An Open Letter to Progressives

If You Want to Fight in 2024 for What You Truly Believe in, STFU until 2025.

Nov 30, 2023

Yesterday, Johnthan V. Last wrote a caustic but helpful, honest and frankly accurate depiction of the coming 2024 Election. In it, he cautions progressives to calm down, be more compromising, and for the sake of the election and American Democracy, vote for Joe Biden. He also warns that some of the things they adamantly demand may have to be on the back burner during 2024 and not to push these too hard:

It’s an excellent piece, one I wholeheartedly endorse and strongly encourage everyone to read. Long story short, they need to start falling in line or risk losing the election to Trump again.

But the main issue can be summed up best by Aesop’s fable about the Fox and the Grapes. In it, the fox has grapes in his mouth and comes across a pond. He sees a reflection in the pond of a fox with grapes in ITS mouth. Wanting not just the grapes he has, but the ones held by this "other" fox, he opens his jaws to try to snatch the other fox's grapes only to lose the ones he already has, dropping them in the pond and losing everything.

If progressives undermine Biden in any way that allows Trump to win, not only are they going to lose the election, they're going to lose everything they've achieved up until this point and more. That is something I don't think they recognize yet.

So in the spirit of making it plain as day, I offer this message to Progressives:

Dear Progressives,

In 2024:

If you push hard for Trans Rights and puberty blockers for minors, Trump will win.
If you distill everything down to race as the primary and only issue in America and call anyone who disagrees with you a racist, Trump will win.
If you continue to protest for Palestinians using anti-Jewish verbiage and symbols, Trump will win.
If you argue we should change the Electoral College so you don’t have to consider the middle of the country, Trump will win.
If you work to remove a statue of Abraham Lincoln from the town square of a town named Lincoln that you also want to rename, on account Lincoln may have used the N word back in 1860, Trump will win.
If you continue to refer to people from Latin American countries as “Latinx”, Trump will win.
If you vocally support drag queen reading hour, Trump will win.
If you push for student loan forgiveness while working class people labored only to get stuck with the bill for your liberal arts degree, Trump will win.
If you shut down an interstate to protest for a Green New Deal, Trump will win.
If you continue to whine about your wages in this economy, Trump will win.
If you continue to call Israel “colonizers,” Trump will win.
If you work to unionize the local Starbucks only to get a $1/hr increase in wages and Starbucks increasing costs of coffee $2, Trump will win.
If you continue to promote and expect identity virtue signaling, Trump will win.
If you even toy with the idea of voting for Jill Stein, Cornel West or whoever the No Labels Party throws up, Trump will win.
If you continue to alienate those on your side but who don’t agree with everything to the extent that you do, Trump will win. Probably by 20.

To be sure, all of these are important issues, particularly for Democrats. However, election years are not the time to take hard line stances on anything. Election years are times to compromise, soften those hard edges, look presentable to the unaligned voters and present to them a portrait of a happy, winning team. Whatever issues are most important to you, those can be ironed out and worked towards after the election when you’ve won.

If you choose to make a stink about them though, exacerbate the large and growing cracks in a fractious coalition, you will lose. Badly. You won’t be able to get anything you want done for the issues you claim to care so much. In fact, there is a very good chance your opponents, who won, will spend time rolling back all the progress you’ve made on these issues to the point you’re back at square one.

And when 2028 rolls around and Democrats have to create a new coalition to get them to the White House, they’ll look at how you handled yourself this year and consider you unreliable. They’ll work harder to get the votes somewhere, anywhere else because the uncompromising group of individuals can’t be relied on to win. You know how you become politically irrelevant? It’s not by taking a position or working hard for it, its by being on the losing side one too many times. You know how you become politically toxic? By pushing away more potential voters than your advocacy brings in, a problem many progressive groups have and continue to demonstrate, even go out of their way to prove.

So seriously, do your best to STFU in 2024. The louder you speak and the more you push yourself to the center of the stage, the more likely a fascist wins. I mean, sure, if you’re gay and want to go back into the closet, by all means, dress garishly fabulous and glitter bomb Biden at some point to make your case heard. That’ll help ensure Trump wins. If you really want to continue using fossil fuels because you like driving your Escalade to pick up your kid from school a block away and want to crash the green economy because Tesla charging stations took your parking spot, get Greta Thunberg to showcase a rally outside a gas station charging $2.75 a gallon. Trump would love that. If you really want to see every person of Hispanic heritage kicked out of the country altogether, start calling as many people as you can in Mexico and Central America that the door’s open and they should start a caravan! Trump would drool at the possibility there.

But if you really do care about Gay/Trans Rights, the environment, immigration, and a host of other issues that most of us trust Biden on a helluva lot more than Trump, and you really want to continue having the capacity to promote those issues in a functioning democracy, you’ll put a smile on your face, bite your tongue, and STFU.

For the sake of Democracy, PLEASE STFU.

PurpleAmerica’s Final Word on the Subject

Some of the best advice I ever got about politics was when I was working in DC, I met a longtime political operative and consultant. To this day I remember the best advice he gave: “If you shout at a dog all day, it’ll never come to you. And the louder you shout, the more the dog will run in the other direction. If you want it to come, you need only stay quiet and hold out your hand. Then every dog around will come over to you whether you want them to or not.” He meant it specifically as a slight to the people who spend most of their days shouting at protests and harshly vocalizing their advocacy. “It’s counterproductive,” he would say. “A much more productive relationship is one where each side says ‘I got you’ (you don’t even really have to say it, a nod would do) and work together towards those goals. Then all you have to monitor are the results, and all there is to maintain is the friendship.”