The 48 Hours That Broke The Left

Two Days In March 2020 Changed The Course Of The Progressive Movement

For the past few years, I’ve been involved in social circles with left-of-center people who were once hardcore progressive activists but have mellowed and begun to forge a path that is more moderate or even conservative. The feeling amongst this group of people is that at some point a few years ago the core of the progressive movement went off the rails and became something unrecognizable to what it was during the Occupy Wall Street and Bernie Sanders eras. Over and over again, we’ve had the same debate and discussion: When and how did this happen? How did this movement go from being one that is uplifting and focused on fairness and justice to a movement locked in a cynical and self-sabotaging doom spiral?

I’ve thought a lot about this and I think the inflection point was two late winter days four years ago; March 10 and 11, 2020.

The effect didn’t show itself until several months later. Still, the root of the misanthropic and self-destructive behavior that has been a calling card of progressivism for the last few years was born out of events that happened in those two days.

Tuesday, March 10th

After 2015, the progressive movement birthed during Occupy Wall Street became almost entirely intertwined with the Bernie Sanders campaigns. For weeks leading up to the 2020 presidential primaries, progressives believed, despite the evidence to the contrary, that they were in the driver’s seat. Bernie Sanders had been the runner-up in 2016, and many, perhaps most, thought he lost due to interference from the Democratic National Committee. In a fair fight, he’d easily win because voters like his ideas and he was getting big turnouts at rallies, such as the one held in Queens in October 2019. Many were sure the Democratic electorate would have seen Hillary’s nomination in 2016 as a mistake and in 2020 would nominate Bernie, correcting that error.

His only real competition was former Vice President Joe Biden, whose consistent lead in pre-primary polls was dismissed as “name recognition.” Progressives shook off massive underperformances by Bernie in the Iowa Caucus, which he lost to Pete Buttigieg, and the New Hampshire primary, where he got the smallest winning margin of any candidate since Pat Buchanan in 1996. It didn’t matter that Bernie was only winning with 25-35 percent of the vote, even a plurality win would be enough to force the party to give him the nomination.

Then came South Carolina on the last day of February 2020. Most expected he’d lose, but figured it would be close. To my surprise though, there were plenty in my orbit who thought he would win. Biden, who many Bernie supporters thought was finished after a poor showing in Iowa and New Hampshire, won the primary by almost 30 points. Over the next few days, leading up to Super Tuesday, several other candidates dropped out and endorsed him including Buttigieg and Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar. This consolidation concerned Bernie’s campaign, who felt it would give Biden a leg up on Super Tuesday.

Indeed on Super Tuesday, Bernie dramatically underperformed, losing key states his campaign expected to win like Maine, Texas, and Minnesota. In Selma, Alabama, the capital of the Civil Rights Movement, Bernie finished third behind Biden and Mike Bloomberg, the architect of a racist Stop and Frisk policing policy. It was a massive letdown.

Disappointed and angry, Bernie supporters blamed the other candidates for dropping out and backing Biden. They engaged in a wild conspiracy that former President Barack Obama and “the DNC” – their eternal boogeyman – engaged in backroom deals to get them to drop out. They bet everything on one last primary, Michigan, on Tuesday, March 10th.

The Michigan Primary saved Bernie in 2016. His surprise narrow victory over Hillary Clinton allowed him to stay in the race for a while longer and gave his flailing campaign a huge jolt. It also foretold the problems Hillary would have in the general election, where she narrowly lost Michigan to Trump. Progressives hoped for a repeat in 2020.

It wasn’t so. On March 10, Biden won the Michigan primary by almost 17 points. He swept every county in the state, including Washtenaw and Ingram, home to the University Of Michigan and Michigan State. The defeat meant lights out for the Bernie campaign and his supporters that night didn’t handle it well.

A shocked Michael Moore, who promised a Bernie victory earlier in the night, struggled to explain his loss on MSNBC. The Young Turks’ Cenk Ugyer had a meltdown and predicted Biden wouldn’t beat Trump because he was “senile.” On social media, one Bernie campaign surrogate, who also predicted a win, was beside herself. She, rather hysterically, pondered how Bernie could possibly lose “when we had the memes,” referencing, I suppose, Bernie’s online operation. The vibe was apocalyptic. Disappointment turned to despair and anger. Promises to vote third party were made. Anger turned into bargaining, with some Bernie supporters first threatening, then begging, Biden to accept Bernie or someone from his wing of the party as his running mate. Several suggested then-Bernie supporter and now MAGA-supporter, U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii.

When the American Left went to bed on March 10, 2020, it felt like the dream was over. They needed something, anything, to validate their desire for dramatic social change and force it on the public that clearly didn’t want it.

Wednesday, March 11th

The Coronavirus was already a global story when grieving progressives awakened on March 11. Italy and China had already instituted strict lockdowns as virus control measures, there were cruise ships in quarantine and there were already a handful of cases in the United States.

March 11 was when COVID-19 got real. The World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic and later that night, the NBA canceled its entire season, evacuating Chesapeake Energy Arena in Oklahoma City dramatically right before the start of a game because two members of the opposing Utah Jazz had tested positive for COVID-19. Within two weeks, nearly the entire country – and the entire world – had shut down. People were told to stay home, non-essential business was shuttered, and hospitals were slammed.

For leftists though, the disruption to society caused by the pandemic offered a new opportunity. With most people unable to work, or unable to engage in distracting social events like sports, vacations, concerts, and parties, now was the opportunity to finally showcase a world without Capitalism and individualism. We were being forced into collectivism, making selfless sacrifices for the good of society, and forced to look at nothing else but the carnage the “system” had wrought.

For leftists, March 11 allowed them to channel the grief and disappointment in Bernie’s loss the night before into a new campaign, that of remaking society through a global crisis, rather than electorally, which had failed them. If most voters didn’t want to join the revolution to overthrow the status quo, the SARS-COVID2 virus would give them no other choice.

Weeks and months went by. Prominent voices on the left would engage in discussions about the “new normal” and would declare that “we are never going back to normal,” and perhaps never should. Capitalism and racism brought us to this point, they would argue, by allowing SARS-COVID2 to become a pandemic. We would have to curtail our economic output, stop traveling, stop working and existing in congregated communities, and even stop eating meat. We would have to wear masks everywhere we go, regularly submit to testing and, if one was created, be forced to get vaccinated. The idea of “degrowth” gained prominence among leftists, which I wrote about last summer.

Progressives have never fully processed Bernie Sanders’ 2020 loss, and his defeat was still raw when the COVID-19 Pandemic slammed society. The Left channeled their grief and anger over the unexpected 2020 defeat in an unhealthy direction, by throwing themselves fully into the idea that if society won’t be persuaded to accept change, it will have to be forced on them through collapse. This was not only so they could rebuild it but also as retribution for rejecting their righteous revolutionary ideas. The social disruption caused by the pandemic provided them a convenient venue. From now on, we would have to live like prisoners in our own homes, we wouldn’t be allowed to celebrate, travel, or enjoy good food and good times. Fun, they decided, was evil because “fun” reinforced, validated, and sustained the evil Capitalist system that fosters inequality and human cruelty.

The Left channeled their grief and anger over the unexpected 2020 defeat in an unhealthy direction, by throwing themselves fully into the idea that if society won’t accept change, it will have to be forced to through collapse.

Nobody Likes A Pity Party

Four years later though, it’s clear they were wrong. Society has almost completely returned to normal. Practically no one wears masks and if anything, we have become even more individualistic and less open to the type of collectivist socialist society progressives wanted. States like Florida and Texas have defanged public health. Frustration over vaccine mandates and online propaganda people ingested during lockdown led to a jump in vaccine skepticism and a rise in young people going unvaccinated. The result of this has been outbreaks of once nearly eliminated diseases like then measles. Attempting to force change on society just made things worse.

Progressives’ fortunes in elective office have also regressed. From 2017 through 2019, progressives were winning elections in major cities across the country, often by knocking out or replacing longtime incumbent Democrats who had fossilized in their offices, representing constituencies that had dramatically changed. The election of progressives like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, and district attorneys like Chesa Boudin of San Francisco, Kim Foxx of Chicago and Larry Krasner of Philadelphia gave the movement a jolt and lead many, myself included, to believe progressive fortunes were on the rise and they would soon start winning in purple and red areas.

Since 2020, however, there has been little good news for leftists. Their governing majority in cities like Seattle, Philadelphia and New York have evaporated. Boudin was recalled and progressives have lost several ballot initiatives in San Francisco. Foxx will be replaced by a much more tough-on-crime DA this year. In Pittsburgh, once a shining beacon of progressive success, leftists lost the District Attorney race last year and only narrowly won the Allegheny County Executive’s race, in a county that voted by Biden by 20 in a state that saw a Democratic wave on the same night. This regression has a lot to do with how progressives reacted during and after the height of the pandemic. Turning a blind eye to the spike in crime and disorder, whether because they were in over their heads on how to handle it, or thought chaos would help foster the change they wanted, left a bad taste in voters’ mouths. The negative effects of draconian COVID measures, such as learning loss among young people due to school closures and inflation due to supply chain issues, added to the ill will. Once staunchly Democratic groups, like Asian-Americans and Hispanics, shifted right. Democrats, who had tried to co-opt the Left when their fortunes were rising pre-2020, got caught in the undertow, leading to some ugly election results in blue states like New York. As a result, many Democrats who once embraced progressives, like Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, have been keeping their distance, and Democrats who have made a public effort to spurn them, like Rep. Tom Suozzi of New York, have held their own.

There’s a growing feeling within the movement that their time has passed for now, and there is no short-term path to victory, electorally or other. If a pandemic that shut down the world for months on end didn’t trigger massive social change and move toward a socialist egalitarian society, would anything? The result of this is what my friends in healthcare have described as “an unprecedented mental health crisis” especially among politically active young people.

Years of arguing that the world will have no choice but to adhere to their worldview, or perish, have led many young progressives to believe we’re now all doomed to perish. This type of fatalism has devastated the mental health of many young people and other progressives, and social media has provided an unhealthy outlet for them. Rather than seek the mental help they need, these progressives are encouraged by grifters to wallow in their doom and assign virtue to it. It’s not only unhealthy, it’s destructive to society.

The public they expected to rally behind them a decade ago has rejected them. This has led to feelings of betrayal and bitterness. There is also a belief that it was Trump who provided the fuel for the ascension of the Left pre-2020 and it would serve the movement well to have him return to the White House as a foil that would spark a progressive renaissance. This has led to suggestions to sabotage Biden’s chances at reelection no matter the cost.

Like the Hamas militants they now idolize as brave resistance heroes, many leftists are prepared to blow themselves up to hurt the rest of us who have wronged them for self-serving delusions. Society would have to pay for rejecting them, and social media charlatans are taking advantage of the unprocessed grief and anger and fanning the flames.