Hasan Piker and the Dangerous Romance of Collapse

Hasan Piker sat down with Adam Mockler last week after the uproar he caused when he said that he would vote third party in a hypothetical election between Gavin Newsom and JD Vance. Unlike his more cavalier approach in earlier discussions, Hasan framed himself here as a committed Democratic supporter who puts significant effort into electing Democrats, even as he argues that the party repeatedly sabotages itself by clinging to center-left politics and tolerating corporate candidates.

That matters, because Hasan doesn’t merely claim that Democrats are ineffectual, but that liberal democracy itself is an obstacle to meaningful change.

In Hasan’s world, Democrats are losing because they capitulate. Kamala lost because she said she would have signed Lankford’s bipartisan immigration bill. Democrats allow 70,000 people to die through the ACA when they fail to implement socialized medicine. Newsom got too chummy with Ben Shapiro. Per Hasan, there isn’t anything he could possibly do to “outflank” the DNC if they constantly run on a moderate, center-left policy agenda and how bad Trump is. 

However, Hasan is running the same game. In his debate with Mockler, he said that socialist movements are more likely to rise from an illiberal regime, and he isn’t wrong. History has plenty of examples of authoritarian excess leading to revolution, but what happened next and who suffered first? If the Democrats are accused of running a negative-motivated strategy, what do you call letting things degrade in hopes of a collapse that forces transformation? At least Democrats are trying to save people; to Hasan, those people become collateral.

Democrats are seeking harm reduction and to protect people now. Hasan appears to prefer allowing a Trump government to force a break, only those pesky Democrats aren’t letting things get bad enough for his revolution to happen.

Hasan’s hypocrisy carried through the whole debate, and while I think Adam Mockler did a fine job trying to get Hasan to explain his dual messaging, there is an overarching hypocrisy in Hasan’s ideology that he didn’t hammer home. Hasan acknowledges that Democrats are better but then calls them the uni-party with Republicans. Hasan describes the policy differences between Democrats and Republicans as marginal, then tries to qualify that claim by conceding that those same differences can have major impacts on marginalized groups. That qualification undermines the original claim. Differences that materially affect people’s lives are not marginal, and calling them so functions as justification for disengagement rather than serious analysis.

So what if a core motivation to vote Democratic in elections is often harm reduction, or “voting for the lesser of two evils”. Hasan often focused on the people that didn’t get help under Democratic policies compared to his socialist dream policies. Hasan claims that socialized medicine would have saved 100,000 people, while the ACA only saved 30,000 people, compared to the insurance system before the ACA. That framing is revealing, because it treats partial success as moral failure. He acknowledges that Democrats are better, but then refers to the Democrats and Republicans as the uni-party, implying they are the same. He claims that the Democrats are leaving 70,000 people to die without socialized medicine, but that only works if the Democrats could have passed Medicare for All and refused. Democrats enacted what they could with the votes they had through the ACA and saved 30,000 people who would have died. When people like Hasan undermine that, or advocate in ways that don’t encourage people to support the Democrats so we can move toward that socialist dream, he is saying those 30,000 people are an acceptable sacrifice until people are desperate enough to vote in a way that saves the other 70,000. 

Same with trans people. Their access to healthcare, identity, and rights get thrown on the poker table for the all in bet so trans people also get access to sports. They are treated as leverage rather than protections. You know, that thing that affects like 10 people in the country.

Sorry, but these things aren’t marginal, and Hasan’s weird attempt to sane-wash his rhetoric doesn’t change that. Hasan and his ilk struggle to win through democratic processes, which makes illiberal routes feel more attractive as a means to enact their agenda. Since anger and fear are so beneficial, the leftists are banking on the idea that if they accelerate the Trump agenda, people’s anger and fear will create the conditions needed for their socialist agenda. 

History has plenty of examples where the left failed to coalesce and this has never led to a socialist utopia. The failure to coalesce and defeat Hitler is the most obvious example, and let me tell you, those leopards ate so good. In the final years of the Weimar Republic, the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) argued that the Social Democrats were “social fascists” and that liberal democracy was already a sham. Some party leaders believed that a Nazi victory would expose capitalism’s contradictions and radicalize the working class leftward. 

They thought Hitler would be the match that ignited their cause, until he outlawed them, destroyed unions, ended elections, and executed their leadership.

In examples where the socialists do get power, they didn’t rule a democratic paradise. In Russia, when the Bolshevik Party was able to take over, they didn’t bother to put one in place once they got the reins. They ruled as a one-party state where they purged citizens, and filled the gulags with former revolutionaries and political opponents.

Reform is messy, but movements that treat democracy as an obstacle don’t suddenly restore it once they have power.

Bernie Sanders-style social democracies don’t come from allowing conditions to degrade and treating marginalized groups as bargaining chips. They grow from things like Bernie Sanders actually does; consensus building, working with liberals in government, compromising to enact more progressive policies, maintaining power by not losing elections and building on these progressive policies once people realize they benefit from them and are comfortable with taking another step.

Harm reduction isn’t sexy, it’s pragmatic. It doesn’t promise a socialist utopia, but it protects more people now while showing others a better way. Using accelerationism to worsen conditions now in hopes of better outcomes later is like betting against the house after you give the casino to your enemy. History shows that method doesn’t have a good track record, and the people who pay first are the most vulnerable. 

If influential voices argue that preventing authoritarianism is less important than accelerating collapse as a political strategy, they share responsibility for the risks that follow.