How’s everyone doing? Yeah, I feel it, too. I’m writing this in mid-July, and the repeated waves of bad news have been overwhelming to cope with. But we’re looking at yet another once in a lifetime chance to save our democracy, if the fundraising emails flooding every screen in my home can be believed, from the same party that asks for our support and then fails to keep its word, lather, rinse, repeat. A new book by former political science professor Ed Burmila looks at how the left keeps failing by tacking farther and farther from its purported platform. “Chaotic Neutral: How the Democrats Lost Their Soul in the Center” (Bold Type Books) is fairly scathing in its critique of the party, but makes several solid points.
The subtitle is really all the plot summary you need. This is an analysis of how Democrats have come to power and, rather than use it to enact widely popular policies that help the whole country, instead have emphasized “bipartisanship” or the appearance of it. Every reach across the aisle has pulled the party slightly farther to the right. Republicans feel no obligation to reciprocate, or even to make a pretense of playing fair, and why would they? Fighting dirty has gotten them some pretty terrific results, culminating in a present day autocracy using the Supreme Court to strip rights from half the population and a party base so steeped in disinformation packaged as “news” that many still believe the last election was stolen. In a word, yikes.
Burmila writes about this with wit and a real talent for making connections throughout history in a way that’s easy for readers to both follow and swallow, bitter though it may be. He’s clear about how long it took for Republicans to build power, and notes how when Democrat Stacey Abrams used similar long-haul tactics to increase civic involvement in Georgia, the response on the left was more cringe-inducing fan worship and less movement to reproduce her tactics elsewhere. But even if we were getting out the vote in droves and turning maps blue from sea to shining sea, it’s valid to question if we’d end up getting what we voted for. Biden ran and won on what was touted as the most progressive platform in US history, but many things he promised have gone by the wayside. It was brutal to have the Supreme Court’s decision leak weeks in advance, only to have Roe v. Wade overturned with no meaningful response save a tepid executive order some two weeks later, amid a spam tsunami of fundraising email.
Democrats are supposed to be the ones in power right now; how come it doesn’t feel like it? In a chapter about Barack Obama’s presidency, Burmila suggests, “(D)emocrats have the tendency to see holding power as the end, not a means to an end.” The book deliberately does not offer a tidy checklist of to-do items guaranteed to fix things, but forcing the party to engage with its actual voters, and imposing consequences when they sell them out yet again to a theoretical swing voter, would be a start. It carries the risk of failure, but if the left leveraged any and all power with the confidence the right does, a lot of good can still be done.
Because this is a discussion being had in real time, it’s not hard to find convincing counter-arguments laying out the good Democrats have done, and also the times they have used power wisely. They’re a necessary counterpoint to a book that risks feeding cynicism at the expense of activism. Burmila also uses footnotes to make joking asides that sometimes land and are more often distracting. The campaign emails asking for money are an agony to read, but they’re not wrong about the potential consequences of apathy, and it’s easy to slide in that direction when it feels like nobody is fighting for you. “Chaotic Neutral” sounds the alarm effectively about the rightward drift of the Democratic party.
Heather Seggel is a writer based in Mendocino County, Calif.
From The Progressive Populist, September 1, 2022
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