An Open Letter to the American Center-Left

President Joe Biden

Dear fellow center-left coalition:

Look, I get it, we’re all disappointed in Joe Biden for one reason or another. We have our unique reasons; after all, the American center-left is a massive slumgullion of diverse groups with separate wants and needs, and President Biden has found ways to ignore us all. I won’t enumerate a list, because doing so would probably enflame tensions, as some people would be angry if I excluded their pet concerns.

President Biden, and indeed the office of the Presidency itself, are by-products of an 18^th Century electoral structure that hasn’t been meaningfully amended since 1789. The only substantive changes have been the 12^th Amendment, which streamlined Presidential elections, and the 17^th Amendment, which provided for the direct election of Senators. America’s electoral process remains mired in the era of powdered wigs and knee breeches.

(A critic has notified me that the preceding paragraph elides both the 15^th and the 19^th Amendments, which extend the vote to minorities and women, respectively. I made this mistake because I was focused on voting procedures, rather than the voting franchise. Notwithstanding my intent, this is a serious oversight, and one for which I wholeheartedly apologize.)

This is a major problem, and a gift to oppressive majorities. Please understand, I appreciate your grievances, because I likewise wish we had an alternative to the current winner-take-all voting system. Levitsky and Ziblatt suggest abolishing the Senate, and establishing proportional representation in the House of Representatives. David Orentlicher suggests a two-member Executive Branch. However, these solutions would require a Constitutional amendment, which hasn’t happened since 1992.

Some young voters endorse third-party candidates. Jill Stein and Cornel West have the largest followings. However, neither has significant elected office experience (Stein served one-and-a-half terms as a Lexington, Massachusetts, town board member). Neither has shepherded a bill through committee, and equally important, neither has any discernible down-ballot strategy. Without a congressional coalition, their dead-letter legislative agendas will make today’s Congress look busy and productive.

Third-party candidates also split coalitions like ours. Though conservatives have their third parties, including the Constitution Party and the Libertarian Party, these have virtually no support. The center-left is historically more receptive to third parties. But voting for them presents the likelihood of a situation like happened in 2000 and 2016, when a clear majority supported a center-left ballot, but split the ticket, and conservatives won on a technicality.

Former President Donald Trump

Splitting the 2024 ticket will hand another term to Donald Trump—a man who recently pledged to criminalize LGBTQIA+ activity, and who previously pledged to forcibly relocate homeless people to camps in the desert. Disappointing as President Biden is, another Trump administration would be catastrophic for queer people, immigrants, the disabled, and other marginalized communities. It would also be catastrophic for remedying the problem later.

You’ll occasionally hear idealists, mostly White, mostly college-aged, wax rhapsodic about “revolution.” This comes mostly from comfortable, secure people who never expect to man the barricades. Further, contra Marx and Engels, revolution rarely ushers in substantive change. Historical revolutions have either been free gifts to landholders and capitalists, as happened in the U.S. and Mexico, or descend into sectarian civil war, as happened in France and the Soviet Union.

For many years, I misunderstood the word realpolitik. I thought that, like other forms of “realism,” it meant finding the most cynical, pessimistic interpretation of events, and using that to justify jerkish behavior. Not until I read Katja Hoyer did I understand Bismarck’s actual meaning: that you must accept the political system you have, flawed and toxic though it may be, and work within it, to make change that others can’t snatch back.

These constant cries of “fire Joe Biden,” “vote Cornel West,” and “viva la revolution!” come mostly from people who have never participated in ground-level politics. Most are committed voters, I’ll grant that. But they’ve never attended local Democratic Party meetings, participated in canvassing sessions, or helped cultivate regional strategy. For too many, politics is a seasonal spectacle, like the Super Bowl, which they cheer from the sidelines, distracted by Taylor Swift.

Please don’t misunderstand: I don’t advocate complacency. Our system is senescent and broken, as I already acknowledged. But the much-repeated charge that refusing to participate, or breaking it even worse, will hasten substantive change, is ignorant of actual history. Systemic change through breaking the system has only happened when circumstances got so bad that the survivors were literally mopping their friends’ blood off the streets.

Attending meetings and canvassing neighborhoods lacks romance, admittedly. Schoolbook history loves tales of sudden, paradigm-shifting change, usually stripped of the brass tacks that made such change sustainable. Nobody ever made Broadway musicals about get-out-the-vote campaigns. Yet any demand for change, without a matching commitment to the daily, dirty business, is guaranteed to fail. Politics is a process, not an outcome, and you must participate to make change.