Thousands Of Words

Precisely.

The first point I’d like to make about this is: Duh. Biden’s policies are better than Trump’s and if Biden loses and Trump wins politics would get worse. Do progressive activists, who are as a group deeply engaged in the issues, need thousands of words to understand this? To put a finer point on it: Who is this for? Setting aside the small number of accelerationists, who as I mentioned above are foolish, where exactly is this enormous group of left wing activists who are unable to understand that Trump is worse than Biden? For one thing, I am on the left and I know a lot of people on the left who go out in the streets and protest Israel, and in November, most of those people who are politically engaged will vote for Biden, because he is not as bad as Trump. Some portion of them will refuse to vote for Biden out of sheer disgust at the direct role he has played in the murder of thousands of civilians. In the context of 150 million voters across America, the number of those people is small. To the extent that there are places like Michigan where there are significant pockets of people who, you know, have had direct relatives blown up in Gaza and who therefore might not be able to bring themselves to pull the lever for the guy who sent the bombs, any electoral damage is 100% the fault of the Biden administration itself. Look in the mirror.

Why can’t progressives be more enthusiastic? Beutler writes as though there is some enormous group of highly engaged left wing activists who personally command large numbers of votes and who are making a tactical choice to boycott the election in order to try to exert leverage on Biden administration policy. In reality, this is just not true. Yes, there are some left wing activists who will not vote for Biden. Is this group going to throw the election to Trump? No. What Biden needs to worry about is not highly engaged activists making some considered calculation not to vote for him, but instead millions of regular ass people who will not vote for him because they don’t feel excited about him. They will stay home because he has not given them an inspiring thing to vote for. That is approximately one thousand times more likely as a scenario for Biden to lose than “left wing activists marshal millions to stay home as negotiating leverage.” Obama excited people. So they turned out to vote. In 2020, people hated Trump so much that they were excited to turn out to vote. Now, Biden is the incumbent and he owns what the government is doing and he has achieved the nifty trick of actively supporting a crime against humanity and isolating himself on the world stage and thereby causing deep moral revulsion within the left wing of his party at the exact same time that he needs them to rally to support him during election season. This is not a problem of miscalculation of leverage; it is a problem of doing something horrible and turning off his political allies right when he is supposed to be pulling them into his coalition. I think that most of the left, including me, will end up voting for Biden, because he is better than Trump. (Polls show Biden winning overwhelmingly among Democratic-leaning swing state voters who pay attention to the news, a group that includes left wing activists. This is not the group that will lose him the election.) But they will not be excited about it, because Biden himself has made that impossible. And that lack of excitement in the Democratic Party’s base will sap the Biden campaign of the energy it needs to turn out voters more broadly.

Is that the fault of the left wing activists? Should those who vote for Biden grudgingly be lectured because they didn’t pretend to be jazzed about the guy who shipped 2000 pound bombs over to be dropped on residential areas? No. Again, if the Biden administration is looking for the culprit who has put its prospects in danger: look in the mirror.