Leftist Practical Politics

This is a fantastic article and I encourage everyone to read it. Especially if you’re trying to persuade a clueless centrist who genuinely believes the “both sides” nonsense, this article has great arguments and evidence for you.

Some people are reading a bit too much into the responses: I don’t believe in parsing every single word or counting seconds until tweet. However, by this point in time, I think it’s fair to start roughly ranking the candidates. So that’s what I’ll do.

Decent-to-Good responses:

Bernie Sanders

Elizabeth Warren 

Jay Inslee

Julián Castro

John Hickenlooper

Kamala Harris

Beto O’Rourke

Pete Buttigieg

Cory Booker

Marianne Williamson

Andrew Yang

Bad, Equivocating, Mealy-mouthed Responses:

Amy Klobuchar

Kirsten Gillibrand

No Response:

Tulsi “I HATE MUSLIMS” Gabbard

Joe Biden

I’m an open borders radical. But I’m also a pragmatist, and open borders are something that isn’t going to happen overnight. It’s a position we have to evolve towards as a global community. So I don’t expect any viable Dem presidential candidate to push for open borders, and using that for a litmus test is simply ridiculous.

But I’m also really unhappy and disappointed with the way Sanders answered the question. It seemed like he was throwing out red meat to court racist Trump voters. He’s always been vague and bad when it comes to immigration, and in 2020 his position is looking to become even worse. 

The correct viable position on this should be to ALWAYS reassert the humanity of marginalized people crossing the border first. And Sanders didn’t do that. He treated poor people like the fucking enemy. 

Here’s how he should have answered:

“We already have open borders when it comes to multinational corporations outsourcing work. We already have open borders when it comes to the super rich, who can go anywhere they want in the world with no problem. The question is, what kind of borders should our country draw when it comes to poor people hurt by those corporations? And why are we using them as a scapegoat for our own problems?”

A failed presidential run is a smart move for her, economically. Because if she ran for re-election in Hawai’i in 2020, she’d probably get primaried out. A presidential run raises her national profile and ensures her job prospects as a future Fox News commentator. She could jump on their discussion panels as the token Democrat. She could even stop pretending that she doesn’t hate LGBTQ+ people. 

The 1 Percent Candidates

They’re unlikely to make it all the way to the White House. But there are plenty of other reasons to run.

Boilerplate explanation for each post in the series:

I’m going to grade the candidates based on three factors: policy, ability to get policy enacted when in power, and strength of connection to the Democratic base.

Odds are taken from a table here. Take these bookie-type rankings with a grain of salt, but they do often reflect the most current sampling of public opinion. If the candidate’s name is in italics, it means they haven’t officially announced yet. If you have questions or feedback about my grades, please ask! I’d love to be able to have discussions about it. Some of the grades I feel very strongly about, others I’m very tentative on and will likely change soon.

This is a pretty big update and a lot has changed in terms of odds.

Bernie Sanders continues to be a dumbass. While he has great policies, if he won (which he absolutely won’t, because Southern primaries still exist) he’d be unable to get any of those policies accomplished due to his conservative mindset when it comes to democratic reforms. And he also won’t release his tax returns, WTF!

My expectations for Biden were already subterranean, yet he somehow managed to drill below them this week.

As I predicted, Yang is already slipping back down in the odds ranking. His brand of techbro utopianism just doesn’t have any broad longterm appeal.

Buttigieg has rocketed upwards recently. He has a practical moderate reform platform, but I’m not excited about his record as Mayor of South Bend and his failure to meaningfully address gentrification.

I heard a good interview with Julián Castro today, so I moved him up a bit. I liked what he said about Puerto Rico, and gentrification, and I know he did get a few things done at HUD. When asked about the rise of white nationalism, he gave a strong answer, attacking Islamophobia while also saying he didn’t want to blame all white guys for when a white guy does something terroristic —while at first such an add-on might sound annoying, your typical voter isn’t up to speed on critical race theory and craves that kind of reassurance, especially from a non-white Latino like Castro. There’s a different standard applied to anything a candidate of color says about white people and so they all have to walk a tighter line. In contrast, Beto O’Rourke gave a pretty strong statement about white nationalism this week, which I credit him for, but since he’s a white guy he can get away with that.

I also heard an interview with Jay Inslee. I moved him up in my grades for addressing climate change with obvious passion and intelligence and saying the exact phrase, “Communities of color are the first victims of climate change” which is the stone cold truth with none of that “Millenials vs. Boomers” bullshit sauce. However, on everything else he seemed a bit vague.

Here’s my third update (first here, second here)

Boilerplate explanation for each post in the series:

I’m going to grade the candidates based on three factors: policy, ability to get policy enacted when in power, and strength of connection to the Democratic base.

Odds are taken from a table here. Take these bookie-type rankings with a grain of salt, but they do often reflect the most current sampling of public opinion. If the candidate’s name is in italics, it means they haven’t officially announced yet. If you have questions or feedback about my grades, please ask! I’d love to be able to have discussions about it. Some of the grades I feel very strongly about, others I’m very tentative on and will likely change soon.

A few notes on this version:

Two people said they definitely wouldn’t run so I took them off the list. Mike Bloomberg isn’t running (good) and neither is Sherrod Brown (which is too bad, because I like him). 

Andrew Yang has rocketed up the odds list due to increased media attention for his UBI platform. He’s also attracted the attention of 4chan-type white supremacists who are supporting him and calling themselves the “Yang Gang” now.  This is partly Yang’s own fault for going on the Joe Rogan show and Tucker Carlson. To his credit, he’s denounced the many racist and antisemitic memes the “Yang Gang” are using to support him (many of these memes are also highly racist against Yang, too). However, I don’t think the Alt-Right support will last. They’ll probably go back to Tulsi Gabbard or someone else after a few weeks, although I could be wrong. And as I’ve explained before, the odds list ranking does not necessarily mean his chances of becoming president have become any higher.

Hickenlooper, like John Delaney, seems like a clueless centrist. The idea that he can “get things done” by “talking to Republicans” might work in Colorado but it’s purely delusional on the national stage.

Buttigieg has similar policies to most of the candidates and seems like a smart guy, but his relative  inexperience makes him a very difficult sell.

Jay Inslee would basically get the same grade as Hickenlooper except for emphasizing climate change more and appearing slightly less clueless in terms of fighting Republicans.

Here’s my second update. The first in the series is here. 

Boilerplate explanation for each post in the series: 

I’m going to grade the candidates based on three factors: policy, ability to get policy enacted when in power, and strength of connection to the Democratic base.

Odds are taken from a table here. Take these bookie-type rankings with a grain of salt, but they do often reflect the most current sampling of public opinion. If the candidate’s name is in italics, it means they haven’t officially announced yet. If you have questions or feedback about my grades, please ask! I’d love to be able to have discussions about it. Some of the grades I feel very strongly about, others I’m very tentative on and will likely change soon.

A few notes on this version: 

Joe Biden has gotten closer to announcing, but he’s also received some negative press lately. I am not a supporter and hope he stays out or drops out early. 

I’m also not a Bernie Sanders supporter (although I was in early 2016). Now that he’s held his first rally, my grades have also been reaffirmed — he hasn’t done anything to fix his terrible connection with the base and will get destroyed (again) in the Southern state primaries.

O’Rourke has decent policies and people like him, but I’m still unsure as to his ability on the national stage. 

I enjoyed reading this longform article on Marianne Williamson and appreciate her willingness to address tough issues and be concrete and specific about reparations. Her flaws as a candidate are also glaringly obvious in the article... hoo boy. I’d still vote for her over Tulsi Gabbard though.

Andrew Yang is running on a platform of UBI and humanitarian technocracy. While I have some sympathies towards his outlook, overall it’s delusional in the present day, and his background in Silicon Valley venture capitalism is a minus in my book.

Julián Castro has decent policies but doesn’t really stand out in the pack.

John Delany seems like a clueless centrist. 

I saw Bill Weld interviewed on TV in 2016 when he was running on the Libertarian ticket with Gary Johnson. During the course of the interview, he basically endorsed Hillary Clinton instead of Gary Johnson, which was hilarious and made me actually kinda like him (as a person, not a politician). He’s totally clueless.

Elizabeth Warren has moved down the list in terms of odds but she’s still my favorite so far.

I’m going to update my feelings as the race progresses. Since Bernie Sanders just announced, I thought I’d try my hand at a ranking.

This is going to be a very interesting but uniquely stressful primary. Here’s my own attempt at a ranking system. I’m going to grade the candidates based on three factors: policy, ability to get policy enacted when in power, and strength of connection to the Democratic base. 

Odds are taken from a table here. Take these bookie-type rankings with a grain of salt, but they do often reflect the most current sampling of public opinion. Tulsi Gabbard wasn’t even on the list but I threw her in anyway because she’s so terrible that she serves as a good point of comparison. If the candidate’s name is in italics, it means they haven’t officially announced yet.

If you have questions or feedback about my grades, please ask! I’d love to be able to have discussions about it. Some of the grades I feel very strongly about, others I’m very tentative on and will likely change soon. I didn’t even rank O’Rourke yet because I didn’t really follow the Texas race (I was too busy with the Georgia race!). 

US imperialism isn’t bad because the US is uniquely special-snowflake bad, it’s bad because ALL IMPERIALISM IS BAD, US, Chinese, Russian, or whatever. 

You can’t just flip something bad upside down to make it better. Foreign policy is not exactly like a pancake, as tankies seem to believe (although they’re not the only ones who operate according to that binary fallacy).

El Chapo Trap House really fucking sucks 

The left is increasingly capable of criticizing itself constructively and thereby becoming better, more representative, more organic, and more popular.

Sure! I’ll try to give you some very general tips. A lot of this very much depends on how repressive your political environment is. If you live somewhere like Turkey or Myanmar or Chechnya for example, you can’t follow activist advice meant for the US and Canada without getting arrested or worse.

1. Take care of yourself and your family first in terms of health and physical safety. If you don’t, if you feel forced to sacrifice yourself, no matter what you accomplish you’ll quickly burn out :-( Remember a lot of famous male activists were only successful over the long term because they had a team of women backing them up! 

2. Start with your local community. Local can mean the people who live around you, but it can also mean people who are in your “local” internet community, the people who you most often communicate with, who support you, who rely on your support. Understand your needs and resources and their needs and resources. If feel like you don’t know your local community, start introducing yourself. This can be agony for introverts if you go about it the wrong way, so find a way that fits.

3. Don’t bite off more than you can chew or you will again get disappointed and, again, burn out. Whatever you do, try to make it sustainable. Try to get involved with jobs or projects that you work on for a certain period every week. Big event-related projects are important too, but hopefully that’s not all you do.

4. Don’t lock yourself into a political identity and make all your activism about conforming to that identity. You don’t have to be an internet influencer to get things done. You don’t even have to call yourself an activist (I usually don’t). It’s about what you do, not who you are: actions, not living up to some idealized identity.

5. If there are people you admire who are doing the work that you want to do, get involved with them. Working together you can accomplish so much more However, don’t think that just because people agree with you on changes that need to be made, that they’re perfect people. A lot of activist “communities” are super dysfunctional. Set your expectations low so that you’ll be pleasantly surprised by reality. You’re going to encounter a lot of unreliable flakes as well as people well along their way to burnout.

6. Of course I get frustrated when people don’t follow my (almost always) excellent political advice, but then I remember that I’m just as capable of flaws as every other human being. So I always try to talk myself down before I get too frustrated. The two forces that help me not get too frustrated are A) Buddhism  and B) Marx, who in his famous The German Ideology, says…

In contrast to German philosophy, which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say, we do not set out from what men humans imagine, but from real active men humans. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life. 

In other words, we can’t start with utopia then get pissed off at reality for not retroactively conforming to utopia. We have to start with reality and make it better.

7. Once you feel like you’re grounded and ready to go, just look around, listen to people, see what needs to be fixed, and start fixing it, or pointing out attention so that other people can help fix it. It’s that easy. Or that hard, depending on how you look at it. 

Kind of a wonky way to set up a graph, but it checks out. 

On the last day of 2018, here are my thoughts on the possible Dem presidential candidates. My focus as always is harm reduction on a global level, never purity or “do I want to have a beer with this person” 🤮

Although on my main account I talk a lot about the evils of generational warfare and how stupid the whole Boomer/Millenial binary is, I’m still very concerned about the age of candidates. And the reason is that we’re entering into a global period of incredible fluidity and vulnerability. People whose mindset has become semi-fossilized are just not as well equipped to deal with these changes. As a Gen Xer who came of age in the 80s, I can see, for example, how Trump’s worldview hasn’t changed since then. Not all old people become rigid, but many do, and I’m not willing to take that risk. 

Bernie Sanders: I voted for him in the primary. Since then, he’s made a lot of bad decisions and alienated a lot of the Democratic base. He doesn’t understand race in America and is deeply patronizing toward people of color. He’s too old. 

Hillary Clinton: I voted for her in the general. I believe she shifted to the left during 2016 as a result of pressure from below (that’s a good thing, not a bad thing, we want politicians who respond to pressure) but since then, her deeply awful remark about European immigration shows that she snapped back once the pressure was off. Also, too old.

Joe Biden: a corporate-loving centrist who, unlike Hillary Clinton, is never ever ever going to shift left. Because people love Biden memes they might not care, so he’s sadly very popular. Way too old. I’d still vote for him against Trump of course, like anyone on this list.

Kamala Harris: I like her because she’s tough. She’s already been attacked by a broad spectrum of people and shown she can handle it. She’s young but has good experience. All the leftists who say they won’t vote for her because she’s a cop don’t vote anyway, so they don’t count. I hate cops, but I’d always rather vote for a cop who sends less people to prison than a non-cop who sends more people to prison. 

Corey Booker: Similar to Harris in that he’s young and high energy, but he’s shown some excitable behavior under pressure. Also is way too cozy with some sectors in finance.

Elizabeth Warren: I like her a lot and think her brand of pragmatic, progressive pro-small-business capitalism represents a vast improvement over what we have now. She’s tough enough, but she’s on the border of being too old. Her misstep with the DNA test was perhaps a sign of that.

I loved reading this article, not because I agree with the writer’s argument (which is really stupid) but because it lists, very clearly and concisely, how much officials were harassed during the anti-war movement and provides a blueprint for doing it again.

Most activists stopped short of planting bombs and shooting police officers. But many still blew past the boundaries of what nearly everyone considered legitimate protest. Demonstrators not only directed chants of “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” at President Lyndon Johnson; they also accosted officials of his administration when they set out in public. In 1967, when Secretary of State Dean Rusk tried to attend a banquet of the Foreign Policy Association in New York, a radical group called Up Against the Wall, Motherfuckers (often called “the Motherfuckers” for short) threw eggs, rocks and bags of cows’ blood, though Rusk slipped into the hotel unscathed. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara was spat upon in an airport and called a baby killer; on a visit to Harvard, a hostile mob encircled his car and rocked it back and forth until police spirited him to safety via a tunnel. Antiwar radicals even tried to set fire to McNamara’s Colorado vacation home — twice. A few years later, after he’d left government, someone tried to throw him off the Martha’s Vineyard ferry.

The confrontations continued after Johnson yielded the presidency to Richard Nixon. Since the 1950s, liberals had regarded Nixon — as they see Trump today — as having uniquely trampled on the norms of American political culture. “Certain charges are not made; there are unwritten rules in the game of politics,” wrote Richard Strout, in The New Republic in 1958. “But the lethal young Nixon does not accept these rules. He is out for the kill and the scalp at any cost.” Historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., agreed, saying Nixon was “the only major American politician in our history who came to prominence by techniques which, if generally adopted, would destroy the whole fabric of mutual confidence on which democracy rests.” The belief (not unfounded) that Nixon would stop at nothing in pursuit of victory primed his critics to spy danger in his every move.

This reputation — combined with Nixon’s own polarizing rhetoric and his failure to quickly end the Vietnam War — fed the left’s desperation. In his first years as president, violent radicalism spiked: A presidential study pointed to a national “crisis of violence,” with some 41,000 bombings or bomb threats during his first 15 months in the White House. In this context, the far left continued to directly go after members of the administration and even the first family. Various Nixonites recounted harrowing incidents in their memoirs or interviews. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then a White House domestic policy aide, told Nixon in May 1970 that militants from Students for a Democratic Society had threatened to torch his Cambridge, Massachusetts, house, forcing his family to go underground. His 10-year-old son, John feared his father would be assassinated.

Julie Nixon, the president’s daughter, also paid a price. Often a target of invective — at one rally at Smith College, which she attended, a crowd of 10,000 chanted, “Fuck Julie and David Eisenhower” — she was set to graduate in the spring of 1970 when the campuses, in the wake of Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia, turned violent. Because of threats, the Secret Service insisted that the president not attend. Julie accepted the decision, writing to her father’s aide John Ehrlichman, “I truly think the day will be a disaster if he comes,” but the thought of her father missing the event brought her nearly to tears.

Hearing these stories, many will respond: Boo-hoo. What’s Julie missing her father at graduation compared to the strafing of Cambodia? But the point is not that Julie Nixon or Robert McNamara was done a grave injustice, any more than discomfort with the treatment of Sarah Sanders and Kirstjen Nielsen means seeing them as victims. The reason to maintain standards of conduct and preserve a non-political space of human interaction is not to protect particular politicians and government officials. It’s to protect America, to uphold the political culture we value.

I’m not a huge fan of that definition because it smooshes together two different things. It’s important to look at ”communism” at least two different ways. One is a political ideology practiced by present-day groups. The other is a goal for a future society. 

I’m going to review a book soon which talks about this, but communism as a goal for a future society is basically just Star Trek without The Federation. We could theoretically get there with or without a revolution. In communism there would be…

no money

no capitalism

no embedded class system that you are born into and determines your future

no state itself

In such a society, highly skilled specialized workers wouldn’t get “paid” more… because there wouldn’t be any money. They’d study and become skilled and then do their job by some mixture of internal motivation (because they want to) and external motivation (because other people look up to them). Reputation and competition are pretty big motivators and there are all kinds of examples of people who do things very well for free that way. People who do less skilled labor or couldn’t do any labor at all wouldn’t be insulted and humiliated like they are today, they just wouldn’t be quite as admired. 

Currently we have a global capitalist system that only very randomly and intermittently rewards hard work, discipline, talent and societal improvement. The most reward (the most money) goes to people who were born into rich families and actively work to make the world a WORSE place. 

I don’t call myself a communist, because while I really want to get to some variant of a communist society, most people who call themselves communists have particular routes for getting to that kind of society that I don’t agree with, either because they’re unrealistic or dehumanizing or both (tankies). So I just call myself a leftist to leave the routes open as broadly as possible. Capitalism is a maladaptive coping mechanism for an uncertain and dangerous future and anything we can do to sustainably move away from it will get my support. Right now I see the best and most viable routes coming from the broadly defined left.

The other thing I don’t like about that Googled definition is that Marx and communism in general “advocates class war”. That’s sort of true but it’s missing the point. Class war is already going on. The elite are waging it every second. The idea isn’t to start a war, it’s to realize the war is already happening, then make other people realize it’s happening, then ultimately win it and put an end to it. Waging class war can involve anything from joining a union to taking up arms.