Too Much Purity Is Bad for the Left

American leftists are facing a question that has become a perennial bugbear. Come November, should they support the Democratic incumbent Joe Biden to defeat Donald Trump? Or, given their profound reservations about both candidates, should they abstain from voting at all?

Biden’s support for Israel’s brutal war in Gaza has given the conundrum special urgency this year, but the question has become exhaustingly familiar. Four years ago, the country’s largest leftist organization, the Democratic Socialists of America, loudly declared that it was not endorsing Biden, despite his backing by a coalition that included Bernie Sanders, Angela Davis, the DSA’s own Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, most major trade unions, and, implicitly, The New England Journal of Medicine. When some in the DSA’s leadership suggested that the organization could at least call on its members in swing states to consider voting for Biden, the majority voted down the proposal. Biden went on to win without any organized help from the DSA.

At moments like these, the American left could stand to learn from the experiences of its international counterparts. The international left seems largely to recognize that it is too small to survive on its own and must therefore build coalitions—most important, to ally with those who defend democracy and basic civic rights. And this is true despite the fact that the left in countries such as France, India, and Japan is a formidable force, boasting organizations with millions of members and sending delegates to serve in legislative and executive office. American leftists, meanwhile, have spent decades mired in niche subcultures of activist groups—they are marginal and yet still spurn coalitions that risk adulterating their purity.

[Helen Lewis: The left can’t afford to go mad]

The United States is relatively rare among democracies in that it has long lacked a far-left party with legislative representation, a distinction that has something to do with the peculiarities of its political system. In most parliamentary democracies, political parties are membership-based and ideologically aligned, whereas in the United States, they are loose coalitions that can encompass a wide range of views.

This protean structure didn’t stop American social movements from achieving important milestones throughout the 20th century—among them, female suffrage, workers’ rights, and an end to segregation. To get there, rights campaigns often had to fight both the Democratic and the Republican establishments. But they managed to mobilize masses, carve out new political spaces, and ultimately make the journey from protest to politics.

Bayard Rustin explained the relationship between movement and party in 1965: “Southern demonstrators had recognized that the most effective way to strike at the police brutality they suffered from was by getting rid of the local sheriff—and that meant political action, which in turn meant, and still means, political action within the Democratic party where the only meaningful primary contests in the South are fought.”

America’s youth-led social-protest movements petered out by the end of the 1970s, however, and the left came to place itself outside the political system, condemning itself to marginality. American leftist activists continued to bring some changes through trade unions, civil-rights organizations, and feminist groups, but they did not coalesce into an organized political movement until 2016, when a democratic socialist senator from Vermont took the step of running in the Democratic primaries. In doing so, Bernie Sanders helped the minuscule DSA grow its membership from 6,200 in 2015 to a peak of 95,000 in 2021 (it now stands at about 78,000).

The DSA is a tiny force in a country of 332 million. And it is less a nationwide political organization than a federation of local activist groups that share a banner despite the wildly divergent politics of their members. The DSA’s elected representatives reliably showed up for Biden in 2020 and have voted for measures such as support for NATO’s enlargement. The national political leadership of the organization, however, has taken diametrically opposed positions. The organization lacks a united political program even on such basic matters as whom to endorse for president.

Many in the DSA good-heartedly argue that what matters is grassroots, and in many cases local, activism, not who gets elected to Congress or the White House. In this sense, the DSA seems more comfortable with the pre-Bernie activism of bumper stickers and single-cause groups than with the prospect of building a cohesive political force.

The international left, by contrast, has both a history of cohesion and the baggage to go along with it. Many leftists are still struggling to transcend the legacy of the 20th century’s authoritarian socialism. Some once-powerful parties of the left have simply disappeared into thin air (as in Italy). New leftist parties, such as Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain, emerged or drew strength from the wreckage of the 2008 global economic recession but didn’t achieve as much as optimists had hoped. Still, socialist parties on multiple continents are major political actors in ways that their American counterparts simply are not, and the reason is at least in part their willingness to forge pragmatic alliances.

This imperative is taken as elementary in much of the world. India’s communist parties have worked within the country’s multiparty democratic structures since its independence in 1947 and have thus also remained relevant in the post-Soviet era. Last year, they came together with the Indian National Congress and a range of left, center-left, centrist, regionalist, and even center-right parties to form the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA). Their aim was to present a united front against Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party, whose chauvinism and authoritarianism have had a chilling effect on the world’s biggest democracy. Pointing to the threat such forces pose to “the ethos of the country,” Annie Raja, the leader of the Communist Party of India, told a local publication, “At such a juncture, any party which is sincerely wishing to save this country and democracy and secularism must try to unite.”

Similarly, the Turkish left, including the Workers Party and several other Marxist groups, campaigned last year for the centrist presidential candidate Kemal Kilicdaroglu, whom it viewed as having the best chance to beat the authoritarian President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Although Erdoğan still won, the left’s campaign gave it new national visibility and its largest parliamentary representation in decades.

In Israel, a left-wing coalition with Arab and Jewish members decided to join Zionist parties of the left and the center in endorsing the centrist Benny Gantz for prime minister, with a goal of ousting Benjamin Netanyahu, seen by the group as a menace to Israel’s democracy.

In countries where democracy itself is not under threat, leftists have learned to make broad alliances in order to remain politically relevant. In Portuguese elections on March 10, the Communist Party, the Left Bloc, and the left-leaning green parties gained about 13 percent of the vote among them. They will now do all they can to exclude far-right and even center-right forces from forming a government. In other words, they are likely to support the center-left Socialist Party, roughly the Portuguese equivalent to Biden’s party. That party’s leader, Pedro Nuno Santos, helped coordinate the support of communists and the Left Bloc for a previous government in 2015–19.

Similarly, in Spain the Communist Party and Podemos are part of a coalition cabinet led by the center-left Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez. One of that country’s most popular politicians is the communist deputy prime minister and labor minister, Yolanda Diaz, who has vocally backed the Palestinian cause and was recently in Washington to work with her American counterpart on new regulations protecting workers from artificial-intelligence algorithms.

One can criticize the left for joining governments in Spain and Portugal, but not without acknowledging that the policies these governments have adopted have already changed millions of lives. Spain has passed gender-equality laws that improve transgender rights, offer state-funded paid leave for women who suffer from painful periods (a first among European countries), and mandate greater parity for women in politics and the public sphere. Portugal reversed austerity measures that had included deep cuts to wages, pensions, and social security; The New York Times termed the result a “major revival.” Whatever soul-searching the American left wants to do about its conception of socialism, if it seeks to be a serious political force, it must also attempt to win elections, come to power, and change real people’s lives.

On a subnational level, too, leftists outside the United States have put sloganeering aside to pursue concrete goals in office and show what their ideals can look like in real life. In India’s Kerala, a democratically elected communist-led government has made particular strides in human development, poverty reduction, public education, and, most recently, public health; the international news media lauded K. K. Shailaja, Kerala’s health minister, for her handling of the coronavirus pandemic, even though the state later faced a new wave of the virus.

[Conor Friedersdorf: How October 7 changed America’s free-speech culture]

Closer to home, Chile’s President Gabriel Boric, who was actually endorsed by the DSA, leads a pioneering left-wing government. Patient political work and broad alliances propelled him to the Mint Palace. Former President Michelle Bachelet, from the country’s center-left, supported Boric in 2021, as did an even more liberal predecessor, Ricardo Lagos. That did not stop the Communist Party from enthusiastically joining his government, and Camilla Vallejo, once a fellow leader of the student movement, now serves as a cabinet minister. Under the leadership of its first-ever communist mayor, Irací Hassler, the capital city of Santiago has taken steps to bolster women’s rights by offering support to victims of domestic violence, for instance, while battling food insecurity and publicly condemning discrimination against migrants.

In the first half of the 20th century, the United States actually had a powerful leftist force in the form of the Socialist Party of America. Its members won municipal races in places such as Berkeley, California, and Schenectady, New York. The party’s proud centerpiece was Milwaukee, which had three socialist mayors for a total of 38 years from 1910 to 1960. Those further to the left often made fun of them as “sewer socialists” who cared more about the city’s excellent public-sanitation system than about the socialist revolution (like all good leftist insults, this one had originated as an internal jab within the party).

But Milwaukee’s sewer socialists could boast something that purists simply can’t: They made a difference in the lives of millions of working people. Those are the politics—result-oriented and pragmatic—that convince people to give the socialist left and its ideas a chance. If American socialists truly want to emerge as a serious political force in the world’s most powerful country, they need to stop cosplaying radicalism and learn how to defend democracy, build broad coalitions, and run successful governments.