A Profile in Courage?
A response to Max Elbaum’s “Profiles in Political Cowardice”
By Joe Allen
Historian, writer, and political activist Max Elbaum appears to have a lot of free time on his hands these days. Scouring the internet looking for enemies to attack, he’s chosen the small circulation Tempest magazine and the marginal political organization, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) for his wrath. Berating them both as “political cowards,” his polemic has circulated among left websites, including Portside, Znet, and the Stansbury Forum. Since I’ve had several articles posted on the Stansbury Form, and have been associated with Tempest in the past, I thought I’d respond to Max’s bizarre rant. Tempest responded here.
Max is in very open about his political motivation:
“It’s no secret that I advocate a vote for Kamala Harris in 2024 to prevent the MAGA authoritarians and fascists from taking control of the federal government. I’ve argued in numerous articles and webinars that advocacy of abstention or a third-party vote is a profound error that underestimates the danger of MAGA, misunderstands the way working-class and revolutionary organizations can build political power, and does nothing to strengthen our immediately urgent or long-term Palestine solidarity efforts.”
How supporting the party that has been a co-partner in Israeli genocide in Gaza and arming the current expansion of the war into Lebanon strengthens “long-term Palestine efforts,” Max has no answer for.
Max appears to be especially annoyed with Tempest. He quotes Tempest writers Ashley Smith and Natalia Tymlin:
“…what should the Left do [in the November election]? First of all, we should not argue with individuals about what they do at the ballot box. That is not the key question and debate to have. Instead, we must argue that activists, social movements, and unions should not spend our time, money, and energy campaigning for Harris as the lesser evil.” (The other Tempest article, by Collective member Natalia Tylim, offers the same punchline: “I want to stress that I’m also not going to spend my time or resources arguing with individuals about how they vote as individuals out of their fear of Trump.”)
Max refers to this as “punting,” and adds gratuitously, “What we have here is a new twist on an old adage: When the going gets tough, the tough…. change the subject.”
If Max was making a criticism of Tempest from the left, I might have actually agreed with him, except that he was striking from the right in support of the candidate, who is co-leader of the world’s greatest military empire currently dripping with the blood of Palestine. This isn’t exactly a profile in courage, and quite the opposite, I’d say.
Max then lumps Tempest in with the DSA leadership, which I’m sure many in both groups would find amusing. He writes:
The new “Workers Deserve More” program for 2024 recently announced by the national leadership of DSA is similar in essential respects. In a vein similar to Tempest, the program declares: “We recognize that a second Trump victory would be catastrophic for the international working class. Relying on the Democrats to defeat Republicans isn’t working.”
I’m pretty sure that history has proven time and time again that, “Relying on the Democrats to defeat Republicans isn’t working.” I’ve written the same thing many times myself. In fact, why was Counterpunch left out of Max’s target package?
Max qualified some of his attacks stating, “a certain respect is due to those who advocate abstentionism or third-party voting: they put their politics out there and fight for them. That’s a serious way to do politics.” I don’t get the feeling that Max is annoyed that Tempest and DSA are not campaigning for Jill Stein or Cornel West, it’s that Tempest more strongly than DSA are critical of the “lesser-evil” political strategy that is deeply embedded in the U.S. Left.
After all, where are Max’s polemics against the cowardice of the Democrats for getting Jill Stein and Cornel West off the ballot in many states? Where were his calls for an open Democratic convention, where the questions of U.S. aid to Israel and Palestine could be openly debated, instead of the White House coup and coronation of Kamala Harris that we got, instead? Or is Max doing what he does every presidential election and supports the Democratic Party’s candidate?
Max finishes his rant by getting up on his high-horse:
There is an unfortunate history of organizations not doing so and, like Tempest and the DSA national leadership today, substituting “bold” radical pronouncements for biting the bullet and making a difficult choice. There is even a term for this practice — “revolutionary phrasing-making” (or “the revolutionary phrase”) — coined by none other than V.I. Lenin:
Revolutionary phrase-making…is a disease from which revolutionary parties suffer…when the course of revolutionary events is marked by big, rapid zigzags. By revolutionary phrase making we mean the repetition of revolutionary slogans irrespective of objective circumstances at a given turn in events, in the given state of affairs obtaining at the time. The slogans are superb, alluring, intoxicating, but there are no grounds for them; such is the nature of the revolutionary phrase.
Seriously? Lenin, who raged against the Second International for capitulating to the mass slaughter of WWI and the national chauvinism that destroyed the old socialist movement, is used in service to supporting the leading party of U.S. imperialism today? I think Max is guilty of what he charges Tempest and the DSA leadership with, using revolutionary phraseology to disguise reactionary political positions, far too common a method of argument in the Maoist/Stalinist political currents that emerged out of the U.S. New Left, and that he largely honors in his book Revolution in the Air.
For me, I think the bigger target behind Tempest and DSA is the Uncommitted movement, which did so much to bring Palestine into mainstream politics and has pried open a small but important space challenging the deadening “lesser-evil” approach to politics. As I wrote earlier this year after the Michigan Democratic primary:
While some Arab-American Democratic Party officials boosted the [Uncommitted] campaign, including Abdullah Hammoud, the Mayor of Dearborn, and Michigan State Representative and Majority House leader Abraham Aiyash, it is largely driven by a younger generation of Arab-Americans. “We’re experiencing a revolution,” said Lexis Zeidan, a 31-year-old Palestinian American organizer and spokeswoman for Listen to Michigan told National Public Radio (NPR). “We’re no longer going for the lesser of two evils.”
The prospect of Biden losing Michigan in the November presidential election is openly discussed, and the prospect of Trump returning to power hasn’t, so far, swayed pro-Palestine activists from campaigning against the Biden administration. “I’m going to live under Trump, because I survived under Trump, because he’s my enemy,” Palestinian-American Nihad Awad, co-founder and the national executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), told New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow. “I cannot live under someone who pretends to be my friend.”
Recently, the Uncommitted campaign announced that it wouldn’t be endorsing Harris for President. The Guardian reported,
“Vice-President Harris’s unwillingness to shift on unconditional weapons policy or to even make a clear statement in support of upholding existing US and international human rights law has made it impossible for us to endorse her,” Abbas Alawieh, an Uncommitted leader and delegate from Michigan, said during a press conference on Thursday.
However, the movement’s leaders who helped mobilize more than 700,000 Americans to vote “uncommitted” or its equivalent in Democratic party primaries throughout the nation also acknowledged the danger of Donald Trump winning the election.
The Uncommitted campaign’s positions appear dangerously close to those of Tempest and DSA. Why hasn’t Max hurled lightning bolts at the Uncommitted campaigners? Max is correct in arguing that there is a choice to be made in November, and for the short and long term goals of Palestine solidarity, it’s not supporting the Democratic ticket.
