A Socialist Plea not to give up on Americans

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The election takes are still flowing as freely as the Dom Pérignon at one of Kamala Harris’s Silicon Valley fundraisers. Many liberals agree on one thing: the American people suck, especially the working class.

The Guardian headline on a Rebecca Solnit piece this week reads, “Our mistake was to think we lived in a better country than we do.” The Nation’s Elie Mystal went further, arguing that the country was so bad it deserves the hell that’s coming. Headlined “Trump is Not a Fluke — He’s America,” with a subhead intoning that “the country will get what it deserves,” Mystal writes: “We, as a nation, have proven ourselves to be a fetid, violent people, and we deserve a leader who embodies the worst of us. . . . Trump reflects us more accurately than perhaps any president ever has.” Rather than ask ourselves how to save America from Trump, as many of us patriotic naifs are now doing, Mystal asks, “Is American worth saving?” and his answer is a resounding no.

Some prominent liberals even dismissed the well-documented problems of the economy, so eager were they to make the case that the American masses are just plain terrible. On X/Twitter, New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones called the idea that voters were discontent with the economy a “rationalization,” while Princeton professor Eddie Glaude, on MSNBC, dismissed it as “BS.”

“I don’t believe that. I can’t believe that,” Glaude insisted, adding that those bringing up issues like the cost of living were in denial about the country’s essential racism and badness: “People don’t want to believe what this country actually is.”

Never mind that extensive polling consistently flagged the seriousness of inflation to voters struggling to afford groceries, housing, or gas; to this Princeton professor, that’s just a made-up story. As for the “evil racism at the heart of America” narrative, well, that’s hard to square with the numbers. As sociologist Musa al-Gharbi has pointed out, Harris did better even with white voters than Biden did in 2020 (a year in which white male voters’ move away from Trump led to his defeat); the problem was that this year, Trump increased his vote share among nonwhite voters.

If they hate America, these establishment liberals hate its working class even more — especially white males.

Democratic strategist Ally Sammarco tweeted, “White men without college degrees are going to ruin this country.” (Insulting people who didn’t vote for you — what a brilliant “strategy!” Hire this person!) Not only do the establishment liberals blame the working class, they see this election as a mandate for their party’s habit of ignoring that class altogether.

MSNBC’s Michael Cohen wrote that under Biden, the Democrats had “adopted one of the most pro-working-class agendas in recent memory – and accrued no electoral benefit.” Cohen even argued that the effort to try to win working class voters was hopeless: “Is there a path for Democrats to reverse their declining support with the working class? The short and depressing answer is that they likely can’t.”

Besides showing off their own elitism and misandry, these liberals are essentially advocating retirement from national politics. How would you ever win an election without working-class voters? That’s impossible.

You’re surely not surprised to read this in Jacobin, a socialist magazine. But part of the reason socialists bang on about workers so much is the math: the working class is the majority of society. And elections are won by majorities. The same goes for white people. You also cannot win elections without men: they’re not a majority, but there are just too many of them to dismiss. You probably also can’t win elections without some people who have some bad opinions on some topics.

To win, you need everyone. This liberal dismissal of millions is simply an innumerate approach to elections.

It’s also baseless, since we know that millions of Trump voters can be persuaded to our side, or at least to agree with us on some issues. How do we know? Because some voted for Joe Biden in 2020 or Hillary Clinton in 2016. Others have voted further left than that: for Bernie Sanders in 2016 or 2020. Some have done so even this year: pulling the lever for a leftist like Rashida Tlaib or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to protect abortion rights or the environment by referendum. Writing them all off not only makes liberals seem like elitist jerks, but it’s also simply not politically serious. In fact, it’s not politics at all.

If you don’t think that some people can be persuaded to change their vote in the future, you have no business opining about politics. Because that’s what politics is. Elections aren’t opportunities to count how many good and bad people exist. They aren’t excuses to cut off some of your family members or high-school classmates. They are serious political contests for power, won by persuasion and turnout.

If you don’t believe in the capacity of some people to change their minds, you don’t believe in social change at all, because that’s the only way it happens. You have no theory of change, because there is no theory of change without such persuasion. And without a theory of change, there is no politics: elections and other news become nothing more than a site of trauma, from which we must, out of self-care, protect ourselves and withdraw.

That is not how we are going to defeat Trumpism. I never thought I’d find myself forced to make the case to liberals that we must defeat Trumpism, but here we are.

This election, Trump was the beneficiary of a pissed-off electorate. It doesn’t have to be this way. We on the Left — in our community organizing, our unions, our socialist electoral campaigns — must become the political home of those who are so rightly angry at the establishment. We can win by rejecting the agendas and sensibilities of the rich, and advancing a political agenda that will make working-class people’s lives better. We cannot beat a promise to Make America Great Again with a mournful dirge or misanthropic insults. We believe in the American people, we know that we all deserve better, and we have a policy agenda to achieve it.

in the coming years I believe the brain drain out of amuuurica will increase. thinking people will continue to vote with their feet.