The Weekly Defrost #21

When I check in on social media like Twitter (don’t do this), American political narratives predominate. That’s useful for a temperature check, but I give up and leave quick-like every time, and that’s because everything gets so repetitive. The obvious well-known about social media is that it forefronts stuff that gets an emotional reaction, which is why you see so many posts throw out obnoxiously unnecessary fragments like “the media won’t tell you this, but” or “we need to talk about how” or my personal least favourite, ”I’m sorry but”, reminiscent of a COVID-era middle schooler starting memes with “Nobody:”. Yes, we all use many of these fillers in everyday conversation, too, but we comprehend that much of our normal speech doesn’t need to make it into how we talk through typing; I think we can do the same for these too. 

I think we often miss the other engagement-maximising detail, which is that comments get a tiny fraction of the attention of the posts themselves. This is not surprising at all. Successfully posts are, definitionally the “best” of the bunch. However, comments have a spread, just like all the posts that the algorithm shows to nobody. The consequence of this is that arguments on social media (and I mean that not just as bickering but in the sense of proposing “I think X because Y”) are very shallow. The vast majority of viewers stop at the first layer. Instead of hearing a succession of new layers of thinking, they hear the same basic points, again and again. This logic only becomes more compelling on formats I haven’t engaged with like TikTok. Not only is it rarer to go read through comments because you chose here over Twitter etc. for video > text, but I doubt most people are sitting through the entire length of in-depth explainers instead of grabbing several seconds at a time.

Proving that social media is not connecting our brightest minds is not rocket science. Nor am I complaining. In the spirit of what I’ve argued time and again, most people in the newspaper-and-TV era weren’t tuning in to intellectual discussions and parliamentary debates. Media is mainly for entertainment, and while the amount of information getting to older generations may have declined over time, it’s picked up for younger people. I’d rather, for instance, young American voters learn about the threat to abortion rights in a sometimes very surface level way from TikTok and go vote than that option not be present and bank on them reading blogs like these or watching CNN, because they won’t. 

After all, you often only need a surface level of engagement to get what’s most important. Can you really say there’s a ton of difference between the pro-abortion voter who understands that Trump got Roe repealed and Democrats and ballot amendments will protect it, and the pro-abortion voter who has a detailed understanding of the specific Planned Parenthood clinics near them being shut down by which Republican Congresspeople? The latter is both ideal and important to form an activist base, but they’re both going to go vote for the same thing.

I tune out of Twitter quickly because, aside from a few polls and current events and the occasional insightful perspective, so much of the shallow engagement is with partisan posting that doesn’t convey any new information. The Trump people continue to pretend with all the confidence of a middle schooler making memes that their side is an effective political movement, instead of a stan culture to make Jungkook blush for a boomer who thinks you lower prices by taxing goods more, asylum seekers come from Arkham, and the best way to win swing voters back is to keep repeating all the anti-democratic and anti-minority reasons they’ve run so far away from you. Democrats just say anodyne stuff by how they don’t understand how anybody could disagree with their obviously right viewpoints. These are often obviously right, but their presentation goes a long way to explaining how a party with this base is always neck-and-neck with a movement that’s really quite bad at democratic politics or governance. 

I tried an experiment of filtering out a few anodyne Democrat posts, and Musk promptly greeted me with a bunch of far-right colour theory, by which I mean these posts have all the persuasiveness of a middle schooler assigning moral, social and economic weight to the crayons they’re still chewing. There is one more kind of post I began to notice, and that is the American far-left. I’m not trying to do some kind of both-sides equivalence here. Given that this is around 1-2% of the voting public, the strength of Bernie’s bloc in recent years, and in the absence of stronger evidence, I think we can safely dismiss the idea that these are mostly terrorist-worshipper tankies. 

These are a widespread bloc of people, from boomer hippies to young college-educated well-off whites to now a lot of Arab-Americans, who might not have been so united in past years; not all of them would have agreed with the left-wing diagnosis of America’s problems as stemming from billionaires and a corrupt party duopoly. The overriding theme with these voters is the war on Gaza*, and the main context in which they post is to argue against voting for Kamala Harris, itself an argument about the kind of campaign the Democratic Party should run. That’s going to be the core of this Weekly Defrost: engaging with the several faces and layers of that argument. 

*Yes, yes, obligatory rule one is dead blah blah blah. Resolving the issue of Israel-Palestine is a complex long-term issue. For instance, the strong and inherent right of Palestinians to their own state and elections comes with the important caveat that Gaza will probably just elect Hamas again, at which point Israel invades once more - just like they invade current recognised state and democracy Lebanon - and the central issue of peace and sovereignty remains unsolved. Any attempt by me to propose an IP peace plan will quickly become a mess. But I’m not gonna ignore an ongoing genocide that can be tackled in much blunter and simple terms. 

Columns of civilians are currently being herded by soldiers through a region still lacking for clean drinking water. Watching such ghastly images, I don’t blame any American who resorts to their main democratic tool to punish an administration that have fumbled an unfolding humanitarian crisis unbelievably hard. This is some real Kennedy-Johnson-Nixon killing kids in Vietnam so they don’t lose the election stuff, and while it’s not American soldiers doing it this time, it’s still American arms doing it and a powerful bargaining influence going unused over a brutal ally. 

However. 

I believe the argument to vote for Harris, and more generally for Democrats, is stronger than any not to. I’m not an American, this is just a mental exercise, but it’s also useful to think about given that we have plenty of voters in NZ who take in a lot of these “boycott the corrupt duopoly” arguments from abroad, arguments I was definitely more partial to a few years ago then I am now. Let’s get into them.

The flying standard for arguments to boycott Harris is moral objection to supporting a genocidaire, or rewarding the Democrats for atrocious choices. As somebody who grew up attuned to the debates around the Iraq War, you’ll hear no argument from me about condemning America’s ruling class for violence abroad. All memetic embraces of Brat Khive Queen Kamala Harris or any of the rest of them are done tongue in cheek, a meaningless aesthetic tag on to the underlying argument, which is a stone cold belief that they’re significantly less worse. 

It’s natural that pro-Gaza campaigners wield moral authority - that’s a significant part of how they attempt to accomplish their goals like courting donations for humanitarian aid, pressuring companies to join BDS, and even pushing their governments to switch their position on the crisis. Who cares if the reason some well-off college-educated white kid is contributing to these causes is to attempt to clean their own cape, what matters is they’re doing it.

However, the issue takes on a different cast when it becomes about voting. I raise no objection or complaint for anybody Palestinian or otherwise victimised by the conflict. However, a lot of the anti-Harrises are well-off, college educated white kids and the like, and the problem here is the lines start to blur. Are they talking about the moral repulsiveness of voting for Harris as part of a coherent political strategy to achieve something pro-Gaza? That’ll be contingent on later discussions about whether that works. 

Or are they simply feeling bad about voting for a horrible administration, and they don’t want to do it because they’d feel morally burdened? This seems really justifiable on the face of it - we want fewer pro-genocide people in the world! Zero, in fact, to be exact! But the concern is that this centres the feelings and identities and self-expression of those voters over accomplishing whatever is best for the most Gazans. 

Anybody could find compelling reasons in any year not to vote for the Democratic candidate, because America is thoroughly cooked and every administration has a whole lot of sins you could lay at its feet. The same goes for governments here - pick state abuse in care, just as a starting place and you already have more than enough to justify not voting for any party ever in government as a protest until they do right by those people. You’re already personally stained and complicit the moment you step in to voting, or willfully blinkering yourself, or ignorant, so the best thing for you is to not vote. 

But…all the many millions of non-voters around the world over the decades haven’t accomplished much with their protest. Politicians write them off for the reasons I’ve mentioned before. They tend to fit all the demographics of people unlikely to vote, so why bother to turn out pink haired young radicals on campus instead of putting the same effort into getting more reliably racist boomers? And, realistically, they are not voting for their “side” for all kinds of different reasons. American polling shows the war in Gaza may have deep salience, but it’s not wide - the large majority of young voters think there’s bigger priorities.  

Basically, I’d argue that the perspective of not voting as protest can’t be a perspective that has thought through consequences beyond the self. If you were morally true and pure to this principle, you would never vote, at which point the question becomes who you’ve helped by doing nothing. I’m not going to indulge in too much cynicism about people looking for a reason to not have to bother to vote here, I think when it comes to these single issues were mostly talking about very motivated and quite engaged and informed people, but it’s the easiest thing in the world to argue the same can’t be said for many non-voters and protest voters. 

The next step in the argument, then, if staying morally pure won’t help anybody, is to argue against what I said above, that holding votes back will motivate a turn from the administration. Persuasion of these protest voters is not helped at all by many of their critics, who tend not only to speak in really denigrating and dismissive terms about “moral purity” (which covers, in practical terms, perspectives about how or even whether to save the lives of thousands of people), but also to take the baffling road of talking about how Democrats need to have power.

You guys. If somebody is at the point they’re ready to protest vote, I doubt they trust and love politicians. When you talk about giving politicians power, you just reinforce that you’ve bought into the system - that you’ve become slavishly loyal, both in a partisan way and in an unquestioningly subservient, manufactured-consent way, to your politicians deserving their spot in the hierarchy, with all of their money and corruption and simple abuses of power. This argument can and should be stepped out more - particularly given that Green Party voters apparently didn’t even flinch that their nominee doesn’t know how many Congresspeople there are. Basically, the vast majority of people don’t know how government works; treat protest voters the same, and not in a bad way.

What confuses me, too, about how poor this counter argument is is how easy it is to judoflip arguments about turning the Democrats. All left-wing characterisation of centre-left politicians is that you can’t trust them, that they’re soulless career hacks, that they relentlessly drive to the right, that they’re bought and paid for…but the plan is…if they lose an election…then they turn to the left?

There is an element of truth to this most people would miss, which is that when you lose seats in a parliamentary election (as was the case with Congressional Democrats in 2022) you generally start with the most borderline members, who also tend to be the most centrist. It’s like NZ Labour losing their Damien O’Connors and Kieran McAnultys last year. Otherwise, though, the whole thing feels like the sudden substitution of wishful thinking at the last hurdle. Democrats, treated as rational, cynical, self-interested actors, will continue to prioritise the more efficient avenue of disproportionately centrist swing voters over unreliable lefties.

But all the analysis about why the Democratic Party is faulty also explains why, on an emotional, irrational level, they’re bound to turn to you to blame! Who wants to admit that what they did wasn’t working? Why not go after those punks who kept picking fights with you, who are naive about how you need power, over those oh so polite swing voters who may disagree with you about a few fundamental human rights, but who talk a lot about civility and look and talk similarly to you? 

The analysis that a centrist party will read defeat through a left-wing lens makes no sense. And we know this because we can look at every time the Democrats lost! 1984: classic New Dealer Walter Mondale loses after promising to raise your taxes, the Democratic Leadership Council forms to push the party to the center. 1988: DLC guy Michael Dukakis loses after looking soft on crime and weak to race-baiting, the Democrats resolve to get tougher on criminals whatever the cost to the black community. So you get Republican-lite Bill Clinton, and Joe Biden’s 1994 crime bill, and when Al Gore loses in 2000 and many Democrats specifically cite the Green Party as the reason why, the Democrats lurch to the left and - no they don’t! After the Green Party sunk a guy whose lifelong obsession has proved to be green politics, the Democrats nominate John Kerry, who basically agrees on invading Iraq but just has quibbles about implementation. Of course, over this time the Democratic Party does progress left on plenty of issues, but that’s…the natural march of progress, the other 730 days between victories or defeats, the hard work on the ground. 

The obvious way to fault this lack of awareness about how Democrats keep moving right after losses is simple: protest voters are disproportionately young and disengaged. Ergo, they just don’t know, didn’t notice, or don’t remember all this stuff happening. But I think there’s also one other thing to mention, which is that these protest voters are pretty bad at finding a morally pure standardbearer to tie their wagon to! Howard Dean in 2004 was the leftie’s guy, and he was a centrist governor who killed universal healthcare in his state that shifted left for political expediency. Obama ‘08 was to the right of Clinton on many issues, but the race was interpreted the opposite way around because they spoke the opposite languages: Obama seized on the extraordinary moment to propose hope and change, and Clinton cautioned stability and reasonableness. 

We’ll put a pin in Obama, because him and Sanders are essential to qualifying the theory of post-loss shifts, and turn for a moment to Jill Stein, Green Party candidate. She’s not just clueless. She’s not just simpatico with war criminals who have massacred the innocent too. (And at the point at which people start reasoning away either the necessity of concentrating their protest vote around even a flawed standardbearer, or excusing war criminals abroad, what’s the point of not just voting Democrat?) She’s somebody who pops up every four years, garners her party’s nomination, wastes their chances and then disappears.

She exemplifies the problem with many protest parties, the deeper analysis of what “power” means: a left-wing alternative in America is not going to come from a breakaway within the Democrats, who have assimilated the likes of AOC and would surely fixate on squashing the likes of Ilhan Omar or Rashida Tlaib if they ever took a leaf from the Corbynite book to leave the party in protest. Compared to further back in history, political parties have simply become too professional, too able to stick and carrot dissidents and marginalise deserters for the kinds of massive party splits that instantly lose you the next election and force the mainstream to put serious effort into reuniting the coalition. (Watch this space in case Trump ever does this to the GOP.)

So, if you want to have at least enough of the vote share that Democrats clearly must prioritise appealing to you over pro-Israel boomer centrist swing voters, you need to expand your outreach. That just doesn’t happen. The likes of Jill Stein show up every four years, take money, get attention, and vanish. They have done nothing to make anybody’s life better. That starts with the hard, boring, uncertain work of winning local offices in your town or county, then graduating to running for state positions like ag commissioner, then for Congress, then…and so on and so on. 

It’s about building a loyal base across the country who can tangibly see what you achieve for them, and trust you more than the alternative. After all, Gaza is a foreign crisis. It may be highly immoral, but the large majority of Americans do not care about Palestine. They care about their self-centered issues, and if you can appeal to their votes over their issues, and then parlay that into influence to save Gazan lives, that’s your moral obligation. (And, of course, a lot of this disconnect arises because predominantly younger and high moral stakes activists tend not to have much overlap with oldheads who attend council meetings to discuss urban planning.)

Let’s bounce back to Obama and Sanders. Both went above and beyond the prior Democratic norm. For Obama, a lot of that resulted from the added demands of the moment, given the recession and the wars and all that. I’d also argue that he ran a more compelling electoral campaign than the typical “just move left on positions and people will follow” argument, an argument that has been tested again and again and typically fails at the ballot box. It’s an argument that exists in a vacuum, without prepared response to how the right wing parties and the media will pillory you or even just how the public will react. And it sometimes winds up, as in the case of Jeremy Corbyn, with blaming the right wing parties and the media and everybody but yourself.

I frequently ask why no Republican ever criticises Donald Trump on the grounds that the corrupt media and covert deep state and sleepy Democrats keep kicking his ass. The same logic applies here. If the most important thing is policy outcomes that materially improve people’s lives, then your greatest responsibility is getting into a governing position to deliver those changes, and if that means finding new language to reach out to swing voters, or arguments that implicitly cave to the status quo to nullify attacks on you, so be it - it’s the right thing to do. We can argue about where the right place to draw the line is - for instance, I’d say unhesitatingly that Democrats should do everything in their power to weaken Israel’s offensive capabilities even if that marginally hurts their electoral chances - but, also as I’ve said before, all political positions involve some drawing of the line, and it’s mere framing and narrative to pretend that the hard left don’t also engage in some of their own. 

Failure to obey this credo of “outcome matters over messaging” explains the fate of Bernie Sanders, who, lest we forget, ran a hell of an upset campaign against Clinton and was at one point the frontrunner for the 2020 nomination. All of this was powered on all those virtues the left celebrate about mobilising people for a better future…but they hit a ceiling. For week after week after week in the Democratic primaries, Sanders would repeat the same arguments phrased the same ways in the belief that their contents were so compelling that they just had to persuade, ignoring the fact that they were not. (Seriously, watch some of those debates back and tell me if you see a difference.) He chewed up valuable time pandering to a base that was already behind him and neglecting to bring other voters with other lines of reasoning into the tent - a disconnect that meant well-off, white college educateds cheered for how he would help them, while key constituencies like black voters never got the invite. And when the Democratic establishment did organise all of their power to pivot, to change, to make Biden the opponent within a matter of days, Sanders lost, comprehensively.

There’s no path forward in the foreseeable future for a left-winger to win the party’s nomination. Repeating the same pure, undistilled arguments and the same ambitious solutions has not delivered those into everyday people’s lives. What has happened is that Sanders and his lieutenants have become quite influential in the Biden agenda, pushing the party significantly to the left - all the working on the inside for change that many leftie detractors oppose.

When you compare this to somebody like Obama or Harris, the contrast becomes clear: they run on platforms that are sometimes surprisingly progressive, that still fall well short of what may be acceptable, and they attempt to curate their message to maximise their vote share instead of to simply repeat their views again and again. You can also put those up for criticism - Obama notoriously neglected to build the Democratic Party around him, fatally undermining changes to make change, and I’m not very impressed with much of Harris’s campaign, which is inexplicably so averse to putting up policy details to compare against those of…Donald Trump. 

I’m beginning to repeat thoughts I’ve shared in previous posts, and I’ve written for quite a while, so I’m going to wrap up here. The conclusion that I’m getting at is a simple one: what matters in politics is improving, and even, saving the lives of the most vulnerable. Everything should be secondary to that. So the hard left should not pretend that their candidates and campaigns do not have the same human faults of ego and grandstanding and legacy as you see crop up everywhere else - not in the sense that that’s disqualifying, but in that you need to plan and think about how to minimise the distorting influence of that. 

And while you have a point and are morally right when you come out to light up a Democratic administration for enabling genocide, that’s not your opportunity to wash your hands clean and let the dying continue. Nor is it to hope for the Qanon stormesque revolution or collective waking-up that has not come to pass for decades and decades. (I mean, COVID got fumbled as an opportunity to redefine government, that’s some absolute asking God for help and he sends you a helicopter stuff.) It’s your moment to take a look in the mirror and go, holy shit, how is the hard left in America so ineffectual that we can do nothing to stop the genocide? Why, even just in the past eight years since Sanders, have we not built our numbers at every level up enough to be able to make a change? 

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict didn’t begin yesterday! At any time in modern American history, left-wing political organisation could have laid out a coherent, professional plan over the next several years to change people’s lives, and did not. And this, I think, gets to the in a nutshell ending to this article - why, for all the sympathy I feel for the goals of a lot of other left-wing uni-educated young people, this has gotta be thought out a little better. 

Left-wing analysis of issues at every step pulls the tarp away to reveal the grand structural design, the omnipresent forces at work, of privilege and power - of institutionalised bigotries, of wealth and deregulation, of empire and north over south. And then, having pointed to the awesome and overwhelming structural reasons why bad outcomes will all result, the solution is so often - definitely not always, there’s plenty of good effective campaigning out there from the left - some variant on “and soon we’ll all wake up and realise, vote in a landslide, and then we can make all the changes!”

It’s a narrative that doesn’t just seem a bit navel-gazey, in that its prescription is basically to be as cool as you are, having gone through that recognition of the way of the world and inviting others to experience that overhaul as the main act of change. Changing what uni-educated young people think is not enough to win elections and pressure campaigns and change lives - you need a lot more of the population, people who aren’t inclined to agree with you, many of whom were once well-intentioned, uni-educated young people themselves. Besides ways to form coalitions with older people, this face of the left also needs to figure out how to improve retention rates, to keep people committed to their causes as they grow up and purchase property and gain a longer perspective on things. How do you keep an Obama from shifting to the right, both personally and on a political-base level? 

These arguments of power structures feel self-defeating, in how it constantly tells you the world is cooked and keeps good down. That can be true, but, like, you need a persuasive analysis then of how things will finally change this time, because sudden big good changes do come in history! Look at the end of communism and apartheid - all the cynics taking the long view would have written those off. And this, then, is the third and final time in this piece I’ll say in conclusion: at the risk of advancing my own “going through change like me is the solution” take, more than any pithy addition to theory, what the left needs is to actually get better informed and acquainted with the world. To have specific and believable analyses on particular contexts, a grasp of chance and risk, of legislative margins, historical precedents - a decidedly unpersuasive grab bag for me to end on, but one that makes the biggest difference. If you’re going to promise bigger and bolder change to the world than everybody else, you need to make people believe it can happen. That doesn’t happen until you realise you don’t know how, and start to learn.