Elizabeth Warren and Her Supporters are Facing a Decisive Moment

By Joshua Davis

Vice President Joe Biden’s win in South Carolina was just the energizing moment that the center has been looking for to establish a coalition. When Pete Buttigieg dropped out on Sunday afternoon, the day after, it was a clear indication that his campaign had served its purpose, and he could now turn his energy and resources to shoring up the center. If the progressive and left wing of the party cannot do the same, its gains may be lost.

The first concerning sign for the left is Elizabeth Warren’s reneging on her campaign promise to eschew super-PAC money spent on her behalf, a decision she reversed this past week. Warren justified this decision by pointing to the disadvantage relative to other candidates, except Amy Klobuchar, that not accepting PAC money creates. Warren was also quick to point to the gender disparity in the situation: The only two women still in the race, she said, were not able to properly compete because they were not on an equitable playing field.

Many have attacked Warren’s decision to accept PAC money as hypocritical. But this is not exactly right. Nor are her appeals to gender disparity entirely cynical, as Saager Enjeti has claimed. The truth is the capitalist system is itself deeply sexist and reproduces social inequality at all levels. We should not quibble with it being identified in campaign finance, and critics from the left do not gain anything by suggesting otherwise. That is a structural point that the left should continually make, and repeat.

But it is the structural point that makes Warren’s choice to accept PAC money, ultimately, so distressing. We should take her at her word when she says that she could not compete without accepting that money, and we should also vigorously object to the sexism inherent in a system that makes it more difficult for female candidates to build campaign credibility. But it is that same reality that marks out the Achilles’ heel of Warren’s campaign from the start.

Take Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez by way of contrast. Sanders allows movement-and union-based organizations to spend money on his behalf, while he has simultaneously built the most successful grassroots campaign finance system perhaps ever seen. AOC has succeeded in becoming one of the most important junior congressional representatives in recent memory by working with the same fundraising model, which she has now expanded into an organizing apparatus that is based outside the conventional fundraising system. AOC is now not just supporting her own re-election effort, but directly supporting other candidates with this approach.

But Warren has consistently kept her distance from movement-based, grassroots politics. As a result, her campaign, its vision, and its sources of funding remain limited to conventional party forms. Is it any surprise that she is now compelled to accept big money donations? She has been able to garner a segment of professional-managerial class support, which admires her wonkish, reasonable, policy-wise persona, but this has not translated into the kinds of financial support or primary wins that can sustain her campaign.

And this is why she is now compelled to take the very PAC money she made a political career of demanding we get out of politics. Without the same mass movement, grassroots support that has fueled Sanders and AOC, Warren must turn to the Party establishment for their support.

This is the most important lesson to draw from her decision to receive PAC money. Even if it is true that she is hypocritical, that is not the point. What matters are the material forces at work in her campaign and the way they deform her politics. Even if Warren wins the presidency, in the absence of mass democratic support, she will be compelled to moderate (or even abandon) her anti-corruption, reformist agenda. No matter the policies she is campaigning on now, her boldest agendas are a dead letter. All the policy wisdom she can muster will not make up for her need for a democratic mass-movement politics in order to accomplish her policy vision.

It is precisely here that her supporters need to be concerned. Warren has begun, in recent weeks, to go on the attack against Sanders. She has argued that she is the candidate with the track record to accomplish a progressive vision. These attacks have come at the expense of alienating the very movement-oriented voters that she needs, and in many cases leading previous supporters to questioning her integrity and struggling to make sense of her campaign strategy. Those who were skeptical of Warren from the start see her actions as confirming their assessment that she has neither ever been a person of the left nor been on their side.

Now she has confirmed that she intends to stay in the contest until the convention, despite having only amassed 8 delegates, and with all polls and projection models pointing toward a poor performance on Super Tuesday. Warren even faces the embarrassing possibility of losing her home state of Massachusetts to Sanders. She has defended her intention to sway a contested convention in a CNN townhall by saying that Sanders also had the same position in 2016. But there is a crucial difference.

In 2016, Sanders made the argument not that the super delegates ought to overturn the democratically determined will of the party voters, but that the superdelegates ought to vote with the delegates from their states, not against them. He also had an obligation to ensure that the concerns of his voters were represented at the convention and in the party’s platform. In the two-person race of 2016, he was the standard bearer of the progressive and left wing’s interests.

It seems clear that Warren wants to make the case to the establishment that she can unify the Sanders wing and the establishment wing, in the case of a contested convention.

But we are in a very different situation in 2020. With Buttigieg now out of the race, and Biden poised to perform well in the south, we now have the makings of a centrist coalition that could possibly box out any progressive and social democratic agenda. By continuing to keep her distance from the grassroots movement and signaling her loyalty to the establishment, Warren may be gambling that she will be picked to lead the party in a contested convention, but that is a bet she seems bound to lose.

If the party took the nomination from Sanders, after amassing a plurality of delegates, only to give it to Warren, who will hold only a handful of delegates, all hope will be lost of unity with the party’s left wing. That would be a conscious decision by the party to run the party aground. And Warren’s supporters should consider carefully at this important moment how such a move would impact them if Warren herself were in that same position: how would they feel, and how would they vote, if the party robbed Warren of the nomination despite having the most delegates?

Warren may have another strategy in mind, though. She may be making a bid to be tapped, not as Sanders’ VP, but as Biden’s. The idea may be to seek to unify the progressive wing in this way. But this would just be to concretize the terrible reality foreshadowed by her decision to take super-PAC money. That is, that Warren is opting to betray her own political vision and legacy in order to be the running mate of the very man whose bankruptcy bill she entered politics to fight.

Warren and her supporters face a decisive and potentially history-making decision. There is a greater chance to realize social democratic policies for the first time since their erosion began in the 1970s. A defeat at this moment will most assuredly secure Trump a second term, but it will also fundamentally fracture progressive politics, perhaps for decades to come.

Warren faces a choice: to preserve her legacy and galvanize progressives and the left by building a coalition with Sanders or she can betray her principals in pursuit of an empty, enervated political power.

But quite apart from what Warren decides, Warren’s supporters face that same choice. They too have the option of building a coalition with progressives and the left.

It would appear that this is what Sanders has always wanted, from the time he pleaded with her to run in 2016. That moment is still possible and Warren’s voters can make it a reality.

Joshua Davis is the Executive Director of the Institute for Christian Socialism.

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