Sunday, November 13, 2022

Faith

 Dostoyevsky said, “You can’t be a socialist and believe in God.  You either believe in the Kingdom in this world, or the one in the next.” I’m a half-assed agnostic, but I do believe in the socialist movement.  I believe that a society’s success should be measured not in its overall prosperity, but in the prosperity of its least prosperous members.  And I also believe that the power of big business is something that must be confronted rather than appeased.


One of my heroes is Bernie Sanders.  His vision of social democracy may be milder than mine, but it’s an important step forward.  I think that the Democratic Party were foolish to choose Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden over him, and I still hope that 2024 will be different. (And if you can believe that they won the nomination “fair and square,” you can believe anything.) Some people keep saying “Bernie’s not a Democrat.” Well, he’s more of a Democrat than Trump, isn’t he?  Who’s being a self-defeating purist now.


Another thing that bugs me is Democrats blaming Clinton’s 2016 defeat on Sanders not being more supportive.  Firstly, that’s blatantly unfair.  Bernie could have double-crossed the Democrats and defected to the Green ticket, and might even have won!  But he played it safe, campaigned for Hillary and actually delivered an even more solid share of his supporters than she’d delivered for Obama back in 2008.  


Secondly, two can play the blame game.  The polls during the primary showed Clinton with the same dicey narrow lead over Trump she’d have in November, and Sanders with a much wider lead:  he was clearly the safer bet.  But some Democrats kept insisting that Hillary was more “electable” because she was a centrist…


Another hero of mine is Jeremy Corbyn.  His detractors keep saying “He lost twice,” as if that were the last word about him. (The same with Bernie.) Yet in 2017 he managed to take away the Conservative majority.  And the accusation that he enabled anti-Semitism within the Labour Party is nonsense.


Opponents of Brexit have some nerve blaming their failure on Corbyn.  He campaigned against it, despite his past criticisms of the EU, then took a pragmatic approach and tried to effect as less drastic break.  He would have actually succeeded, but the Liberal Democrats abstained on the key vote!  Then Keir Starmer persuaded the party to demand a second referendum, which backfired badly in the 2019 election.  A second referendum wouldn’t have been wrong, but the proposal was disastrously ill-timed and turned a crucial bloc of voters against Labour in crucial seats.  Voters who rejected Labour over the second referendum made the wrong decision for the wrong reason, but it was a predictable backlash.


Soon after becoming Labour leader, Starmer launched an anti-left purge starting with Corbyn, as needless as it is dictatorial.  His thinking is clearly along the lines of “Screw the left, they have to vote for us anyway.  Or if they don’t, there aren’t enough of them to matter.  Or if there are, they can serve as a scapegoat!” What could possibly go wrong?  It’s time for the British left to form a genuinely socialist party.


Socialists often have to defy the Official Difference and risk the accusation, “If you aren’t with us then you’re with the Bad Guys!” Sometimes you have to risk making a bad situation even worse if there’s to be any real chance of making it better.

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