Pyrrhic Victory

“If we are victorious in one more battle with the Romans, we shall be utterly ruined.”

- Pyrrhus of Epirus after the Battle of Asculum, as reported in Plutarch's Lives

I have learned, over the past few years, to brace myself for the dumbest possible outcome in the world of politics. This isn't, I should stress, the worst possible outcome. It is the dumbest. If the worst possible outcome is goose-stepping fascists and a highly motivated cabal of elite operators relentlessly assassinating dissidents, the dumbest possible outcome is a neoliberal government in which austerity is accompanied by vague hand-waving towards social justice issues and performative identity politics, and some fat piggly-eyed pasty fuck with delusions of military grandeur in an improvised flak jacket spraying Sunday shoppers with automatic gunfire in an act of stochastic rage at a suburban CVS.

And this is what my crystal ball has been telling me for months – a wave of blue mail-in votes, followed by a wave of red votes on election night itself, followed by a narrow, tooth-and-nail Democratic victory. Presumably to be followed by weeks of protracted court battles, bursts of occasional right-wing violence, and four years of utter fecklessness (not to mention a probable repeat of the Republican backlashes of 1994 and 2010).

A summation from someone more educated than I:

“Right now, what we are facing is a catastrophe. A Republican Senate, a narrow Democratic house majority, and a Democrat president who did not win by a big margin, who will be reviled for various reasons from day one by Trump supporters and adherents to the opposite side, who has conservative instincts, who will now have both a scapegoat in Mitch McConnell for his refusal to do anything that might move the country to the left, anything that might improve the lot of the most vulnerable in this society, should he even have that inclination. Not only provide a scapegoat, but he will also have the opportunity to enforce what could be a brutal austerity regime in the midst of a continuing pandemic in the midst of an economic crisis. I mean, before this election, I had pretty much no hope for the Democratic Party, and after it, it's pretty much the same deal.” 

- Virgil Texas in conversation with Briahna Joy Gray, Bad Faith podcast

We live in a time when more Americans than ever before believe in, at least to some degree, what I believe in: universal healthcare, some form of UBI, a higher minimum wage, an end to military misadventures, the overhaul of the criminal justice system, a Green New Deal, and support for unions and worker co-ops to help resolve the contradiction between labor and capital. Let us be reminded, that no matter what the mealy-mouthed editorial boards of the New York Times and Atlantic tell you, it was pro-Medicare for All Democrats who managed to carry swing House districts, and that while Florida went for Trump, Florida also went for a 15 dollar an hour minimum wage.

And yet the gap between political will and political representation has rarely been starker. The ostensible party of the left is led by a senile puppet for the donor class and a fucking cop, advised by all manner of Wall Street cronies and liberal war hawks – people who would have been called “Rockefeller Republicans” in another era (and even Nelson Rockefeller was in many respects more liberal than these fucks). While the world burns. Literally.

OK, I voted for Biden, regrettably. It seemed like it wouldn't hurt, and I didn't see how a Biden presidency could be worse than a Trump presidency, even if I doubted it would be much better. A bit like the French communists in the Chirac-Le Pen election of 2001, who walked into the polls with clothespins on their noses.

I'm sure plenty of nice center-lefties would tell me – and I hear this dull wording again and again – that Biden had “the most progressive platform of all time.” Well, were his policies anywhere near memorable enough to excite voters? Or were they the sort of means-tested nonsense pushed by DC wonks? Were there even any attempts to convince anyone of these policies, or was the sole form of messaging “not Trump”? Do you even trust this putative platform? Or should I believe that Biden's and Harris' records speak for themselves?

And so we're left, as I said at the beginning, a serious case of the dum-dums. The notion that those of us on the left can in any way “push” Biden leftwards or have any leverage to do so (versus a well-organized apparatus to maintain the Democratic Party in its post-Clinton form as a neoliberal entity, and one willing to capitulate to Republican excess instead of actually building working-class politics) is absurd.

I'm sure I'll get people saying that this sort of doomer mindset is a product of my own privilege. To which I respond that standpoint epistemology is pearl-clutching masquerading as empathy, and is indicative of a gray-faced Protestant ethos suffused with late-capitalist narcissism.

So what is to be done? I really don't know. Fuck.