consistently wrong and never apologize.”

It hardly needs to be said that the days following the election provided nearly ideal laboratory conditions for assessing the predictive accuracy of Grim’s Law.  An astounding number of pundits were consistently wrong on the election in so many ways that it will take a veritable encyclopedia to document their errors.

Among the most egregious were those who predicted not only a Clinton victory, but denied even the possibility that the race could be close.  For those doing so from the left, the certainty of the result became grounds for attacking “soft leftists” urging swing state votes for Clinton.  According to them, we were capitulating to the “climate of fear” manufactured by the Democratic Party of “hippie punching” those who had the courage to resist the calls to help prevent the disaster of the Trump presidency.

In retrospect, it now seems incredible that these charges would be levelled, but they were more or less routinely in the weeks and days prior to the election, not just by random internet bloggers but by bona fide pundits-those with access to substantial major corporate media perches.

Indeed, one of these left pundits, hereafter LP, showed up in the comments section of this very blog to issue a snidely personalized attack on Chomsky and myself for our article advancing swing state lesser evil voting.

“Congratulations John, this post will be used relentlessly to bash everyone an inch to the left of Democrats. As was surely it’s (sic.) intent.”

This was followed up by a rather stunningly confident assertion of what he took to be fact of the matter:

“By the way: Trump cannot win. This election is not close. It has never been close. The notion that it was ever close was always a fantasy sold by a media that needs to perpetuate the idea that it’s close.”

At the time, as I pointed out in response, most polls indicated that Clinton was ahead but that the election was close, with a few polls putting Trump in the lead.  But this was too much for our LP to bear and he invented his own reality, using it as the grounds to launch an attack against me and Chomsky.

“And in 2020, they’ll nominate another conservative Democrat again, and you’ll make this identical argument again. Every presidential election of my lifetime, the Democrats have lured soft leftists like you to hippie punch with this argument. And they will never stop doing it.”

It has now been two weeks since the total bankruptcy of LP’s comments was revealed, sufficient time for us to assess the validity of Grim’s Law namely, its prediction that when a pundit, in this case LP, is embarrassingly and incontrovertably wrong, they “never apologize.”

I can personally attest therefore to Grim’s Law having been confirmed.  For not only would LP not apologize, he would double down on his attacks on me in a facebook thread hosted by Astra Taylor in which he accused me (bizarrely) of blaming Jill Stein for the Trump presidency, something I neither believe, nor have I ever suggested.  In short, another invention on his part providing the grounds for an attack.

It would be easy for me to put this aside if it were not for LP’s most recent performance.  As I mentioned, P is clearly moving up the ranks, now in a position to inform Washington Post readers that, contrary to what Clinton supporters have repeatedly asserted, “Sanders could have won” . The piece was approvingly circulated by Sanders sympathizers who assumed that the pundit was giving voice to their views.  

Probably few were aware that rather than supporting Sanders when it mattered, LP was not just neutral but hostile, having reminded his readers that he has “repeatedly and publicly said that I won’t vote for Bernie Sanders due to his stances on Israel, immigration, and guns.” Some months later, he would shift to becoming, in his words “a lukewarm supporter”, making clear that to those who were deeply invested in the Sanders campaign, donating whatever they could afford to, putting in countless hours canvassing, phone banking that they were investing in a “highly flawed” candidate who would almost certainly disappoint them.

Yet again, Grim’s Law is confirmed.  In no way did LP provide any evidence that he held these prior views, he now sees himself as leading the parade: dictating how the left should respond to the attacks on its core institutions which will define the Trump era.

As a pundit, he sees himself as having the right to do so, but with complete certainty and blithely dismissing questions as to whether his past analytical failures and factual gaffes should raise any doubts.

Those of us who do so without the benefit of his platform will, as Thucydides remarked, “suffer as we must”, our rejoinders, relegated to the fringes of what now passes for discourse in the new media age.

Not surprisingly, as they always do, Sanders’s critics have jumped on the opportunity to attack him, dividing themselves into two categories:  a) those who assume Sanders is operating in bad faith, i.e. a typical Democrat “rolling over” to the right and b) those who question Sanders’s command of political strategy. As for a), it should be recognized that most of those offering it are ultra-leftists who have opposed Sanders from the beginning, regarding him as a “faux socialist“, “corporate hack” or “sellout“. During the campaign, they tended to mute this line knowing that it would expose them to ridicule (and further marginalize the pitiful sects that they delusionally take as the vehicle toward revolution). A quick google search will reveal their history along these lines, and provide a prima facie basis for why they should be recognized as the opportunists they are and ignored. 

Whether Sanders succeeds or fails, the reality is that he is the only Washington figure possessing the moral and political authority required to lead an opposition. No one else has even an ounce of it. We either support him or we concede defeat.

The Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky and Kurt Eichenwald are two  Clinton surrogates who helped to saddle us with a candidate under FBI investigation with the lowest approval ratings of any Democratic Party nominee in history and whose loss they were blindsided by.  It should come as no surprise that they are now trying to defend their indefensible role and that they are flailing away wildly at Sanders and his supporters in a desperate attempt to salvage their remaining credibility.  For both, their defense rests on the supposition that nominating Sanders over Clinton would have been been a mistake since he would have been a sure loser.  It is a “delusion” to believe otherwise, so we are instructed.

According to Tomasky, Sanders winning the primary would have been disastrous since it would have triggered the entry of former NYC billionaire mayor Michael Bloomberg into the race. No doubt for Tomasky, a long time apologist for the Democratic Party’s corporate/billionaire wing, this would have posed a problem.  But for Sanders and his supporters, it would have been a dream race for we would now be opposing not one but TWO billionaires. Sanders wouldn’t have had to say anything in his stump speeches. All that would have been necessary is for him to mount the podium and laugh and everyone would know what he was talking about.

For Eichenwald, Sanders’s inevitable loss would have resulted from the devastating effect of Republican opposition research he claims to have seen, though anyone following the race had known about the stories from the very beginning when they were first aired by Sanders’s antagonists in the Democratic Party. Among the items is a four decade old fictional essay in which Sanders describes the rape fantasy of one of his characters. According to Eichenwald, this would have torpedoed Sanders. Why? Apparently “values voters” would have fled in horror to, get this, a candidate who bragged about committing multiple sexual assault on tape less than seven years ago.

Over the past few months, I’ve advanced the category of the idiot left to apply to ultra left opposition to Sanders and then their small but possibly not insignificant role in  electing Trump.

Tomasky and Eichenwald provide me the pleasure to announce, ladies and gentlemen, a new category: the idiot left,  neoliberal edition.

Today’s New York Times reports that crazed bombs-away Islamophobe Michael Flynn is likely to assume the post of NSC advisor of the “peace candidate” Donald Trump. You laugh, but it was not Trump’s neo-Nazi base which was promoting Trump using this expression but respected left figures Rosa (Ehrenreich) Brooks here, John Pilger here and Robert Parry here among others. Did they, in fact, vote for Trump on these grounds? None seems to want to say. But it is reasonable to infer that at least some did.

In short, they were Trump voters, included among those who Robin Kelley, in a widely praised Boston Review essay, would consign to the category of racist, misogynist, homophobic, bigoted deplorables. One should not attempt to interrogate, understand, or attempt any reconciliation with those making up the Trump coalition. That they “voted for a platform and a message of white supremacy, Islamophobia, misogyny, xenophobia, homophobia, anti-Semitism, anti-science, anti-Earth, militarism, torture, and policies that blatantly maintain income inequality” cannot be “ignored” and, one presumes, forgiven.

Adam Gopnik of the New Yorker delivers yet another entry in the “my hands are clean” school of journalism. An article of faith of the genre is to view Trump as “one of those phenomena that rise regularly in history to confound us with the possibility—and black comedy—of potent evil: conscienceless, cruel and pathologically dishonest.” But at the same time, Gopnik insists, “there is no explaining Trump . . . Overexploiting (his) rise is as foolish as pretending that it can be easily defeated.”

It’s fortuitous that Matt Stoller’s How Democrats Killed Their Populist Soul appeared around the same time as Tom Hayden’s death was announced. Stoller’s piece is essentially a retrospective of the new left and a critique of its failure to develop an alliance with pre-existing strains of domestic working class radicalism.  This, Stoller suggests, should have formed the basis for the left to consolidate power in the years to follow but did not.

One largely forgotten historical incident Stoller focusses on to make his point is the demotion of the head of the congressional banking committee Wright Patman in 1974.  A prairie populist New Dealer whose contempt for what he knew in his bones to be the predatory class on Wall Street, Patman was responsible for for the banking industry being kept on a short leash for much of the middle part of the last century. This history was invisible to sixties radicals of Hayden’s ilk who saw Patman, then in his seventies, and those like him as “ineffective” and “out of touch”. Hayden’s congressional allies George Miller and Henry Waxman worked to remove him from his position on this basis. But more fundamentally, as Stoller demonstrates, they and other new leftists rejected Patman’s generation’s suspicion of finance capital and big business. This would be replaced with a de facto promotion of Patman’s enemies Wall Street under the guise of economic “efficiency” within what would become known as neoliberalism.

While it (oddly) doesn’t mention it, Stoller’s critique shares substantial common ground with that of Thomas Frank’s Listen Liberal which also focusses on the McGovernite rejection of the New Deal alliance.  While both critiques are well taken, the problem is that both view the New Deal alliance through excessively rose colored glasses. In Frank’s case, as I noted in my review of Listen Liberal, the problem is his failure to view critically, or even mention, the deeply reactionary and dysfunctional character of the labor unions which the McGovern coalition sought to displace within the Democratic Party. For Stoller, the blind spot resides in not recognizing the reactionary aspects of populism, most conspicuously its providing a foundation for the maintenance of Jim Crow in the South as well as its co-optation into supporting the national security state and its attendant anti-communist purges and military adventurism. Patman himself (as I well remember) opposed landmark civil rights legislation and supported Johnson’s genocidal policies in Vietnam. None of this is mentioned by Stoller except for vague allusions to the new left’s discomfort with the “hawks”.

Maybe significantly, similar tendencies are to some extent reflected within Stoller’s political trajectory.  This began with his being an advisor to the aborted campaign of General Wesley Clark who was being promoted by Michael Moore and other liberals as a candidate of the left in 2004. The left, aware of Clark’s record for aggressive militarism in Kosovo wasn’t buying the claims for him as a peace candidate and Stoller has since moved on to better things. (Stoller does not take kindly to being reminded of this, incidentally, as I myself discovered).

Interestingly the same blind spot is apparent in the political orientation of Stoller’s current employer, Bernie Sanders, arguably a Wright Patman resurrected for the new century. Reliably populist on economic issues, a scourge of the banks and Wall Street, Sanders has relatively little to say on the destructive effects of bloated military budgets and military interventionism.  That this will necessary prevent his ambitious domestic program from being enacted presents a paradox which will need to be reconciled at some point. While Stoller’s article is very much worth reading, it gives little indication of how this will be accomplished.

Hopefully, sooner or later the question will be answered eventually and no longer pushed under the rug.

It is a matter of elementary logic that a political system under the control of predatory capital will produce highly unsatisfactory candidates at best and utterly odious ones at worst. It also logically follows that those seeking to prevent the worst from materializing will advocate a lesser evil vote (LEV). To state the obvious, this constitutes a lesser evil VOTE not a lesser evil STRATEGY. While this distinction should be apparent, certain elements of the activist left have routinely suggested that those advocating for the former are simultaneously advocating for the latter.

Among those unable or unwilling to make the distinction was Green Party Presidential candidate Jill Stein who, in a National Press Club appearance, characterized Noam Chomsky’s “lesser evil strategy” as having “failed”. Another was NYU Professor Nikhil Singh who, in a widely circulated response to a recent piece by Adolph Reed, implies Reed is sympathetic to neoliberalism for having endorsed a “politico-strategic recommendation . . . to unite the vote around Hillary Clinton.”

Stein’s and Singh’s accusations have no merit for a simple reason: neither Reed nor Chomsky regards voting as any kind of “strategy”. In fact, Chomsky and Reed regard presidential elections as “quadrennial electoral extravaganzas”, a largely meaningless exercise designed not to build but to weaken and inhibit challenges to elite dominance. Since a vote does not advance the main objective of building class power, it is not a strategy at all but rather the exact opposite.

That said, there is, according to Reed and Chomsky, one reason to participate in presidential elections: to head off the worst possible result, one which, in addition to inflicting huge damage on vulnerable populations will make subsequent attempts to mobilize a left opposition more difficult.

But by exercising this option where it is necessary (in swing states) one is not in any way advancing a strategy. Rather one is acting according to basic common sense equivalent to, for example, driving on the right side of the road. One does so to avoid getting into a head on collision, whether one is going in the right or wrong direction or nowhere at all.

Exactly the same logic applies to voting. It has nothing to do with attaining a positive objective but is a purely defensive act to achieve the least worst results under corrupted and anti-democratic mechanisms.

****

This truth is uncomfortable. Unfortunately, rather than dealing with it, leftists imagine that a vote in November will achieve gains, telling themselves fairy tales which prevent them from confronting reality.

Probably the most common of this election holds that a vote against Clinton for Stein will “punish” the Democratic Party for their continual drift to the neoliberal right forcing them to nominate a presidential candidate from the populist left wing of the party. Believing this requires ignoring all recent electoral cycles in which the Democrats in every instance responded to defeat by nominating neoliberal centrists. There is no indication that 2020 will be any different. A Clinton defeat will do nothing to alter this dynamic other than increase calls for suppression of Sanders supporters who will be viewed as having fatally wounded Clinton through their primary attacks on her.

Another variant claims that voting for Stein will help the Greens achieve legitimacy as a national party. Again, obvious facts expose this as a chimera: every Green run since Nader 2000 has coincided with a decline in Green local organization and Green office holders. These are now down to pitiful numbers with not a single Green having been elected to state level office and with their local office holders accounting for around 100 of the 900,000 positions-less than .02%. These could be available to them if they were a serious party. But they are not, and it has become apparent that the national Greens have little interest in it becoming one, devoting their resources to failed national races rather than in developing a local base which is required for them to begin to build a foundation.

Finally, a third claim actively celebrates “consternation, confusion, dissension, disorder, chaos— and crisis, with possible resolution” regard “a Trump presidency (as) the best chance for this true progress.” At this point, left delusion metastasizes into full blown psychosis providing ammunition for neoliberals to smear the left as bizarre and irresponsible, needing to kept as far away from positions of power and influence as possible. The less said, and the less attention provided to crazed performative politics of this sort, the better.

****

While ranging from unrealistic to insane, what the three scenarios have in common is in regarding national elections as a crucial component of a left strategy. This recognition returns us to Chomsky and Reed’s critics. That their predictions have virtually no chance of materializing demonstrates Chomsky and Reed’s essential point: voting in presidential elections has no place in a viable left strategy to achieve power.

Rather, what appears to be operative is that LEV critics are engaged in what psychologists call projection: Chomsky and Reed are, they insist, supporting a lesser evil strategy because voting, must be, critics assume, a significant expression of one’s political beliefs and commitments.

But it is nothing of the kind, and to view voting as anything more than an empty spectacle is to play a role in what has proven to be a highly effective technique for maintaining elite dominance of the political system.

As Chomsky and Reed’s century of combined political experience and engagement has shown, rejecting fairy tales of the right or the left is a necessary precondition for serious politics.

It is time that we begin to understand and take seriously what they have to say.

Dear Randi,

“Deplorables of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your insignificance.”

Whether it is communicated in those words or not, that will be the rallying cry of the newly emerging variant of fascism of which the Trump campaign and, God forbid, the increasingly likely possibility of a Trump presidency, is the most conspicuous, though by no means the only, expression.

The two images provide different perspectives on the underlying phenomenon. The first of these, a graph from a New England Journal of Medicine article by Anne Case and Nobel economist Angus Deaton has begun to function as something like a crucifix or garlic to ward away Clinton partisans who, when confronted with it, can only avert their eyes or be reduced to nothingness. That includes even the best of them, like economist Dean Baker who, when confronted with it yesterday on twitter, responded that Case and Deaton were “mak(ing) things up” citing in response a blog entry by the statistician and political scientist Andrew Gelman.