days 19 through 24: the end

I write from New York. It is the end.

I have just come from an underground jazz club in the Village, where Rodney Jones was shredding in front of a band all of whom were simultaneously improvising. Rodney told us about how his career began – when Dizzy Gillespie plucked him out of a school band. ‘No you can’t drop out of school to join Dizzy Gillespie’s band,’ his father had said.

Having begun the blog endorsing Adorno, I must end it departing strongly from him. Jazz is radical – is subversive: this jazz, even this old guy, sounds like Right Now. Apologies for sounding like poorly written Ginsburg biopic.

Like most good music, it was both exciting, and extremely anxiety-inducing. To reflect the political moment perhaps.

I have done almost everything in New York. I will not bore you with the details, but there are some pictures. I’ve mostly been taking pictures of the ironic things and putting my camera away when having fun, so it makes my trip look a lot more boring than it actually was – ask me about the other stuff some time.

It felt so good to be back in a real city. None of this San Francisco nonsense. New York was just my speed.

Imagine some vaguely comic and interesting sentences about New York. I haven’t slept in 29 hours tbh. They have good pizza. Some insight there.

We should talk about Super Tuesday, I suppose.

It was, as you probably will have gathered, disappointing.

Joe Biden won the most states and the most delegates, including crucial victories in Texas and Massachusetts. Bernie won in California though!! The largest, most diverse state in America!! By a healthy margin of 8%. We smashed it in SF and Oakland too, so that was very pleasing to see that work come to fruition. I am apparently the Sanders campaign’s lucky charm.

Shoutout to the East Bay DSA who I spent the last couple of days and nights of the campaign with, and who were absolutely lovely, as well as setting a new benchmark in my series of political automobiles.

But there were some very disappointing snippets from the night. Massachusetts was a bitter blow, with the Warren + Bernie vote nearly double Biden’s total. Youth turnout in Texas was down, despite what we thought was a really strong campaign there. Biden massively increased turnout in Virginia and other states, turning out these mostly old people to vote for him.

There has been plenty of liberal sneering about the fact that Bernie has not managed to systematically increase turnout from 2016. But given that the polls continue to have Bernie on 60%+ of young people, surely the relevant counterfactual here is what if Bernie wasn’t running? How low would the turnout be then?! And what kind of politics is responsible for a situation in which young people feel permanently disengaged from the political process and like it offers them absolutely nothing? What kind of outcomes will that produce as the lives of the young get more and more desperate? Not one conducive to liberal sneerers, I’d suggest.

I feel incredibly angry about the prospect of Joe Biden winning. This is your guy? The candidate for whom you would dismantle an enormous and vibrant grassroots movement of your base and demoralise an entire generation? Joe Biden? Really?

Biden is now running a Boris Johnson-style campaign in which he tries to spend as little time actually showing his face as possible. He’s refusing to do Rachel Maddow – remember Andrew Neil. I am absolutely convinced his staff are using GE 2019 as a model. The more people actually see of him, the more they don’t like him, is the logic. No gaffes – no word slurs again, Joe. He spoke for 7 minutes at a rally today. 7 minutes.

It’s not surprising – he actually has very similar politics to Boris Johnson – if anything to the right of him on healthcare and with a longer history of reactionary social positions (if only by virtue of being alive longer). He was selected by Obama, of course, specifically for his conservatism. Ah, Obama ’08. Remember when a Democrat ran an unashamedly progressive campaign that promised material change and won handsomely, the only candidate out of Al Gore, John Kerry and Hilary Clinton to do so this millennium? Nothing to see there.

Joe Biden will lose to Donald Trump in November. Trump will maul him. Turnout will be low. Trump will win a second term, and, probably buoyed by winning the popular vote this time, will press forward towards dictatorship. Expansion of ICE’s operations, border violence, racist rhetoric, and child-caging; more Muslim bans; increase in fossil-fuel dependence; stacking the Supreme Court. Possibly a war with Iran. The ranks of the tired, poor and huddled masses will swell, but their yearning to break free will not be satisfied – quite the opposite.

There is a demographic of people, mostly older people, who have a form of liberalism which has become pathological. They cannot accept a modicum of change, or engage in the least bit of self-reflection. And it is killing people. It is killing young people. It is killing trans people. It is killing migrants. It is going to kill the whole planet. It is like they have a death drive but rather than for them it’s their own grandchildren – often as yet unborn.

The reasons that I have heard for voting Biden over Sanders, honestly. Most can’t actually give a reason – but I’ve heard that ‘Bernie’s supporters are too mean,’ or that ‘Biden can win the centre,’ etc. This is not based on any evidence (the polling shows the opposite), and it seems like absolutely zero lessons have been learned from 2016 – you know, that time something serious happened that we all said we should learn lessons from. It’s so banal. This stumble towards Biden. Divorced from actual politics.

When future generations reflect on the collapse of liberalism in the 21st century, they will mark as a seminal moment when the Democratic Party decided to run ‘woke’ Joe Biden against the incumbent Donald Trump.

In fact, liberalism’s chance to save itself was Bernie Sanders. I believe he is a socialist at heart, but his program over 4 or 8 years would not have amounted to much more than social liberalism. A social liberalism that might have been normalised in American political life. But, as always seems to be the case, the liberals miss the moment.

The race is not by any means over. In many ways, it has always been the goal of the Sanders campaign to get it down to Bernie v Biden, as the case to be made at that point is very clear. But the momentum coming out of Super Tuesday is a challenge to wrestle with. If we don’t win Michigan on Tuesday, then you’d have to say it becomes very unlikely. But I know comrades from Las Vegas working in Michigan and I have every faith in them and the team to fight to the last second. If we can win, we must win – a motto of ours in Nevada.

It has been a wonderful journey in America. I’ve loved every single minute of it, and I mean that about as literally as is humanly possible.

I’ve learned so much, and I feel humbled to have met so many of these amazing people. Thank you.

I am so lucky to have been touched by and contributed to a movement the like of which hasn’t been seen in America for a long time. Whatever happens, it is not going to go away.

And thank you for following this blog. I had some lovely comments which have made me feel warm inside. I plan to write little bits and bobs now and then and post them on here and maybe Medium, so do keep an eye out.

I anticipated, when beginning (and naming) this blog, that I would be entering what amounts to a proto-fascist state. I cannot report that I was mistaken. From Las Vegas to San Francisco to New York, America feels as if it’s in the death throes of an empire, and the means by which it maintains power as the world it created crumbles will be desperate and bloody.

It is decaying, frankly: the language in public space, the political institutions, the cultural fabric within which people lead their lives. In all three cities. The clearer its contradictions are, the more vociferously they must be hidden… the clearer they are. The idea of America, that is. Or capitalism. Alienation just hangs over every interaction. And everywhere they try to compensate with nostalgia, myth and the Nation.

A Nazi flag was briefly waved at a Bernie rally in Arizona this week. Today I was at the Immigration Museum at Ellis Island, where Bernie’s father entered the country at the turn of the 20th century.

We are in a moment of history not dissimilar from that which birthed jazz or Bernie Sanders’ parents. We must be ready, and we must be its equal this time.

There is a limit to what electoral politics can salvage, but there is not a limit to what movement-building like the one I have seen can achieve. Frankly I cannot see any alternative, if we want to have a safe, loving society on anything resembling a habitable planet.

And being part of that just by being one person, doing little things like making calls or knocking doors, as part of something bigger, with millions of people working to the same goal – the joy and collective bond that engenders – I can carry that home, and onward – a little ethic, if you will.