In raking Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez across the proverbial coals,
does an excellent job demonstrating not just one reason the left stays losing, but three in total. (I wrote about her last year in AOC addresses the burdens of masculinity.)Lefties stay losing because:
1. They’re allergic to collaboration
2. They’re afflicted with cool-kid syndrome
3. They prioritize aesthetics over impact
In one column, deBoer deftly exemplifies all three self-defeating left-wing tendencies.
Inability to get along
While Republicans pass shit that only appeals to the fringiest fringe, Democrats can only get weaksauce through. I highlighted one reason Democrats are so ineffectual in the aforelinked post. “As it turns out,” past me wrote, “it’s harder to get shit done when you’d rather shit on your own teammates than work together to accomplish anything.”
“Labor is the heart of the left,” deBoer wrote. He could have easily written a column praising Rashida Tlaib for voting against the bill that forbade the railway workers from striking. Instead, he wrote a column attacking AOC. For not being lefty enough. When’s the last time you saw a conservative call out one of Congress’s most loudly right-wing mouthpieces for being insufficiently reactionary?
The right doesn’t constantly purity test each other and perform ritual castings out because the ROI is negative.
Hipster politics
There’s a difference between “popular” and “cool.” The two are actually, at least to some extent, mutually exclusive. Jason Aldean is popular, according to Billboard. But he is not cool. Flat Worms are not popular, as far as I can tell. But according to the website that ranked first when I Googled “indie music magazine,” they are cool.
The far left and far right both necessarily eschew the popular political orientation. And the far left more than the far right choose the option that is cool.
A sitting Senator protesting immigration restrictions at the border is the political equivalent of the hipster who earns $150/hr spending 20 minutes making himself a mediocre pour-over. Just a wildly inefficient way to broadcast your sophisticated tastes.
Evidence aversion
What
wrote this week about the “banana discourse” explains the situation well.Left politics is split between pro-growth leftism and degrowth leftism, and the two tribes are wrestling over the metaphorical steering wheel of what leftists should believe about economic growth. The pro-growth camp is by far the bigger camp in the real world and argues that socialism can and should deliver economic prosperity and growth to all people in a fair and sustainable way. This camp also has a mainstream equivalent of non-socialist center-left thinkers - the ‘abundance progressives’ or ‘supply side liberals’ like Jerusalem Demsas, Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson, etc.
The degrowth camp is much smaller but includes quite a few notable personalities on Twitter.
They’re deadwrong about every major belief they have, and their ideology would immiserate billions of people. We can decrease carbon emissions while growing the economy. International trade and globalization decrease poverty. And there’s absolutely no reason to think that in a socialist word, tropical nations would for some reason stop exporting produce to countries in cooler climate. It’s all just nonsense. I’m grateful that degrowth is still incompetent enough to think ‘You should not ever have bananas’ is a winning political message.
I don’t think deBoer is a degrowther. But what degrowth and deBoer’s column have in common is they both support policies that are unpopular, ill-concieved, or both.
For example, he castigates AOC for voting for the ARP bill despite it not raising the federal minimum wage and voting against the rail strike.
Voting in favor of the rail strikers and a minimum wage increase is one way to empower labor relative to capital. But it’s kind of a stupid one.
The evidence, and support, for raising the federal minimum wage are mixed at best. And voting against the rail strike would have been similarly unpopular and ineffective. There’s a reason eight out of 12 transportation unions involved in negotiations approved of the deal. They seemed to believe a 24% raise over five years and an immediate $11,000 average payout were reason enough to thwart a national rail strike which would have fucked over a whole lot of people to get 100k workers paid sick leave.
AOC could much more effectively empower labor relative to capital, with fewer unintended consequences, by introducing a bill to ban occupational licensure laws, for example. She could introduce legislation that penalizes municipalities whose restrictive residential zoning artificially inflates housing prices. She could implement other pragmatic policy solutions that promote upward mobility for all working Americans.
To my knowledge, she’s done none of that. So, deBoer could castigate her for that failure.
But instead he takes her to task for crying on the floor of Congress over a bill to fund Israel’s “Iron Dome” and then voting “present” rather than “no.”
I hope you bought a mug warmer with that pour-over set.
To be real for a second, most of deBoer’s column is the gossipy, celebrity culture, tribal warfare wrapping necessary to get anyone to pay attention to anything these days.
I suspect one simple question is the real point here: Where is all the money going? Individual donors have given millions and millions to Bernie Sanders & Co. And what does anyone have to show for it? In Huntsville, I’ve been invited to two local Democratic fundraisers this year, and have yet to hear a single peep about a solitary candidate.
In sum
To quote a popular Democrat: Let me be clear. The Democratic Party sucks ass. It sucks ass in ways big and small. It sucks ass because it’s too far left (childcare requirements for US chip fabs) and because it’s too far right (kids are still in DHS cages).
But I can just about guaran-damn-tee you that in the long, long list of reasons the Democrat Party sucks ass you’ll find deBoer’s particular policy disagreements near the bottom. Or at least the bottom of the middle.
Private-sector labor unions will never again be a relevant force in US labor policy, much less national politics. US support for Israel is a given for the foreseeable future. Raising the federal minimum wage is similarly DOA.
These policies are infeasible, inadvisable, or both. The only other thing that really unites them is a certain hipster aesthetic. The main utility of having a strong position on unions and/or Palestine is to pass a left-wing purity test.
Far be it from me to deny anyone their pour-over progressivism. At the same time, if we want a better world we might get further, faster by supporting policies that have a chance of winning or a chance of working rather than shitting on each other for failing to support policies that have a snowball’s chance in hell of doing either.
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