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Hong campaign postmortem: It wasn’t the socialism, it was the woke |
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The right’s attacks actually don’t focus on socialism’s defining economics. |
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During the high point of McCarthyism in the early 1950s, what the American right focused on wasn’t so much the current views or affiliations of the leftists it sought to vilify. It was what they may have believed or said 10 or 15 years earlier, when thousands of Americans flocked to the liberal-left Popular Front groups backed by the Communist Party, then seeking to present itself as merely the most zealous part of the pro-Roosevelt community. By the time Joe McCarthy began charging the Pentagon with communist sympathies, however, the Popular Front was history, and Communist Party membership had shrunk to perhaps 10 percent of its World War II apogee. That was why the signature McCarthyist question to its victims about their supposed Communist Party membership didn’t just ask “Are you now?” but continued to “or have you ever been?”
That “have you ever been” part of the right’s catechism is with us still today. The current iteration of these not-so-Grand Inquisitors have had their greatest impact by sorting through the social media postings of what Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has termed the “Woke 1” period of five years ago, when various precincts of the left, for instance, extended entirely justifiable critiques of police practices into a call for police abolition and other similarly marginal stances. “Woke 1” is clearly the left’s Achilles’ heel.
What’s not the left’s Achilles’ heel, strictly speaking, is its democratic socialism, which almost invariably takes the form of social democratic proposals when socialist candidates campaign. Wealth taxes, higher taxes on the rich, greatly enhanced workers’ rights; universal publicly funded health insurance, child care, and senior care; opposition to monopolies, ending big money’s control of politics, establishing public options to private corporations in essential sectors—these are the issues that such socialists as Bernie Sanders, AOC, and Zohran Mamdani have successfully run on, and that Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong also ran on, as well as her opposition to the spread of data centers.
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These are not the issues, however, on which the right has attacked Hong or other socialist candidates. Rather, they attacked her for her politically marginal support for police abolition and opposition to Thanksgiving, stances she committed to social media in the heyday of Woke 1 and failed to convincingly repudiate when the right surfaced them in the closing days of her campaign. (Mamdani and AOC were far more skilled at distancing themselves from any earlier follies.) Such stances certainly had and still have resonance within some of the campus and college-town cocoons in which candidates like Hong and New York’s Darializa Avila Chevalier were politicized. They still have some resonance within sections of DSA.
The irony, of course, is that it’s the not-strictly-speaking socialist parts of some socialists’ agendas that impede their success. Bernie, Zohran, and AOC understand that. It would behoove their fellow socialists to understand that as well.
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Harold Meyerson
Editor at Large |
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