It’s easy to get discouraged by the state of left-leaning politics in the United States. As of late, President Biden has consistently and unsurprisingly not lived up to the demands of progressives and leftists throughout his term. On climate change, the Inflation Reduction Act increased investment in renewable energy projects and represented a good first step, but Biden followed that up by approving an oil drilling project in Alaska. Despite at one point claiming that he had declared a climate emergency, which would open up essential paths to combat climate change, Biden has not done so despite pleas from many climate activists. As his presidency has gone on, his progressive economic positions have retreated and he has backed away from more ambitious proposals like creating new Medicare benefits. Most recently, many leftists believe that Biden has taken the worst possible approach with recent developments in Israel and Palestine by supporting the Israeli military despite its use of collective punishment against the Palestinian people. With this backdrop, it’s easy to see why progressives with Democratic affiliations and leftists have looked outwards towards other options for the 2024 Presidential election. Unfortunately, a wide array of issues with these options, whether they be personal or political, candidate-based or systemic, highlight the frustrating nature of the two-party American political system and help explain the sad state of the American left.
Working from within the Democratic party, the most mainstream option is Marianne Williamson. Williamson has gained a fair amount of traction with young progressives, and her social media team has certainly been putting in the work; her TikTok account has almost 600,000 followers and frequently posts snappy, personalized content that has a definite appeal to young voters. Her platform is promising; she talks about how the system fails most Americans, is happy to criticize the innumerable failings of trickle-down economics, and rightly calls out establishment politics for its corporate corruption. She supports reparations, wants to put into place plans to introduce 100% renewable energy while also ending all new oil and gas leases on federal land, supports a holistic (if still police-supportive) crime prevention plan, and wants to reform immigration policy to create an affordable and available path to citizenship to all who pass criminal background checks. In a lot of ways, her platform is exciting. While Biden may have co-opted many progressive ideas during his campaign after winning the Democratic nomination to satisfy progressive detractors, a lot has stalled or been left to the wayside. Williamson, on the other hand, makes big promises from the start, and comes across as highly passionate.
Unfortunately, Marianne Williamson is not the progressive messiah she appears to be at face value. There are little clues sprinkled throughout her campaign website that all is not what it seems, and occasional self-helpy turns of phrase and hints of spiritual rhetoric are only the beginning of the Marianne Williamson rabbit hole. Moments like when she tweeted about how “the power of the mind” could stop Hurricane Dorian from hitting the U.S. in 2019 and her saying that she would “harness love” to defeat Trump that same year during a debate make her come across as some sort of pseudo-spiritual hack-and predictably, her past confirms the harmful route this rhetoric can take. The deeper you go into Williamson’s history, the stranger and more alarming things get. She considers herself a spiritual guru, and has written many books over the past few decades, including 1992’s A Return to Love, which included a section saying that all illness was an illusion and all in the mind. Particularly mystifying are her comments on AIDS, which are numerous and concerning, at one point saying “Imagine the AIDS virus as Darth Vader, and then unzip his suit to allow an angel to emerge.” While she has since claimed a pro-science and pro-medicine stance, it’s hard to trust that statement in the face of so much evidence to the contrary. Despite her progressive platform, Marianne Williamson is a laughingstock to the general public, and she should be to progressives as well.
It’s telling that this is the most mainstream progressive presidential option: a 71-year-old spiritual self-help author-turned-attempted politician running as a Democrat despite there being no possibility that she can win the nomination. The case of Marianne Williamson encompasses a lot of problems with the American left in 2023; like Williamson, it has issues building a base due to confused messaging, it’s in a constant state of struggle to exist, and it has no support from the political establishment.
Technically, there are other left-leaning candidates running campaigns. First of the two major players is Dr. Cornel West; a well-respected leftist political activist and philosopher, West is running as an independent. He has no strange backstory to bring up, but his independent candidacy is enough to eliminate any chance of presidential victory. Unlike the Democratic establishment, he understands that “People are hungry for change”, but there is no world where he will be the one to bring it. West’s ideas are strong and sure to resonate with many American leftists-and there’s no doubt that him running a campaign could draw attention to leftist ideology and push American political debate to the left-but he simply does not have enough mainstream support to get anywhere near the presidency. Second is Claudia De la Cruz, candidate for the the Party for Socialism and Liberation. De la Cruz is an organizer and educator and is running on a truly leftist platform the likes of which mainstream United States politics never see, promising to “End Capitalism Before it Ends Us.” It’s exciting stuff, but once again, the two-party system will inevitably crush any chance of her gaining substantial political traction.
Leftist politics, and even less radical progressive politics in the United States Federal Government are hard to pinpoint. There is no true leftist representation, and even the progressive wing of the largely moderate Democratic party (call them Democratic Socialists or some other right-of-socialism but left-of-center name) feels weak. Many of their policy ideas are hugely popular, yet they get little representation in our government due to fearmongering about socialism and backlash from the more moderate Democratic establishment. Representatives like those in the “Squad” (original members Reps. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rahida Tahib, and Ayanna Pressley; subsequent members Reps. Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman) had their time in the sun a few years ago when they were new in Congress, but as time goes on and nothing changes, they feel less and less important. They may represent popular ideas and the hopes of many young progressives, but if their major proposals (think Green New Deal) never seem to go anywhere, what’s the point?
Throughout American history, leftist movements have continually failed to gain substantial and long-lasting traction, while also being met with state-sanctioned repression and violence. In the early 20th century, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) was founded on principles of overthrowing the capitalist system through “One Big Union” that focused on solidarity between all workers regardless of identity and type of labor. While members had success with many short term goals, they were consistently met with repression, violence, and imprisonment by the state and employers backed by the state. Within the IWW, there was conflict over whether political action was even effective, similar to many conversations in leftist circles today. Leftist organizations were deeply affected by the Russian Revolution, which split many groups like the IWW between support for Communism and other leftist ideologies. Policies of the Communist International (Comintern) led by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union dictated the beliefs of American Communists. In the 1930s, this led to deep divisions and aversion to collaboration with other leftist groups in the U.S. when the Comintern shifted ultra-left. The most extreme example of government repression was with McCarthyism and the Red Scare during the Cold War, where those with links to the Communist Party were targeted, blacklisted, and imprisoned by the government out of fear of Soviet danger to American safety. These are just some examples of the failures of strong collective leftist movements in the United States, but a common theme has been destruction by the state or by internal disagreement.
The problem is that our two-party, comparatively right-leaning political system barely allows progressive policy to happen. Most other so-called “developed nations” have at least one political party that is either leftist or much more progressive than the relatively moderate Democratic party, but the United States’ historical lack of strong leftist movements with political aspirations has made that impossible. It’s no wonder there’s so much fatalism around voting in leftist circles: we’re told that if we don’t vote, things will get worse, but there’s not much motivation or inspiration in that. People want real change-this is what causes them to cling to the false hope that Marianne Williamson represents despite her past, and the exciting but ultimately futile ambitions of a Cornel West or Claudia De la Cruz figure. We live under the illusion of choice; in the end we only have two options, and the lines between them can blur quickly when thinking about the scope of the issues the country faces.
The most left-leaning major party in the United States, the Democratic party, is too moderate and stuck in its ways to support progressive policy. Because the two-party system makes the Democratic party the only feasible pathway to the presidency or Congress for progressive candidates, this refusal of support stifles left-leaning politics in the Federal Government completely. Even in terms of messaging, the Democratic party utterly fails at presenting progressive change, choosing instead to emphasize compromise and unity in contrast to Republicans who have utterly abandoned moderation and turned towards blatant extremism. Many in the Democratic establishment cry out that progressive candidates are too dangerous and won’t win elections. This is constantly disproven when progressives get a fair chance; in 2020, all three of the new House Democrats that ousted incumbents in primaries were much more progressive than their predecessors. Similar trends occurred in 2018. Nonetheless, establishment Democrats do all they can to make people coalesce around more moderate candidates, as evident with Biden in 2020; and it’s hard to see that changing anytime soon. The fact that it has been proven time and time again that progressives can win elections given the right opportunity raises an important question: how much of this establishment fear is based on reality, and how much of it instead creates backlash against progressive candidates by perpetuating fear?
There’s no easy answer to the complicated question of how to approach the ballot as a more progressive or leftist voter in these conditions. Some will argue that those who don’t vote for Biden are essentially voting for the Republican nominee. Others will argue that the dangers that Republicans apparently represent are already realities for many, and that moderate Democrats who refuse to enact substantial and necessary change don’t deserve their support. The Biden stance on Israel-Palestine is a great example of this dilemma; the hundreds of thousands of Americans with family or connections in Gaza will have a hard to impossible time voting for Biden because he’s a “better alternative”.
National politics are a losing battleground for leftists and often progressives. Fearmongering both within the Democratic party itself and from external sources drives establishment and constituent support away from popular ideas and good candidates. In today’s political climate, substantial progressive policy enactment at the federal level feels like an impossible wish. There’s no easy solution, but some solace may be found in state and local politics, which present different ballparks that allow for much more political choice. New York is a great example: there are currently eight Democratic Socialist of America (DSA) members serving in the New York State Senate and Assembly, and they have been able to enact actual change across the state. One example is Julia Salazar-elected in 2018 from North Brooklyn-who was an essential part of a huge expansion of tenants’ rights in 2019. This DSA-wing also won a group victory in 2021 on a grassroots Tax the Rich campaign that was able to save many public services from cuts. The New York City Council has a long history of leftist members, and that historical precedent has made somewhat of a comeback recently, with the Council currently including three DSA members as well as many that are much more progressive than the national Democratic party. It’s an imperfect and unsatisfying answer to a complicated question; the truth is that while local and state politics are essential, they can’t solve wide-reaching national and geopolitical issues. But until moderates age out or the system changes, it might be all there is.
