Jawn_Quijote

11h

This really crystallizes some inchoate thoughts I've been having about the left since 2015, when Trump really scrambled the original playbook. The original incrementalist plan from the left fit in with the overall sense of Obama-era politics—that things were fundamentally pretty good and we were trying to push them forward in different ways. Trump scrambled that in a few ways, most importantly because he shook faith in liberal incremental politics: if this guy could just sweep in and tear everything down, what was the point of inching slowly forward?

But the silver lining of Trumpism was that it offered a potential new path: maybe the people wanted radicalism, and pitching crazy new schemes was actually better politics than liberal incrementalism. This energized the left, naturally, and also got some genuine buy-in from the middle, which didn't police the left over the last decade out of concern that Trump really did show some latent desire for radical change, and that the primary way of defeating him was to hold together the coalition and not alienate the left. These were really two different beliefs, but they complemented each other, because the belief that Trump represented a desire for radicalism papered over any concerns that keeping the left in the tent could alienate moderates.

Of course, that wasn't the case, and the lesson of the Biden era is that people still don't like radical change. Which puts the remaining factional left in a pickle. If you're just pushing for small wins on the edges, it doesn't rhetorically meet the moment. But if you really take Trump seriously as a threat, the answer to defeating him is to not push the party to take big unpopular stances, which just isn't emotionally satisfying. It's a test of moral seriousness, unless you find ways to reject the premise.

Your cause is not the moral equivalent of fighting slavery