i think most of this piece beyond the ukraine section misses the mark on two simple bases: firstly that a lot of this just reads like “socialists won’t adopt my correct positions instead of their incorrect positions” without examining why socialists would come to a conclusion differing from the author; and secondly that socialists are not liberals, yet most of this piece seems to operate as if socialists are just spicy liberals and not diametrically opposed to most of the existing system.
take this, for example:
This theory also failed. The phrase “Medicare For All” polled consistently well, but when the specifics of the plan were explained, poll numbers tended to drop off sharply. Ultimately, the socialists got neither their preferred health care plan nor any sort of compromise at all — health care was simply de-emphasized by the Biden administration and the Democratic Congress, and no one except socialists seemed to care. The simple truth is that the Democrats already spent a huge amount of political capital on one big health care reform, and the nation was not in the mood to repeat the trick. The socialists asked for the moon and got nothing at all.
the entire framing here is, at its core, a liberal, electoral, pragmatic framing–it reduces the totality of political struggle and change change down to what can be won or lost within electoral politics and prioritizes the correctness of issues on whether they can be won or not in the existing system. but as a socialist, i don’t care whether or not an issue can be won on an electoral, pragmatic basis. if my politics revolved around that, i would literally not be capable of being a socialist, because it isn’t electorally convenient or pragmatic to be a socialist.
put another way: i could not care less how medicare for all polls (and as a side point, most people shouldn’t care how issues poll–just ask biden how well most of his objectively good policies are polling right now for a demonstration of how tying yourself to what is supposedly popular is a fundamentally flawed endeavor), i care that it is correct, and the right thing to fight for.
