Washington Monthly - September/October 2023 - 109

on political books
the subway, reading about why they're
wicked and should feel bad, ensuring
that their next interaction with a
Black coworker will be strained and
awkward, and lining the pockets of
white editors, white publishers, sometimes
white authors in doing so.
DeBoer is so insightful and pushing
obviously intelligent prescriptions that
it feels a bit unsporting to point out that
the failure of the political system to respond
to Floyd's murder with the sweeping
reforms that are plainly needed
wasn't chiefly the fault of the left-even
the smug, virtue-signaling, censorious
left that has him so wrung out. Rather,
reform failed because Republicans
didn't want it to pass. Even Mitt Romney,
who admirably bucked the Trumpist
currents in his own party by joining
a protest march after Floyd's killing,
didn't support the Democratic police reform
bill.
That kind of progress will require
electing more Democrats. DeBoer
is
characteristically clear-eyed and sensible
about the need for leftists to get behind
this important (but ideologically
unsexy) effort, even when it entails supporting
moderates like Joe Biden. He
has good ideas about how to do so.
The left, he says, should quit obsessing
over " ephemeral and inconsequential
cultural
issues. "
It
should
drop
the off-putting academic jargon. And
it should return to a focus on class
and to meeting the material needs of
working people. Washington Monthly
readers will find most of what he prescribes
to be solid advice for advancing
a left-of-center political agenda. What
makes DeBoer's book transgressive is
that he's aiming it at a younger generation
of activists for whom winning
the votes of, say, white working-class
Trump supporters isn't axiomatically a
good thing.
But it is, of course, a necessary thing if
Democrats are to win back the governing
majority they'll need to pass actual
reforms. It's especially necessary for
securing the kind of robust social democratic
state that leftists are after. And
its prime beneficiaries, DeBoer notes,
without projecting a great deal of confidence
that his audience will be receptive
to the point, would be precisely the
oppressed minority groups that activists
on the left are forever claiming to
speak for. If they'd focus on electing
Democrats, they'd finally be in a position
to deliver for those groups, rather
than just bicker over whose turn it is to
talk next.
Joshua Green is a contributing editor at
the Washington Monthly and author of the
forthcoming book The Rebels: Elizabeth
Warren, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria OcasioCortez,
and the Struggle for a New American
Politics.
Screwing Heads On Straight Since 1969
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Washington Monthly - September/October 2023

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Washington Monthly - September/October 2023

Contents
Washington Monthly - September/October 2023 - Cover1
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Washington Monthly - September/October 2023 - Contents
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