To Be Born Is To Be Cast Upon An Island
A stranger to the rest of humanity, needing love and facing his death.
A few days ago I came across something in the closing pages of The Romance of American Communism—a more critical text than its title would suggest, for the nervous—that I have been thinking about ever since.
Loneliness has long been a theme of this newsletter but I think the idea of loneliness as a politically motivating force—the product of being able to understand and empathize with the plights of others—is an important one. It is the lonely who are most likely to go looking for explanations, somewhere to direct their blame, and if all we have to offer them is guilt and shame then we will turn them into the arms of those who would take advantage of their plight. Who would make scapegoats of other poor and downtrodden people and say, this here is what made you fail.
As of Wednesday afternoon, Joe Biden looks like he’s the favorite to win the presidential election, by the narrowest of margins—if he wins the four states where he currently holds a lead (Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, and Michigan), he will get precisely 270 electoral votes, the magic number needed to become president. You could not ask for a better illustration of the Democratic Party’s commitment to doing the bare minimum.
I think a lot of people are going to look at the election results—that Donald Trump nearly got reelected despite hundreds of thousands of dead Americans capping four years of corruption, incompetence, and white supremacist violence—and decide that America and its people are fundamentally, irredeemably racist. This to me is a myopic and misanthropic conclusion that does us no good. Because if it is true, there is almost nothing to be done. Might as well turn inward, look to you and yours, and further wall yourself off from your fellow man. Complete atomization, at long last. Eternal prisoners of our own smugness and scolding.
The better answer, and one that accounts for the fact that Trump appears to have actually increased his vote share over 2016 in every race/gender category except white men, is that for the second time in four years the Democrats ran a race based on nothing more substantive than “Hey, We’re Not Him!” In doing so they abandoned key parts of their base, especially Latinos, in pursuit of mythical Republicans who were embarrassed by Donald Trump’s lack of couth. This is not reading tea leaves, by the way. This has explicitly been their strategy since 2016.
2016
2020
It didn’t have to be like this. People can’t eat paeans to Values and Restoring America and Hope; that $1,200 in COVID relief was spent a long time ago. The Biden campaign could have been run on explicit, material promises to make people whole, like Rashida Tlaib and Pramila Jayapal’s proposal to give every American $2,000 a month during the pandemic and another $1,000 a month for a year afterward. It could have been run on concrete steps to immigration reform and promises to undo the deportation machine that was created the last time Joe Biden was part of a presidential administration. It could have been run on a healthcare plan that 70+% of Americans would support, rather than on “improving” the Affordable Care Act, which was politically toxic precisely because it still left millions out in the cold and was prohibitively expensive for millions more, leading to thousands of deaths each year. (Do we need to “improve” on drunk driving, or should we do something different?)
But the Democratic Party has continued to steer hard right while the American people drift left, which is how you end up with the confused refrain of “I hate Joe Biden too, but I’m going to vote for him, because at least the possibility of good things happening might still exist if he’s president!” That’s the kind of inspiring message that will get people out to the 10-hour voting lines and secure a mandate for a new president trying to depose an inveterate racist criminal. Only in America can you have the kind of cognitive dissonance that leads to messages like “Vote to Save the Planet” and “Vote for Racial Justice” issued in service of…electing an unabashedly pro-fracking and pro-incarceration tag team to the presidency.
I’m sorry if this seems unfairly negative on a day when we probably don’t need any more of that. I am not a particularly mean or combative person. But god damn, aren’t you tired of it all? All this bullshit we’re expected to swallow every few years after the table has been cleared of any real possibility to meaningfully change for the better? That the limits of our collective political imagination still seem to reach no further than wanting the people at the helm of the imperial death machine to look different than they do now?
Make no mistake: even if Joe Biden does become president at the end of the day, this election has been a collosal failure for the Democrats, insofar as you assume that they are actually interested in winning and governing. Their handpicked #resistors like Amy McGrath ate shit; the Senate will remain red for another few years. They will hold the presidency with no mandate, no groundswell of support for the vague set of Values that they campaigned on in lieu of actually giving people what they needed. If this makes you feel bleak and hopeless…well, I can’t say I blame you. And if we are to ever feel any less bleak and hopeless I think we need to do two things: widen the bounds of our collective imagination, and strengthen our collective political muscles.
What I mean by this is not that we should abandon electoral politics (although we do eventually need to abandon the Democratic Party by building one that is explicitly in our own interest), but that we need to consider the political forces that impact our day-to-day lives, and where we have the chance to change those forces. For most of us that means our workplaces need to become the primary site of political struggle. Americans, even white men, experience very little actual democracy; how much say do you really have in a) electing the president and b) what happens at the place where you spend 1/3 or more of your waking life? Only one of those two things is really in your power to change, and the good news is that changing it means you also have the chance to turn your new power outward to face other challenges, too.
I hear a lot of talk about “holding Joe Biden’s feet to the fire” when he gets into office. For most people I think that means calling their representatives or similar appeals to the consciences of people who have decision-making power. But where liberals get things mixed up is in their belief that politics is an exercise of morality and conscience and not an endless power struggle where concessions must be extracted by force. Calling your reps, even when you’re vociferous in your demands, doesn’t have a fraction of the power that mass demonstrations and walkouts do. Not just on nights and weekends either—I’m talking about strikes and sit-ins. Our collective ability to disrupt the economic activity of the United States is the only political power we have. That’s it, and that’s all, to borrow a phrase from Nina Turner. We have to get smarter, we have to get better organized, and we have to learn how to use these muscles that Americans a century ago knew how to flex.
A good place to start doing that is through the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee, a joint project of United Electrical Workers and the Democratic Socialists of America, which has helped thousands of people across the country organize in their workplaces since the start of COVID-19. Not everyone is going to find their political home in DSA and I get that (although if you want to, we’d love to have you aboard), but if you do care about what comes next, I would encourage you to start thinking more expansively about the site of political struggle.
Despite how it might sound I am concerned for each and every one of you and I hope you’re taking some time for yourself this week. We all need it. As always, I appreciate you reading. Talk to you next Wednesday.
-Chuck
PS- If you liked what you read here today, why not subscribe to get this newsletter in your inbox each week? It’s free and always will be.
PPS- If you would rather absorb yourself in something interesting and not political, I got to make a guest appearance on my PCT friend Prodigy’s livestream last night to talk about my book and life as a hiker more generally. I’m on from about 0:05:00 to about 1:20:00.
Thanks for this Chuck--feeling like a loooong week already, but this helps!