Andom Ghebreghiorgis and the Limits of Left Electoralism

For various reasons, I avoid political campaigns.  I just can’t get excited about them, in part because electoralism has so thoroughly colonized the US left.  In a healthy intellectual culture, its predominance would be automatic cause for skepticism.  Unfortunately, these days sickness feels compulsory.  Rejecting electoralism invites disdain and derision. 

Amid the bickering on the US left about the utility of voting, a compromise usually emerges:  voting is merely a form of damage control that one performs every few years before returning to the serious stuff.  But the rhetoric of voting supersedes the physical act. In turn, elections have become a nonstop preoccupation.  The off-season no longer exists. 

When candidates become politicians, they have a tendency to abandon important elements of their platform, thereby undermining their original appeal (almost always it happens with foreign policy, but healthcare is another common site of backtracking).  I don’t want the stink of betrayal on my conscience.  (And I’m uninterested in “educating” people whose supposed ignorance is deeply incentivized by the ruling class.) 

Moreover, I’m not the sort of constituent who can do an aspirant to higher office any good.  The main thing I can offer is disrepute.  I figure it’s better for everyone if I stay out of the way. 

I was therefore surprised when Andom Ghebreghiorgis reached out to me some months ago to discuss his congressional campaign.  Andom (in keeping with his election literature, I’ll use his first name) is running in New York’s 16^th district, which spans northernmost Bronx to the bottom half of Westchester County.  Despite his dubious judgment in contacting me, I found him to be a fascinating candidate.  I’ve been thinking about what his candidacy so far reveals about left electoralism (i.e., running or endorsing candidates for office in service of a broader socialist project; or affirming the importance of voting from a leftist point of view). 

I don’t want to rehash debates about the phenomenon.  I’m more interested in dynamics of power within the culture of left electoralism—how handlers and opinionmakers curate political brands according to market conditions and thus reproduce vital features of the bourgeois system they claim to oppose.  Those dynamics don’t invite scrutiny because left electoralism sells itself as virtuous, as a kind of insurgent realism that transcends the muck of duopoly. 

A lot of leftist (or left-ish) outfits practice electoralism, but none has the reach and appeal of the Democratic Socialists of America [DSA], a large (and growing) organization with various publications (some without formal affiliation), a significant presence in academe, and a stable of eminent pundits.  If you’ve encountered an argument in favor of upending the Democratic Party from within—more or less, some variation of achieving socialism through reform—then chances are it came from a DSA member or somebody aligned with its mission. Although DSA membership is heterodox, the organization’s most visible attribute is loyalty to Bernie Sanders.  (From its quarters, I’ve seen the following argument presented in hundreds of variations:  every Democratic candidate for president is terrible on [insert issue] except, of course, for Sanders.) 

I’ve chatted a bit with Andom, who is a DSA member.  He’s an impressive person:  smart, gracious, friendly, knowledgeable.  He answers my questions with complete sincerity (and always intelligently) and has provided insight into the challenges of running for office in a corrupt and constricted system [my adjectives, not his].  I’ve offered no advice about his campaign.  I wouldn’t know where to begin and much prefer the ease of chitchat to the soul-killing tedium of wonkery.  I’ve made plenty of friends online.  I’m glad to have found a new one. 

Andom has a standard democratic socialist platform on domestic issues:  more investment in public education, Medicare for all, cancellation of student loan debt, affordable housing, and so forth.  He’s more radical than his peers around foreign policy.  In fact, he rides hard for Palestine and for the Global South more broadly.  He doesn’t hedge opposition to imperialism with appeals to save America’s wayward soul and other variations of US exceptionalism. He speaks about the dignity of its victims. 

It’s a noteworthy approach.  When it comes to imperialism, star politicians of the left who are otherwise firebrands morph into world-class dissemblers, sloshing around in vagueness, timidity, and doublespeak.  Progressive and democratic socialist candidates have mainstreamed discussion of grotesque wealth and corporate greed, but only superficially challenge a political economy reliant on Indigenous dispossession, coups d’état, covert meddling, and mandatory peonage to Western capital.  Left electoralism has a poor record in the area of US foreign policy. 

Andom addresses these problems and so it’s no surprise if you’ve never heard of him.  The large community of DSA pundits and intellectuals has virtually nothing to say about his campaign.  He’s getting some coverage, but nothing close to hype.  Rank-and-file DSA members have provided encouragement and support, but luminaries haven’t taken up his cause.  The absence of hype is curious.  A DSA media industry adept at ballyhoo has been put to use on behalf of candidates much less “socialist” than Andom. 

As of now, the only significant demsoc group to endorse Andom is The People for Bernie Sanders.  He’ll have an opportunity in the coming months to snag local and national DSA endorsements (such things are mired in bureaucracy).  Sanders himself hasn’t stumped for Andom, however.  Neither have Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (one district over), Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar (a fellow East African), Rashida Tlaib, Cynthia Nixon, Julia Salazar, Lee Carter, Tulsi Gabbard, or Ro Khanna.  He hasn’t appeared on shows and podcasts popular among democratic socialists, such as Democracy Now!, The Young Turks, Intercepted, The Katie Halper Show, and Chapo Trap House.  A search for Andom at Jacobin Magazine, the de facto organ of left electoralism, turns up zero results.  Ditto The Baffler and Current Affairs.  If these people and publications have promoted Andom, it was in such a way that can’t be found through a simple online search. 

Why the silence, though?  Of Eritrean origin, he has a more compelling, and less tortured, immigrant story than Salazar.  He’s better on Palestine than Tlaib and Omar.  He’s not boring like Nixon and Carter.  He resembles Ocasio-Cortez in terms of age, location, and sensibility.  Like Ocasio-Cortez, he’s challenging an unpopular centrist Democrat.  Journalists covering the NY-16^th race have noticed the parallel, attributing his candidacy to the “Ocasio-Cortez effect” (a young, energetic person of color going after an establishment politician).  But AOC hasn’t said a word about him, either. 

Two things work against Andom:

1.) A candidate endorsed by the Justice Democrats, Jamaal Bowman, is running in the same district.

2.) Andom has thus far maintained a strong anti-imperialist outlook. 

Although Andom and Ocasio-Cortez are visually similar, she is closer ideologically to Bowman.  The Justice Democrats endorsement provides mainstream credibility and signals to centers of power that they’re not dealing with a legitimate threat, but a reformer who can be expected to maintain domestic order and facilitate foreign extraction despite occasional gestures of radicalism.  The ruling class isn’t locked out of left electoralism.  It influences decision-making and media coverage.  The Justice Democrats are involved with most of the prominent demsoc politicians, which will preclude them from boosting the actual socialist running in Bowman’s district (assuming they would be inclined to boost an actual socialist in the first place).  The hype will fall to Bowman.  He has already been interviewed by Jacobin and Current Affairs and enjoys some corporate media attention, along with steady social media chatter. 

Andom would need to moderate his foreign policy platform in order to generate institutional support.  Nobody so hostile to Zionism (not Israel, mind you, but Zionism) becomes a media sensation in the United States.  Tlaib, remember, launched her campaign with a J-Street endorsement, and Omar, although viciously targeted by the Israel lobby, has written tweets and op-eds that are painfully conventional.  Anti-Zionism and electoral politics are fundamentally incompatible. 

Likewise, Andom’s unambiguous opposition to US meddling around the globe—in contrast to the well-oiled affectations of Sanders and The Squad—provides serious incentive to keep him on the margins.  Arbiters of political stardom need something they can sell to the elite. Anti-imperialism is an untradeable commodity.  Prioritizing the well-being of people in the Global South is also fundamentally incompatible with electoral politics. 

Electoralism necessarily tracks right and its socialist iterations are no exception.  The system is designed for that purpose.  (DSA founder Michael Harrington, for example, was an adamant anti-communist and a supporter of Israel.)  Campaigning requires brand equity, glad-handing, and appeasement.  I’m not chastising leftists who vote, nor am I dismissing electoralism as a possibility.  People want a say in how the world is managed.  Voting can satisfy that desire or serve as a stopgap on the way to more exciting possibilities.  I’m highlighting the properties of electoralism as a way to encourage meaningful conversation.  Too many smart people labor under the illusion that socialism can be voted into existence.  That illusion is currency for hustlers who view “socialism” as a means to prestige and influence. 

By revising its core tenets for greater appeal (and access to liberal institutions), left electoralism diminishes socialism.  By emphasizing celebrity, it cultivates an assemblage of ruling class stooges in leftist cover.  You can like it or not, support it or not, but by now it should be clear that the electoral arena in the USA possesses no revolutionary potential.  Match this knowledge to your political inclinations and move forth accordingly. 

It would seem useful, though, to guard against turning elections into four-year events and to cease treating critics of electoralism as beyond reason.  The intolerance of dissent in particular depletes our critical faculties (or at least inhibits our ability to use them).  Consider the swiftness and savagery with which the state shuts down (or co-opts) sites of revolutionary organizing both at home and abroad:  Indigenous nationalism (pipeline protests, armed revolt, land reclamation efforts); insurgent Black politics (Paul Robeson, the Black Panthers, the original Ferguson activists); basically anything anti-Zionist (but especially that of a socialist disposition).  We would do well to deemphasize US political culture and seek communion with like-minded people around the world. 

This point is central to Andom’s campaign.  That the campaign has been so unmarketable tells us less about his skillset than about the limits of left electoralism.  In the coming months, I’ll be observing NY-16’s congressional race.  Will Andom’s campaign catch on?  If so, what conditions allowed it to happen? 

Or will that campaign continue to be largely ignored?  If so, it raises a different sort of question:  under what conditions can people in the USA nurture a revolutionary politics if the most popular option reifies the system we propose to abolish?