Electoralism, Nihilism, and Medicare for All
By: Nick Christian
Tags: Politics, Jimmy Dore, Socialism, Medicare For All

The Brouhaha about AOC, and a Medicare for All floor vote, for all its strategery from both sides, is indicative of both leftist nihilism and ironic inability to look beyond electoralism. First, it is worth looking at the central arguments put forth for such a vote, articulated best by Briahna Joy Gray in a piece for Current Affairs.

First, she argues the vote is of utility in exposing elected Democrats who “will never be made to answer for why they stand well to the right of the public on the need for universal health care.” This case is premised both on polls that indicate broad American support for Medicare for All and the assumption that centrist and faux progressive Democrats will not vote for the bill. This argument is wrong on both counts.

On the latter point, Gray quotes AOC as saying that she would rather hold Democrats to account on issues like the $15 minimum wage than M4A — Pelosi already passed a messaging bill on $15 minimum wage, so can’t we just trust the reactionary corporate establishment to pass it without progressive pressure? Gray’s logic is the same with regards to the M4A vote, which we know will not pass currently. What is to say that opportunists such as those she mentions — Cory Booker and Kamala Harris — will simply vote for the bill knowing it will not pass regardless? What is to say that Pelosi, too, could vote for it for the same reason? Mitch McConnell himself hoped to get a floor vote on M4A — to force its failure. Further, much like Obama’s hopes for a public option in 2008 and Biden’s same promise today, power concedes nothing without a demand, and without pressure on Democrats to follow through with such promises, nothing will happen. Whereas M4A is something a small minority of congress say they support, a public option and $15 minimum wage are actionable policy which Democrats have promised to pass. Gray says that passing a floor vote on M4A would mobilize voters because it creates movement energy, but wouldn’t the actual passage of bills that truly improve material conditions, such as a doubling of the minimum wage or a public option for the 80 million individuals with no insurance do the same, if not more, to activate otherwise sleeping voters?

Gray assumes both that the public strongly supports M4A and that a media narrative about it will help create the movement energy needed to pass it. She dismisses the utility of using AOC’s energy to instead (for example) try to remove Neal from his seat on the Ways and Means Committee, saying it would not create said energy needed to pass bills like M4A. However, we just had an opportunity to directly knock off Neal, one of the most reactionary members of congress, by using that very same movement energy and championing bills like M4A and a Green New Deal — and it failed, badly. Assuming her polls are correct in sampling broad popular support for M4A, Gray must explain how Alex Morse, Jess Scarane, Mckayla Wilkes, Jessica Cisneros, and many others lost their primaries against corporate Democrats in solidly blue districts whose opposition to even marginal reform, let alone M4A, is firmly established. If the public’s desire for Medicare for All was so well-articulated, these races, against Neal, Coons, Hoyer, and Cuellar among others should have been handily picked up by progressives. Further, if a media narrative held any sway in how people vote, then a third of Michiganders would not have thought that Biden supported M4A, despite all the coverage, debates, and general fanatic fearmongering about socialized medicine. For this same reason, a purely aesthetic floor vote means nothing because the media is not a sufficient avenue to create the change we need on the ground. At the end of the day, attempting to temporarily sway a media narrative which, as any leftist understands, is strategically positioned to minimize and vilify progressive change — as it did in both races — is an insufficient if not a wholly inappropriate strategy. Gray agrees that we must remove the politicians standing in the way of the bill, but we need a different strategy. We already know who the enemies are, we can already demonstrate their complete opposition to progressive policy, and we have tried and failed to unseat them, so if the polls that she cites about the general positive opinion of M4A are correct, then the obstacle to passing such legislation is not uprooting the “fake supporters of M4A” and finding the right amount of media coverage to obtain, but building a grassroots organizational structure capable of delivering these districts for progressive candidates.

I do not think that Gray is opposed to this strategy — I am certain she is in favor of it. However, the logic behind pressuring AOC and others to pass aesthetic votes to create a “media narrative” is a rejection of grassroots organizing because it implies that politics only occurs in the halls of congress among the two teams — us and our enemies, rather than between a broad array of structures, some of which we can build ourselves. Jimmy Dore perfectly illustrates this attitude to an absurd degree with his vitriolic slander of our few allies in congress.

The Question of Leadership

The argument goes like this: because AOC is a politician, we cannot trust her to make good decisions because she is institutionalized by the system, therefore, we must “pressure” her to do “stuff” like a floor vote. While I agree that the risk of institutionalization exists, completely excising her from the progressive movement by stating she is “simply a politician” and “we cannot rely on leadership” just doesn’t make sense, both because no successful movement exists without leadership, and because the progressive left leadership as it exists currently is a perfect reflection of the left base that created it.

Any movement that has ever existed has relied on some degree of leadership — even the oft-praised anarchistic Zapatistas of Chiapas and Kurds in Rojava are very proud, and in cases almost worshipful, of their leadership — Marcos and Ocalan respectively — few homes in Rojava lack a framed portrait of the ideological leader, for example. That is not to say that I expect every self-proclaimed progressive to frame a photo of the Bronx congresswoman, but that the idea of reliance on leadership being necessarily bad is silly. Whatever errors AOC has made as a 28-year-old with no prior political experience, it is undeniable that, whether it is refusing to raise money for the DCCC, beginning to reform the progressive caucus, and more-or-less singlehandedly reviving Bernie’s campaign in October of last year has done more to revitalize something vaguely progressive in this nation than anyone else excepting Bernie himself for many years, and I do not expect that to change simply because she refuses to make one vote, the strategic value of which is already highly contested.

A more moderate critique is that we cannot rely on political leadership of the progressive movement because they face different pressures than activists. I agree, but the fact the modern left’s leadership figures overwhelmingly come from politics is exactly a symptom of the left’s composition — college-educated youth who were radicalized by the same Sanders-style politicians they now reject, and downwardly mobile millennials whose professional possibilities were cut short by the 2008 economic crisis — a class of which AOC is very much part and can fairly claim to represent.

People can complain all they want about the political nature of our leadership, but until our movement becomes more based in labor rather than college campuses, I don’t expect this problem to end on its own. Worse, forcing political actors to commit seppuku for floor votes to prove allegiance is certainly not the solution, unless the goal of these puritans is to self-destruct whatever it is we have built in the name of a vaguely articulated left movement. Given how structurally weak the left is at all levels, the base has to give the political leadership a certain degree of independence in terms of their decision making because they are operating in a neoliberal system that has been unchallenged for the past half-century — a terrain to which we are completely foreign, for which we have little understanding, and in which we have a bare minimum of human and financial resources. Sadly, a simultaneous rejection of electoralism and self-destructive nihilism that feeds on electoral failure creates a vicious cycle completely immobilizing the American left. Worse still, this cycle is quite the cash cow for “leftists” with little nuance and less decency.

Media Nihilism

If Jimmy Dore had a show on MSNBC instead of Youtube, and he said that AOC was a sellout for not holding this floor vote, I wonder if people would consider his ideas with the same good faith. This was the guy who said that Tulsi Gabbard was a better candidate in the primary and that both AOC and Bernie are sellouts. On any mainstream platform, we would consider him a psy-op, but because he has a nominally independent platform, we suddenly give up our systemic critiques of media and capitalism. Like any other business owner, Dore wants to make money. We know that media tends toward sensationalism because it is profitable. How is Dore any different? Are we so ignorant as to believe that his bombastic attitude simply stems from his deeply held Marxian critiques? Like any other comedian cashing out on progressive trends, Dore is still no more than a media figure who owns and runs a business and acts accordingly.

Irrespective of where Dore’s true allegiances lie (his pocketbook or his political values), his reaction to contemporary politics is highly representative of the modern left’s demobilization because it provides us with content that confirms our smug nihilism. For all the anti-electoralism talk of some parts of the left, the critique of people like Dore is restricted to that same notorious realm of politics because they see politicians only as people who must act exactly as they are expected, rather than people with a broad array of different pressures that must therefore be supported through organizations in opposition to the current power structure — unions, political organizations, etc., which must be grown over time. Dore’s strategy does not build these alternative structures, it serves only to tear down existing ones. Thus, when existing structures (or politicians) inevitably fail to deliver, the frustration of leftists is released by watching jagoff comedians to blow off steam. Dore’s is a self-fulfilling doom prophecy that is incapable of any movement building — it is highly illustrative of his general “philosophy” that his first and only call to mobilization is an unhinged rant against a woman who has done more for the progressive movement than almost anyone else. While it is perfectly fair to critique AOC — her stance on Israel is something I take issue with, for example, to call her an enemy is to be either a fool or worse, to play on the emotions of fools for cash.

Conclusion

One of the primary faults of Bernie’s campaign was not that it lost, but that it instilled in many the assumption that leftists can win if they just have a strong enough candidate and message, because “the people are already on our side.” This is the same line that Briahna relies on when she says that a majority of Americans already support M4A. Again, this ignores the fact that most Americans are demobilized and fundamentally misunderstand their place in the political process. If they were truly class conscious, they would have voted Bernie over Biden, and the half of Republicans who, according to the poll Gray cited, support M4A, would certainly not have voted for Trump.

Anyone who has ever spoken to Trump supporters knows that, even when these policies are explained to them, the deeper culture war that has, like a disease, infected most with false consciousness prevents them from acting in a class solidaristic manner. Much like the nihilism of a Jimmy Dore, mass media generally has infected most Americans either with a very confused sense of the way the world works, or, if one can see through the cesspool of neoliberal politics, a sense of despair and nihilism so deep they are incapable of taking the steps necessary to act against it. Thus, we are stuck in a vicious loop of attacking our few supporters, allowing them to fail, and then despairing at their failure. The goal of the left should not be, currently, to push the few politicians we have, but to expand the number — otherwise, the left will always be self-destructive as it pushes an ever-smaller group of individuals to take on ever-more monumental tasks, as whatever remaining grassroots organization decays beneath our feet.

This is why leftists have always argued that creating class consciousness is not a result of snappy politicians, but the ground organizing that happens under them. Simply asking more from politicians who cannot deliver anything else because they constitute a small minority and then being stunned that they do not do everything we ask of them creates the demobilization that further weakens the ability of the left’s already limited institutional power from acting. If we want our political leadership to be fierce, we must first be fierce in developing an organization capable of giving our leadership the power it needs to actually act on our goals. To allow leadership, whatever that might look like, to wield power, we must first grant them it, and electorally, that means the conquest of the Democratic Party.

Finally, some say that electoralism is a fool’s errand, that it must be ignored entirely, and others that say the left, being weak, must try an “all of the above” strategy. The irony of this debate is that all strategies are electoral because all leftist strategies involve ground organizing that invariably creates leftist voters. Electoralism or not is a false choice because the actions involved in both are the same — building a grassroots organization capable of toppling some institutional structure in society.