He Admit It

Risky Business on the Far Left puts democracy in danger. Some now say it aloud.

Prominent writer and activist Hamilton Nolan recently stepped up to admit many on the Far Left are prepared to hold democracy hostage to fascism in exchange for policy wins (he even used the phrase “hostage”). Nolan advocates for “a left wing candidate to launch an independent presidential campaign explicitly designed to suck votes away from Biden in key swing states—Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, etc.” For those who don’t spend their waking hours tabulating electoral votes on cocktail napkins, that would result in Donald Trump’s second term.

It’s a clarifying argument. It articulates the choice, and makes it: many on the Far Left prioritize ideological purity over winning, regardless of the consequences. Matt Yglesias termed this “murder-suicide politics.” While the “Tlaib should run to weaken Biden” approach may represent the views of a small slice of progressives, it also represents that faction’s preferred method of extracting concessions - often implicitly, but increasingly explicitly.

For instance, as border negotiations move forward, Immigration Hub, a progressive immigration advocacy group, is claiming that a bipartisan border deal would depress Hispanic voters. Sunrise and other Far Left groups have threatened to not engage in the 2024 election if they do not win policy concessions (there is some academic research that suggests this would be beneficial to the anti-authoritarian majority on net). In both the immigration negotiations and the response to Hamas terrorism, organized blocs on the Far Left are willing to explicitly undermine the broad-tent coalition capable of beating Trump. This counterproductive approach is compounded by the fact that Biden has frequently conceded to the left (which Nolan acknowledges in his essay). 

Rather than recognizing the threat of Trump as a reason to moderate their policy demands and welcome Center Right voters into the Democratic Party, progressives see the threat of Trump as a way to extract concessions from the center. The theory goes that, because pro-democracy moderates no longer can choose to vote for Republicans, Democrats’ agenda can lurch to the left, forcing moderate voters to choose between the fascism of Trump and a left-wing agenda they dislike. Most centrist elites will swallow their agenda, rather than empower Trump, progressives appear to believe. 

A Problem of Perception

Polling shows that voters perceive Joe Biden as more liberal than Donald Trump is conservative. While 41% of voters “strongly agree” that the Democrats have moved too far to the left for them (62% total agreement), a smaller 32% “strongly agree” that Republicans have moved too far right (57% total agreement). 

This is especially pronounced among independent voters, who place themselves closer to Trump than to Biden by large margins.

Blueprint polling found there is only one issue where voters say Biden is closer to their views than Trump: election integrity. But on immigration (25% Biden, 44% Trump), oil and gas (26% Biden, 43%) and crime (32% Biden, 44% Trump), voters increasingly say Trump, not Biden, shares their views on policy. 

The United States is not the only country with a key election in 2024. India, the world's largest democracy, will also decide whether to continue with right-wing populist populist Narendra Modi. In a recent New York Times podcast, the Indian academic Pratap Bhanu Mehta diagnosed why why Modi has had such staying power: 

If you want to tell a hopeful story, the opposition will keep reminding you of this. They will keep saying something like 60 percent percent of Indians still don’t vote for [Modi’s ruling party] the B.J.P.. In a first-past-the-post system, roughly about 38 percent to 40 percent of the vote can actually get you a pretty dominant majority in Parliament.

But there is a lesson in that, and the lesson is that like everywhere in the world, that ethnic majoritarian forces have come to power, it has largely been because the forces arrayed against them have failed to credibly unite on a coherent platform. So the center and left in India splits 20 different ways. But I think more deeply — I think, and I actually do think the cultural transformation that I see of India is truly astonishing.

Two different countries, but the same problem: a big-tent majority fundamentally unwilling to cede the full ambitions of its agenda to defeat fascism. 

For far too many leftists, “democracy” means “the Democratic Party wins elections running on the agenda I want.” The problem with this strategy is that, while a majority of voters dislike Trump, a majority also rejects the progressive left’s policies – a dynamic that succinctly explains why Biden won the 2020 primary and general election. While many Democratic strategists have interpreted the 2022 and 2023 elections as evidence that everything is fine, the reality is that since Dobbs, Democrats have not unseated a single Republican senator or governor.

Biden is increasingly concerned about his polling. He would be well-served to embrace what first made him President: a commitment to unifying a nation that remains disturbed by Trump’s obscene behavior. 

Risk Mitigation

Nolan writes, “It is true that a Biden loss to Trump would be a catastrophe, and should not be brushed off idly” in the midst of a piece doing just that. This is dangerous rhetoric and almost wholly flawed reasoning; if the author’s cause is the project of liberalism, any rational analysis would lead him to the inescapable conclusion that its darkest hour would come during a second Trump term. And that purposefully weakening Biden – not even necessarily because he’s Biden, but because he’s The Guy In The Way of The Former Guy – is, indeed, “murder-suicide.” As Ian Bassin, executive director of Protect Democracy, wrote back in 2021, “A united opposition is the best way to defeat an autocrat. And a fractured opposition opens the pathway for one to attain power.”
It is clarifying to have a Far Left is so candid in its nihilism; Nolan acknowledges that siphoning votes from Biden as a means of imperiling his re-election – and, thusly, the Republic – is “risky.”

And politics, as Finley Peter Dunne once noted, ain’t beanbag. But it is – or can be – serious business, and this is one of those elections where it’s really best not to mess around, take fliers on no-shot campaigns whose sole purpose would be to weaken the only candidate standing between the mortal threat that is Donald Trump and another four years in the White House.