[Peace-discuss] Stop Trying to Shame Socialists Into Voting for Joe Biden. It's Not Going to Work

[David Johnson]

Stop Trying to Shame Socialists Into Voting for Joe Biden. It's Not Going to
Work.

By

 <https://jacobinmag.com/author/paul-heideman> Paul Heideman 

The New York Times attack yesterday on socialists who won't endorse Joe
Biden isn't actually about convincing socialists to vote for him - it's
about performatively denouncing leftists as irresponsible, for the
edification of the liberals who are watching.

 

In the New York Times yesterday,
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/13/opinion/socialists-support-biden-electio
n.html> Mitchell Abidor added his voice to the swelling chorus hectoring
young leftists to support Joe Biden. Leaning on the
<https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/letter-new-left-biden/> bathetic
open letter published by veterans of Students for a Democratic Society
(SDS), Abidor chides the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) for not
heeding their elders and endorsing a candidate whose career has been spent
opposing
<https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/socialists-biden-vote-november/>
everything they stand for.

Abidor's letter is remarkable for the utter lack of effort it puts into
making a single convincing argument. He scoffs at Daniel Finn's
<https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/04/sds-new-left-joe-biden-letter> argument
in Jacobin that Donald Trump is no fascist, but he evidently doesn't believe
his reader requires any convincing on the point. (The irony involved in
comparing Trump to fascists openly, in the pages of the country's leading
newspaper, is evidently lost on him.)

But Mr. Abidor's op-ed isn't actually about convincing socialists to vote
for Joe Biden. Instead, it's about reassuring liberals that socialists are
bad and irresponsible.

Everyone knows that attacking leftists for abandoning decency will probably
not convince them to vote for Biden. And if convincing people to vote for
Biden is so important that it merits denouncing DSA in the New York Times
for declining to do so, you'd think that such convincing is what Abidor
would try to do. The fact that he himself declines to do so undermines his
presentation of his position as the result of sober consideration, and DSA's
as driven by self-righteousness. Abidor attacks the Left for not wanting to
elect Biden, but he himself cares more about attacking the Left than
electing Biden.

The great irony of this is that many, many DSA members embrace a position
that is not far distant from Abidor's. As
<https://www.nj.com/opinion/2020/05/should-democratic-socialists-endorse-joe
-biden.html> two New Jersey DSA members put it recently:

We believe swing state leftists should vote Biden, not because he deserves
it but because a Democratic administration offers more fertile ground for
the left than a Republican one, where we desperately scramble to fight for
basic union, reproductive, immigrant, and queer/trans rights. For those
seeking to build third-party power, we'll do better under a Democrat as
well, since Trump generates a false sense of "resistance" unity that
obscures the deep divisions within the Dems.

Others in the organization disagree, of course, with some arguing DSA
members should never vote Democrat, and others arguing that even in places
like New York and California, DSA members should vote Biden. That's what a
big-tent organization looks like.

If Abidor (and his editors at the New York Times) were actually the
cool-headed political realists they present themselves as, they might be
focused on these debates in the organization, and they might take an
interest in its activities and life beyond Twitter.

The fact that liberals pretend to be hardheaded realists while remaining as
enthralled to the passions of their position as the wildest revolutionary
goes a long way toward explaining the revulsion with which these kinds of
arguments are received - even by people, like me, who are sympathetic to
arguments for swing-state voting. We are accused of having abandoned decency
by people practicing the rankest hypocrisy in their arguments. No wonder so
many of us are contemptuous of contemporary liberalism.

Most socialists will undoubtedly react to Abidor's argument in precisely the
same manner he would react to us publishing a piece accusing him of
betraying the international working class by voting for an imperialist
party: by ignoring it. Abidor is free to use us as target practice so that
he and other liberals can congratulate one another on how realistic and
responsible they are, but he can hardly expect us to be interested in that
exercise.

Meanwhile, if liberals think that Joe Biden needs DSA's votes, they should
try something new for a change and actually work on convincing us. They've
put considerable time and effort into
<https://newrepublic.com/article/146345/democrats-risky-pursuit-suburban-rep
ublicans> thinking about how to win over Republican voters, and it wasn't by
calling them racist lunatics. If liberals want socialists voting for their
party, they can start by showing us the same level of courtesy.

 

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