Ian: The socialist left's self-sabotage problem

There is an extremely compelling argument for wresting control of the Democratic Party away from the people who have been running it.

The party is too old, too cautious, too comfortable with the institutions around it. The party is too dependent on wealthy donors, too terrified of offending anyone with money, and too happy to explain to everyone without money why they can’t deliver the change they campaigned on.

Look at this moment we are in! Housing, healthcare, childcare are all impossibly expensive! Young people look at the lives their parents could afford on ordinary salaries and increasingly conclude that somebody has stolen something from them, and I don’t think they are wrong. The hunger is there and the table is set for a big change that actually helps working Americans enjoy their liberty and live more fruitful lives.

And yet, confronted with these crises, with millions of Americans begging somebody, anybody to take a crowbar to “trickle-down” economics, a substantial part of the organized socialist left has apparently decided that the winning message is: Okay - but we also have to eventually abolish police and prisons and borders.

WTF are you talking about?! Why make those ideas prerequisites for an insurgent economic movement that doesn't remotely require them?! If you can't figure out how to yank the levers of power away from the geriatrics running the Democratic Party without having to defend abolishing police, prisons, borders, maybe you're not actually very good at politics.

As much as many of them don’t like to admit it, these are black-and-white line items in the DSA’s stated agenda. Then again, some of the movement’s biggest stars seem to wish they weren’t.

Political talent is not distributed evenly among progressives

Case in point: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said something on ABC Sunday that I did not expect to hear from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

On the August 9th program, host Jonathan Karl read out portions of the Democratic Socialists of America’s newly adopted national program:

• Abolish the police and prison system.
• Abolish the Senate.
• Establish public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries.
• End ICE detention and deportations and eliminate visa caps and quotas.
• Replace the president and Supreme Court with institutions chosen by and subordinate to Congress.

AOC said she doesn’t support those positions. Well, good. This is where the Democratic Socialists completely lose me.

The DSA’s current national program does not merely call for criminal justice reform. It explicitly describes redirecting police funding and other reforms as steps toward “fully abolishing the police and prison system.” In 2019, DSA went even further and formally endorsed “open borders” and the “uninhibited transnational free movement of people.”

These are not Republican attack ads (though obviously they will be!), they are literally bullet points from the Democratic Socialists of America’s website.

That is an absolutely heroic commitment to making politics harder than it needs to be.

Take prisons - surely the United States can reduce incarceration without abolishing prisons.

We can stop giving people absurd sentences for nonviolent crimes. We can treat drug addiction and mental illness as health problems instead of relying on jail cells to solve them. We can reform cash bail. We can make prisons safer and more humane. We can do a much better job rehabilitating people who will eventually be released and become somebody’s neighbor again.

There are serious arguments to be had about all of that.

But the moment your ultimate objective becomes abolishing prisons, the conversation changes.

Now instead of asking you about all those common-sense reforms, somebody gets to ask why you think a child rapist and murderer should not be locked up in a cell, and you had better have a good answer. Even if you do, nobody will remember it - but they’ll damn sure remember the question.

Why voluntarily create that political problem?

The same thing happens with immigration. America’s immigration system is a disaster. Congress has failed to seriously fix it for decades. There are millions of undocumented immigrants who have lived and worked here for years, asylum cases that take forever, employers who exploit illegal labor and legal immigration pathways that are needlessly difficult to navigate.

So just fix it! Be dramatic! Smash the whole thing if you must, and build it back with sensible legal pathways. Protect Dreamers. Make asylum decisions quickly. Create some rational process for people who have built lives here. Enforce the border without treating penniless, desperate human beings like terrorists.

None of that requires concluding that national borders themselves are morally illegitimate, and none of it requires campaigning on open borders!

This is the part of modern progressive politics I find so maddening - a legitimate criticism becomes a demand to destroy the institution being criticized.

Police departments have abused their power - your answer is to abolish police?

America’s carceral system has a lot of problems - your answer is to abolish prisons?

Immigration policy can be contradictory and cruel - and your answer is abolish borders?

Why are we acting like there is no setting on these machines between “this needs repair” and “this whole thing needs to be shot into the sun?” Reform does not logically require abolition.

It’s OK to run - sprint - away from bad takes in your past

Then there is Thanksgiving.

Francesca Hong, who came startlingly close to winning the Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial nomination, was criticized during the campaign for an old social media post saying Thanksgiving should be canceled because “we should stop celebrating colonialism.” She has since described posts like that as attempts at humor.

Fine. I have made little jokey comments on Twitter or on air that would probably make a campaign consultant tear their hair out. But Hong had a chance to clean this up while talking to Kaitlan Collins on CNN, and boy, she whiffed it.

Collins initially asked Hong whether she still believed Thanksgiving should be canceled, and Hong conspicuously declined to say no. She defended the idea that the holiday is painful for some Americans and offered only that “views can evolve.” Two days later, after the entire country had a hearty laugh at her expense, Hong tried again: Thanksgiving, she said, was actually her favorite holiday. “I don't want to cancel it. I actually love it.”

Why couldn’t Hong just say “No, I didn’t literally mean we should cancel Thanksgiving” the first time it came up? Why is she letting canceling Thanksgiving exist in the same package as making childcare affordable? What does prison abolition have to do with lowering the price of housing? What do open borders have to do with helping somebody organize a union? These are separate ideological projects that are being stapled onto an economic message that can stand perfectly well on its own.

Radical maximalism is not a substitute for good old political courage

This maximalist stuff - treating compromise with an institution as compromise with injustice itself and instead declaring that you’re gonna burn the whole thing down - there’s just no way voters are going to buy into that in sufficient numbers to beat the right consistently, build durable majorities, and turn progressive ideas into actual law.

Any strain of politics built around that maximalist instinct eventually becomes an endless scavenger hunt for the next thing that needs to be abolished, and Democrats do not need that to win elections or deliver meaningful reform.

Democrats could become much more aggressive about building housing. They could make it easier to organize unions. They could attack hospital consolidation and monopoly power. They could build public transportation that does not embarrass us when somebody visits from Europe or China. They could reform permitting so the government can actually build things again. They could challenge wealthy donors and corporate interests that have far too much influence over both political parties. They could actually use the power the American people give them.

None of these ideas require you to defend the most bizarre political impulses you cooked up in 2020 after eating a 50mg gummy.

There is an opportunity here for a younger generation of Democrats to be less timid, less beholden to the old establishment and considerably more aggressive about the economic problems driving voters insane.

But if you cannot figure out how to yank the levers of power away from the geriatrics running the Democratic Party without demanding that we abolish prisons and borders and Thanksgiving, go take a cold shower and come back when you’re ready to win, and ready to govern the America you actually live in.

You don’t have to abolish everything. You just have to know what you’re trying to fix and do it.