Acclerationalism: history’s dumbest political strategy

It’s “if we throw the election to Trump it will increase our influence within the party” season, and the arguments have not improved since the last round:

This is the dumbest strategy and is conceived by high people who have no understanding of politics or have paid attention to Trump and his white Christian Evangelical base. https://t.co/JmWEjoXmmX— Wajahat Ali (@WajahatAli) October 19, 2024

Eric Levitz goes into this at greater length:

All this said, I suspect that anyone who believes a Harris defeat would strengthen the party’s progressive wing is kidding themselves. On the contrary, I think Trump’s election would push the Democrats rightward or at least consolidate the moderate turn that the party has already taken.

This would not be a happy development, from my perspective. Under Biden, the Democratic Party’s positioning on many issues has been to the right of my own preferences. I believe the United States would be best served by a more generous social welfare state, higher levels of immigration, and a foreign policy that showed less tolerance for the human rights violations of US allies. But the political case for some degree of moderation in the wake of a Harris loss will be plausible. And I believe that case will win out for three reasons:

First, the unusual conditions that led Democrats to move left after their first loss to Trump no longer hold.

Second, one of progressives’ perennial arguments against the political necessity of moderation — that Democrats can mobilize low-propensity young and nonwhite voters through bold progressivism — has grown less credible over the past eight years.

Finally, a Trump victory would almost certainly lead to a full extension of his 2017 tax cuts — and, if the Republican gets his way, new reductions in corporations’ tax liabilities. This would swell the federal deficit, thereby rendering moderate Democrats more averse to ambitious new social welfare spending, such as that proposed by Biden during his first year in office.

This is not to say that a Harris loss would cause Democrats to re-embrace the across-the-board centrism of Bill Clinton’s second term. Rather, Democrats would likely remain staunchly progressive in areas where left-wing positioning has little political cost.

But losing a second election to an undisciplined reactionary probably won’t convince Democrats that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were insufficiently left-wing on immigration, criminal justice, or fiscal policy. A second Trump victory would therefore probably mean not only a more conservative federal government, but also, in all likelihood, a more moderate Democratic Party.

The idea that Democratic elites will see the lesson of a defeat by turning the keys over to its leftmost faction if Stein gets 1.2% of the vote instead of 0.8% is essentially self-refuting. Indeed history is clear on this point — Ralph Nader, to put it mildly, did not increase his influence within the Democratic Party by throwing the 2000 election to Trump.

At this point some Nader dead-enders will chime in to deny that Nader influenced the outcome, or to claim that if events have multiple causes nobody bears any responsibility for them. This is wrong, but more to the point what matters for evaluating the accelerationalist argument is the perception that Nader threw the election to Bush. It made Nader a pariah, not an influential member of the party.

But the response is in itself instructive, and a clue that very few people actually think accelerationalism is right. The vast majority of Nader apologists don’t say “damn right he threw the election to Bush and it worked so well we should do it again,” they say “Nader was a smol bean who had no impact on the outcome of the election how dare you say that.” And I guarantee that the vast majority of people saying that it would be good to throw the election to Trump to punish the Dems over Gaza or whatever else will deny responsibility for affecting the outcome if Harris loses. Because the idea that deliberately throwing the election to a horribly unfit president everybody else in your coalition despises will make you more popular within the party is extremely dumb. On some level, everybody knows it — it’s an attempt to provide an intellectual veneer for what is essentially a temper tantrum.

As for the “this right-wing authoritarian can be easily contained and manipulated to our own ends” argument, this is not only nonsensical on its face but literally has the worst track record of any political strategy in known human history. I would say that we should probably not try it again.