Judis On The Left

I have had my problems with John Judis' arguments at times. I typically do with Leftists. But he's written a penetrating critique of the Left from the perspective of an aging Leftist who lived through the failures of the New Left.  It's fairly long, so the TL;DR version is basically this:

- The Left's causes are fundamentally moral.
- This can give them the feeling of religious reform movements rather than coalition politics.
- The purity of belief inevitably means schisms.
- The combined effect is to turn off the requisite number of voters needed to win an election.

As everyone howls over Hillary Clinton's criticism of Bernie Sanders, it's worth noting one aspect that is true: Bernie Sanders has been unable to build a coalition in the Senate, despite being there for decades.(Yes, she should support the party's nominee, but I imagine she will.)  Sanders has never been able to reach a critical numbers of his peers to create meaningful legislation.  Biden has his fair share of baggage, but he did author and shepherd major legislation. Klobuchar and even Warren can make that case better than Sanders.

Warren is the most interesting, because at time she "gets" the idea of reaching out to middle ground.  She talks big structural change, but also commits herself to being a capitalist.  Where Judis points out the Left's descent into its own navel is probably correct. I think it's important to recognize gender identification, because I think every person has the right to define themselves to society. But I don't obsess over pronouns.  I'll do my best to remember, but I'm sure I'll forget (should it arise).

The High Priests of the New New Left need to understand that compromise is built into all political change. I don't see that dynamic at work.  I think back to the schism between William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass, where Garrison considered all cooperation with what he felt was morally corrupt politics was evil.  Douglass was much more concerned with the actual emancipation of African American slaves, and he was ultimately willing to use coalition politics to achieve that.

I've stated often that I believe revolutions always fail.  They always snap back into the forms that created them, if with slightly different spins. The Tsar becomes the General Secretary. The Shah becomes the Ayatollah. Louis becomes Napoleon. Judis' piece is illustrative of why that happens.  The inevitable factionalism of revolutionary forces makes coalition governance impossible. And, yes, coalitions produce unsatisfactory results, if you are only judging those results based on your prefered outcome.  But, of course, there is more than an unsatisfactory result.  There is Trump.