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Political allies don't have to like each other
Stop treating coalitions like personal relationships!
The radical left has a limited but quite real interest in allying ourselves with liberals against the right. This isn’t a popular point to make among some folks but it strikes me as strategically obvious. If for example you do not want our country to revive red scare era legislation against socialists — which has already happened in some places — you are probably going to need to get some Democrats on board to stop it. I have no illusions about Democrats being reliable allies in this regard, but the record is what it is. When Congress passed a resolution “denouncing the horrors of socialism” a few years ago, for example, you could only find any opposition to it among Democrats.
Here’s the practical thing to understand about that vote, however: the liberal Democrats who opposed it didn’t oppose it because they’re buddies with socialists. They opposed it because some liberal do oppose red scare legislation as a matter of principal and because they represented districts that let them express that opposition.
Consider Rep. Gerry Connoly, who has been subjected to ferocious criticism by the national left ever since he defeated Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to chair the House Oversight Committee. I specify the national left because if you have ever lived in his district you know that he has been targeted by the local left for a very long time. George Mason University is in his district, and when I was there early in his career our chapter of SDS protested against him on a regular basis. Back in 2014, the Green Party ran Joe Galdo against him in the general election; in 2020 he faced a primary challenge to his left from Zainab Mohsini.
Nevertheless, in 2023, Connolly voted against the resolution to denounce socialism. Why? Certainly not because the left has treated him with kid gloves. Connolly voted nay because he represents a deep blue district and because he understood that the resolution was a cynical publicity stunt by Republicans. He had no political interest in taking the bait and he had compelling reasons not to. That — not any love for socialists — was clearly why he opposed it.
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I make this point because, as always happens when Republicans take power, socialists are suddenly under extraordinary pressure to abandon their opposition to liberalism for the sake of a popular front alliance. This demand routinely goes as far as demanding that socialists give up any criticism of liberalism on the grounds that this could alienate liberals at a time when the two need to work together. This recent post by Democratic activist Dante Atkins is a typical example:
All it takes to qualify “liberal” as an “ideological slur,” of course, is for socialists to use it disapprovingly, which means that what Atkins is really calling for here is a complete suspension of any negative reference to liberals whatsoever.
On one hand, this is just an embarrassing — albeit popular — exercise in burden shifting. There’s a common premise in our discourse these days that one can only be expected to do the right thing politically if everyone else treats them nicely. You see this in the Angela Nagle style arguments about how “cancel culture” forces people to leave the left, as if me calling someone a racist casts a spell on them where they have no choice but to react by lurching right. But you also see it in arguments like the one Dante is presenting: because the implication is that if socialists don’t stop using “liberal” disapprovingly, liberals will betray them and abandon their opposition to the right. Let’s suppose that a socialists’s charge of racism is unfair, or that his criticism of liberals is unfounded — is that any excuse for the victim to abandon their opposition to reactionaries? Of course it isn’t. Instead of expecting to be coddled with praise and pulled punches all of the time, activists need to grow a spine and fight the right even if they hate their allies.
On the other hand, meanwhile, it is not merely that we should expect liberals to opppose the right regardless of criticism from socialists — it’s that, ordinarily, we can. Gerry Connolly clearly isn’t as thin-skinned as Dante, and fortunately most normie liberals aren’t, either. Adult Democrats expect the radical left to criticize them for being bourgeois warhawk imperialists and they don’t let that govern their political judgment because they are adults.
It has become popular among liberals to argue that if socialists don’t show more “gratitude” for things like Joe Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan that we shouldn’t expect this to happen in the future, but this is just a completely baby-brained overpersonalized understanding of how national politics works. Joe Biden didn’t withdraw from Afghanistan because the antiwar movement was sufficiently nice to him over the years. He withdrew because our presence in the country had become such a catastrophic liability that even the hawks in his party couldn’t justify it. At that point, the antiwar left could have held a mass rally warning Biden that they would give him no credit whatsoever for withdrawing and he obviously still would have done it.
Liberals are always going to use these guilt-trips and thinly-veiled threats of betrayal as ways to silence criticism from socialists, but socialists shouldn’t capitulate to them. All we need from liberals is for them to oppose the right, and whether or not they do that is going to be determined by national-scale historical and political factors, not by petty interpersonal dynamics.
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