Six years ago, I covered several of the arguments some leftists use to justify their decision to vote Democratic. In that series, I looked at arguments for the conclusion that we should vote Democratic because Democrats create better ‘organizing conditions’ than Republicans. Angela Davis* stands out prominently among these leftists, arguing for the need to avoid the (in her view) fascist organizing conditions found under the GOP.
In fact, these arguments serve as a psychologically satisfying excuse for voting for candidates of a party that opposes socialism at its core. The arguments carry just enough of a veneer of Marxist concern for historical and material conditions that it makes us forget its actual material impact. Namely, they allow the Democratic Party to march to the right and take its left flank for granted.
In the earlier article, I pointed out that the term ‘organizing conditions’ picks out a complicated set of things. Democrats are better than Republicans on policy. Under them, the left can push for incremental, positive change. But motivation is far trickier. It’s usually easier to recruit new leftists under Republican power. And no Republican created more leftists than Donald Trump.
There’s another deep flaw, however, with the ‘organizing conditions’ argument. And this one cuts directly at the heart of its usefulness as an argument about how we should vote.
It’s this: utter unpredictability. We simply don’t know which presidential candidates will create better organizing conditions for the left. It depends on factors outside of our control and not knowable for months – even years! – after the election.
Unpredictability
To get at unpredictability, let’s look at the last three presidential elections.
In 2016, Donald Trump probably had a worse policy slate than Hillary Clinton. I use ‘probably’ because Trump was all over the place on policy, and he ran to Clinton’s left on issues of war and trade. In office from 2017 to 2021, Trump accomplished little in the way of policy. His appointment of three Supreme Court justice had more impact than his policy game. On the motivation side, however, Trump was a large net benefit for the left, compared to any potential Clinton presidency. Leftist organizing skyrocketed in the first Trump administration. Under Clinton, many of these folks would’ve gone ‘back to brunch.’
Furthermore, the Covid pandemic throws in another wrench. Trump’s public health pronouncements worsened the pandemic. But a Clinton presidency might’ve been an even greater disaster. Not because Clinton’s public health policy would’ve been worse than Trump’s. On the contrary, it would’ve been far better. Rather, it’s because Clinton would’ve faced greater public health resistance from the far right than that faced by Trump, and it’s likely this resistance would’ve manifested itself in state and local non-compliance and resulting spikes in Covid cases and deaths.
It’s even tougher to judge 2020 and 2024. Joe Biden’s economic policy took significant steps to the left compared to Bill Clinton or Barack Obama. The child tax credit was particularly notable. But on the other side of the ledger, a Trump win in 2020 almost certainly would’ve spared the country the horrors of DOGE, the new war against Iran, and particularly nasty tariffs. These things were cooked up by Trump during his four years in the wilderness from 2021 to 2025.
Lessons about Organizing Conditions
So, what can we learn from this exercise?
For one, ‘organizing conditions’ is a complicated term. There’s no single feature. It’s not simply a matter of seeing which party has the best ideas. In Davis’s version of the organizing conditions argument, it’s basically just the ‘harm reduction‘ argument in drag. But to make it work, she needs to say far more.
Our most important lesson is that in each of our last three presidential elections, there’s no reasonable way we’d have been able to judge the resulting organizing conditions ahead of time! To know which candidate would create the best organizing conditions would’ve required us to actually live through the election aftermath and find out.
Who could’ve predicted Covid and its aftermath before voting in 2016? Who could’ve known how the 2025-2029 Trump presidency would’ve gone before voting in 2020? No one. Making these determinations requires careful attention to history and running of complex hypotheticals and counterfactuals. And all of that comes even when you already know the outcomes of normal history.
And so, Davis’s argument for voting Democratic is bad because it provides no basis for voting at all. Whatever it is that helps us vote as leftists, it’s not the question of who will provide the best organizing conditions.
*P.S. – On Angela Davis
Finally, as a P.S., I should note that I referenced Angela Davis above only with a certain amount of reservation. While Davis is by far the most prominent leftist who takes the ‘organizing conditions’ route, her specific version differs from most folks who go this route. And it differs, particularly, from the version I discuss in this post.
Davis defines ‘organizing conditions’ differently than the view I lay out here. In this post, it’s a combination of concerns about policy and recruitment. By contrast, Davis thinks about it more in terms of creating a space for leftist action. She thinks the election of Republicans bring so-called ‘fascist’ threats and closes off opportunities for the left.
While often imprecise in her statements, I think Davis has in mind smaller, independent, radical leftist orgs of the type that dominated the leftist scene before the rise of DSA in 2015 and 2016.
There are a couple of problems with Davis’s direction here, and there are good reasons why most people who cite her don’t follow her out to the end. Big the biggest issue is that DSA is by far the largest and most impactful leftist org in the U.S. It’s as large and as impactful as literally every other leftist org in the country combined. And so, for all intents and purposes, ‘organizing conditions’ means something rather close to ‘what’s best for DSA.’
Even beyond this, the ‘fascist’ conditions Davis seems to have in mind also don’t differ all that much between GOP and Democratic administrations. Certainly we’ve seen police overreach under both Republicans and Democrats. And any difference between the two, for the narrow purposes of the ‘organizing conditions’ argument discussed in this post, are more than surmounted by the improved member recruitment efforts under GOP administration.
Lest readers misunderstand, this isn’t to draw a more equivalence between Republicans and Democrats. And it certainly isn’t to say that suppression is a good thing if it gets more people to join DSA. Rather, it’s to evaluate the arguments of Davis and others on the argument’s own terms. If ‘organizing conditions’ are what matters, then they simply haven’t demonstrated that these conditions are better under Democrats than they are under Republicans.
Leave a Reply