The Dumb-Dumb Left and the Damage Done
The Bernie Coalition break-up requires serious socialists to cut the fat and move forward
I didn’t know Michael Brooks well. He and I were mutuals on Twitter and we’d DM each other from time to time, and one of my regrets was not getting to know him better before he passed on last July. He was a great mind with a great heart, twice when I tweeted about personal tragedies he reached out to give his condolences, someone he barely knew.
One of the most useful concepts he imparted to us is the concept of the “dumb dumb left” — a cute sounding name to a set that can become very dangerous if left unchecked. The faces and names change, but wherever there is a socialist or progressive movement, there are loud, obnoxious, uninformed cranks who show up at try to wreck movements. Sometimes we find out these people have ulterior motives, like career ambitions or frankly are snitches and feds, but for the most part these people stay in their lane and leave when they realize no one gives a shit about what they have to say.
These folks are harmless until they’re not and my 20+ years in organizing have taught me that you listen to the cranks, make a good faith effort to find common ground so they can’t be too disruptive, give them space to bitch a bit, and then assign them tasks.
Cranks stop showing up to meetings once they start to see how much work goes into even a small community meeting. It requires leaving the house, talking to people who you don’t know, establishing new relationships, and teamwork.
We’re approaching dangerous territory because unlike the past, cranks and dummies just have to log on Twitter and a couple Zoom calls to be disruptive, which gives birth to the rise of an extremely toxic role in the movement — the Parasocial Wrecker.
Bad comedian Jimmy Dore is a dime a dozen. I know people like to call him a “failed comedian” but I feel that’s insulting to all the good comics who never made it big. He’s just not funny. He’s mean and loud. He’s more of a sports talk radio host than a comedian. Loud, brash, opinionated, and the worst part, extremely ignorant.
Like Alex Jones, he’s a carnival barker with a few pet issues. Unfortunately for serious Medicare for All organizers, he’s chosen this very important issue to take on as his pet issue. As a multimillionaire, he has no real skin in the game so his recent wreckerism on the Medicare for All movement should surprise no one.
I started watching Dore a year ago during the Democratic primaries. I found his crankiness against people like Nancy Pelosi, Neera Tanden, and Pete Buttigieg funny. It was like listening to a Chicago cop trying to sound progressive. It was amusing and I sort of felt like he was good for the movement because maybe he was recruiting people to Team Bernie with his obnoxious style.
Electoral coalitions made strange bedfellows, so I sort of shrugged of that he wasn’t particularly funny and was obviously not very intelligent. What I was suspicious of but didn’t pay too much mind to was the fact that he never targeted Republicans in his idiotic rants. If you watched his show for a few hours, you would think the ONLY impediment to progress was the Democratic Party.
Now, I hate the Dems. with all my heart. But, as someone who has worked in and around politics for more than 20 years, I know that you have to make strategic alliances at times. As a labor organizer, that often means working with Democrats.
Currently, the big fight in Chicago is to prevent the Board of Education to start school in-person next week. Chicagos’s COVID numbers are sky high and the mayor wants to bust our union by any means necessary, even putting teachers’ and students’ lives at risk.
The vast majority of Alderman signed a letter telling the mayor not to start school until it is safe. Most of these aldermen are Democrats. Now, do I love most of the aldermen? Hell no. I have active hate for many. Are they my friends at the moment? Yes. This is a life-and-death situation and these folks have chosen life over clout with the mayor. That’s far more important to me than any symbolic votes.
Dore doesn’t get that, or at least he doesn’t care. He yells at everyone, including his dwindling coalition of pundits that make up his coalition. Serious political people do not do that. I should repeat that, his coalition is pundits.
This isn’t just a shittalk post, what Dore and his enablers like former Bernie press Secretary Briahna Joy Gray are doing is harmful to the movement. I’ve seen cranks organize many times to break up important coalitions, and that’s the future I see with a Medicare for All coalition that includes influence from the Dumb Dumb Left.
Dore has made statements decrying the uselessness of organizing because “88% of Democrats support Medicare for All.” He professes that all we need is one quick trick in Congress to get us there — the “Force the Vote” sham.
He’s used his bully pulpit on YouTube to bash the Democratic Socialists of America, AOC, and Ilhan Omar. You would think 100% REPUBLICANS were on board the way he never mentions the name of a GOP member of Congress or Trump. I am not going to do dimestore psychology to get into his head, but I will list his behaviors, which are wrecker behaviors, regardless of intent. People die because of friendly fire, you know.
Let’s break this down a bit. The survey that informed this poll was conducted by Pew Research, who talked to 11,000 voters in summer of 2020. In comparison, there are about 331 million people living in America at the moment.
All that this survey tells me is that the majority of 11,000 people who were asked about government-run healthcare were on board. What happens when you call it Medicare for All? Or Single Payer?
There is no proof whatsoever that these few thousand folks will knock doors or make calls to their neighbors and elected officials to support Medicare for All.
Polls don’t show political power, they are confirmation bias wrapped up in stats and charts.
If polls alone could determine the outcomes of campaigns, we would be seating President Bernie Sanders in two weeks. The Dems looked at the same polls and thought “how can we use all of our might to squash this.” And they did.
That’s not to say “don’t fight.” It’s saying “Fight smart.” Understand that to nationalize one of the most profitable sectors in America — healthcare — will not be won in Congress alone. We need a coalition of people in the streets making life for the ruling class unbearable to create the conditions where AOC, or whoever, can propose a bill and a majority of members of congress would support it because their offices are being constantly flooded by Medicare for All activists.
When Dore and Brianha Joy Gray dismiss the need for street heat and push their followers to tweet at members of Congress, they’re not creating conditions for Medicare for All, they’re creating a MAGA for the left. People who are constantly tearing down people without a positive agenda to improve the lives of the working class.
And I’ll just say it — Gray has a responsibility. The Bernie coalition was not supposed to be about any particular personality (not me, us, right?). But she hosted the podcast, tweeted her own agenda through the campaign, and gained immense influence through her proximity to Bernie.
The Sanders campaign was a coalition and there was some evidence that she wasn’t part of the “not me, us” mentality. Her clout is based around the Bernie model of organizing, which is decentralized and worker-driven. She’s now taking that clout and demonizing organizers and organizing. Again, I don’t know her intentions, but I do see her actions as harmful.
So Bernie was able to captivate millions of people with the “not me us” message and Gray is dividing the coalition. She’ll eat off his name but won’t take on the responsibility to the coalition that she would continue pushing the messaging of organizing.
Her ideas are picking up some steam because of parasocial relationships. Dore and Gray will brag about the high number of followers they have on social media as if that converts into political power. However, there’s no guarantee that these millions of people are any particular place on the political map.
Organizing means education, and it means assessing your own political power and having to be brutally honest with yourself and your coalition before advancing an idea forward. If you can’t say X number of people called their Congresspeople about Force the Vote, you don’t know where people stand. Relying on corporate polls is not the work of socialists, it’s the work of hacks. Some hacks are more successful than others, but hacks are hacks.
We need to keep an eye on the Dumb-Dumb Left and make sure it doesn’t wreck our good work. One present they have given Biden and the neoliberals is a pathetic display of the Medicare for All movement. After weeks of bashing pro-Medicare for All groups like DSA and National Nurses United, the extremely suspicions Movement for a People’s Party held a rally in DC that attracted a couple hundred people. It was organized over podcasts and YouTube channels. No organizing work was done.
If I were Biden and I wanted some visuals to kill Medicare for All, I would point to video of that pathetic rally and say “Look, this is the Medicare for All movement, no one wants it.” This is a trick that old guard union bosses would use to squash dissent. They would ignore the real reformers in meetings and call call the crankiest people in the room to represent the opposition. They would then say “look, only these goofballs want change.” It works. It works extremely well. It can undo any polling you throw at it.
This essay isn’t about Dore, or Gray, or even Bernie. It’s about us. It’s about vetting fly-by-night orgs that promise us the world and cannot deliver it.
We may not have the time to do things “right,” but we have an obligation to try our hardest and to choose effective solutions over easy ones. The Dumb Dumb Left needs to be called at, or at the very least, be ignored. They are not working with us, they are selling us content, which is fine, but it isn’t going to build us the movement we need and deserve.
Solidarity,
Kenzo
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