How Socialists Vote

As you know I've had my issues with Senator Bernard Sanders over the years, but his guest star appearance on Twitter TV this afternoon made me feel all kinds of warm.

I think I've talked about my dear dead communist friend Wayne in this space before, and tried to explain what he taught me about being a socialist, but I can't remember exactly how I did it. This time I'd like to put in in a way I just thought of, that it involves perpetually thinking on two distinct levels: one about what a truly just society would look like, and the other about what you're going to do right now, at whatever moment in the history of capitalism you happen to be located in. For example, when it's time to vote.

When it came to voting, and door-to-door canvasing, Wayne was a Democrat, with a preference for "reform", but a nostalgia for city bosses, because, as he said, everybody in Richard J.Daley's Chicago could get a good city job. He wouldn't talk about the "lesser of two evils" but rather about the marginal good. He'd frame the question in terms of whether your candidate might do any good at all, for working and poor people.

That's what I saw Bernie doing today with Joe, in their different Covid-world stay-home screens. I'm sad that these guys don't have more room for women in their mental world, but I'm still glad they're friends, and are able to attend to and show some appreciation of their differences. I found it endearing that the thing was scripted kind of like an amateur radio interview, with the awkward asking-each-other-questions format that ensured they'd get in the essential things but made sure it wasn't going to be smooth in production values.

But mainly I saw Bernie judging that Joe was going to try to take an opportunity to make life better for working and poor people in our country, and could use some help (and pushing, obviously), and it would definitely be on the marginally good side, starting, obviously, with getting rid of the dreadful ascendancy of the Trump Republicans but going well beyond that, and he's going to vote—and campaign—like a socialist.