[Peace-discuss] FW: [CU DSA] Excellent Jacobin article - An Open Letter from SDS Veterans Haranguing Young Socialists to Back Biden Was a Bad Idea

[David Johnson]

I don't think age has anything to do with it. I am almost 63 years old and I
know people in their 70's who were in SDS back in the 1960's ( while I was
in elementary school ), and we all agree with the " New New Left ".

An Open Letter from SDS Veterans Haranguing Young Socialists to Back Biden
Was a Bad Idea

By

Daniel Finn <https://www.jacobinmag.com/author/daniel-finn>  

We don't need melodramatic hyperbole from New Leftists telling us to
campaign for Joe Biden. We need to build a democratic-socialist movement
that is the only real hope for the planet's future.

 

The Nation has published
<https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uac
t=8&ved=2ahUKEwjnxNnZ5-_oAhULTBUIHdzQATMQFjAAegQIARAB&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.
thenation.com%2Farticle%2Factivism%2Fletter-new-left-biden%2F&usg=AOvVaw1Uv6
EDjEhYO3UX6wrhhB-c>  an "open letter from the old new left to the new new
left," signed by more than sixty "founders and veterans of the leading New
Left organization of the 1960s, Students for a Democratic Society." Its main
thrust is to criticize younger leftists - in particular those in the
Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) - for not endorsing Joe Biden's
presidential campaign.

If there's a generation between the "old new left" and the "new new left" -
the middle-aged new left, perhaps? - some of its members will remember a
similar plea from one of the letter's signatories, Todd Gitlin, before the
2004 presidential election.

"Restarting Politics"

On the eve of the Republican National Convention that year, Gitlin debated
<https://www.democracynow.org/2004/8/26/naomi_klein_vs_todd_gitlin_a>  with
Naomi Klein on Democracy Now. He urged anti-war protesters to stay off the
streets and fall in line behind John Kerry:

John Kerry is the possibility of restarting politics. Right now, we have no
possibility of politics because we have a one-party state. That state can be
defeated, and to say that we don't have the luxury of waiting to November 2
is to say we don't have the luxury of the US Constitution. I beg to differ.
We have the luxury of the US Constitution. We have the possibility of
defeating this reactionary cabal.

Gitlin invoked the memory of anti-war protests in Chicago in 1968,
suggesting they had paved the way for Richard Nixon's electoral triumph.

For her part, Klein insisted that it was essential to protest in New York,
because Kerry and the Democrats - including his colleague Joe Biden - had
lined up uncritically behind George W. Bush's war drive:

The Democrats have really sealed off the possibility of just expressing our
opposition to the war by voting .. They are running on a hugely militaristic
campaign. They're promising to continue the occupation, even expand the
occupation of Iraq. So we need to be in the streets.

Of course, John Kerry lost the presidential election that autumn: Bush
didn't need any Chicago-style disturbances in Manhattan to see off his
challenger. Then as now, there were plenty of liberals denouncing the
Republican president as a "fascist
<https://socialistworker.org/2005-1/527/527_09_ThreatOfFascism.php> " whose
continued presence in the White House would lead to the eclipse of
democracy.

However, the Republicans lost control of Congress two years later, and
relinquished the presidency to Barack Obama in 2008. The Bush administration
certainly presided over gross violations of civil liberties, at home and
(especially) abroad, leaving behind a repressive machine that Obama refused
to dismantle. But the two-party system and its institutions remained fully
intact.

The greatest crime perpetrated by Bush and his "reactionary cabal" was the
occupation of Iraq, which led to untold suffering for the people of that
country. In that project, he had the unhesitating support of the Democratic
establishment, from John Kerry to Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden.

In her debate with Todd Gitlin, Naomi Klein kept the focus firmly on that
unfolding horror, and refused to subordinate her political arguments to the
electoral needs of the Democratic Party:

I wasn't in Chicago in 1968, I hadn't been born yet. But I really feel a
tremendous responsibility to the people I met in Iraq, to bring those voices
here, because they're being crushed there.

Protofascism?

What can the old new left, the middle-aged new left, and the new new left
learn from this experience? The open letter in the Nation once again invokes
the specter of fascism:

In our time, we fought - for a time successfully - against the sectarian
politics of the Cold War. We were mindful then of the cataclysm that befell
German democracy when socialists and communists fought each other - to death
- as Hitler snuck by and then murdered them all. Now we hear that some on
the left cannot see the difference between a capitalist democrat and a
protofascist. We hope none of us learn the difference from jail cells.

It requires no soft-soaping of Donald Trump's atrocious political record to
describe this as melodramatic hyperbole. Trump has been in power since 2016:
if he had both the will and the capacity to crush his opponents in the style
of Hitler, Franco, or Mussolini, he would have done so by now.

The most likely outcome if he wins reelection is not a crude dictatorship,
but further erosion of civil liberties within the existing political
framework. Opposition parties and media will still be able to function. The
people who suffer the worst forms of oppression under Trump will be the
immigrants and ethnic minorities whose rights are routinely violated under
Republican and Democratic presidencies alike. A Biden administration won't
close detention camps for refugees, or take down the surveillance state.

In any case, Biden won't have to face Trump alone. He'll have the full
support of the Democratic Party machine and its resources (including the
Wall Street and Silicon Valley donors who were so spooked by the idea of a
Bernie Sanders nomination), not to mention liberal media outlets with a vast
reach, from the New York Times to MSNBC. He'll even have Bernie Sanders
himself going out to bat for his candidacy.

So why do they need DSA, or left-wing media platforms like Jacobin? After
all, they've made it abundantly clear they hold everyone from that political
quarter in contempt. Their main priority for this electoral cycle was to
stop Sanders from winning the primary: beating Trump came a distant second.
If their strategy for defeating Trump hinged on enthusiastic support from
America's new left-wing activists, they shouldn't have treated those
activists like something you'd scrape off your shoe.

An Ethic of Responsibility

Hitler isn't the only prominent twentieth-century German cited by the open
letter:

In 1919, in the midst of the brief German socialist revolution, the great
sociologist Max Weber addressed left-wing students about politics. He urged
upon them that the best politics must be painfully aware of the consequences
of action, not just intentions. Speaking to young men, he prophetically
warned them that the cost of ignoring consequences might be their deaths.

The choice of Weber as a source of timeless wisdom about political maturity
is eccentric to say the least. Weber directed the most vitriolic barbs
<https://newleftreview.org/issues/II41/articles/peter-thomas-being-max-weber
.pdf>  against his country's radical left, days before their leaders Karl
Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were murdered by right-wing death squads, with
the complicity of the German Social Democrats and Weber's own Democratic
Party: "Liebknecht belongs in the madhouse and Rosa Luxemburg in the zoo."
That might explain why those "young men" (and women) were unmoved by Weber's
scolding.

If there's one political cause that really can't wait until 2024 or 2028,
it's the climate crisis. Climate change was already an urgent matter when
Naomi Klein debated with Todd Gitlin in 2004, and even more so when Barack
Obama became president. But eight years of rule by a centrist Democrat in
hock to corporate donors left the planet still hurtling towards catastrophe.
And this year, the Democratic establishment moved heaven and earth to stop
the only candidate who proposed to do something about it.

Just as they did in 2004, Democratic leaders have sealed off the possibility
of doing something about the most urgent moral and political issue of the
day. No socialist who campaigned for Bernie Sanders should feel guilty about
abandoning them and concentrating on building a movement that is the only
real hope for the planet's future.

 

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