Riiiiight. Talk to the black people who stayed home or, even cast a protest vote for Trump, in 2016 and 2020. And think about why Trump gained votes from blacks & men (+6) and women (+5), Latino men (+4). and white women (+3)--but not white men, who shifted toward Biden (+7). Must have been Caitlin Johnstone's normalization of white supremacy.
DiMaggio and the Shortstops know this very well. At the end of this "vaudeville" article, he comes around to saying: "any left worthy of the name should be mobilizing and empowering disillusioned and disadvantaged demographic groups that have been left behind in the neoliberal era by two political parties that increasingly represent plutocratic, elite business interests."
Unfortunately, this comes across as another throwaway line to establish "leftist" bona fides. He doesn't seem to notice how it clashes with the bulk of the essay, which is devoted to deriding people who are doing just what he urged. He's correctly characterizing the lay of the land, but when he gets to work, he can't see the forest for the Trump.
He did the same thing in a previous essay that nicely deconstructs the misleading notions of "working class" support for Trump. He urged Bernie Sanders to "start by talking to people in the rustbelt and elsewhere that the Democratic Party has spent the last few decades demobilizing via its plutocratic policies, which resulted in millions of former supporters flocking from the party and migrating toward non-voting." At the same time, he ridiculed Bernie for saying: "We've got to take it to them... I intend as soon as I have three minutes, to start going into Trumpworld and start talking to people."
So, we've got to talk to people left behind by the two neoliberal, plutocratic political parties--but not those people who voted for Trump, not in the media they watch, not by criticizing the inherently-better one of those parties too much, and not by talking about the structures of the deep state that determines their common purpose. Got it.
There's another, most fundamental, attitude semi-hidden in all this discourse--and it has everything to do with class politics and the nominally left. It's not just about whom leftists are permitted to talk to in the media; it's about whom they are permitted to consort with in the audience. DiMaggio comes close to saying it: Not only the pundits, not only the hosts, but the audience itself is irretrievably damned, if it's not sufficiently upset about Trump. Maybe even voted for him. Seventy million+ did. Can't talk to them.
There is one concept, dominant in the U.S., that understands left politics as built upon using a checklist of "progressive socio-political attitudes"--most of which have no material effect on people's lives, let alone on the structures of socio-economic power--as a prior condition of solidarity with working-class people. For this concept, agreement precedes solidarity. Before you work with, or even talk to, working-class people with "reactionary socio-political attitudes," you have to set them straight, and they better listen.
There's another concept--the core of historical socialist movements throughout the world--that understands left politics as built upon support of the multi-racial, multi-gendered working class based on material interest, no matter what ideas they have in their heads. For this materialist concept of class struggle, agreement results from solidarity. You get popular support and build a revolutionary movement by respectfully defending and fighting for the people's material interests, not by looking for people who have the same ideas as you and attacking those who don't. Solidarity in the fight for material and social empowerment will make new forms of agreement possible.
Or it won't. Of course, if there are too many people too adamant in their reactionary attitudes, the working class will lose--as it has been doing. But, guaranteed, the necessary changes in attitudes will not come as a result of placing hectoring before solidarity. This is bedrock socialism: you work with--and I mean with--the working class that exists.
Which is the better, which is the only, way to organize a union? Isn't organizing a revolutionary left socialist movement exactly organizing a big, fighting union of the entire working class? Here's one of the "vaudevillians" quite sharply and eloquently making the point, in response to a denunciation of him for talking to one Boogaloo Boy (whose unexpected statement I also presented in my article on January 6th)--a conversation that DiMaggio specifically denounces as "normaliz[ing] the neofascist Boogaloo Boys." You know, like Rachel Maddow talking to her favorite general-of-the-week normalizes "oh, well":
DiMaggio and the Shortstops may make gestures to the second concept, but their operational engine is the first. For them, anyone who's evinced the slightest wavering on correct attitudes toward a bunch of things on the woke checklist--but mainly now Trump, Trump, or Trump--is an enemy whose sins you must not normalize by talking to them. They are all irredeemable white supremacists and anyone talking to them is just "normalizing" that. That seems to include the entire audience of Fox, and all who voted for Trump.
But not the audience of MSNBC or those who voted for Biden? After all, according to DiMaggio, 27 percent of Democrats are "white supremacists." Or the "functional equivalent." Or "fit the bill." Or something.
So you have to write off not only the seventy-four million Trump voters but also twenty-million or so Biden voters. Almost 100 mil. Playing that game is not the thoughtful leftist way to make a revolution; it's a foolish way of making politics impossible. Unless the point of your politics is just to get votes for the Democrats.
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