Leftists are Playing Politics on Hard Mode

The recent debates surrounding police brutality and the rising tide of racist violence committed against people of color (particularly Black men) by law enforcement have given rise to their fair share of hashtags and slogans in the broader progressive community. I’m struck by two in particular: “Abolish the Police” and “Defund the Police.” These slogans are so perplexing to me because they seem to completely misrepresent the policies for which they stand, making them sound much more radical and less thoughtful than they are, and because the progressive movement seems to think this disconnect between the slogan and what it stands for is entirely fine. This debate has been one more data point in my steady realization over the past few years that many Leftists seem intent on engaging in politics from a place of inherent disadvantage compared to all other players on the field: as I call it, playing politics on “hard mode.” In my view, this dogged insistence on maximizing adversity is at best poor strategy and at worst intentional self-sabotage.

I first noticed this trend back in the lead-up to the 2016 election, when I was supporting Bernie Sanders during the primary season. I wondered to myself why Bernie was taking many common sources of support off the table: he refused to take Super PAC money, refused to take money from wealthy donors or corporations, and refused to run attack ads. While the principles behind these stands are admirable, and the desire to not make himself look like a hypocrite understandable, these restrictions were like tying a hand behind his back. Hillary Clinton certainly had no interest in refusing Super PAC or billionaire dollars, and no one in the dizzying mass of corporate protoplasm that was the 2016 GOP primary would be refusing that help either.

It feels gross to advocate for taking money from billionaires and Super PACs, but here’s my spiel: picture you’re running for office in an America that chooses the President by who is the first to press a button at the top of a skyscraper. To reach the top, you can only take the stairs or an elevator. A group of corrupt politicians and oligarchs set in place a system by which the elevator would only let you in if you wrote a check for $1 million to a hate group. This ensured that only the rich and corrupt could reach the top first. This system was of course morally reprehensible, but legal and blessed by the Supreme Court as constitutional. Naturally, you want to dismantle this system, and you vow that if you press that button first and become President your top priority will be to change this system to something more fair and just for all. But before you can do that, you need to get to the button first. You must either write the check or take the stairs. It would be hypocritical to write the check, take power, and then use that power to condemn the elevator system. But if you take the stairs, you will never get there first. You know where I’m going with this. By refusing to take funds from billionaires, corporations, and PACs for fear of looking like a hypocrite, Bernie took the stairs. And surprise surprise, he didn’t get there first. When Elizabeth Warren said she was open to taking the elevator in 2020, she was again called a snake.

Further, though his suite of policy proposals contained at most one or two truly socialist programs, Bernie insisted on calling himself a “Democratic Socialist,” rather than the more accurate title “Social Democrat” (they are different!) Instead of taking a moniker that added a positive-sounding, incredibly familiar word to the name of the political party whose nomination he sought and a moniker that most accurately described his policy agenda, he voluntarily and completely unnecessarily affixed to himself a label which most Americans synonymize with abject poverty and brutal dictatorship.

So, right off the bat, Bernie was playing politics on hard mode. To win, he would need to beat everyone else without the help of the deepest pockets in the country, while those pockets were giving money hand over fist to his opponents, all while trying desperately to overcome a century of negative conditioning instilled in the American electorate against “the S word.”

Of course, Bernie followed a similar track during his ill-fated 2020 primary campaign as well. This time, he also strapped some more weights to his ankles by taking a more aggressive approach against the Democratic National Committee, which many in his camp still believe robbed him of the nomination in 2016. Most memorably to me, he threw down a gauntlet on Twitter on February 21 of this year, emblematic of his more unabashedly insurgent approach for this campaign: “I‘ve got news for the Republican establishment. I’ve got news for the Democratic establishment. They can’t stop us.” CNN, the flagship news source for that very same “Democratic establishment,” took this as a “declaration of war.”

This isn’t to say that the Democratic establishment isn’t well deserving of a progressive insurgency. Nonetheless, by laying bare that whatever contempt the DNC had for Bernie, the feeling was mutual, Bernie put himself at even more of a disadvantage. The DNC and the Democratic establishment was already not keen on a progressive trouble-maker trying to seek their nomination, that much was obvious to Leftists since the beginning of Bernie’s campaign, but this wasn’t something the average voter knew or cared about. This brazen challenge in the public square, by contrast, allowed the DNC to paint Bernie as the instigator of this infighting to the median voter, and to more openly oppose Bernie alongside Trump as “bad for America.” Instead of playing coy and giving jabs as passive-aggressive or veiled as those he received, Bernie openly dared the establishment to oppose him, and they were all too happy to accept that duel.

And they buried him again.

I love Bernie, supported and voted for him in both 2016 and 2020, and wish him well — this comes from a place of tough love, not ridicule. But this isn’t just about Bernie; many of the most vocal segments of the Left seem to revel in a nearly masochistic aversion to doing anything the easy way. For example, I find that a common refrain when I ask for clarification from someone, or disagree with someone in some small way in certain camps of the Left, is dismissal and/or insult, generally including being told that I am not a Leftist. Keep in mind that this isn’t always based on policy disagreements — I have been told I was “neoliberal trash” for saying that the rat jokes about Pete Buttigieg are getting old —some Leftists simply seem to think the boundaries of Leftism begin and end inside their skulls.

It goes deeper than “Leftists can be mean,” though that certainly isn’t helping our image. The more important critique is that “Leftists are obsessed with exclusivity” (I’m purposefully avoiding the word “purity,” because so often it’s not based on how progressive you are but by how much you align with the person speaking). That the first reflex in response to dissent is “you are not a Leftist” shows that the number of “True Leftists” must be dwindling with each passing day. Every day brings new issues, new stimuli, new events on which we must form the correct opinions or be purged. We must keep our positions on old issues constant or be purged. If the official stance on issue X changes (think Liz Warren in 2016 vs. in 2020), we must update our positions or be purged. Again, hard mode: we seek to win a contest where the winner is chosen by the popular vote (per state), while seemingly tripping over ourselves to tell people they are not actually aligned with us, no matter how much they think they are (ironically, these same people love ridiculing Joe Biden for telling people not to vote for him).

I have never in my life observed any conservative telling another conservative in a conversation that they are not conservative for some slight disagreement. For that matter, I don’t think I’ve observed any liberal telling another liberal they aren’t liberal based on an isolated disagreement. For those groups, their political identity isn’t a merit badge to be seized for bad behavior. And I’m not talking about the Joe Manchins or Mitt Romneys of the world being called DINOs or RINOs, I’m talking about “if you don’t agree with calling Callista Gingrich a deformed, uncanny valley lizard person wearing ill-fitting human skin, you’re no Leftist!” (Yes, that’s the gist of an argument I’ve had. No, it wasn’t sarcasm or a joke.)

This attitude of haughty dismissal also keeps us from reaching new listeners. Another common refrain I’ve heard, when someone who says they are not Leftist asks why they should support certain Leftist policies, is “I don’t owe you my labor,” or variations on that theme. It’s a line borrowed from a much more appropriate context: in conversations of racial justice, sex or gender justice, or any other situation in which there is an oppressed out-group and empowered in-group, members of the oppressed groups have reasserted that they do not owe members of the in-group their time or effort to explain why oppression is hurtful. In the context of oppression, that attitude is wholly called for: forcing oppressed groups to constantly justify their own existence and shepherd the advantaged group to acceptance is just another form of oppression. But Leftists are not an oppressed group (though many Leftists are members of oppressed groups). We are a non-mainstream political group/movement that absolutely has the burden to explain to people why they should listen to us at all, let alone join us or vote for us. By refusing to do that work, we squander an opportunity to gain a new ally and instead leave them with a sour taste, a feeling that we don’t think we need their support. Whether it’s right or wrong for them to form that conclusion, it’s more hard mode. And especially where the other side is more than happy to provide a newcomer or undecided voter with a primer on what they believe and why the newbie should join up, it’s not how we win in a democracy.

Finally, and most lamentably, I have heard the idea in Leftist circles that “electoralism is a farce.” This was on everyone’s lips after Bernie dropped out in 2020. While I think people have come back from the ledge to a degree in the months since, it is still a popular refrain among many Leftists. To boil it down, “we didn’t get what we wanted when we ran the same candidate two times for the same position, so clearly American democracy is irretrievably broken, don’t bother participating in it.” This is the hardest of hard modes. We’re not content to turn off newcomers. We’re not content to tell our “comrades” they are not actually our comrades. But we’re now telling even our discourse-approved, 100% correct-opinion-holding Platinum Plus True Leftists that they shouldn’t vote because the system is rigged and thus voting is a farce. They shouldn’t even vote down-ballot, because the two-party system is irredeemably corrupt and third parties are incapable of breaking that barrier.

So let’s tally up all of the various intentional disadvantages the Left has decided to bear. If we’re going to win power in the United States of America:

• We must do it without billionaire help.
• We must do it without Super PAC help.
• We must do it while embracing a political moniker most Americans consider a third rail or a quick slide to autocracy.
• We must do it in open defiance of the most powerful members of the party whose nomination we’re seeking.
• We must do it while constantly telling our own allies they are not actually our allies.
• We must do it while telling those curious about our goals to figure out why we’re right on their own. If our slogans don’t accurately represent our goals, that’s their problem. If they hear “abolish the police” and draw the foolish conclusion that we want to abolish the police, that’s their problem.
• We must do it while dismissing the very act of voting or participating in American democracy.

And we wonder why we haven’t won yet! We’ve been playing two games of chess at once with both hands tied behind our backs, blindfolded, with our legs in splints and with half of our pieces already off the board. That we’re doing as well as we are is a testament to our strength and our ability to win.

If we swallow our pride and turn hard mode off, I think we can finally get through this.