Analysis
Morality and realpolitik: Harris seeks a semblance of unity on the American left
Harris has managed to gather wide support in recent months. Perhaps the greatest driver among the left today is still the need to build a barricade against Trump, perceived as a serious danger to democracy.
When an early band of Puritan emigrants arrived in Massachusetts Bay, before setting foot on dry land, their leader, John Winthrop, wrote the sermon “A Model of Christian Charity.” In it, he augured the birth of a nation of saints: a just society that would be a model of equality and equanimity for the whole world.
Centuries later, one doesn’t have to look too far to discover that the U.S. is not, in fact, a nation of saints. However, that Puritan tradition, in many ways obsessed with morality, is still present, as trade unionist Leo Casey argues in an op-ed published in Dissent magazine on October 8.
Casey points to the extremist “moralism” of America's ultra-left as something that has crippled the Democratic movement: “Rather than looking for common ground with needed allies, it looks for moral failings in others; rather than building consensus, it focuses on isolating a morally pure vanguard from the body of the morally fallen. It is a politics of ‘scarlet letters,’” referring to Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel of the same name.
As a result, Casey argues, choosing allies based solely on ethical and moral unimpeachability has weakened American social democracy to near-extinction. This fatal complete rejection of realpolitik scattered the forces of the left and gifted many votes to the Republicans.
A similar argument was put forward in March by Arash Azizi, a columnist for The Atlantic, in his article “Too much purity is bad for the left”. Azizi noted the eternal fragmentation of the U.S. left, which, rather than working to form various types of coalitions, “spent decades mired in niche subcultures of activist groups—they are marginal and yet still spurn coalitions that risk adulterating their purity.”
Azizi mostly focused on the Democratic Socialists of America, the home political organization of Bernie Sanders and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, which four years ago decided not to support Joe Biden in the presidential race against Trump. Ocasio-Cortez herself got to bear the brunt of the organization’s rigidity in July, when they revoked their endorsement of her because they deemed her positions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict too moderate. Azizi expressed the hope that the leftmost wing of the party would accept a lesser level of ideological purity and come to an agreement with moderates to “defend democracy” and “change real people’s lives.”
At this point, Harris still seems to be putting off the whole question. Her ideological positioning is still a matter of debate: while those on the right claim she is a “Marxist,” the progressive press considers her a “pragmatist,” often deliberately ambiguous and soft-spoken on issues considered divisive. Harris has something to offer to all sides: she showed signs of agreement with the leftmost wing of the party by choosing Walz as her running mate (something the DSA was very happy with) and putting forward an agenda that, according to The Hill, “mirrors the Democratic Socialists of America,” but at the same time she focuses her speeches on issues that are important the middle class. Moreover, many commentators on the left see her stances on social issues and Gaza as “troubling,” as Branko Marcetic wrote in Jacobin in September.
Most importantly at this point, Harris has managed to gather wide support in recent months. This can be seen in the number of media outlets that had remained neutral in 2020 but have decided to endorse her. Perhaps the greatest driver among the left today is still the need to build a barricade against Trump, perceived as a serious danger to democracy; at the same time, there is a perception that there is something truly constructive, not just pragmatic, in the coalition Harris has built.
“We believe those threats [to democracy] are real,” said The Nation magazine in its October edition, under the headline “For Kamala Harris.” “But we also endorse Harris in her own right, as an experienced and capable leader with a vision for America’s future that—while not as progressive as we might prefer, particularly when it comes to foreign policy—represents a clear advance on the Democratic presidential nominees of the past half-century.”
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/etica-e-politica-la-difficile-unita-nella-sinistra-usa-e-harris-temporeggia on 2024-11-03