Of course it happened. Of course in the wake of Justice Alito's memo regarding his plan to eviscerate reproductive rights in America, I made the mistake of looking at social media. And of course what I saw was an army of liberals screeching at anyone who didn't vote for Hillary in 2016 – you know the type, all the “you did this” and what not. I would put up some screenshots here, but they are kind of self-evident.
Because if there's one thing that Democrats should be doing going into a midterm election, it's blaming individuals rather than actually examining and going after systems of power.
Unfortunately, in contemporary American liberalism, this isn't a bug, it's a feature. Having given up hope of any form of solidarity or collective action, having reduced every behavior to the level of the atomized individual whose personal moral value is, in Protestant fashion, to be weighed, in perfect lockstep with the neoliberal forces submitting all human life to the cruel logic of market capitalism – save for a few bare, viciously means-tested remaining fragments of the mid-century welfare state – the only thing left to do is to turn to individual actors, and to blame, hector, nag, and whine.
Of course this is amplified by the Internet in all the worst possible ways – all the armchair Ukraine experts and Kremlinologists on Twitter and Reddit have transformed into constitutional-law scholars who are fully able to ascertain the impact of the memo they read half an article about on Politico before rage-skimming on the Loving and Griswold decisions.
So I will take this opportunity to provide a corrective, and, being a good leftist who, as the late great Michael Brooks put it, seeks to be ruthless with systems and kind to people, I will direct my line of questioning at the structures and the persons who hold high ranks within them.
How many of the people who stayed home in the 2016 election in vital swing states were those much-feared but few-in-number Bernie bros who couldn't plug their nose, and how many were people disengaged from the political system after the losses of good union jobs and the destruction of communities in the wake of the free trade programs that the Democrats enthusiastically endorsed?
How many people didn't vote, and don't generally vote, because they suffered under Bill Clinton and Joe Biden's 1994 Crime Bill, people who overwhelmingly come from poor backgrounds, who are predominantly black and brown, whose family members were forced into a carceral-industrial system propagated by both parties, whose very voting rights were in many cases stripped away, and as for the remainder, how many of them realized that they and people like them were going to be fucked no matter what the electoral process was?
How many people had their brains permanently broken by the right-wing media that emerged like mushrooms after the rain in the wake of Bill Clinton's 1996 Telecommunications Act, and have emerged thinking that anyone to the left of Mitch McConnell is taking part in a child grooming cult, permanently alienated from reasonable discourse?
How many laws weren't passed to help enshrine abortion rights, instead resting upon a Supreme Court precedent that even the center-left's yass-qween champion Ruth Bader Ginsburg called a dangerous overreliance, especially at a time when 80 fucking percent of Americans are in favor of at least some access to abortion.
Simply, how many were just checked out because they had never, in their lives, seen any meaningful response to their abject misery, administration after administration?
And really, you're yelling at us jaded
leftists?
By the way, I did pinch my nose. I did vote contra Trump, twice. But I won't judge people for not doing so, because a big part of what it is to be a socialist is to recognize that our political system is broken.
To the social media ninnies, I feel you too. You're at the bargaining stage of grief. All of that being said, while I won't judge individuals for their political action or inaction in a complex environment, I will judge individuals for actively being dicks. So fuck you for that. But let's move on.
Once I helped a nice young woman get an abortion once (none of my DNA involved, by the way). Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to find a way to buy some pills for some nice ladies in Texas to terminate their pregnancies, and I encourage you to do the same. And if you want to do some deeper questioning, come and join. We on the populist left are more than happy to welcome fellow travelers.
