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The one-sided war between Blue MAGA and anyone on the left has once again reached a fever pitch this week, with Hasan daring to say that he does not pledge his vote 2 years in advance to one of the worst candidates the Democrats could ever conceive of, Gavin Newsom. And, lacking the cynical misuse of identity politics Blue MAGA was extremely happy to use to defend Vice President Harris’ record, they have become slightly more honest in the actual arguments they make, so I would like to address those directly before the full mobilization of the multi-billion dollar propaganda machine that is the Democratic Party happens.

This is a attempt, but very much still draft, to very quickly set out the leftist approach to liberalism, then set out the argument liberals present and work backwards from that to the leftist theory of change. The goal is not to build on leftist literature on why liberalism is incorrect, I take that as a given. My goal is to at least give a primer for tactical engagement with liberalism, my first round attempt at dealing with their arguments in a more cohesive way, and generally an outlet to release our collective frustration with them. I hope you find it useful, I have moved from wanting to arm you with the arguments to deal with your fascist uncle at thanksgiving, to aiming to arm you with arguments to deal with your Blue MAGA cousin. Oh how fun it is for all of us to grow up.

0 - What is the Liberal Positionality from a leftist analysis

First to set out very quickly what the leftist position on liberalism is, many more and better books are written on this.Functionally, liberals act as a pressure valve for working-class sentiment to co-opt revolutionary energy and protect class interests for the cost of class collaboration. Every genuine revolutionary in American history understood this, with the two coming to mind being MLK and Malcom X, both of which had words ranging from disappointment to scorn for the white liberal. You don’t need to take my word for this analysis, please just take theirs.

1 - What is the Ask? - My Attempt as The Liberal Position

The argument as it is articulated to me is often not that Democrats are perfect or even good, the primary and near singular premise is that the policies democrats enact are better writ large and specifically to minority communities than those of the Republicans. This itself can be questioned,considering the blindness of both of them to the harms they both enact upon minority communities internationally, but this is not where the core fundamental disagreement happens, as most leftists, and what I believe to be proper leftist analysis, will conclude that the Democrats do in fact provide better outcomes from a purely immediate policy perspective to those communities. In fact, I think that is often part of the model of electoral “good cop, bad cop” models that leftists promulgate.

So where is the disagreement? It is presented as a disagreement about the theory of change. I must be honest and say that I am extremely cynical that that is actually where it is, I do not believe that liberals want the same outcome as leftists even though they both claim to believe in Social and economic progress for those harmed by capitalism. I do not believe that they actually recognize the extreme harm that the Democrats are doing and are engaging tactically in a way to undermine it. I do not believe them that they care as much about International minorities as they do National minorities.

Regardless running through the argument as they present it is probably the most productive, and it effectively goes as such: the primary means of changing things in America is educating the masses to vote better (For Democrats). If Democrats have more power in Congress, they will be able to enact policy that makes them more popular, and if progressives become a larger portion of the democratic voter base then the Democratic party will be responsive to its voter base and become more Progressive. The primary form of this Democratic feedback within the party is through primaries, not through defections to non voting or third parties in general elections. Not voting or voting for third party from their view in fact weakens the power of leftists in the party, because it discludes them from the base the democrats are responsive to.

So the ask following from this comes with a series of Demands: 1 - vote for blue no matter who, as that is the entry into your opinion mattering. 2 - your effort and rhetoric should be used to demonstrate to moderates, the core people who should be swayed to strengthen democrats in elections, that the difference between “our side” and the “other side” is large (ie trump bad in a unique and totally not Harris way) and thus 3 - not a single moment should be used to recognize the crimes of the Democrats even if we can all agree they exist, because that decreases the perceived difference between the 2 sides, thus demobilizing moderates and risking them moving to the other side for fringe disagreements. That is my genuine attempt, and I think a quite gracious one, to summarize the liberal position on voting. And the disagreement is not so much that that is a tactical way to engage in electoral politics, but that the terms of the debate are wrong, in a fundamental way.

2 - Where is the Disagreement?

Let’s try and set out some basic premises of this argument that can be tweaked.

Firstly I think it presumes that America is a democracy, but it is not, it is a hegemonic oligarchic Empire. Those in Iraq, Palestine and Libya do not get to vote in American elections despite being effectively ruled by the american empire. Both parties are almost entirely funded by billionaire donors to whom they are statistically almost singularly responsive. The system legally and structurally rejects millions of people’s right to vote by Merit of criminalizing them, labeling them as “non-citizens” (a label that ought to be worn with pride, as it relates to a criminal genocidal Empire) or pushing such mass media into their brains that their opinions are not representative of their own in any meaningful moral sense.

Secondly, it divorces the material from the ideological. We cannot divorce how people act within an electoral structure from the material interests that influence that electoral structure. That is to say, this strategy completely ignores the billions of dollars that go into a influencing people’s votes, the material interests of one policy over another, and the economy that fuels it all. These types of arguments only recognize billionaires being effected by policies (if we tax the wealthy they will just leave and that will hurt us) and refuse to recognize how billionaires affect policy ( billionaires are threatening to leave if we force them to pay their fair share, that is undemocratic)

Third, as a consequence of the second one it focuses merely on the tools presented to it by this hegemonic Empire: civil legal periodic elections, with occasional perfectly legal and non-disruptive protests. All else is criminalized, or otherwise dismissed by the cop that has been forced into their brains. Americans writ large are not only not educated on the large diversity of alternative power structures (starting with casual and disorganized systems social systems, to highly organized and militant groups of resistance, from strikes to community defense to what the Empire might call terroris) but they are militant against learning them, by merit of terms such as terrorism, criminal and thug which have been used to slur any that engage in them. Of course as a consequence of the mass media.

Fourth, let’s take them out their word that they are a bulwark, even though it is my opinion we would in fact be more effective against fascists if liberals simply cease to exist in the political sphere, but even if we accept that they are an imperfect defence, we must consider what a tactical Alliance costs us to get that nominal benefit. and I think too many leftists spend too long arguing that that benefit is either literally nothing or de minimus, in a way that opens us up rightly so to critique that we are not the beneficiaries of it, the oft repeated but rarely substantiated “ at least the Democrats protect minorities” and however cynical I am of that observation it’s not really my place to say that if that is the experience of people in those communities then it is irrelevant, but I can say though is that the Tactical Alliance costs more protection for those groups and I want to lay out a few ways that that cost is paid.

* 1.994 Billion Dollars - The amount spend on the Kamala campaign, for literally no benefit. Like literally zero she implemented zero policies because she was not elected, there is absolutely no way to tell me that there was a material benefit to the spending of a single one of those dollars. one could argue that they bought a chance at winning, but every single internal poll from the Democratic party that has ever been released to the public demonstrated that they had no chance of winning, and they knew it the whole time. They burned 2 billion dollars on fire, which just noting could have gone to 2 million Serbian Zastava ZPAPM70 for the communities they claim to protect (roughly 5% of the black population in america). Now, I will admit this is ignoring the fact that that money of course could not be spent on such effective revolutionary things because it was given specifically for electoral purposes, but once again this is admitting something much greater than a liberal would aim to: which is that when presented with a better more revolutionary and more effective option the funders of this would not do so. I say this with genuinity I do not see how that is not admitting that they agree elections are a less effective tool of change.

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3 - What do leftists want?

So if we free ourselves from those presumptions, and we recognize America for what it is the claim becomes a lot weirder, and I think most leftists would not have an issue with you ( as is my experience in doing so) if you simply said it as such: As person who is granted the privilege of citizenship in the United States Empire, you have an obligation to engage in all forms of democratic feedback in the most effective way to liberate those that do not have that privilege. their secondary assertion is then that this is the most effective way to do so. My first and foremost request of liberals is to centralize the undemocratic genocidal and despicable nature of this current system, not just with with diminishing euphemisms such as “ it’s not perfect” or “ I agree more should be done, but this is what we have” but I genuine effective recognition of the harm that is done by this system. Because only then can I even begin to discuss with you how to start reducing that harm, and prior to that any claims that I am the one failing to take into account the interests of or threats to minority communities will simply fall on deaf ears.

Before I get to where I think the effective engagement with this electoral system is, I want to note another benefit here which is that if people recognize my above propositions then I hope that they will be a little more humble and a little less righteous when they’re discussing such things. I’m consistently told that I do not understand the electoral system, that I have no plan, that I am idealistic, or that I am simply too privileged to have to take seriously the system we have in front of us. I think every single one of those accusations is demonstrated as true in the other side due to their refusal to recognize any of the above things.

So now to what is to be done.

4 - What is to be Done

I want to start with the fact that many liberals do not know, that in fact there is a long and very storied history of marxists, leninists and ofc marxists leninist engaging with Bourgeois electoral democracies, in fact many of the Communist parties that were disparaged by those Bourgeois electoral democracies engaged in them - and then of course were met with literal daggers in the night. leftists are not unfamiliar with elections and are actually historically extraordinarily pleased to bite the bullet and click the box for someone that does not agree with them entirely. the rhetoric that I see coming out of American leftists regarding anti-electoralism, or the more moralization of a voting as a complete endorsement of all actions of the American Empire, in my mind occupies a very particular position as a reaction to deeply inarticulate positions held by those who are obsessed with elections.

So how does a leftist engage with elections: tactically and materially. Firstly, leftist recognized that elections are consequences they are not causes, and the largest and near singular cause of an election going a certain way is the underlying economic interests of those running and funding the election, so leftists tend to focus not on changing hearts and Minds but on empowering the working class against the ruling class that changed those hearts and Minds into fascists in the first place. Secondly, in order to do this we engage in material analysis of the situation in front of us, in America that is a late stage capitalist Empire whose primary export is violence, and thus the only way to organize effectively is starts with the demobilization of that extreme violence in the periphery (hence the focus on anti-imperial struggles, and tactical alliances with resistance organizations) and the development of militants against such violence in the core ( hence the focus on community defense and labor organizing), because we are not free to vote how we want if our neighbors can be deported because we vote incorrectly. And third, and perhaps most frustrating to the liberal who claims to “not like some of Harris’ policies”, we are unwilling to compromise our critique and criticism of the war criminals we are fighting against in the first and second aims, even if those war criminals call themselves Democrats. that is because in order to be at all effective in organizing the workers and to the oppressed nations of America, we must first be able to label those who oppress them. in order to have any cognizant or productive theory of change against that oppression we must understand it in its entirety, and thus neutering it merely because someone claims to be a less bad fascist and this is important even if that is true and it is in the end as an individual tactical to vote for them , hurts our ability to to undermine the system of Oppression as a whole.

5 - Some notes on the Leftist Approach

I want you to notice some things about that approach (which is incompletely and inaccurately summarized above) that fundamentally differ from the liberal approach.

Firstly it does not focus on the individual, where and how the individual votes is if not tangential the very final thing that is considered. Liberals think that if we can merely convince enough people to not be racist racism will cease to be, leftists recognize that racism is extremely profitable for the elite and thus we must organize against them to undermine it. Two entirely different approaches, one that actually works.

Secondly, the leftist approach does not require you to lie. Now make no mistakes I am totally fine with a tactical fantasy, commonly explained with the “ always act like a gun is loaded metaphor”. but doing so has to be done for a very good reason and not cost us more than it gives us. The liberal argues that ignoring the crimes of Democrats increases our ability to sway moderates, the leftist says that that costs us our ability to organize against anything the republicans and democrats have in common, because we are not even able to recognize it as bad.

Third, this is not putting morals over efficacy, it is actually engaging in a critical discussion of what works and what doesn’t. It is in fact liberals that are requiring us to ignore what works, and leftists that are infinitely inconsistently curious about what does.

Finally, if you disagree but you think my characterization of liberal arguments are correct then I want you to notice but the consequence of that is. You can at no point ever tell me that you would not ever vote for Trump, because if the Republicans somehow found someone worse you would vote for the lesser, and work singularly within the system to beg for a better Democrat. You can make absolutely no absolute claims about who you would or wouldn’t vote for because your argument for voting is entirely content independent. Your strategy is not aligned with any history, it is incoherent to say that women black people or those under 21 got their rights to vote through the strategy you are proposing, but entirely and uniquely true that they received those rights through the strategy I am proposing. And finally, if you suggest that we can do both then you must recognize that in order to do one (radical and militant organing) we must be able to articulate what we are organizing against, and thus Banning us from critiquing criticizing or attacking the democrats in a way that “might demobilize moderates” does in fact limit our ability to do so. Our ideologies are at ends - you must pick one, and I strongly urge you to pick the one that has any historical basis.

Conclusion -

My aim here is in part to educate liberals on the disagreement because I believe there is at least with the people that are brought into the very well funded liberal pipelines, a genuine misunderstanding. It is also to in part, a kind, and non-forceful suggestion for what and how rhetoric to use when addressing this. I have an exponential about more to say on this issue, and if you would like to see different forms of that rhetoric please look at any of my recent videos inspired primarily by abject annoyance with those on the other side of this debate. I hope this is built on, and I hope that it is something worth being built on.

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