More like Jimmy BORE
(argue in the comments, but like, the WWE equivalent of arguing)
Biden’s nomination wasn’t a people’s referendum on M4A it was capital defending itself from M4A. And the rest of the primaries weren’t even about M4A it was about Trump. Trumps done. That’s not on the table anymore. Biden being elected isn’t even a referendum on centrism, it’s just a rejection of Trump.
Normies aren’t us. They don’t spend all day listening to podcasters and tweeters shit on Dems. They think the dems are the good guys. Dore’s audience reaches people who are not us and that’s okay. There are people who think the Dems want to do M4A but Mitch won’t let them. If the idea is that those people are lost and we should never waste time convincing them, then fine. But Dore isn’t pandering to lanyards and Marin County. Forcing the vote won’t turn Matty Yglesias into a Bernie bro but it might reach some frustrated blue collar worker who doesn’t even know what PMC is.
The real problem is that Dore doesn’t have the aesthetics we like. He’s an older white guy with a problematic past. We don’t like those. And he does the boomer AM talk radio thing which we also don’t like. We don’t like Hannity and Limbaugh and Carlson so we feel we don’t need/want that kind of thing as an aspect of left discourse. If Dore was about 30 years younger and went on Chapo the tone around this would be very different. We’d still be having the same discussion about effectiveness but people wouldn’t be getting hung up on Dore as a character.
People I trust and respect have dedicated some of their time to this cause so I will defer to that and assume it’s not totally baseless or just a publicity stunt. I trust people who have been doing this a lot longer than I have or have had more successes than I have to put their energy in a good place.
There’s not going to be any one-off event that’s going to cause socialism. We’re never going to know the correct string of events that will lead to it either. This has potential to win over some people and I think that’s worth something. It’s not going to bring M4A, which is a half-measure anyways. It’s not going to cause all centrist Dems to resign or get them voted out. But it will provide some people who are not online leftists or people familiar with organizing something to cut their teeth on. Not everyone is going to join the DSA or the SRA or IWW or what have you. It doesn’t matter how good your sales pitch is. So waiting until the moment where a significant portion of people do is a bad strategy. We can’t just go “these people need to join a socialist org if they’re really serious.” They’re not going to. We don’t need them to. If this gets some trucker from middle America to listen more to people like Brie Joy, Cornell West, Nina Turner, Sirota, etc then good.
I don’t think the problem is that Dore is an old white man. The problem is that he’s kinda a misogynist and he doesn’t know what he’s talking about half the time. That would still be true if he were 20 years younger.
Edit: also, forcing an m4a vote has been given way too much attention for the very minimal gains it offers, which is completely separate from whether Dore is involved or not.
