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

[David Green]

Frankly, it's a rather ridiculous exercise all around; the DSA votes in
contested states can't possibly add up to much anyway. Biden will win
Brooklyn and Boston, not to mention IL.

On Thu, May 14, 2020 at 12:54 PM David Johnson via Peace-discuss <
peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote:

>
>
> *Stop Trying to Shame Socialists Into Voting for Joe Biden. It’s Not Going
> to Work.*
>
> By
>
> Paul Heideman <https://jacobinmag.com/author/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, Mitchell Abidor
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/13/opinion/socialists-support-biden-election.html>
> added his voice to the swelling chorus hectoring young leftists to support
> Joe Biden. Leaning on the bathetic open letter
> <https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/letter-new-left-biden/>
> 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 everything
> they stand for
> <https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/socialists-biden-vote-november/>
> .
>
> 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 argument
> <https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/04/sds-new-left-joe-biden-letter> 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 two New Jersey DSA members
> <https://www.nj.com/opinion/2020/05/should-democratic-socialists-endorse-joe-biden.html>
> 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 thinking about how to win over
> Republican voters
> <https://newrepublic.com/article/146345/democrats-risky-pursuit-suburban-republicans>,
> 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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