Thanks for writing! This definitely helped clarify some of the push-back I often get when trying to explain these ideas to friends.
For reasons that elude my comprehension, many progressives do not seem to conceptualize the current assortment of economic and legal policies that cause some countries to be ~100x richer than others to be a relevant form of oppression. If they do, they are unlikely to give it as high a priority as, e.g., within-country racial disparities or within-country economic inequality.
This will definitely stick with me. It seems the only way to get around this contradiction is to just not think about it, but maybe I’m missing something?
I think it’s a matter of prioritization and non-quantification: they either don’t really appreciate how much bigger/worse extreme poverty is, or else agree that it’s very bad but just don’t want to get involved in stopping it because they’re worried about being Neo-Colonialist or something similar and it’s easier to just focus on the domestic context.
I haven’t read this whole thread, so forgive me if I’m re-stating someone else’s point. I think there’s another explanation: they have a hypothesis about you/EAs/us that we are not disproving.
My experience has been that people in any numerical or social minority group (e.g. Black Americans, people with disabilities, someone who is the “only” person from a given group at their workplace, etc), are used to being met with disappointing responses if they try to share their experiences with people who don’t have them (e.g. members of the numerical or social majority group that they are different from). Most of us have had this experience at least some of the time, maybe as EAs! People get blank stares, unwanted pity or admiration, or outright dismissal and invalidation (e.g. “it can’t be all that bad” or “you’re just playing the [race/poverty/privilege/ whatever] card”). This is definitely the kind of conversation people see over and over again on the internet. So, until proven otherwise, that’s what people expect. Majority group members are expected to be ignorant of what life is really like for people who experience it differently. I think this is a rational expectation at least some of the time. The hypothesis then goes: EAs look like majority group members and often are, ergo anything EAs say about which problems are “most important” is assumed to be somewhat ignorant. Maybe people see it as well-meaning or callous ignorance. Regardless, ignorance is assumed as most probable, because it’s true of most people. (I think EAs and progressives also have different models of when ignorance matters the most and when differences matter the most, but that’s a different thread).
I’ve usually taken the view that I don’t get to assume people will see me as an informed, compassionate person on the progressive left until I disprove the hypothesis above. If the first thing I say is something like why local US poverty issues are “less important” than other issues, I’ve just reinforced the hypothesis rather than disproven it. It sounds like denying the reality that they know is true—they’ve seen the real-life people impacted and/or read their stories or studied the human impact of these issues. At least in my case, it’s not true that they struggle to think of people in other countries as real people too. (My progressive friends have often lived abroad, have family in other countries, or work in immigrant communities). It’s a trust issue. If they see me denying that local issues are “real/important,” I must be ignorant, and worse, I must be unwilling to be bothered with the real-life experiences of people different from me. Why should they trust anything I say after that about helping people? “But Africa though!” sounds like a deflection, not a genuine consideration or a sincere, compassionate challenge of their own thinking about poverty.
When I speak first about things we both care about and share sincere examples of the ways that I do see and care about the depth of personal stress that US poverty and racial disparities have on people I actually know, I haven’t had a progressive friend respond by saying that poverty in other countries didn’t matter. I brought it up second though, and that seems to make a difference. If someone trusts that I am a caring, informed person, not a callous ignorant one, we can expand the scope of the conversation from there.
Fwiw, I can’t think of a time this has led to changed actions on their part.
I think it’s because they know women/poc/trans ppl/ppl on whatever fashionable domestic axis of inequality you want to look at, but don’t know anyone who lives in Burundi, and because the experience of oppressed people in America is still close enough to their own to actually empathize with. Lot easier to empathize with your friend who got called a slur than with someone dying of malaria in Africa. Both because they are your friend, and because you’ve probably been called mean names, maybe even by the same type of asshole tossing slurs at them, whereas deadly diseases that affect young healthy people are hard to even imagine.
This is a useful point but I would add a little bit to it. People on the left often think about racism, transphobia, and homophobia as quite a bit more than a POC friend of theirs being called a slur. Leftists often think of these as fundamentally systemic issues with very real, often physical, consequences. Like, racism in the US can manifest as, say, an entire generation of poor Black families being poisoned by a local CAFO, or an inability to develop intergenerational wealth due to explicitly racist economic policy.
I think sometimes EAs can offer a rather uncharitable take of the left, like that the left’s concern with racism is just “SJW Safe Space” stuff or whatever. Not saying that’s what’s happening in this thread, but I would just say that if EA wants to be more open to progressives and leftists, it has to take very seriously what they actually believe.
As an example, I was pleased to see that the broad EA take during the BLM summer protests didn’t seem to be just “well people should donate to AMF instead of buying markers and signs,” Which may have been the take of 2015 EA. Whether EAs agree with them or not, ideas like socialism, progressivism, social justice, and so on, are serious ideas and shouldn’t be dismissed in the way that I sometimes have seen them dismissed.
I disagree on socialism being a serious idea in American politics. It’s a thing left-wing trolls say to offend right-wingers. Any American who is serious about politics would never call themself a socialist as long as there is room to describe their ideas some other way, even if socialism might fit. Elizabeth Warren has a more left-wing voting record than Bernie Sanders. So you could argue she’s a socialist. But she doesn’t call herself a socialist, because she’s trying to actually get legislation done, and there are other ways to describe her beliefs.
I use the slur example not to be dismissive of social justice, but because it’s something a kid at Harvard can understand. No matter how privileged you are you’ve probably been called mean names at some point, and you can easily see how a racial slur is a worse extension of that. But that same Harvard kid, while thinking themself a dedicated anti-racist, will generally focus on instances like that over even domestic forms of inequality outside their understanding. I hear a lot of SJ talk about student loans, but not so much about the earned income tax credit, for example.
Arguments like this certainly don’t help win over leftists to EA.
A self described democratic socialist nearly won the democratic nomination for president. The Democratic socialists of America (dsa) helped get dozens of candidates elected to national, state, and city offices over the last 4 years. Polling shows millennials being more sympathetic to socialism than capitalism.
The Warren example would also quickly get your political analysis dismissed by almost anyone on the left. Warren’s lifetime voting record is slightly more left than bernies according to this site (https://progressivepunch.org/scores.htm?house=senate) but she took office in 2012, while bernie became a senator in 2006 after serving 16 years in the house. The democratic party has moved to the left over the last 30 years so more recently elected officials will have a more left record, all else equal. Bernie also received far more support from left wing organizations than Warren. The last point that Warren is trying to get actual legislation done while bernie and other socialists aren’t is just wrong. Bernie played a huge role in shaping the recently passed American rescue plan, which is estimated to halve child poverty (https://www.politico.com/newsletters/politico-nightly/2021/03/16/bernie-sanders-joe-manchin-492117).
This argument is hugely dismissive of a significant strain of American politics based on flawed analysis and unsupported assertions.
I am not sure there is value in winning over self-described socialists. There is certainly not if the intention is to get them involved in politics, but I suppose they could be valuable contributors in other career paths if they take a more rational approach to their career than their politics.
Assuming your values are broadly progressive, the net impact of self-declared socialists’ political participation is negative. DSA helped get five Congressional candidates elected in safe Dem seats, and nowhere else. Looking at Wikipedia’s list of current DSA members of Congress, the most conservative district any represents is Jamaal Bowman’s NY-16, with a Cook PVI of D+24 (meaning a Democrat typically gets 24 percentage points more here than the national average, and would win 74% to 26% in an evenly divided year.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Democratic_Socialists_of_America_members_who_have_held_office_in_the_United_States#United_States_House_of_Representatives. DSA national did not endorse a winning Congressional candidate in any swing district in 2018 or 2020. https://electoral.dsausa.org/past-endorsements/. I’m not going to go look through their locals’ endorsements but I’d bet $100 the same holds true there if anyone wants to do the research.
And their impacts when elected are bad. The Borgen Project, a nonprofit focused on advocating for the needs of the global poor, rated Eliot Engel one of the top 10 champions of the global poor in Congress. https://borgenproject.org/tag/eliot-engel/. Jamaal Bowman replaced him with a more isolationist, more nationalist foreign policy. AOC spends millions and millions of dollars that could go to winning a swing district seat on social media ads for herself in her safe Dem seat.
Sanders did not come close to winning the Democratic nomination. He had a temporary lead that was a quirk of the timing of various primaries. Biden wound up with 2.5x as many delegates as Sanders.
I’m a self-described socialist. I also work at an EA-aligned nonprofit and co-organize one of the largest EA groups in the world. I know plenty of other EAs who do great work and identify as socialists or leftists.
But maybe EA would be better off without us because our political contributions are objectively wrong according to your analysis.
Your analysis assumes that the goal of anyone with left of center politics is to flip seats from red to blue, but this is not the goal of the DSA. Obviously, winning majorities is essential to enacting legislation, but the composition of those majorities will change what legislation looks like. In the example I linked above, Bernie was able to significantly influence the American Rescue Plan to get more unconditional cash to people who need it, among other things. In New York State, Dems hold super majorities in the Assembly and Senate. All 5 of DSA’s endorsed candidates won their primaries (the actually competitive election). One of them was the lead sponsor on the HALT Solitary Confinement Act, which significantly restricts the usage of solitary confinement (i.e. torture) in New York’s corrections facilities and just passed the Assembly and Senate with veto-proof majorities yesterday.
Eliot Engels:
supported the Iraq War
opposed the Iran deal
supported Saudi’s war on Yemen
Source. (The author of this article also wrote a defense of EA 5 years ago)
The nature of presidential primaries is that there is typically a clear front-runner by some point who captures the lions share of the remaining delegates. Even so, in 2016, the results were far closer, with Hillary receiving 55% of the popular vote to Bernie’s 43%.
Honestly, you sound ideologically opposed to socialism, which is fine. What’s frustrating is that you’re writing about politics with a certitude that doesn’t seem to match your understanding of it. You’re picking a few random data points and then asserting that this proves some very broad claim, like that socialists participating in politics is bad for progressives or that Engel is better than Bowman.
I am not ideologically opposed to anything. I am opposed on empirical grounds to Marxism, and approximately indifferent between centrist democrats and what most Americans refer to as “socialism” on the merits. I am also empirically opposed to anyone referring to themself as a “socialist” in American politics, because it’s a bad tactic in the elections that actually affect people’s lives. Even in dem-supermajority legislatures, self-described socialists don’t make up enough of the caucus to be the deciding vote on an issue that has a clean left-right divide.
I voted Sanders in 2016 because my uneducated instinct is “progressive good” and because I thought Clinton a particularly weak candidate. Then I learned how bad his record is on immigration (well to the right of Joe Biden, for example), and have deeply regretted that vote ever since. EA has moved me somewhat toward the Dem establishment and away from the Left because it has given me the tools to prioritize effectively between issues I care about. Which was something I always knew I should be doing, but didn’t know how to do before. I always noticed a strain of America Only-ism in some quarters of the Left that I was uncomfortable with, but it’s complicated, because I didn’t know how to weigh that against, e.g. the Left not listening to idiots like Larry Summers on economic policy, or the different version of xenophobia that a lot of centrists espouse. And it turns out that the answer is that politicians have to be evaluated individually based on their support for the global poor and not based on ideology. On the merits, Bernie Sanders and Jamaal Bowman are pretty bad, Joe Biden meh but better than a Republican, AOC is pretty good, Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker great . Republicans in the Trump era are consistently bad but someone like, idk, Lincoln Chaffee, might have been better than a lot of Dems in the 80s. And America Only-ism is definitely more common among self-described socialists than among people like Elizabeth Warren who are about as Left ideologically but don’t adopt the identity. And at least in my social circles it seems to be even more pronounced among activist types than among politicians.
Thinking that you can be opposed to a broad ideology on empirical grounds is simply mistaken. You can say something like ” the countries that adopted self-described Marxist governments fared worse than they would have otherwise”. But even that claim requires a lot of evidence to defend! Marxist revolutions didn’t happen in already wealthy countries with stable institutions. I don’t even consider myself a Marxist—I’m just trying to make the point that this stuff is too complicated to make a claim that an ideology is empirically right or wrong.
Ideology is like bad breath, you can’t smell your own. You have an ideology, whether you’d like to admit it or not!
I share your wish that American politics weren’t so focused on Americans and wish that Bernie were more of an internationalist. However, his platform on immigration in 2020 was better than any other candidate’s from an EA perspective IMO, even if his record may not have been great on it.
Thanks for the clarification—I should clarify as well. By serious ideas I don’t mean that they necessarily have a lot of purchase in, let’s say, American society. They might (it depends on your measures, and as I noted above we’re talking about different things. Socialism, progressivism, leftism, etc. can be understood differently) or they might not. What I mean is that they have a rich intellectual history, in the case of socialism an intellectual history that is much older than EA, and that when a person on the left espouses an idea that it should be judged seriously. As opposed to the way that—not necessarily in this thread—I’ve seen EAs dismiss ostensibly or actually left-leaning concepts without a lot of deep introspection.
I want to again mention the example of the summer BLM protests. It’s possible that 2015ish EA would have given the trite and unhelpful response of “well, there are worse things happening in X country, so people should instead be donating there” or whatever. But, EA has meaningfully grown since then, particularly when it comes to issues of race and justice. By taking those (left-leaning) ideas seriously, there has been a tangible shift, I think, in EA’s ability to be compatible with progressives and more inclusive generally. As I mention in another comment, I think there’s a ceiling to this, but progress is possible.
EA has changed a lot over the past ~8 or so years, and I think it’s moving away from the “Elon Musk Silicon Valley” EA that Dylan Matthews noted several years ago and is morphing into something more diverse and interesting. And I think part of that is because left/progressive/social justice ideas like diversity and racial justice are being taken more seriously (while acknowledging that there is a lot of work that still needs to be done).
To summarize, anytime I see a thoughtful person seriously (and disparagingly) refer to progressives and leftists as something like “SJWs” I cringe because of what that could mean for the future of EA.
I worry that there’s a danger in taking the ideas of the left too seriously, if I take ideas like “abolish the police” seriously, I want to respond with the best arguments against it in order to have a productive discussion of criminal justice policy, and end up denying people’s lived experience. I think it would be a very bad idea for EA to take the ideas of the Left seriously in any way that risks seeming critical of them.
Whereas if I don’t take the idea seriously and understand it merely as an expression of distaste for modern American policing, I can be much more compassionate and understanding. It’s probably better to take the sentiment more seriously than the slogans.
I take your point, but I think I still have some slight pushback. Although I am unconvinced myself of the abolish the police position, slogan or not, it seems a bit patronizing maybe to assume that a very real policy proposal—which has some support by real academics and philosophers including utilitarian ones—is just, like, an “expression of distaste”. Maybe I’m misunderstanding your point, and if so please let me know, but I guess that’s the kind of dismissal of real (real not necessarily as in “good” just as in “supported by thoughtful people and perhaps defensible in some cases”) ideas that I worry EA does too much. One reason I love EA is because of its ability to deliberate and to really deal with many different ideas in a productive way. I’m not sure that it’s super productive to not take seriously a political idea because the conversation would (truly) be difficult.
Again, I am curious how many EAs view leftists as something like “people who aren’t really good at being thoughtful or serious, but maybe sometimes, when they’re not being SJWs, have some valid sentiments” or whatever. Like that dismissal, insofar as it exists, is I think representative of a deep problem with EA , which in its history has been just as naive and stubborn as any left movement.
I guess I would say that maybe EA understands the left just as little as the left understands EA, and if this is true, then EA is destined to never have a movement that involves the left.
As an anecdotal example, I’ve had dozens of conversations with EAs about this kind of stuff and, reliably, they will view “socialism” or “leftism” as synonymous with something like “centrally-planned government-run economy”, which is if that’s your only understanding of the left, then you don’t understand the left any more than if someone thinks EA is nothing more than day traders donating to AMF.
I’m not saying nobody has thought through the ideas, I find the proposed alternatives to police fascinating, although I’m personally sceptical that they’d actually be better than the existing system—that’s an essay all on its own!
My point was just that many people repeat slogans to express feelings rather than to advocate for concrete policy proposals, because everyone has feelings but almost nobody has policy proposals. (Myself included—I have opinions about lots of policy issues, if I’m honest I don’t really understand most of them). I’m not saying we should dismiss ideas just because most people that advocate for them would struggle to defend them, I’m just recommending against getting into arguments over the minutia of how community based restorative justice will actually work in the real world with people that have no idea what you’re talking about! It’s often more tactful to take people seriously but not literally, especially since slogans remove all nuance from the conversation and make it hard to know what people actually believe—saying “defund the police” could signal anything from supporting modest budget reallocation to literal anarchy!
I agree that treating “the Left” or “Progressives” as a monolithic bloc reveals a lack of understanding, but since Stalin and Hitler are much easier to argue against than what people on the left or the right actually believe, I’m not seeing this cheap rhetorical trick going away any time soon. We definitely should refrain from it though!
Many EAs support open borders, which to me is in the same general ballpark of “abolish the police”. Both are radical breaks from how the world currently is. Both slogans are open to many different interpretations. And both have a lot of literature and research behind them. But one slogan is popular among EAs, and one isn’t.
Yes there is a kind of “Narcissism of small differences” in which societal progress is measured in the context of a wealthy western countries instead of the broader world. The social justice initiatives in the U.S. do not benefit or extend to people of color in poorer countries who often suffer under even more pronounced economic or state injustices (e.g. deadly malaria mosquitoes, malnutrition, lack of access to healthcare, jobs, education, and internet, government oppression, etc). I believe this is in part because people in the U.S. don’t know how how much worse quality of life can be in poorer or more authoritarian countries.
Thanks for writing! This definitely helped clarify some of the push-back I often get when trying to explain these ideas to friends.
This will definitely stick with me. It seems the only way to get around this contradiction is to just not think about it, but maybe I’m missing something?
I think it’s a matter of prioritization and non-quantification: they either don’t really appreciate how much bigger/worse extreme poverty is, or else agree that it’s very bad but just don’t want to get involved in stopping it because they’re worried about being Neo-Colonialist or something similar and it’s easier to just focus on the domestic context.
I haven’t read this whole thread, so forgive me if I’m re-stating someone else’s point.
I think there’s another explanation: they have a hypothesis about you/EAs/us that we are not disproving.
My experience has been that people in any numerical or social minority group (e.g. Black Americans, people with disabilities, someone who is the “only” person from a given group at their workplace, etc), are used to being met with disappointing responses if they try to share their experiences with people who don’t have them (e.g. members of the numerical or social majority group that they are different from). Most of us have had this experience at least some of the time, maybe as EAs! People get blank stares, unwanted pity or admiration, or outright dismissal and invalidation (e.g. “it can’t be all that bad” or “you’re just playing the [race/poverty/privilege/ whatever] card”). This is definitely the kind of conversation people see over and over again on the internet. So, until proven otherwise, that’s what people expect. Majority group members are expected to be ignorant of what life is really like for people who experience it differently. I think this is a rational expectation at least some of the time. The hypothesis then goes: EAs look like majority group members and often are, ergo anything EAs say about which problems are “most important” is assumed to be somewhat ignorant. Maybe people see it as well-meaning or callous ignorance. Regardless, ignorance is assumed as most probable, because it’s true of most people. (I think EAs and progressives also have different models of when ignorance matters the most and when differences matter the most, but that’s a different thread).
I’ve usually taken the view that I don’t get to assume people will see me as an informed, compassionate person on the progressive left until I disprove the hypothesis above. If the first thing I say is something like why local US poverty issues are “less important” than other issues, I’ve just reinforced the hypothesis rather than disproven it. It sounds like denying the reality that they know is true—they’ve seen the real-life people impacted and/or read their stories or studied the human impact of these issues. At least in my case, it’s not true that they struggle to think of people in other countries as real people too. (My progressive friends have often lived abroad, have family in other countries, or work in immigrant communities). It’s a trust issue. If they see me denying that local issues are “real/important,” I must be ignorant, and worse, I must be unwilling to be bothered with the real-life experiences of people different from me. Why should they trust anything I say after that about helping people? “But Africa though!” sounds like a deflection, not a genuine consideration or a sincere, compassionate challenge of their own thinking about poverty.
When I speak first about things we both care about and share sincere examples of the ways that I do see and care about the depth of personal stress that US poverty and racial disparities have on people I actually know, I haven’t had a progressive friend respond by saying that poverty in other countries didn’t matter. I brought it up second though, and that seems to make a difference. If someone trusts that I am a caring, informed person, not a callous ignorant one, we can expand the scope of the conversation from there.
Fwiw, I can’t think of a time this has led to changed actions on their part.
I think it’s because they know women/poc/trans ppl/ppl on whatever fashionable domestic axis of inequality you want to look at, but don’t know anyone who lives in Burundi, and because the experience of oppressed people in America is still close enough to their own to actually empathize with. Lot easier to empathize with your friend who got called a slur than with someone dying of malaria in Africa. Both because they are your friend, and because you’ve probably been called mean names, maybe even by the same type of asshole tossing slurs at them, whereas deadly diseases that affect young healthy people are hard to even imagine.
This is a useful point but I would add a little bit to it. People on the left often think about racism, transphobia, and homophobia as quite a bit more than a POC friend of theirs being called a slur. Leftists often think of these as fundamentally systemic issues with very real, often physical, consequences. Like, racism in the US can manifest as, say, an entire generation of poor Black families being poisoned by a local CAFO, or an inability to develop intergenerational wealth due to explicitly racist economic policy.
I think sometimes EAs can offer a rather uncharitable take of the left, like that the left’s concern with racism is just “SJW Safe Space” stuff or whatever. Not saying that’s what’s happening in this thread, but I would just say that if EA wants to be more open to progressives and leftists, it has to take very seriously what they actually believe.
As an example, I was pleased to see that the broad EA take during the BLM summer protests didn’t seem to be just “well people should donate to AMF instead of buying markers and signs,” Which may have been the take of 2015 EA. Whether EAs agree with them or not, ideas like socialism, progressivism, social justice, and so on, are serious ideas and shouldn’t be dismissed in the way that I sometimes have seen them dismissed.
I disagree on socialism being a serious idea in American politics. It’s a thing left-wing trolls say to offend right-wingers. Any American who is serious about politics would never call themself a socialist as long as there is room to describe their ideas some other way, even if socialism might fit. Elizabeth Warren has a more left-wing voting record than Bernie Sanders. So you could argue she’s a socialist. But she doesn’t call herself a socialist, because she’s trying to actually get legislation done, and there are other ways to describe her beliefs.
I use the slur example not to be dismissive of social justice, but because it’s something a kid at Harvard can understand. No matter how privileged you are you’ve probably been called mean names at some point, and you can easily see how a racial slur is a worse extension of that. But that same Harvard kid, while thinking themself a dedicated anti-racist, will generally focus on instances like that over even domestic forms of inequality outside their understanding. I hear a lot of SJ talk about student loans, but not so much about the earned income tax credit, for example.
Arguments like this certainly don’t help win over leftists to EA.
A self described democratic socialist nearly won the democratic nomination for president. The Democratic socialists of America (dsa) helped get dozens of candidates elected to national, state, and city offices over the last 4 years. Polling shows millennials being more sympathetic to socialism than capitalism.
The Warren example would also quickly get your political analysis dismissed by almost anyone on the left. Warren’s lifetime voting record is slightly more left than bernies according to this site (https://progressivepunch.org/scores.htm?house=senate) but she took office in 2012, while bernie became a senator in 2006 after serving 16 years in the house. The democratic party has moved to the left over the last 30 years so more recently elected officials will have a more left record, all else equal. Bernie also received far more support from left wing organizations than Warren. The last point that Warren is trying to get actual legislation done while bernie and other socialists aren’t is just wrong. Bernie played a huge role in shaping the recently passed American rescue plan, which is estimated to halve child poverty (https://www.politico.com/newsletters/politico-nightly/2021/03/16/bernie-sanders-joe-manchin-492117).
This argument is hugely dismissive of a significant strain of American politics based on flawed analysis and unsupported assertions.
I am not sure there is value in winning over self-described socialists. There is certainly not if the intention is to get them involved in politics, but I suppose they could be valuable contributors in other career paths if they take a more rational approach to their career than their politics.
Assuming your values are broadly progressive, the net impact of self-declared socialists’ political participation is negative. DSA helped get five Congressional candidates elected in safe Dem seats, and nowhere else. Looking at Wikipedia’s list of current DSA members of Congress, the most conservative district any represents is Jamaal Bowman’s NY-16, with a Cook PVI of D+24 (meaning a Democrat typically gets 24 percentage points more here than the national average, and would win 74% to 26% in an evenly divided year.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Democratic_Socialists_of_America_members_who_have_held_office_in_the_United_States#United_States_House_of_Representatives. DSA national did not endorse a winning Congressional candidate in any swing district in 2018 or 2020. https://electoral.dsausa.org/past-endorsements/. I’m not going to go look through their locals’ endorsements but I’d bet $100 the same holds true there if anyone wants to do the research.
And their impacts when elected are bad. The Borgen Project, a nonprofit focused on advocating for the needs of the global poor, rated Eliot Engel one of the top 10 champions of the global poor in Congress. https://borgenproject.org/tag/eliot-engel/. Jamaal Bowman replaced him with a more isolationist, more nationalist foreign policy. AOC spends millions and millions of dollars that could go to winning a swing district seat on social media ads for herself in her safe Dem seat.
Sanders did not come close to winning the Democratic nomination. He had a temporary lead that was a quirk of the timing of various primaries. Biden wound up with 2.5x as many delegates as Sanders.
I’m a self-described socialist. I also work at an EA-aligned nonprofit and co-organize one of the largest EA groups in the world. I know plenty of other EAs who do great work and identify as socialists or leftists.
But maybe EA would be better off without us because our political contributions are objectively wrong according to your analysis.
Your analysis assumes that the goal of anyone with left of center politics is to flip seats from red to blue, but this is not the goal of the DSA. Obviously, winning majorities is essential to enacting legislation, but the composition of those majorities will change what legislation looks like. In the example I linked above, Bernie was able to significantly influence the American Rescue Plan to get more unconditional cash to people who need it, among other things. In New York State, Dems hold super majorities in the Assembly and Senate. All 5 of DSA’s endorsed candidates won their primaries (the actually competitive election). One of them was the lead sponsor on the HALT Solitary Confinement Act, which significantly restricts the usage of solitary confinement (i.e. torture) in New York’s corrections facilities and just passed the Assembly and Senate with veto-proof majorities yesterday.
Eliot Engels:
supported the Iraq War
opposed the Iran deal
supported Saudi’s war on Yemen
Source. (The author of this article also wrote a defense of EA 5 years ago)
The nature of presidential primaries is that there is typically a clear front-runner by some point who captures the lions share of the remaining delegates. Even so, in 2016, the results were far closer, with Hillary receiving 55% of the popular vote to Bernie’s 43%.
Honestly, you sound ideologically opposed to socialism, which is fine. What’s frustrating is that you’re writing about politics with a certitude that doesn’t seem to match your understanding of it. You’re picking a few random data points and then asserting that this proves some very broad claim, like that socialists participating in politics is bad for progressives or that Engel is better than Bowman.
I am not ideologically opposed to anything. I am opposed on empirical grounds to Marxism, and approximately indifferent between centrist democrats and what most Americans refer to as “socialism” on the merits. I am also empirically opposed to anyone referring to themself as a “socialist” in American politics, because it’s a bad tactic in the elections that actually affect people’s lives. Even in dem-supermajority legislatures, self-described socialists don’t make up enough of the caucus to be the deciding vote on an issue that has a clean left-right divide.
I voted Sanders in 2016 because my uneducated instinct is “progressive good” and because I thought Clinton a particularly weak candidate. Then I learned how bad his record is on immigration (well to the right of Joe Biden, for example), and have deeply regretted that vote ever since. EA has moved me somewhat toward the Dem establishment and away from the Left because it has given me the tools to prioritize effectively between issues I care about. Which was something I always knew I should be doing, but didn’t know how to do before. I always noticed a strain of America Only-ism in some quarters of the Left that I was uncomfortable with, but it’s complicated, because I didn’t know how to weigh that against, e.g. the Left not listening to idiots like Larry Summers on economic policy, or the different version of xenophobia that a lot of centrists espouse. And it turns out that the answer is that politicians have to be evaluated individually based on their support for the global poor and not based on ideology. On the merits, Bernie Sanders and Jamaal Bowman are pretty bad, Joe Biden meh but better than a Republican, AOC is pretty good, Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker great . Republicans in the Trump era are consistently bad but someone like, idk, Lincoln Chaffee, might have been better than a lot of Dems in the 80s. And America Only-ism is definitely more common among self-described socialists than among people like Elizabeth Warren who are about as Left ideologically but don’t adopt the identity. And at least in my social circles it seems to be even more pronounced among activist types than among politicians.
Thinking that you can be opposed to a broad ideology on empirical grounds is simply mistaken. You can say something like ” the countries that adopted self-described Marxist governments fared worse than they would have otherwise”. But even that claim requires a lot of evidence to defend! Marxist revolutions didn’t happen in already wealthy countries with stable institutions. I don’t even consider myself a Marxist—I’m just trying to make the point that this stuff is too complicated to make a claim that an ideology is empirically right or wrong.
Ideology is like bad breath, you can’t smell your own. You have an ideology, whether you’d like to admit it or not!
I share your wish that American politics weren’t so focused on Americans and wish that Bernie were more of an internationalist. However, his platform on immigration in 2020 was better than any other candidate’s from an EA perspective IMO, even if his record may not have been great on it.
Thanks for the clarification—I should clarify as well. By serious ideas I don’t mean that they necessarily have a lot of purchase in, let’s say, American society. They might (it depends on your measures, and as I noted above we’re talking about different things. Socialism, progressivism, leftism, etc. can be understood differently) or they might not. What I mean is that they have a rich intellectual history, in the case of socialism an intellectual history that is much older than EA, and that when a person on the left espouses an idea that it should be judged seriously. As opposed to the way that—not necessarily in this thread—I’ve seen EAs dismiss ostensibly or actually left-leaning concepts without a lot of deep introspection.
I want to again mention the example of the summer BLM protests. It’s possible that 2015ish EA would have given the trite and unhelpful response of “well, there are worse things happening in X country, so people should instead be donating there” or whatever. But, EA has meaningfully grown since then, particularly when it comes to issues of race and justice. By taking those (left-leaning) ideas seriously, there has been a tangible shift, I think, in EA’s ability to be compatible with progressives and more inclusive generally. As I mention in another comment, I think there’s a ceiling to this, but progress is possible.
EA has changed a lot over the past ~8 or so years, and I think it’s moving away from the “Elon Musk Silicon Valley” EA that Dylan Matthews noted several years ago and is morphing into something more diverse and interesting. And I think part of that is because left/progressive/social justice ideas like diversity and racial justice are being taken more seriously (while acknowledging that there is a lot of work that still needs to be done).
To summarize, anytime I see a thoughtful person seriously (and disparagingly) refer to progressives and leftists as something like “SJWs” I cringe because of what that could mean for the future of EA.
I generally agree with your second paragraph!
I worry that there’s a danger in taking the ideas of the left too seriously, if I take ideas like “abolish the police” seriously, I want to respond with the best arguments against it in order to have a productive discussion of criminal justice policy, and end up denying people’s lived experience. I think it would be a very bad idea for EA to take the ideas of the Left seriously in any way that risks seeming critical of them.
Whereas if I don’t take the idea seriously and understand it merely as an expression of distaste for modern American policing, I can be much more compassionate and understanding. It’s probably better to take the sentiment more seriously than the slogans.
I take your point, but I think I still have some slight pushback. Although I am unconvinced myself of the abolish the police position, slogan or not, it seems a bit patronizing maybe to assume that a very real policy proposal—which has some support by real academics and philosophers including utilitarian ones—is just, like, an “expression of distaste”. Maybe I’m misunderstanding your point, and if so please let me know, but I guess that’s the kind of dismissal of real (real not necessarily as in “good” just as in “supported by thoughtful people and perhaps defensible in some cases”) ideas that I worry EA does too much. One reason I love EA is because of its ability to deliberate and to really deal with many different ideas in a productive way. I’m not sure that it’s super productive to not take seriously a political idea because the conversation would (truly) be difficult.
Again, I am curious how many EAs view leftists as something like “people who aren’t really good at being thoughtful or serious, but maybe sometimes, when they’re not being SJWs, have some valid sentiments” or whatever. Like that dismissal, insofar as it exists, is I think representative of a deep problem with EA , which in its history has been just as naive and stubborn as any left movement.
I guess I would say that maybe EA understands the left just as little as the left understands EA, and if this is true, then EA is destined to never have a movement that involves the left.
As an anecdotal example, I’ve had dozens of conversations with EAs about this kind of stuff and, reliably, they will view “socialism” or “leftism” as synonymous with something like “centrally-planned government-run economy”, which is if that’s your only understanding of the left, then you don’t understand the left any more than if someone thinks EA is nothing more than day traders donating to AMF.
I’m not saying nobody has thought through the ideas, I find the proposed alternatives to police fascinating, although I’m personally sceptical that they’d actually be better than the existing system—that’s an essay all on its own!
My point was just that many people repeat slogans to express feelings rather than to advocate for concrete policy proposals, because everyone has feelings but almost nobody has policy proposals. (Myself included—I have opinions about lots of policy issues, if I’m honest I don’t really understand most of them). I’m not saying we should dismiss ideas just because most people that advocate for them would struggle to defend them, I’m just recommending against getting into arguments over the minutia of how community based restorative justice will actually work in the real world with people that have no idea what you’re talking about! It’s often more tactful to take people seriously but not literally, especially since slogans remove all nuance from the conversation and make it hard to know what people actually believe—saying “defund the police” could signal anything from supporting modest budget reallocation to literal anarchy!
I agree that treating “the Left” or “Progressives” as a monolithic bloc reveals a lack of understanding, but since Stalin and Hitler are much easier to argue against than what people on the left or the right actually believe, I’m not seeing this cheap rhetorical trick going away any time soon. We definitely should refrain from it though!
Gotcha! Now I think I understand. This makes sense to me
Many EAs support open borders, which to me is in the same general ballpark of “abolish the police”. Both are radical breaks from how the world currently is. Both slogans are open to many different interpretations. And both have a lot of literature and research behind them. But one slogan is popular among EAs, and one isn’t.
This is a really interesting comparison. A lot of leftists also support more open border policies.
Yes there is a kind of “Narcissism of small differences” in which societal progress is measured in the context of a wealthy western countries instead of the broader world. The social justice initiatives in the U.S. do not benefit or extend to people of color in poorer countries who often suffer under even more pronounced economic or state injustices (e.g. deadly malaria mosquitoes, malnutrition, lack of access to healthcare, jobs, education, and internet, government oppression, etc). I believe this is in part because people in the U.S. don’t know how how much worse quality of life can be in poorer or more authoritarian countries.