Not Everything Eugene Debs Famously Said Stands The Test of Time

Sometimes a great slogan turns into the stupidest thing you can say.

Having mentioned the lunacy of the left surrounding San Francisco Bay yesterday, I read this alternative analysis of one of my arguments by the New York writer, Jim Sleeper, on the webzine, AlterNet.

The second reason given to Sanders enthusiasts for folding themselves into the Clinton campaign rests on cautionary history lessons: In 1968, Richard Nixon narrowly defeated Hubert Humphrey, a capable, committed liberal Democrat, because anti-war leftists refused to vote for a man who, as Lyndon Johnson’s vice president, hadn’t opposed the war. In 2000, Ralph Nader “purists” handed Florida and, thanks to the Supreme Court, the presidency, to George W. Bush, who wreaked havoc upon a republic that Al Gore might at least have preserved. Now, Bernie’s supporters are cautioned to imagine a Supreme Court with one or even two more Republican nominees, not to mention the havoc that either Trump or more Republican “voodoo economics” would wreak.  Dissent magazine co-editor Michael Kazin reminds us that the problem with this argument was well-expressed by the early 20th-Cenutry American socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs: "Better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it." You may really, really not want about 80 percent of what Clinton would design and deliver. 

The Debs quote would seem to be the authority on which Sleeper makes his argument against learning from the disastrous elections in 1968 and 2000, he seems to forget 1980, though I still think it belongs in that pattern.  I voted for Barry Commoner that year, which I regret.  Carter was definitely undermined from the left as well as from the right.   Can anyone really say with a straight face that the country and world wouldn't have been better off if Carter had won that election?

The big problem with depending on the slogan by Eugene Debs is that it was made in 1912, the early 20th century context of the Democrats and Republicans of that period and in a heady period when his own Socialist party was electing people, even as he didn't foresee it being attacked and destroyed from the left seven years later.  At his worst, Barack Obama has certainly not been anything like Woodrow Wilson and Wilson wasn't as bad as the alternatives put up by the Republicans, if you want to see the proof of that, look at the solidly Republican 1920s and what that led to.  Debs slogan, if used in 1932 may have lengthened the reign of Herbert Hoover setting the United States up for an even worse depression and risking it turning to a fascist strong man as so many European countries with more robust parties of the left did.  And, in fact, if followed as Sleeper is advocating, it could well have led to Republican-corporate one-party rule in the United States.  Nixon in 1960 instead of in 1968,   It would have meant McCain-Palin in 2008.  There would be no stalemate on the Supreme Court, there would have been a series of horrific rulings by a seven to two majority, if not worse.

I don't know what Jim Sleepers' income level is but know he's a product of Yale-Harvard and works in the milieu that brings him work at such Ivy institutions as Harvard and Columbia and Yale,* so I doubt he's among those who would feel the pinch of a Trump presidency first.   And when I say pinch, I mean what a man of his class is likely to feel at the worst.  I'm not talking about the crushing weight it will bring on the underclass, members of racial minorities, LGBT folks.   I also don't know his sexual orientation but I can tell him that when people "vote for what you don't want" what we actually got included every single civil rights law that has been passed in the last century, state governments that passed civil right laws and anti-discrimination laws.

The issues for the left less at risk is more theoretical and whimsical than it is for those targeted by American fascism, which is what the Republican alternative to the Democrats is in 2016.

If Eugene Debs slogan had been consistently followed I doubt a single one of those things would have been adopted.  My identity would still be illegal and punishable by a long prison sentence.  The Democratic Party that made those laws is not the Democratic Party that Eugene Debs set up as a straw man in the brief period of the ascendancy of his Socialist Party, that old Socialist Party which was destroyed, again, from the left.   The left which used similar thinking to reject the practical socialism of Victor Berger because it wasn't fast enough and, really, what was probably their problem with it, working for something real was so much less exciting than talking "revolution".

For someone with the chance to learn from the experience of the past century to be using that slogan in the context of this year's election is proof that not only the old ideas of the past often need to be retired, so do the slogans because they prevent people facing the reality they face instead of that of a century ago.   That the small journal-elite university class of radicals is still resorting to them only shows how out of touch they are because that's the kind of out of date thinking they depend on.


*  Michael Kazin is another Ivy and Ivy Equivalent product,  Harvard and Stanford who works in a similar milieu to that of Jim Sleeper, places like Georgetown.  The Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars,  William and Mary, etc.   It is remarkable how many of those who make such decisions about what is best for those of us in or near the poverty line work in those establishment venues.  

Note:  I do like some of Jim Sleepers work, I liked a lot of it in The Nation when I was a subscriber.  But, then,  I hadn't thought hard about just what kind of a track record of success such journals have had.  I've only done that, myself, in the past ten years.   I recommend looking at the history of the left as if actually getting something accomplished were the goal instead of posing and preening as a means of getting work in elite institutions and getting published in small journals. 

Also note, AlterNet is one of those sites I no longer link to because of their advocacy of bigotry.