How The Left’s Approach To Campaign Contributions When Running for Office Fits In With Their Joseph Heller Mindset for Politics In General

 

 

The more time I’ve spent with so many progressive thinkers, on this site and others, I am convinced that the far left’s approach to politics is modeled after the kind of thinking Joseph Heller illustrated in his classic novel  Catch-22. Since I’m convinced that, as with many books the left highlight, that they might own a copy but have never read it, I’ll illustrate it here.

A progressive believes with all his heart that the American political system is corrupt and beyond repair. He believes the only way to fix it is to run for elected office. By doing so, however, his fellow progressives will argue that if he wins that office, he is de facto corrupt himself and can’t be trusted to change the system. That is one of many of the left’s Catch-22 type of thinking. (More will be illustrated below.)

To be fair to them, this approach to running for office has been part and parcel of the electoral system in America since candidates began running for office more than two centuries ago. Whether running in a general election or a primary, one candidate will argue the incumbent is guilty of being part of the status quo and will come to shake things up. Once he wins office, he is subject to the same process. Where the left critically differs is that their mindset is so devote to upholding this principle that while they are just as loud about the lack of change in Washington, at least since the era of the Vietnam War they have made it clear they will not participate in that system at all, lest their principles be compromised.

Worse, they are more than willing to acknowledge that other groups, most obviously the conservative branch of Americans, feel no qualms about not playing by those rules. They will acknowledge over and over how the conservatives have spent the last half-century devoting their effort to subvert our democracy from within and how that power is now felt in every branch. But as Hunter Bregman pointed out in a New York Times interview last month, the left has never felt compelled to follow a similar work ethic when it comes to bringing about the change they say that America actually wants despite the results of elections. They remain, at best, outside that glass house chucking stone at everyone in it with abandon and occasionally saying that if the Democrats want their vote, they must come outside and meet them rather then them bothering to go in or even meet them halfway. And over the last decade whenever the Democrats do decide to go out to meet them, they have usually found that the left has moved at least ten miles further to the left and then tell them that’s where the new halfway point is.

I have often wondered if, much like so many of the more conservative people during the 20^th century, some of the left knows that its views are not popular with the American mainstream but have committed so much time and energy to upholding them they feel unable to back away. Perhaps that explains why the few progressive candidates that have run for office in the 21^st century are determined to handicap the fight against them winning by tying their hands behind their backs before going to battle. This is true when you consider not only the platforms that they run on when going into elected office but what has been a touchstone in their thinking for this century: campaign contributions.

I need to make it clear so I’m not misconstrued: I agree firmly that there is too much money in our political system since Citizen United and that the current group of elected officials, mostly Republicans but some Democrats, have no motivation to repeal it in the near future. If progressives were serious about getting it done, they would be running for elected office in every state of the union and making it part and parcel of their platform. (I’m aware quite a few have; I’ll get to that.)

But here we hit upon another  Cstch-22. It takes money to get into politics in the first place. And it’s very clear that the system will pour any money they can to stop it from happening. If progressives were serious about it, they would find an angel who they use for this method, agree to do it this way now and once to get to Washington, then focus on reform.

But in the paradoxical thinking of the left, when they run for office they seem determined to ignore the rules and win by the sheer force of their argument. This is true, I should add, even before Citizen United made it impossible to do so.

In 2002 Robert Reich attempted to run for Governor of Massachusetts. His campaign rejected the traditional funding and even by the standard of the left was very radical: he supported same-sex marriage, condemned capital punishment and was for campaign finance. His staff was essentially made up of his Brandeis students. He narrowly managed to come in second with 25 percent of the vote, losing to Shannon O’Brien, who lost in the general to Mitt Romney. Reich never attempted to run for political office again.

Massachusetts was one of the few states that had voted for Clean Election funding in 1998, providing funding to candidates agreeing to limits. By the time of the 2002 election, the people reversed that position by a 74 percent margin. By and large the idea of publicly funding elections was not popular even in the era of McCain Feingold: only Arizona and Maine have in effect and only once – in 2006 – did both the Republican and Democratic states for governor run it. California actually managed to pass it and put into law in 2008 but it had to pass by initiative in 2010. The voters rejected it in a landslide: 57 percent to 43 percent in June of 2010. It failed in Alaska by nearly two to one in August of 2008.

So despite the argument that money out of politics is a good thing, the few times Clean Election bills have run statewide, the voters have rejected it. In a sense that’s because the money to run campaigns must come from somewhere and the taxpayers don’t want to finance it. All of this happened before 2010, well before the Supreme Court ruled on Citizens United.

One of the few people who has always endorsed is Bernie Sanders, which is logical because he is from Vermont, one of the few states that still has publicly funded elections. When he ran for the Presidency in 2016, he basically ran on the idea as well as $25 campaign contributions.

Sanders, its worth remembering, only caucuses with the Democrats and has never been one. As I’ve argued before so much of the reason he did as well as he did in 2016 was because by the time of the Iowa caucuses he was the only candidate left against Hilary Clinton. I firmly believe much of his vote was anti-Clinton as it was pro-Sanders and that if a significant Democrat had been Hilary Clinton’s opponent – Joe Biden is by far the most obvious example – he would have receive much of Sanders’ vote in the earlier states and Sanders would have become a nominal presence, much like Dennis Kucinich had been in both his runs for the Democratic nomination.

But in the revisionist think that the left has always been guilty of when Trump ended up winning the White House that November, they decided that if Sanders had been nominated he would have beaten Trump and the only reason he lost was because ‘the system’ was against him. Blaming the system is the other major boogeyman of the left and appeals to the martyrdom that follows so much of their writing.

So three days after Trump was sworn in two leaders of Sanders’ Presidential campaign helped form the Justice Democrats. The group made it clear it would only endorse candidates who pledge to ‘refuse donations from corporate PACs and lobbyists. They were trying to start a movement with both their hands tied behind its back.

I’ve written about the Justice Democrats and their failings multiple times in 2024 so I won’t go into detail about their fallacies in their platform, only deal with the results. They ran 72 candidates in the 2018 election cycle, five for Governor, one Lieutenant Governor, four for the Senate and the rest for Congress. Only thirty of them managed to get past the primary, all but two of them candidates for Governor. When the general election took place, only four who didn’t already identify as Justice Democrats won elected office: Ayanna Presley, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Taib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

It is very hard to see a glass half-full scenario when your batting average for your first time out is four for 72. The Democrats, a party used to dealing with defeat, should have realized that before welcoming them into the fold. But ‘the Squad’ like progressives before them, chose to see themselves as the future of not just the Democratic Party, but the entire American political system. Despite the fact that their movement was incredibly unsuccessful by any rational standard they have continued to believe ever since that they are representative of the future of politics.

And while correlation doesn’t necessarily equal causation, I find it telling that with each subsequent election cycle the Justice Democrats have been able to raise less money to go on this venture. Apparently there are only so many people willing to spend even the bare minimum for candidates on a progressive platform – and those who do, want to have their candidates win as much as those who the PACs spend their money on. Clearly they have a greater sense of reality than many of the candidates that were recruited and even elected. For all the talk about the ‘effect’ AOC has supposedly had on politics in the six years since she won office, that effect has yet to be felt in people in the left being inspired to run for office in order to join ‘The Squad’. It certainly has not been felt in the immediate aftermath of the 2018 election among the Justice Democrats themselves.

 Two years later they only endorsed ten newcomers, all but one of them in Congress. While they did slightly better this time: five of them made to the primaries and three of them won – the Party’s majority as a whole shrunk as the right  did a good job painting the entire Party as being adjuncts of the Justice Democrats. That many Democrats themselves not only disagreed with them but disliked them didn’t matter in 2020 as they were trying to take the White House back.

In 2021 Nina Turner ran for a vacant seat in Ohio’s 11^th Congressional district and lost. In 2022 they endorsed 6 newcomers, only two won. One of their own Marie Newman lost her seat after winning the previous time out. Jessica Cisneros, who’d been recruited in 2020 to run in the Texas 28^th and lost, lost again.

This past cycle the Justice Democrats didn’t run any newcomers at all. Notably two members who had won in 2020, Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush lost their primaries that year. In both cases both candidates had been problematic members of Congress for both terms and their views on Israel after 2023 had made them a target. Both Bowman and Bush will no doubt argue that certain PACs chose to get rid of them because they were considered ‘too dangerous to the system’. There is some truth to that but both could have no doubt saved their seats had they been willing to compromise on their strident rhetoric and do work for their district. Neither chose to do so and in the case of Bush, she chose to double down on her rhetoric.

It needs to be noted that the Justice Democrats appeal, like so much else about the left, has only played in certain places. Usually it is the deepest blue districts of the bluest states imaginable. (Bush’s victory in Missouri was an outlier in that regard.) Even then it has limited appeal even in states such as Illinois, California, Pennsylvania and New York. There is only so far to the left you can go and be tolerated unless you have money and since the Justice Democrats clearly are unwilling to take much of that, they have little but the purity of their cause to carry them through the day. That has limits on it that I doubt campaign finance reform could help.

After the disastrous results of the 2024 election the Democrats have been struggling to find a path forward. The numbers themselves tell where they have to go. Kamala Harris got less than 34 of the white working-class vote and only eight percent of rural America.

This is not an answer the left will accept no matter how many elections they lose. They can’t sell their brand in Utah, Tennessee, West Virginia or Texas and even purple states like Wisconsin and Ohio have rejected their candidates. So in the aftermath of the 2024 election their attitude is not that different from 2016: the problem is the Democrats didn’t go enough to the left. That parties only win elections when they go where the voters are is not something that would occur to a group that tends to think politics is beneath them.

And indeed some Democrats remain convinced that, despite the results of the election, the public is still on their side. One Democrat who I will not give the dignity of naming said that when it comes to winning the white male vote, “most of the men I know are already on our side.” At worst, this is political malpractice which goes against the election results. At best, it confirms yet again about the bubble that the left is already a part of and that they don’t intend to leave.

But this is indicative of the third and most fatal part of the Catch-22’ type thinking of the left: their corruption of the term ‘level playing field’ that comes to arguing (when they do) how the Democrats can win. Campaign finance is a large part of it. If you take all of the money out of elections this argument goes and allow the candidates to win on the merits then the left will win every time. This is a variation of so much of their argument about how to win the votes of the average American: they have to be better educated, they have to have more accurate news, they have to understand why the leftist point of view is better for them.

All of this is not only magical thinking that is unlikely at best but it does what it always does for progressives. It absolves from having to compromise and move towards where the people are. It absolves them from having to moderate their rhetoric and attitude so that they might win friends. In short, it means that everyone else has to change to come where they already are.

I will end this article with  one last thing about Catch-22. In Heller’s novel, it’s a term that is assumed to be part of the military rules but that we later learn is just a made-up clause that ultimate the soldiers use to justify everything they do. One victim of it says ‘Catch-22 says they have the right to do anything we can’t stop them from doing.”

When Yossarian asks why she didn’t insist on reading it:

“They don’t have to show us Catch-22,” the old woman answered. “The law says they don’t have to.”

“What laws says they don’t have to?”

“Catch 22.”

Again this kind of circular thinking can be applied to so much of the policy of both parties during the 21^st century. But when the left uses it to justify that its principles are more important than actually compromising to change anything, then I believe we are free to look at them as Yossarian himself does near the climax of the novel: “Like a psychiatrist through a ward of nuts, like a victim through a prison of thieves.”