Kyrsten Sinema: The Origin Story

Here are some quotes from a politician currently stumping in Michigan, rallying voters around the 2024 presidential race:

• "[W]e do have a real opportunity to win something historic. We could deny Kamala Harris the state of Michigan. And the polls show that most likely Harris cannot win the election without Michigan."

• "[The goal is] fighting to defeat Harris, not just symbolically but in reality. This is ground zero to punish Kamala Harris and defeat her."

• "Ultimately, Harris is a more reliable and consistently controllable tool for billionaire interests."

• "The Democrats were the party of slavery, and of slave owners — that’s in their history."

Now here is my question for you, dear reader: Based on these quotes, do you think this politician is (a) an utterly unremarkable, bog-standard conservative promoting the MAGA right, or (b) a self-described "leftist" campaigning on behalf of Jill Stein?

Guesses in? Answer: It's a trick question! Self-described "leftists" campaigning on behalf of Jill Stein are utterly unremarkable, bog-standard conservatives promoting the MAGA right!

Anyone who was baffled by Kyrsten Sinema's "journey" from the Green Party to obnoxious contrarian "independent" doesn't pay attention to what the Green Party is all about. Though in fairness, even at her worst Kyrsten Sinema never came out and actively campaigned on behalf of Donald Trump.

(The politician in question is former Seattle city councilor Kshama Sawant, who was elected under the banner of the Trotskyist-Socialist "Socialist Alternative" party but, in true splitter fashion, has broken away to form two new organizations -- "Workers Strike Back" and the "Revolutionary Workers" party).

Jill Stein: The Ultimate Ideological Compromise

Last week, I explored the issue of whether leftists "should" vote for Jill Stein. Many people on the left frame the choice as being between ideological purity -- the candidate whose positions are closer to their ideal candidate -- and realism about who can get elected. My argument was that (a) part of the preference calculation for picking one candidate over another should include the realistic effects of that choice (here, making it more likely Trump comes into office), and (b) while one can decide that said effects are less important than avoiding the moral compromise of voting Clinton, that decision is substantively awful and is condemnation-worthy in itself.

But while I still agree with that analysis, I also think it gives Stein way too much credit, in that it accepts the basic suggestion that Stein is a non-compromised, purely progressive choice hampered only by the fact that she stands no chance of victory.* In reality, many of Stein's positions range from the objectively terrible to the merely incoherent. The "realism" argument isn't just about political realism but policy realism -- Jill Stein swaps out actual progressive reforms in favor of vague fulminations about how the "system" is all that stands between us and our hearts' desires. It's the revenge of the Green Lantern Theory of Politics. To the extent that progressives have an ideological commitment to, say, basic precepts of science, it is not an uncompromised position to punch the ballot for a candidate who plays footsie with anti-Vaxxers and rejects the scientific consensus on GMOs.

To take one example near to my heart, Jill Stein's energy platform calls for moving completely to clean power sources by 2030. That sounds great; I'm all for aggressive efforts to promote clean power. But in this call she excludes nuclear power and (if we take the Green Party platform seriously) hydroelectric as well, without which the move to clean power is essentially impossible (unlike, say, wind or solar, nuclear power and hydroelectric power are "dispatchable" sources of power -- they can run at any time as needed, as opposed to only when the sun shines or the wind blows. This attribute is absolutely essential for grid stability, which is why we couldn't just build a lot more solar plants to replace our fossil fuel generators). This isn't a more ideologically pure energy package that suffers from being a political non-starter; it's an ideologically blinkered energy package that suffers from being utterly unmoored from any understanding of how the electricity grid works, much less how to leverage it in favor of our environmental goals.

To put it another way, the choice isn't between a flawed progressive who can get elected and a great progressive who can't. It's between a flawed progressive who can get elected and an even more flawed progressive who can't. Voting for Jill Stein is a massive ideological compromise for anyone who thinks of themselves progressive. And one gets the sense that it only feels like a "pure" choice because Stein stands no chance of being elected; the vote isn't even "for Stein" as much as it is "against the system."

And that logic hammers home another reality: The basis of Jill Stein's appeal is more or less the same as that which pulls people to Donald Trump. Both are seeking to harness an inchoate anti-establishmentarian rage that need not (and in many ways prefers not) tie itself to the world of facts and data. Everything from workable policy agendas to a basic consonance with the factual world can be dismissed as a sort of establishment-gotcha. It is to the great credit of the American left that Stein looks like she'll only muster support from the left-most 2% of the electorate or so, while Trump will capture the votes of at least the right-most 46%.

I doubt that most left-wingers are going to end up voting for Jill Stein. And it strikes me as equally unlikely that they will be the ones to tilt the election over to Donald Trump (though the spectre of Nader continues to linger). But regardless of whether Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump wins come November, if you're a Jill Stein supporter you don't get the consolation prize of knowing you kept your ideological purity intact. You compromised your integrity just as much as anyone else did.

* Some might object and argue that Stein, while not perfect, is on net a better progressive than Hillary Clinton. I'm not sure I'd even cede that, but I'll also stand my ground on the argument as presented. If voting Jill Stein is conceded to be an ideological compromise, it isn't clear how the argument against voting for Hillary Clinton on the grounds that one is tired of "compromising" sustains itself. At most it could be an argument of degree -- I'll concede up to Jill Stein, but not further -- but that's rarely how it is presented and lacks quite a bit of the self-righteous purity that normally drives the claim.

"Should" Leftists Vote for Jill Stein?

A question that pops up periodically on my social media account is whether folks on the lefter-side of the left-spectrum "should" vote for Jill Stein come November. Persons answering no typically accuse their Jill-curious fellows of being selfish or of not actually caring about progressive outcomes (on the theory that their decision risks throwing the election to Trump). Persons answering yes sometimes make the trivial -- and uncontested -- point that everyone has the right to vote for whomever they want. But more often they make more serious arguments, such as the contention that politicians are not owed anyone's vote but have to earn them, or that given their political positions Clinton and Trump are not meaningfully distinct from one another.

My instinct, on reading these innumerable back-and-forths, has always been to dismiss the inclination to vote Stein as one only possessed by political imbeciles. But recently, it struck me that perhaps part of the problem with the discourse here was the conflation of more than one type of question. To illustrate this, consider a different voter asking if he should support Donald Trump. To simplify, let's say this voter's political views are as follows:

1. By far, the thing he cares about most is insuring the absolute minimum amount of federal regulation on big business. He thinks Wall Street should be able to do effectively whatever it wants.
2. If it were up to him, he would not be building an immigration wall or engaging in mass deportations of Muslims, but the issue is of comparatively little importance when weighed against his views on business deregulation.

"Should" this person vote for Trump? On the one hand, we could say "obviously yes" -- Donald Trump matches his policy preferences far better than Hillary Clinton does, and voting for Trump is the best way to bring his political desires into reality. On the other hand, we could as easily say "obviously no," for the simple reason that his policy views are substantively terrible. His preferences are bad and he should feel bad for having them.

The discourse regarding left-wingers voting for Stein likewise blurs these understandings of "should". To be sure, sometimes there is just pure confusion at play -- someone's positions are perfectly compatible with Clinton's but for whatever reason they're in denial about it. That said, there absolutely are sets of preferences where it makes more sense to cast a ballot for Jill Stein than Hillary Clinton. However, given the realities of American electoral politics (at least for voters in battleground states), these preferences would have to include general apathy regarding whatever chaos Trump would wreak upon America and the world -- including another generation of GOP dominance on the Supreme Court, massive rollbacks of labor and environmental regulations, evisceration of reproductive rights, probable crackdowns on racial and religious outgroups (the list goes on) -- at least as compared to the "message" voting Green would send.

Someone who is okay with that calculus -- that is, who finds the possibility of all the terrible things a Trump presidency would bring about less significant than whatever expressive joy or moral satisfaction they get from casting their Stein vote -- can reasonably say they "should" vote for Stein in the sense that she better maps onto their actual preferences, just as a right-wing corporate hack who doesn't even care about the lipservice they give to "colorblindness" "should" vote for Trump. But they "shouldn't" vote for her in the sense that this view is normatively appalling and is worthy of significant scorn, as is that held by our hypothetical Trump voter.

Part of the confusion, of course, stems from the fact that many in Camp Stein fervently contend that they do care a lot about the aforementioned litany of horribles, even as their actual behavior shows that they care about it less than "sending a message" or "rejecting the two-party system" or whatever. They sometimes try to square this circle by suggesting that Trump and Clinton are not meaningfully distinct from one another in the America their presidencies will produce. Once again, sometimes this is just confusion of the normal kind -- not having any clear sense of the actual havoc a Trump presidency could wreak (see "Meh, the Supreme Court will block anything too terrible" -- how adorable). But sometimes it can reflect a cohesive position. If you actually think, as Cornel West apparently does, the "neoliberal" and "neofascist" are morally indistinguishable from one another, then it may well be that the gaps between a Clinton and Trump presidency will likewise not strike you as morally relevant. But once again, while someone who thinks that way may in some sense be perfectly justified in casting a Stein ballot, the real problem with is that the analytical steps that lead to that conclusion are substantively awful.

Irrelevant Public Figure A Endorses Irrelevant Public Figure B

Cornel West has officially announced he is endorsing Jill Stein for President, denouncing the woman Bernie Sanders endorsed as a "neo-liberal disaster." (I guess Donald Trump's "authenticity" wasn't enough to win him over). I'm just glad someone who is committed to the practicalities of making progressive change happen was on the Democratic platform committee. One wouldn't have wanted such a valuable slot taken up by someone still infuriated that President Obama doesn't recognize his personal aura of eminence.