There’s nothing practical about keeping silent
By: Sam Carliner
Tags: Politics, Healthcare, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Protest, Congress

There’s nothing practical about keeping silent

A recent Left Twitter beef between two types of M4A supporters is a great opportunity to explore how leftists can successfully fight for their demands. Sam Carliner Follow Dec 13, 2020 · 5 min read

Photo by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash

If you’re like me and spend way too much time following prominent names in left-leaning indy media on Twitter, your Saturday feed was likely full of heated takes on celebrity-congresswoman, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (AOC). This is because political comedian, Jimmy Dore, recently called on AOC and other members of the insurgent “progressive” movement in the Democratic Party to withhold their upcoming votes to re-confirm Rep. Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House unless she commits to putting the widely popular Medicare For All (M4A) policy up for a vote on the House floor.

Before writing about this further, I wanna be clear. I’m not interested in dunking on AOC and I’m not interested in dunking on Jimmy Dore. Regardless of your thoughts on both of these leftists, I hope we can all agree that the most important conversation to be had is how we can get M4A. I agree much more with the approach being proposed by Jimmy Dore, and I’ll be explaining why. The point of this article is to have a serious conversation on how to stop people from dying, and disagreements are not only welcome, but encouraged.

So let’s talk about AOC, or rather, the side of the argument AOC represents. The idea seems to be that even if AOC can succeed at convincing enough of her colleagues to withhold their votes for Pelosi unless she allows a M4A vote, that vote will fail. This is probably true. The second part of that argument is that if a M4A vote fails now, that will set the movement for M4A back for years, maybe even for decades. If you ask me, that’s probably not true.

As of this year, 69% of Americans support Medicare for All, and with the devastation caused by the global pandemic, support is likely to grow. Our government, on the other hand, does not support Medicare for All due to how many elected officials are funded by the private healthcare industry. This is why a vote would fail to be passed. But a vote failing to be passed doesn’t mean it’s failed.

A vote would ensure that every single member of the House of Representatives are on record as either supporters or enemies of a policy that the majority of Americans want. This alone would be a great advantage for increasing the scrutiny of a political establishment that works against the demands of working people. That scrutiny can serve as the basis of a disruptive, on the ground movement for healthcare. A sustained protest movement is not out of the realm of possibility. Right now mass mobilizations can be found all over the world. India and France are particularly inspiring examples of countries with well-organized mass movements.

The idea that many of AOC’s supporters are suggesting is that such protest movements can’t happen in the United States, and for this reason, the left’s best assets are left-of-center politicians like AOC who are willing to support M4A, but only through navigating the bought-off, convoluted bureaucracy that is the U.S. government. Maybe this strategy can get us all healthcare, but it won’t get us healthcare anytime soon.

Following the lead of the Bernie Sanders campaign and The Squad, dozens of working class people ran insurgent campaigns against incumbent Democrats in 2020, the goal being to help people like AOC pass M4A and other progressive policies. While some of these campaigns resulted in wins, most notably Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman, the vast majority of candidates failed to overcome the obstacles, both natural and influenced by DNC rigging, that they were up against. These candidates will have to try again, and maybe a lot will win in 2022 or 2024. But with the Bernie Sanders campaign now effectively snuffed out by the DNC and a Biden administration unapologetically doing everything it can to silence the demands of the left, it’s unlikely party newcomers will find it any easier to campaign their way into office as time goes on.

Maybe a strong protest movement which holds our government’s feet to the fire will also take a while to build. It’ll certainly take a while for it to make an impact. But unlike the long, grueling process of electing enough insurgent Democrats to pass a M4A bill, the long, grueling process of building a protest movement does not have to be done on a corrupt bureaucracy’s terms and timeline.

The abolition movement that made headlines this summer showed that in every single state, there are people willing to put their time, energy, and bodies on the line for what they believe in. The protests may not be as big and loud now as they were at the start, but they’re still happening months later. There are organizers committed to sustaining the infrastructure that was built this summer. And it’s not just the abolition movement that has infrastructure. Nurses have been on the front lines of the fight for better healthcare, organizing strikes in order to get better PPE and working conditions for themselves and their patients.

These movements aren’t waiting to make their demands only once enough politicians who support M4A have been elected. They’re not going to stop fighting just because a vote fails on the House floor. AOC and many of her colleagues have a significant platform thanks to their position in government and their massive followings on social media, particularly among young people. They can use that platform to energize a movement that already exists and demonstrate to a national audience the need for supporters of M4A to join in the fight.

The history of successful movements is not one of elected officials playing the long game until the “correct” time to make a move. It’s a history of unelected people threatening to directly challenge their representatives’ power and disrupting party stability unless demands are met. In fact, leftists wouldn’t even be arguing over how to pass M4A right now if the Bernie Sanders campaign hadn’t pushed for the policy back when the odds of it passing were even more unlikely. Sanders’s strategy of making the demand when it had seemingly no shot of catching on served as a catalyst for a conversation on how to make the world better. That conversation led to political organizing. But now leftists seem to think that the very strategy that sparked the M4A movement in the first place is the very strategy that will kill it.

Frederick Douglas once made this very argument far more eloquently and concisely than I could hope to.

“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”

Rather than choosing to compromise, the modern left should choose to endure.