Bernie Sanders has spent much of the last eight months touring the deepest red parts of the country. Earlier this month, for example, he held a rally in Wheeling, West Virginia, where he told a packed room that West Virginia is a “working-class state” that should stop electing politicians who serve “the billionaires.”
That simple message, delivered in a place where left-wing politics don’t normally leave much of a footprint, is exactly what we need to communicate with the as-yet unconvinced. All too often, the Left forgets that this is the point of our politics. At protests and conventions, in reading groups and organizing meetings, one sometimes gets the uncomfortable sense that instead we’re competing to show off the depths of our radicalism.
From maximalist slogans about abolishing police and the family to debates about identity politics or Palestine or the role of the Democratic Party, the same dynamics keep playing out. Leftists have become excessively concerned with proving our political bona fides to each other, or even with gaining the approval of the tiny fraction of the American public with positions to the left of standard-issue democratic socialism.
Amid the grandstanding and one-upsmanship, it’s easy to lose sight of our real task: to win over the hundreds of millions of ordinary Americans who currently stand somewhere to our right.
Socialists have always had what our comrades in previous generations called “maximum” programs, or ambitious long-term horizons, and “minimum” programs, or proposals for short-term steps…
Auteur: Ben Burgis
