The Right Is Wrong and So's The Left: What Bayard Rustin SHOULD Teach Us About The Left and Democracy

 

 

I have spent the last few days trying to sum up more than  a few troubling stories I have seen from pretty prominent sources about how the left’s attitude is harmful. Then, in pure synchronicity,  I got an answer.

In this week’s New Yorker, there is a column on Bayard Rustin, the black civil rights leader who has been as they say, ‘having a moment.” A musical, a collection of essays about him and a film on Netflix have all recently debuted and author Adam Gopnik admits all our basically historically accurate. But that is not all that interests  Gopnik.  What fascinates him is how, after the civil rights movement, he worked doggedly within the Democratic Party ‘earning the enmity of the time’s radicals.’ He was implacably clearheaded about the Soviet Union and worked with Democratic neo-cons such as Henry Jackson and also worked just as hard for a commitment to a social democratic program that wen t further than the New Deal.  He worked with Martin Luther King and critiqued Malcolm X and the Black power movement.  And a year after arranging the March on Washington, he earned the enmity of the next generation of activists at the 1964 Democratic Convention. During a controversial conflict involving the Mississippi Freedom Part, that party wanted to walk out rather than accept LBJ’s compromise deal. Johnson feared that this seating would lead to a walk out by the Southern delegates. Rustin urged them: “When you enter the arena of politics, you’ve entered the arena of compromise.” He saw the danger that a Goldwater presidency would be to the civil rights movement and told them to take the deal. The deal happened, but his policy of patience opened a gap between him at that next generation. He believed that African-Americans could not act alone because there were not enough of them to make a difference.

Rustin’s policies are counter to everything that the left stands for: “Work within as big coalition as broad as you can make it. Emphasize logistic efficiency. Relish the metaphoric imagination, but don’t let it run away with your judgment. Accept perseverance as the best friend of freedom. Although utopianism and visionary overreach may be necessary beacons of freedom, they can, left to their own devices, become its betrayers.”

I have a feeling those who claim to worship Rustin only do so because of his identity: being both African-American, in an era of closeting, relatively open in his sexuality and because he has been ‘forgotten by history’. If they knew what he actually strived for, they would reject him as at best, a sellout, and at worse, an Uncle Tom.

I have had cause to think of that in several stories in the past week which have proven just how far removed from Rustin’s ideals the left is. The first involved an article in The Nation, one of the more famous leftist publications.

It is impossible not to deal with this without bringing up the fighting in Israel and I’m not going to take a position on here because it doesn’t matter.  However, it’s very clear the left’s shows the intractability and double standards that make up so much of their thinking. It’s also clear because of the binary way they see the world.

Jewish Americans need to be protected from hate crimes in the United States because they are the minority and therefore, the oppressed.  Israel’s actions in Gaza are utterly intolerable and must be opposed by the left because Israel is in charge and therefore the oppressor.  The decision to see your institutional opponents – be they the South, The Republican party or corporations – as a single evil individual is typical of leftist thinking: the individuals within these entities are part of it and must all be considered the enemy, full stop. And anyone who argues not only the opposition but merely for nuance is de facto their enemy – something The Nation makes clear.

In this article, the author says that they are upset at Bernie Sanders – the idol of the left – for not publicly supporting a cease-fire in Israel.  They omit the fact the U.S government has no power to call for a ceasefire; that decision must be made by the Israeli government.  They then say that every major leftist has taken this position and question Sanders’ ‘waffling’ on refusing to make what is to be clear a purely meaningless gesture when it comes to policy but that could hurt him electorally.  The writer is nuanced enough to acknowledge this is complicated for Sanders, not only because he is Jewish but because he spent his childhood in Israel. They also acknowledge he has said much without calling for an actual ceasefire. But at the end of the article, the writer says that while they understand the difficulty of his position, they want him to call for a ceasefire anyway. 

This makes it very clear how the left feels about personal positions, principles or even ones religious background. Being a leftist comes first; everything else is secondary. This is, by far, the most generous portrayal of it: several people have sent hate mail to Sanders and one shows they are not merely angry at him for that. One astute mind says that if he doesn’t support a ceasefire, “he might as well flush whatever credibility Biden took from you for your 2016 and 2020 campaigns down the drain.”

Let’s parse that statement, too.  As the left seems inclined to forget at every single opportunity Bernie Sanders is not a Democrat; he merely caucuses with them. I’m sure that fact alone enraged most of them; many of them have little use for the Democratic Party as an institution either.  Also notice the word ‘campaign’. Bernie Sanders is not President; he is a Senator who has some power but does not have anywhere near the ability to wave a wand and make his policies law. And I love how progressives have spent the last six years calling him anti-establishment. 

Sanders has been in the Senate for fifteen years.  He was the Chairman of Veteran’s Affair in January of 2013. He served Vermont as Congressman for eight terms before running for Senate and Mayor of Burlington for eight years before that. In other words, he was part of the establishment a full twenty years before Hilary Clinton won her first elected office. Bernie Sanders knew Congress better than most and therefore knows very well about the rules that Rustin argues for. The whole reason the left chose to think he spoke for the Democratic Party was simply because there was no one else to run against Hilary.  Had he by some miracle managed to win the Presidency (which would never have happened) he would have had to move to the center in order to govern like everyone else.  He might campaign as a protest; but he knows you have to govern, something the left has little to know interest to doing.

And of course the reason that Bernie Sanders was loved by the left was for a vital reason; he lost in a glorious, principled cause.  This became clear in the other major story this week involving this year’s elections. Now no one can deny this was a good night for the Democrats in every way. But I’d actually like to go into detail about the two governor’s races; the one they won and the one they lost.

First let’s start with the fact that Andy Beshear, who won in a huge victory in Kentucky, a ruby red state. Brandon Presley lost by five points in Mississippi. In the latter case, Presley came closer to winning in Mississippi than Stacey Abrams did to winning in Georgia last year, despite the fact that Mississippi is far redder than Georgia.  Furthermore, Beshear’s Republican opponent, Dave Cameron was the African-American attorney general of Kentucky who lost by five points.

What’s the commonality? Well in both case a moderate white did far better in a deep red Southern state than a more progressive African-American woman did in a purple one. I mentioned in my article on Strom Thurmond last Friday about how in the 1970s and 1980s a ‘New South’ came into existence because of a generation of moderate white Southerners, including Dale Bumpers, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. All of these man were able to win the African-American vote as a bloc. As a result, all they needed for victory was to win roughly a third of the white vote. This has been the bete noire of the Democratic Party in the South for the past thirty years. Beshear’s victory in comparison to Abram’s defeat should be a template for them to take in future elections. It remains to be seen if the left will let them.

I also mentioned in my article about the Mississippi governor’s race last week the position that so many progressives and women seemed willing to take in regard to Presley even opposed to Reeves, who as we all know is cartoonishly corrupt and incredibly unpopular. I mentioned the Democrats had an opportunity there but even in my wildest dreams I found it unlikely it would come to pass.

And to be clear, it didn’t. Presley lost by 4 and a half percent to Reeves.  Nevertheless, this was still the best performance by a Democrat and the worst for a Republican in the state since 1999. So the question needs to be asked: how much did it hurt Reeves that so many progressives chose to take the position to hope Presley one, but not vote in it.

For those who did, I really wonder if their self-righteousness can stand up in the face of reality. That progressive said she didn’t want a crumb has now guaranteed that for the next four years that exactly what will happen. The ‘visionary overreach’ or full plate she wanted, has betrayed the state of Mississippi. A truly horrible governor will have power for four years and a candidate who promised incremental change that would improve life for Mississippians has been defeated.

But you do get this kind of thinking so often from the left, as was made clear in an AP story that I saw this Thursday.  The Biden Administration, perhaps understandably, wanted to take credit for the victories on election night. There were many progressives who thought Biden had nothing to do with the results. One Ohio progressive went further and said not only should he not take credit for what happened this week, but for the results of the previous year.

To be clear Biden campaigned extensively all throughout 2022. He made stops in every swing state and quite a few that shouldn’t have been. In the face of what everyone, including the left, was certain would be a red wave that destroyed democracy as we knew, he kept pressing certain that America would save himself.  And on election night 2022, his faith was almost entirely proven right across the country.

I think the reasons for Biden’s low popularity are much clearer to me. It’s not just because of the right’s contempt for him, but the left’s. In their eyes Biden is responsible for everything wrong in the country and anything that goes right has nothing to do with him. I’ve always theorized that the left’s gratitude to Joe Biden ended on January 21, 2021.  They were grateful he’d gotten rid of a man they despised, but the moment he became President, he was part of the establishment or ‘the Other’.

One of the last paragraphs in this story best sums up the problems that the left has:

“The perpetual tragedy of leftist politics is the complete inability to imagine the Other – not the near-at-hand Others of allies who marginally deviate from your views, or the fantasy Others of the working classes who would agree with you if they only understood you were right, but the actual Other of religionists and ferocious ideological reactionaries who think that minimal programs for social equality are a form of personal theft. They get a vote, too.”

 

Nothing could some up the attitude of everything I have read by leftists in almost every capacity better than this single paragraph. Gopnik refers to the conjoined twins of ‘the authoritarianism of the right and the totalitarianism of the left that had to be equally opposed.’ Joe Biden, who is closer in this idea in his policy towards governing understands this as well as Bayard Rustin did. He understands as Rustin did: “the exhausting part of democratic politics is working within that reality and that the alternative is to imagine a mono-ideological utopia -  a fantasy even worse when made real.’

There are some on the left who seem to at least understand that this mythological utopia is impossible but given the alternative of working within that reality, they seem to prefer the dystopia that they spend so much time and energy warning us about.  In that sense I think the left’s arguments for universal suffrage and voter purges are essentially just talk.  They don’t care so much about minorities being unable to vote; they’re infuriated that the people they hate are able to vote, and their votes count as much as theirs. They will make all the argument about small states such as Wyoming and South Dakota having ‘too much power’ when in fact they are angry they have any power at all.

Rustin’s life’s work may have seemed like a failure at the time, but it did lead to change. In his lifetime, the apartheid of the South was dismantled and the first rush of African-American officials were elected since the end of Reconstruction.  George Wallace was such a figure of segregation and power that as late as 1972 he was a force for the Democratic nomination; just four years later Jimmy Carter, another Southern governor, defeated him on a civil rights platform. The changes were limited but they were concrete. Progressive might view Obama’s Presidency as too limited because he did not disrupt the system enough but if you view in a historical context as the kind of guarded success democracy allows, it’s a template for political advancement.

 I know how today’s progressive feel about it because in their minds coalitions – not just across party line, but within them – are things to be avoided over disruption and demanded systemic change for this so called mythological utopia.  Those people are frequently proud of refusing to vote except out of ideological purity and who will turn on their heroes the moment they disappoint them even slightly. The results in Mississippi and the attitude the left has towards Bernie Sanders in so many ways speaks volumes to that position.

I admire Bayard Rustin not merely for who he was but for what he spent his life trying to achieve, because that policy of compromise and trying to find a middle ground is one that I have spent the last few years – and in a sense, my entire adult life – embracing.  Democracy when it works perfectly is boring and dull. I can understand why the loudest voices don’t much care for it in an age where we constantly need entertainment.  But to argue that an entire part of the country is your intractable foe, based on who they vote for or where they live or a decision to only listen to people who agree with you about how miserable the world is rather than try to do anything to make it slowly but marginally better is not going to make anything better for anyone.  Building coalitions may not lead the histrionic moments of the film of your life. But it is the kind of work that leads to a true feel-good story, particularly for the world.