The socialists of Jacobin magazine used to treat her like a promising alternative to Bernie Sanders. Now they write as if she’s almost as bad as Joe Biden. What gives?... Politico
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2019/12/08/elizabeth-warren-jacobin-socialist-left-072693
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| Jacobin current issue |
I subscribe to Jacobin and am a member of DSA, I found this a fascinating article. The reporter asks if the former is merely a mouth piece for the latter, both of which have had 10 times growth in recent years.
Here is a simple answer - Warren is not a socialist and Bernie, even if he claims he is a modest socialist ala New Deal FDR, Bernie really comes from the historical left and Warren doesn't have those traditional left politics, which means she is way more subject to being driven off her agenda than Bernie is.
I posted a piece from NYT rightward columnist Ross Douthat the other day -- Shocking: Ross Douthat makes The Case for Bernie - NYT
And this week he is back it again, actually making a case for Bernie or Biden as a revolt against the Obama/Clinton technocrats -- I don't agree - it's neo-liberalism. But worth reading:
How Bernie and Biden both channel the current distrust of technocrats.
The Politico piece below. Thanks to Harry for sharing:
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2019/12/08/elizabeth-warren-jacobin-socialist-left-072693
Millennial socialists’ favorite magazine is breaking up with Elizabeth Warren. But it’s saying: It’s not me. It’s you.
That magazine is Jacobin, the
nine-year-old publication that has become the de facto voice of the
young socialist movement in America. Its favorite candidate all along
has been Bernie Sanders, the only self-proclaimed socialist to mount a
major campaign for the presidency of the United States since Eugene Debs
almost 100 years ago. But for many months, as the 2020 campaign began
to unfold, Jacobin treated Warren as the next best thing.
It wasn’t so long ago that you could read an article in Jacobin
that argued, “If Bernie Sanders weren’t running, an Elizabeth Warren
presidency would probably be the best-case scenario.” In April, another Jacobin article conceded
that Warren is “no socialist” but added that “she’s a tough-minded
liberal who makes the right kind of enemies,” and her policy proposals
“would make this country a better place.” A good showing by her in a
debate this summer was seen as a clear win
for the left in the movement’s grand ideological battle within, or
perhaps against, the Democratic Party. Even staff writer Meagan Day,
probably the biggest Bernie stan on Jacobin’s masthead, found nice things to say about Warren.
No more. A selection of Jacobin headlines from November: “Elizabeth
Warren’s Head Tax Is Indefensible,” “Elizabeth Warren’s Plan to Finance
Medicare for All Is a Disaster” and “Elizabeth Warren Is Jeopardizing
Our Fight for Medicare for All.” In October, a story warned that a vote for Warren would be “an unconditional surrender to class dealignment.” Even a recent piece titled “Michael Bloomberg? Now They’re Just Fucking with Us” went out of its way to say that Warren is insufficiently confrontational to billionaires.
At some level, the picks and pans of an activist magazine with only a fraction of the readership of, say, pre-2016 Breitbart
might not seem of much consequence as America heads into its next
presidential election. But as the Democratic Party faces its intramural
battle over how best to respond to the Trump presidency—with measured
centrism, or an opportunistic and disruptive lurch to the left— Jacobin has emerged as a hard-to-ignore voice in defining what the latter should look like.
And in many ways, it’s winning its corner of the battle. Six years ago, the New York Times called the niche, neo-Marxist publication with a mere 2,000 subscribers at the time “an improbable hit.” Three years later, Vox dubbed it
“the leading intellectual voice of the American left.” At that time,
Sanders was still seen as a gadfly in the 2016 Democratic presidential
primary; since then, his style of socialism has become its own kind of
improbable hit in American politics, and Jacobin has grown to a
paid circulation of more than 40,000 and draws more than 2 million
unique visitors to its website every month. It has found fans not just
in Bernie Sanders, who has shared almost a dozen of Jacobin articles on social media over the past couple of years, but also in liberal celebrities like John Cusack and even right-wing commentators like Tucker Carlson—who said he reads Jacobin because he appreciates that it isn’t fixated on Trump but rather on “ideas and principles.”
As
the 2020 campaign has unfolded, Warren has, if anything, tacked toward
Bernie, embracing “Medicare for All” and free college, and making a
wealth tax the centerpiece of her platform. Still, in the pages of Jacobin, Warren
has gone from seeming like a close second to Sanders to being a member
of the neoliberal opposition, perhaps made even worse by her desire to
claim the mantle of the party’s left. The magazine’s newest quarterly print cover
makes this point explicit in illustration: Sanders and his new
democratic socialist comrades in the House are pictured cycling on Team
Red in a race against Joe Biden and Warren on Team Blue.
So
why the sudden turn against a candidate whose soak-the-rich politics
would have thrilled the anti-establishment, anti-capitalist left not
long ago?
***
One easy theory is that Jacobin,
beneath the clever historical name and the hip graphics, is essentially
a house organ for the Democratic Socialists of America, the grassroots
political organization that grew out of the now-defunct Socialist Party
of America and has expanded from around 5,000 members before 2016 to
more than 50,000 now. Bhaskar Sunkara, the magazine’s 30-year-old
founding editor and publisher, has been a member of DSA since he was a
teenager, and he was recently vice chair of the organization. DSA
endorsed Sanders in 2016 and did so again this past March.
Sunkara rejects that theory—as do other DSA members. Technically, he points out, Jacobin
and DSA are separate, neither taking its marching orders from the
other, even if many writers are members. More broadly, where DSA focuses
on supporting campaigns across the country that align with its
socialist mission, Sunkara considers Jacobin’s role as more
“abstract.” The magazine is still figuring out how, and if, it wants to
be involved in electoral politics at all, he said.
“We
can’t directly convert people,” he said. “What we can do is try to
cohere together—from all these different strands and threads—some sort
of left opposition to liberalism, give it a name and call it democratic
socialism, and create a debating grounds for these broad sets of ideas.”
That
broad set of ideas has included everything from the proposals now
commonly referred to as Medicare for All and a Green New Deal to more
radical concepts like prison abolition—all of which are also components
of the Democratic Socialists of America platform.
The
change in the publication’s treatment of Warren, Sunkara told me, was
not a conscious decision or directive from higher-ups like himself. The
publication, as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, cannot formally endorse political
candidates.
But it does reflect, he said, what Jacobin’s
mostly young left-wing writers and contributors, many of whom are open
Sanders supporters and even campaign volunteers, are thinking. Where a
previous generation might have been more than satisfied with a candidacy
that would have been a socialist dream a mere decade ago, a younger
generation tired of tempering its hopes is hungry for what it thinks
could be a more revolutionary outcome.
Warren’s ginger concessions to the center—be it her proclamations of “ faith in markets” or her refusal to say she’d raise middle class taxes to pay for single-payer health care—thus seem like a betrayal of necessary convictions.
“There
probably has been, among certain writers, a disillusioning with certain
parts of the Warren approach to things, and also it’s probably an
attempt to push her to be more resolute,” Sunkara said. There’s a
reason, after all, why the candidate who said she is a “capitalist to her bones” was not the socialists’ favorite to begin with. (POLITICO reached out to Meagan Day and other Jacobin writers for this story, but they declined to comment.)
Observers should be careful, he said, not to place the blame for the Jacobin-Warren divide only on the magazine’s writers, and not also on Warren and her team.
Maybe,
Sunkara suggested, as Warren has refined her policy platform, she’s
changed her stripes to try to “accommodate all wings of the Democratic
party.”
“I
mean, her record is quite admirable, and I think her personality is
quite charming and whatever else, but she needs to be palatable to the
establishment. She needs to not scare donors. She’s needs to not scare
the markets, while at the same time she wants to maintain credentials as
a left-wing policy person,” he said.
***
Some Jacobin sympathizers
who might be considered old leftists to this new generation are happy
to see socialism surge into the mainstream. But they’re also nervous
that the magazine’s dismissal of Warren is dangerously overzealous,
especially as it discounts a candidate who seriously worries Wall
Street, moderates and billionaires.
“It
reflects a particular sensibility of a particular generation,” said
Robert Kuttner, a co-founder and co-editor of the liberal magazine The American Prospect.
“I think the Jacobin
people represent the left wing of Sanders’ support,” he said. “They
think it’s really important to self-describe as a socialist.”
Jacobin
isn’t the only young lefty publication to turn on Warren. Nathan
Robinson, the 31-year-old editor of the smaller but similar Current Affairs, wrote last week in a column in the Guardian
that “progressives no longer need to wonder whether she’s with us or
not. She’s not.” Regarding the Warren versus Sanders comparisons, he
wrote: “She is not just a more wonkish and pragmatic advocate of the
same politics. The politics themselves are very different.”
As
Robinson’s piece suggests, the new leftist energy isn’t really a
reaction to Trump—it’s a reaction to Obama and Clinton and a whole
Boomer-era approach to liberalism. Summing up Jacobin’s
generational critique of Warren, an article by Dustin Guastella in the
latest print issue argues that Warren “favors the cool language of
expertise and technocracy over white-hot tirades against the ruling
class.” Not meant favorably, he writes that “Warren represents a certain
continuity in the Democratic Party’s approach to politics.”
This
all-or-nothing approach does not sit well with the older guard of
American leftist thinkers. “If the plutocrats themselves think she’s
just as dangerous as Bernie, why does Jacobin doubt that?” asks Rich Yeselson, a labor historian and journalist who’s written for Jacobin in the past and is a contributing editor of the leftist publication Dissent.
Yeselson admires Jacobin
and its success. “Bhaskar is kind of a genius,” he says. “He’s a
venture capitalist of socialism, and I mean that as a full compliment.”
But he counts himself among those starting to have reservations about
the magazine’s approach to the 2020 presidential election, and
especially its treatment of Warren.
“If she were to be elected president, she would be the most leftist president in American history,” Yeselson said.
“If
Sanders is elected, he’s going to draw from the same pool of left
technocrats to people his administration as she will,” Yeselson added.
“Is it liberal left? Is it socialist? Whatever. It’s to the left of
Biden; it’s to the left of Obama; it’s to the left of Clinton. Neither
of them is going to appoint officials from Goldman Sachs.”
Minor
differences in the most ambitious legislative proposals—like Medicare
for All payment schemes or different approaches to a Green New Deal—from
Sanders and Warren are immaterial, Yeselson suggested, because neither
will be able to get those programs through Congress. That said, there
are real differences between Sanders and Warren on foreign policy, he
said. “There should probably be more discussion of that.”
John Judis, author of The Populist Explosion, credits Jacobin
as an important intellectual force, but says that the fine distinctions
the magazine’s writers are drawing between Sanders and Warren are more
“sectarian” than ideological. “They recall the battles among Lutherans
and Baptists,” Judis said.
Michael Kazin, the co-editor of Dissent and a professor of history at Georgetown, points out that neither
Sanders nor Warren is a true socialist, at least by international
standards. Bernie calls himself a “democratic socialist,” but he also
likens himself to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Still, Kazin says, both
Sanders and Warren are “two of the most obviously left-wing candidates
in American history.” (Sunkara said he disagrees, calling it “a strange
and ahistorical claim,” though he concedes that “she’d be one of the
best presidents in modern time.”)
Although his party and his publication are all-in for Sanders, Sunkara, who is also the author of The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality,
said he doesn’t see a Sanders win in 2020 as the only barometer of the
movement’s—and the magazine’s—success. “If it wasn’t bigger than Bernie,
we would be really screwed,” he said. “I hope he wins, personally, but
he’s a 78-year-old candidate, and we need to create something that
extends far, far beyond him.”
To
Sunkara, his magazine’s 2020 coverage is unremarkable—comparing and
contrasting candidates is part of the primary process. “You air
criticisms, you challenge people on their record, and the best
politicians adapt and improve and make themselves stronger candidates as
a result,” Sunkara said. They aren’t spreading falsehoods or making
bad-faith critiques, he added. And they’re definitely not “getting
together in a room and seeking to tank Warren.” They know there are far
worse candidates, he said. Jacobin is publishing a full book about Joe Biden’s record and why he’s unfit to be the next Democratic president. “We don’t have a book on Elizabeth Warren.”
But as the 2020 election gets closer, others fear there won’t be
a progressive politics after Bernie, much less a socialist future, if
the rift between Democrats and democratic socialists stays this wide.
Kazin, who wrote a history of the left in America and is currently
writing a history of the Democratic Party, worries that Jacobin’s
current strategy could hurt the cause in the short term as well as the
long one. “I’m not someone who thinks that we should never criticize
anyone on the left,” he said. “But right now, I think a big danger
actually is a divided Democratic Party.”
Sunkara countered, “You can make an
argument about holding punches for any centrists—center left or even
center right if you hold that perspective.” He added, “You can take that
logic to any extreme,” and “you would end up criticizing no one but
fascists.”
But for some, this election is so
important that it’s worth erring on the side of caution. “The final
outcome is what, in the end, really matters,” Kazin said. “When Trump is
president, we won’t have time to say: ‘Well, let’s fight another day.
Too bad we didn’t win, but I’m glad I didn’t support Warren, because
that would have been a betrayal of my principles.’”
He added, “You can’t change society unless you win elections.”
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