How the advent of social media gave rise to ‘fanfiction leftism’

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Episode Summary

In recent years, we have seen the rise of a new kind of left-wing pundit, one whose audience consists almost entirely of right-wingers.

And there is a good reason for that. Almost every one of these people do nothing but criticize Democrats, despite calling themselves progressives or liberal. There’s a long history of this on the political left, and this phenomenon exists in other countries as well, like the UK and Canada.

What motivates people who started off with some sort of leftish politics to gravitate toward right wing fans?

There are many reasons, as it turns out. Some of them originate in the intersections of libertarianism with other political ideologies. Other such commentators seem to have financial or emotional reasons for seeking Republican audiences. And still others seem to have a poorly developed understanding of how to build political change, which leads them to seek unproductive alliances.

In this episode, I’m joined by David Masciotra, a writer and author who recently wrote a piece in the New Republic entitled “Who Are These Supposed Lefties Who Love Robert F. Kennedy Jr.?” that we’ll be discussing. Also interestingly and relevant to this conversation, he had a libertarian phase as well.

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Transcript

MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: This is going to be an interesting discussion. Thanks for being here, David.

DAVID MASCIOTRA: Thank you for having me, Matthew. I appreciate it.

SHEFFIELD: All right, so, let’s set the table here, you wrote a piece last year for CNN in which you talked about the “fanfiction left.” What did you mean by that?

MASCIOTRA: Well, in case any of your viewers don’t know, fan fiction is a genre of writing in which fans of a series of novels, or a television series, or a series of films –could be Harry Potter or the Sopranos– start to write their own stories, perhaps to continue the storyline of the characters if the program ends. Or the author announces that a recent installment was the final in the series of novels.

So by fanfiction left, I’m describing a particular breed of American leftists or at least they identify themselves as leftists, and you’re right to say they exist in other countries, but I’m most familiar with American political discourse, who’ve created a fictional universe in which they live and operate. And they base assumptions that they have on that fictional universe on those false precepts.

So in the CNN essay, I was referring specifically to people who spend all of their time castigating Democrats while claiming they’re progressives, for the failures of our health care system, for the failures of our criminal justice system, for the rising rates of economic inequality, while conveniently ignoring that it is Democrats who, while not perfect (no political party is) are striving to address, mitigate, and even solve those problems; but they’re colliding with the obstructionism of increasingly partisan but also increasingly violent and hateful Republicans.

And so, there are a few principles of the fanfiction left, for example, when the Supreme Court revoked Roe v. Wade and overturned that decision, you saw certain people like Krystal Ball, she identifies as a left-wing populist. She’s co-host of a program called “Breaking Points” with a right-wing populist.

You saw Briahna Joy Gray, a former spokesperson for the Bernie Sanders campaign and several others lambast the Democratic Party for not codifying Roe v. Wade without ever acknowledging that it’s Republican appointees to the Supreme Court who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade. It’s Democratic appointees to the Supreme Court who voted to preserve it.

And at almost no point within the last 30 to 40 years. Did Democrats even have the votes to codify federally protected abortion? And should they have tried to have done that, it certainly would have gone to the courts and their right-wing justices would have overturned it.

So they created, I’m using that example to show they created this fictional universe and then they make ideological assertions based upon that fictional universe.

Whereas here in the real world, the reason of course that Roe v. Wade is no longer on the books and no longer protecting women’s right to choose an abortion is because of right-wing Supreme Court justices, the presidents who appointed them, and Mitch McConnell’s refusal to give Merrick Garland a hearing and all of those other incidents and issues that we could tick down the list.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. I would maybe push back a little bit on this particular point, just simply because they could have done what Republicans did, which was pass trigger laws, as they called them, that said if Roe v. Wade is overturned, then this would happen. And those can’t really be litigated because, well, the case was still precedent.

But I think it is a very fair criticism on a lot of the other issues. So whether that’s why can’t we have universal health care magically; there’s this idea of we’re going to “force the vote,” we’re going to “force the vote,” as they called it, to make Democrats go on the record as to whether they support universal health care or not. Even though they knew that they would lose that vote.

MASCIOTRA: Yes.

SHEFFIELD: And let’s say that it had happened, basically what they would have done is damaged their cause. Because basically it would have shown that all these people can go and vote against universal health care, and nothing will happen to them. Because you don’t have the infrastructure to stop them or to push back on them.

MASCIOTRA: Yeah, that’s a good point. And there’s a general lack of awareness and recognition of the way in which government works, the way in which politics works and perhaps most consequentially, there’s a lack of concern about the people who stand to lose the most according to this all or nothing philosophy.

So if we take a look at healthcare, the Affordable Care Act barely passed during the Obama administration. It passed by a very small amount of votes. Very famously, it was almost overturned during the Trump administration. Senator John McCain saved it with the iconic thumbs down moment on the Senate floor.

The people who would say, well, we need to have Medicare for all or nothing. And people were saying that at the time that Democrats were saying that, or I should say, at least so-called progressives were saying it at the time that the Affordable Care Act passed. They don’t even seem to deal with the fact that through the Affordable Care Act, over 20 million Americans gained access to health care coverage for the first time.

The Affordable Care Act, while it certainly has its flaws, and while there are certainly still some pretty big cracks in the canvas of the Affordable Care Act through which people can fall, it has literally saved the lives of millions of people. And it was under the restraints on the Obama administration and Congressional Democrats at the time, it really was the best that they could do.

Had they gone for a public option at the time, Susan Collins, Murkowski, and others would have voted against it. Should they try to force the vote, and in the false belief that they’re exercising some kind of sophisticated form of brinksmanship, as you just pointed out, it would actually hurt the cause, and it would do nothing to help people who so desperately need medicine to acquire it. So people who so desperately need to be able to go see a doctor.

So another part of the “fanfiction” aspect is a detachment from the real consequences of the political process. It’s a world of theory; and oftentimes the theory sounds good on paper, but in practice it’s disastrous. It doesn’t have an on the ground application.

SHEFFIELD: The other thing about this is, and I why I think the fanfiction metaphor is appropriate, is that fanfiction is sort of dependent on another work. Somebody else’s creativity, somebody else’s system.

And in this sense, they don’t have a system that they want to create. I can’t fault them for wanting to have universal health care. And it’s fair to blame Democrats for not delivering on the promises that they made. I mean, it is fair and 100 percent true that many of these senators, like Kamala Harris, had endorsed Bernie Sanders’s bill.

So it’s appropriate to be upset at them for having betrayed what they said they would do. But if you don’t have a system that can actually mete out punishment or can mobilize people in favor of your ideas, then all you’re doing is just, you’re just tacking on to somebody else’s game, and then you’re whining at them for not going along with rules that favor you.

And that’s how it’s similar to fanfiction. Fanfiction is dependent on the creativity, the fiction of somebody else. A system that someone else built. And it’s a fun thing for people, but it’s not, it is not literarily as high of a form, and it just simply doesn’t deserve as much respect.

MASCIOTRA: Yeah, and I think that another way that we could criticize Democrats before I get to your broader point, is for their rhetorical timidity. You raised a very good example, and another one is that we could look at, for example, President Joe Biden. He has said many times that he wants to create tuition free community colleges.

That’s a wonderful idea. As I wrote in my book on Jesse Jackson, it was part of his campaign for the presidency in the 1980s, and it was called radical and fringe and extreme at the time and impractical. Well, now it’s become rather mainstream within the Democratic Party. But it’s something that key figures mention now and then, and they don’t aggressively advocate for.

So I think that’s a very fair compare our criticism of the Democratic party, that they do have this rhetorical passivity in which they don’t pursue arguments using the bully pulpit, and using their power of sociocultural influence as they should.

But unless one can actually delineate a strategy, delineate exactly how we get from –back to healthcare, for example– the Affordable Care Act barely passing and then barely surviving to creating Medicare for all. It’s just kind of a fun distraction.

But it has very significant serious consequences because people who are in the audience of these fanfiction pundits are taking that analysis very seriously.

And if they turn against the Democratic Party for reasons that are illegitimate, and for reasons that are specious, that can have very destructive real-world effects because we’re in a battle right now for the survival of democracy against a Republican party that is increasingly extreme, increasingly hostile to democratic norms and institutions, and increasingly willing to either defend or downplay violence as a political instrument of change.

And I would return to something referencing Jesse Jackson again, so he’s always been to the left of most mainstream Democratic Party figures, but he’s put it very simply using a sports metaphor that we do better, we, meaning the progressive left, we do better when we can play offense rather than defense.

And when Republicans have power, whether it’s at the state level or the federal level, the best that left of center activists and officials can do is play defense. And we saw that during four disastrous years of the Trump administration and eight disastrous years during the Bush administration.

When Democrats are in power, what activists who’d like to see the party move to the left should do, instead of reserving all of their vitriol for Democrats and imagining a world of make believe in which Biden, or before him Obama, could just wave a magic wand and create transformative institutional change, is start pressuring Democratic congresspeople, Democratic senators, to adopt more progressive positions and to live up to those promises that they made.