Your coalition is your choice
Disclaimer: If Medium allowed us to edit titles, I’d change this one to read “Your coalition is a choice.”
The mainstream Democratic Party and the Democratic Socialists attempting a Party takeover have something important in common — an opportunistic relationship to black voters. They like the idea of being associated with the glory of the black freedom struggle and, even, using that association to inspire them toward more comprehensive, principled platforms addressing various kinds of inequality. But, when those associations come into conflict with the bigotries of supporters they deem to be more coveted, both liberals and leftists choose to create space for those bigotries in the name of necessary coalition-building. As if they have no choice in the matter.
Today, the Sanders campaign celebrated an endorsement by Joe Rogan because of Rogan’s popularity among disaffected male voters. An Atlantic profile captures his appeal well:
The bedrock issue, though, is Rogan’s courting of a middle-bro audience that the cultural elite hold in particular contempt — guys who get barbed-wire tattoos and fill their fridge with Monster energy drinks and preordered their tickets to see Hobbs & Shaw. Joe loves these guys, and his affection has none of the condescension and ironic distance many people fall back on in order to get comfortable with them. He shares their passions and enthusiasms at a moment when the public dialogue has branded them childish or problematic or a slippery slope to Trumpism. Like many of these men, Joe grumbles a lot about “political correctness.” He knows that he is privileged by virtue of his gender and his skin color, but in his heart he is sick of being reminded about it. Like lots of other white men in America, he is grappling with a growing sense that the term white man has become an epithet. And like lots of other men in America, not just the white ones, he’s reckoning out loud with a fear that the word masculinity has become, by definition, toxic.
Still, he identifies as “left on everything” politically which was good enough for the Sanders campaign. The obsession with the white working class or otherwise politically alienated white men has dominated American political discourse since 2016. These voters are thought to be the critical missing link that delivered victory to one of the worst presidents in U.S. history. But political analyst Zerlina Maxwell reminded today that two assumptions drive this framing: 1. all 78,000 Midwesterners who swung for Trump were members of the white working class and 2. “expanding the electorate” shouldn’t mean focusing on increasing black voter turnout which decreased from 2012 to 2016, resulting in about a million votes lost.
The Sanders campaign focuses on winning white males in the rust belt (who we already know he can win) because, for his continued disavowal of identity politics, that’s the demographic he, in particular, and the white Left, in general, have placed at the center of their theory. It’s an approach that allows them to continue championing a form of anti-capitalist politics that doesn’t acknowledge black anti-capitalist intellectual and political traditions. Unfortunately, C.L.R. James was writing about this same tendency in 1948:
We can compare what we have to say that is new, in that sense, by comparing it to previous positions on the Negro question in the socialist movement. The proletariat, as we know, must lead the struggles of all the oppressed and all those who are persecuted by capitalism. But this has been interpreted in the past — and by some very good socialists too — in the following sense: The independent struggles of the Negro people have not got much more than an episodic value, and as a matter of fact, can constitute a great danger not only to the Negroes themselves, but to the organized labor movement. The real leadership of the Negro struggle must rest in the hands of organized labor and of the Marxist party. Without that the Negro struggle is not only weak, but is likely to cause difficulties for the Negroes and dangers to organized labor. This, as I say, is the position held by many socialists in the past. Some great socialists in the United States have been associated with this attitude.
We, on the other hand, say something entirely different.
