The Counterpublic Papers vol. 5 no. 15

   A lot’s gone on since the last issue. Going to try to congeal as much as I can into several thoughts about the election, in no order.

• The model Sanders relies on is based on the idea of increased youth turnout, in both the primary and the general. We don’t see that playing out.

    From the data I’ve seen we have seen increased turnout in general in most Democratic primaries. But we don’t see an increase in youth specifically. Sanders has been making the claim, and he isn’t the first to do so, that to win the primary, the presidency, and the state, we have to bring people who aren’t traditionally involved in politics into politics. To an extent this reflects the electoral politics version of the Marxist argument about where to find the vanguard—in the lumpenproletariat (in people who aren’t formally connected to the economy and tend to be un or even anti-political) or in the proletariat (to people who are formally connected to the economy through their labor and tend to be political). Sanders and many others believe that we win by going to people not connected to politics and bringing them in, as opposed to going to people who ARE involved in politics and moving them to our side. I think the assumption that people who don’t normally participate in politics would do so (in our direction) if they were only made to see that politics matters is right….but I don’t believe focusing on “the youth vote” is. Young people are idealistic, far more than their parents perhaps. But they aren’t institutionalists in general, and they definitely aren’t institutionalists in this particular moment. I’ll come back to this.

• Biden's victories in the south aren't meaningless. but without significant resources put in turning voters out over time, his victories in states the democratic party won't win in november will increase the stranglehold his tendency the central tendency of Democratic Party has over it. Without garnering the political gains it claims to seek.

    Biden’s victories in the south may very well make him the democratic candidate. But I’m not sure what to make of the possibility that his candidacy will rely on states that will likely vote for Trump in the general election. Particularly given that Biden and the tendency he represents have had no deep abiding interest in organizing southern voters. I’ll come back to this too.

• It seems as if last minute voters are turning for biden. i'd love to see data examining the influence of biden campaign appearances on this calculus. Biden's a hollow candidate. There isn't a there there. Unlike some, if Biden's the candidate I'll vote and do more than that. But if support for Biden is PURELY driven on "electability" that fails the smell test, we're in trouble. ANYONE CAN BEAT TRUMP. There are levels though.

    Biden’s made a number of mistakes on the campaign that point to….senility. Before Warren dropped out of the race I wrote that I felt that there were only two candidates people were affirmatively voting for, and that it didn’t make sense for people to suggest that one of them should drop out. I write more on Warren below, but what I meant to do here was juxtapose support for Sanders and Warren against support for Biden, Bloomberg, and [INSERT CENTRIST CANDIDATE HERE]. Support for Sanders and Warren were truly affirmative—I know few who voted for either of those candidates out of a purely defensive position (because for example they primarily thought Warren or Sanders could defeat Trump). Support for Biden on the other hand tends to be either indirectly defensive (thinking about the candidate most likely to get the average white moderate voter) or directly defensive (thinking solely about the candidate most likely to defeat Trump).

    I think this means something come the general election. If Biden is the electable candidate, and is ONLY that, then he’s going to need every bit of the Bloomberg money and Democratic Party resources he can lay hands on in order to win. For voters like me, voting for Biden is about as hard as voting for Clinton—the hardest vote I’d ever cast even though I cast it in a blue state.   

• The left needs institutions. Those institutions must both be independent and linked with existing ones. At the local (see Baltimore, Saint Louis), state, and federal level we're not able to take full advantage of political opportunities because we don't have the institutional capacity to do so.

    After the uprising five years ago the liberal-left wing in Baltimore saw significant gains in the City Council, and the rhetoric employed by the mayoral candidates (ALL of them) might as well have come from the liberal seventies. But without the institutional muscle to force the eventual winner, even given her corruption, to follow through was weak. To say the least. Sanders is not the end result of a significant political movement, but rather the end result of symbolically influential social movements. I don’t particularly like the Sanders-Trump comparisons for a range of reasons. One of them is because to the extent we can trace the election of Trump to the growth of the Tea Party Movement, that movement was an internal one rather than an external one. Transforming the Democratic Party is going to take a set of institutions that work within it and outside of it. We can't build the youth vote without these institutions. We can't win the South without these institutions.   

    (The same set of claims can be made about black politics as well.)

• I supported Sanders over Warren in large part because I believe organizing beats top-down policy. But this isn't the reason Warren didn't win her home state and couldn't do more than push Bloomberg out. There was a moment when the DNC could've stated plainly that a woman WON the last election but had it stolen. When that moment passed another story took shape--a woman can't win. Warren couldn't defeat that narrative. No woman could have. 

    I remember talking to another friend of mine about her choice in the upcoming election. She liked Warren but didn’t think she could win. She thought that it had to be an older white (moderate) man, so she was putting her money on Biden. She was and is the strategic voter I mentioned above. Although this would’ve violated a whole set of US norms on how losing presidential candidates are supposed to behave, given the stakes, I thought that the Democratic Party would’ve been best served by taking an approach that acknowledged the theft of the election. Doing so, I think, may have given Warren and others coming after her, with a better chance to win. This wouldn’t have been the most important consequences, and there are a range of other not so positive consequences, but given the circumstances I think this would’ve been a good idea.

• Not only does the left need better institutions, I think we need a better analysis, of micro-, meso-, and macro-level change.

    Warren is now in the position of having to make a decision as far as her endorsement goes. I don’t think her endorsement will change much, vote wise. I get the sense that individual Warren voters are going to do what they do, with some going to Sanders and some going to Biden. If she ends up supporting Biden, it’ll likely be because she’s either given a position or because she thinks it’s the best way of getting her policy planks on the platform…and the longer she waits at this point the better for her and her policies. I don’t think she’s waiting because she’s a shill, disingenuous, a plant, etc. A number of my academic friends are quite capable of making fairly sophisticated renderings of individual decision making, but aren’t able to apply that skillset to this campaign.    

    Anyway, take all of this with a dab of salt, or a shot of whisky.

….

    I’m struck by the degree of time I spend in this newsletter writing about death and dying.

    A day or two ago, Sam Burns passed away.

    If you were to dig into DJ subcultures in every major city what’d you’d find is that most of them can be traced to a set of institutions (nightclubs, record stores, party promoters), and then a set of individuals within those institutions.  Sam Burns was one of the individuals most responsible for DC’s subculture. He was a fixture at a range of clubs (Red, The Sanctuary, Eighteenth Street Lounge, 12” records). In 2019 I remember dragging a group of political scientists to hear him the day before Labor Day at some hole in the wall spot. He spun like it was a packed house.  His Sunday night set at the Eighteenth Street Lounge was probably the best Sunday night set on the east coast, if not the country. As I type this I’m listening to a 15 hour set dedicated to his memory. There’s a good possibility that even though I have to drive kids to the bus stop at 6:30am I’ll be in DC tonight. I know life is temporary. I wish that I didn’t have to be consistently reminded of that fact.    (I’ve already had one conference cancelled because of the coronavirus. Pretty sure classes at Hopkins are going to transition to virtual space—as an aside I’ve been told by one administrator that the virus has affected enrollment numbers so much that most hiring has been halted. Take the virus seriously. And if anyone asks you why, point them here.)

    Always more to write. Never enough time. The ones you love? Tell them. Show them. We don’t win any other way.

    My name is Lester Spence. You’re reading The Counterpublic Papers.