The past decade has brought the greatest revival of left energies in half a century, if not longer. The past year has also seen the rout of the left in the Democratic presidential primaries, ensuring a near-term future of dissent and supplication more than ruling. This situation makes the choices of the next years particularly important. Will they point toward accepting a marginal, gadfly role, with power in a few city governments (which are, sadly, mostly not very powerful themselves) and a visionary flank of legislators who rarely control key votes? Or will they continue to press toward the goal, not just of the Bernie Sanders campaign itself, but of the activists and energies that gathered around it: to build a majority that can wield power?
Famously, we don’t choose the circumstances in which we make (or fail to make) history. What can the defeated faction of the democratic left learn from the limits and distortions of the political world in which it grew up, to avoid recreating what it sets out to overcome? The basic lesson is not a new one. Building democratic power is both the only way and, by the same token, difficult and risky. It is so difficult and risky, and its practice has been so often distorted and debauched, that it is tempting to persuade ourselves it is what we are doing when we are not at all, when we are in fact doing something more pleasant and less effective. In the end, it comes down to the power to use the state to change institutions that change lives. That is what can make newly majoritarian phrases like “Medicare for All” and “Black Lives Matter” into realities. The less this is so, the more we’re caught in recurring whiplash between, “Hello, another world is not only possible, it is morally and ecologically imperative!” and, “Hello, there is literally nothing we can do to change the course of this global death cult, thank you for coming to my TED talk.”
Pursuing majorities is especially frustrating in the United States because antidemocratic features of the political system make a political majority sharply different from a demographic or even electoral majority. The Electoral College, the Senate, gerrymandering, and disenfranchisement all stanch majorities, while the Supreme Court can thwart them even when they become effective. I’ve argued elsewhere that a democratic agenda in the United States should include constitutional reform and full enfranchisement for everyone who makes their lives here. But in any version, to get there, we have to go through the institutions we have. Political power is a thoroughly artificial thing, and votes are where you get it if you are not the financial industry, a retail empire, or big oil. (We are not.)
There are many perfectly good ways of thinking about politics, or practicing ethics, or pursuing institutional influence, that do not involve trying to bring a political majority into being to exercise power. Many of these might be corrupted, or at least confused, by a democratic political orientation. That last orientation, however, has to be primary when we are doing politics in a quasi-democratic polity like the United States. If we cannot explain how we are going after that majority, we should entertain the possibility that we are not engaged in democratic politics at all. The alternatives are well-practiced and familiar, the bafflements of the Long 1990s. We should stay alert to the various forms of anti-politics available, and keep in mind what we mean to be doing, and whether we are actually doing it.
