Okay, so summer’s heating up by the point, and we’re halfway to the end of the baseball season.
Of course, I do have a baseball book on the list this month. Because why wouldn’t I? Mostly, though, I’ve got some history for you.
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A few years ago, I had some thoughts on the working class politics of the returned TV show Roseanne. The gist of it is that I thought the show played Roseanne’s title character in a plausible way. Yes, they turned her from a fairly left-leaning working class woman into a Trump supporter. But they did so in a way that rang true to her character and the character’s likely development.
Fast forward a few years. Now I’ve had a chance to watch most of seasons 2 and 3 of The Conners, the updated version of the show after Roseanne herself got booted.
What do I see here?
From time to time, I like to point readers to the podcast Revolutions by Mike Duncan. I most recently did so for lessons about avoiding authoritarianism, even the kind we find in so-called ‘democratic’ forms.
Here’s one more lesson.
Jamaal Bowman lost last week’s primary to moderate Democratic challenger George Latimer. Coverage of the loss – both in the mainstream press and on the left – focused on his shifting positions on Israel and Palestine.
That’s fair enough. Israel and Palestine turned out central both to the campaign and its funders, in light of the ongoing Israeli invasion of Gaza. But this leaves out a broader ideological struggle within the Democratic Party between a more moderate and a more progressive wing. Latimer might have run on foreign policy issues, but he’ll also join Congress as a voice against ideas like Medicare for All.
However, the struggle between Democratic moderates and progressives typically doesn’t involve foreign policy.
Indeed, that fact is highly relevant to internal struggles within the Squad and the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Most progressives don’t see foreign policy as central to their political project. They’re often willing to vote in favor of the foreign policy consensus on most issues, so long as those issues don’t involve U.S. troops literally on the ground. They give ground on foreign policy because it’s not central to their political vision. It’s not very important to them.
AIPAC exploited this very division in the ways it heavily poured funds into the Bowman vs. Latimer race.
But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself. Let’s start by talking about why Bowman lost. And then let’s ask what his loss means for DSA and the electoral left.
In two previous posts (Part 1 and Part 2), I detailed studies sponsored by Jacobin magazine on working-class politics and the left. Among other things, the studies concluded that voters prefer a ‘progressive populist’ (and later, ‘left populism’) message to a ‘woke progressive’ message. Readers can review the links above.
In my discussion of those studies, I pointed out that while the electorate – especially working-class voters – prefer left populism, they’re not yet on board with many left policy ideas. We have an electorate open to us. But we haven’t yet reached it. And so our task should involve building a majority. Not simply assuming our majority is already out there.
