BRIAHNA JOY GRAY: Let’s talk about something like Medicare for All, which Bernie has already done the work of making popular. It went from a 37% approval prior to 2016 to enjoying 90% approval among Democrats, high 60s% approval among independents, and 49% approval among Republicans even.

If you have a so-called socialist, a DSA candidate like AOC, who, by the way, now says that she is not a member of the national DSA. Right? She says, “I’m a member of the New York DSA, but not the national DSA,” which is not a thing you can do. That’s not a real thing. These are the kind of pivots that are getting made. And for what? For, I believe, a presidential run, but that’s really a vice presidential run. If our ambitions have gone from electing someone who will fight for and win Medicare for All to getting a socialist in the White House as the vice president, and that person is actively saying that Hakeem Jeffries should be Speaker of the House, when just this past week Hakeem Jeffries says that he does not support Medicare for All?

Then again, what are we doing? My previous image of the left winning and then having Black people come over— do I want this neutered version of the left to be the face of the left? And to shift Black people into what is another version of the status quo so that all those Black people in South Carolina, in Jim Clyburn’s district— Jim Clyburn, who takes more money from the pharmaceutical industry than any other member of Congress— can continue to deny them a right to healthcare so that it has some of the lowest health outcomes in the entire country that mirror some of those in the Global South, in the richest country in the history of the world? Is that what this work that I’m doing, that we’re all doing, and that the— collective left has been doing is for?

Look, I too would like to not be living an Upton Sinclair novel. That being said, that is not my job. I didn’t quit the law firm and take a pay cut ’cause I wanted to go back to the Clinton years.