We are all just this screwed: Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton and our muddled, perverted democracy
Hillary will be the nominee this fall. Time to examine what Bernie achieved and how it might go different next time
The consensus is not complete, but it will be soon enough. Bernie Sanders is not going to make it, as some of us forecast many months ago (and as a lot of Hillary Clinton supporters, having pitifully diminished aspirations, assumed from the first). The dream now being all but definitively over, we must look to the post-Sanders period in this political season. What did he get done, what mark does he leave and where lie his failures? In all cases, why have things turned out as they have?
For my money (if not my vote), Sanders has made two of the most consequential decisions of any presidential aspirant now out on the hustings. One was choosing to run as a Democrat even though he has stood outside the party since his student days as a Harringtonian democratic socialist in Chicago. The other was his judgment—apparently more considered than Sanders and his people have let on—to opt out of the disgraceful ritual wherein all political figures striving for high office must touch their foreheads to the floor at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
One at a time.
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Why did Sanders throw in with the Democratic Party when he decided to reach for the Oval Office? What was the point of sitting in Congress as an independent all those years if, when he looks up at the dangling brass ring, Sanders associates himself with a party that has step-by-step abandoned working-class interests from the mid-1960s onward? Amanda Marcotte, one of Salon’s political writers, posed these questions last week. They are good ones. There is a not-so-simple twist of fate buried in them.
Good questions are good, however, often because they are not so easy to answer.
On one hand, the tale of the Democratic Party’s “realignment,” filled as it is with mistakes and misjudgments, simply has to be plain to someone of Sanders’ political sophistication. Jacbobin, which has made itself must reading in a matter of a few years, recently published Paul Heideman’s superb account, to be found here, of the Democrats’ transformation from New Dealers into what we see before us: a party of professionals, technocratic elites and NPR-addicted suburban liberals who have no habit of thinking for themselves and whose interest in labor or any kind of properly left agenda is more or less zero.
There sits Sanders. Since announcing his candidacy last year he has walked among people even more cynical than the Republicans, in my view, given that they survive by surfing atop an honest political tradition and devouring the straight-ahead aspirations of most—so we would find if we had a credible political process and a principled press—working Americans.
It is hard to figure, for on the other hand Sanders arrived as a presidential aspirant with a domestic agenda vastly more worthwhile than anything put before American voters since Roosevelt’s day. This he should have advanced from within his own tradition as an independent, as some people understood from the first. Sanders’ departure from his own achievement is where the fateful part lies.
He was wrong to run as a Democrat in any number of dimensions. One, Sanders’ positions are wholly at odds with the interests of the thoroughly realigned party leadership, now known as “New Democrats.” Nobody is going to pry these people away from the reigning party orthodoxy, which is neoliberal and imperial. Two, Sanders had already planted the “independent” flag in the Senate, making him a third-party legislator who is missing only a party.
Last but most of all, there is the question of the mark left behind. As of this week even the Sanders camp, in a tacit acknowledgement of defeat, is talking about the impact the Vermont senator wants to exert on Clinton’s platform as it is shaped at the party’s nominating convention. The ambition seems correct but misplaced. It has long been understood that an important aspect of the Sanders campaign, win or lose, is his brave willingness to change the very language of American politics and shift the conversation leftward. Two problems, however.
One, how long does anyone seriously think Hillary Clinton will continue calling herself “progressive” once the Sanders threat is out of the way? At the latest she will revert to type the morning after she secures the election in November. Two, how much greater would the Sanders legacy have been had he left behind a third-party apparatus with a formidable ability to raise funds outside the patronage system and speak directly about the dysfunction endemic in our political process?
There are at least two ways, maybe more, to understand the Sanders-as-Democrat phenom. One reflects badly on Sanders and the other badly on the rest of us. They both have to do with his judgment as to what time it is in our great nation.
It could be that Sanders thinks—against much evidence, I would say—that the American political system as now constituted is capable of self-correction: Stay within the established frame and anything can be done in the providential land of the free. Anyone who continues to make this civics-class assumption after the Supreme Court’s theft of the 2000 election or, at the latest, the Citizens United decision a decade later spent too much time in the Scout troop.
One of the questions the Sanders campaign just has to raise among right-thinking people is what now amounts to a weird allegiance among us to elections as guarantors of justice. Maybe once upon a time but not in ours. In the ocean of reading that washes across my desk daily, somebody recently wondered whatever happened to the street. Good question. How can we frankly accept that the political process has been effectively taken away from us and at the same time act as if elections are the only avenue open as we try to get things done?
Politics in America has been turned into spectacle over the past four decades—a ritual reenactment serving to legitimize power as it is now distributed. There is very little more to it. This is a recognition of considerable magnitude. Given our near to total immersion in the illusions presented by the spectacular, it is difficult to hold on to this recognition, but we must. Then we must ask what responsibilities this reality places upon us.
Bernie Sanders had no intention of facing us with this question, surely. But he has.
These are some of the things the Sanders attempt requires us to ask as his campaign goes gracefully down. An old, politically seasoned friend wrote at the start of the year, “We need the 1960s on steroids.” In my read it will eventually come to this. In this connection, Sanders may have revealed over the past year a faith in elections long typical of Michael Harrington and the rest of the “D-Sock” crowd but emphatically out of date now. If this faith drove democratic socialist Sanders to run as a Democrat, he got it dead wrong.
The other way to consider Sanders-as-Democrat is to ask whether a serious judgment lies behind it. Maybe Sanders’ earnestness as a political figure—a desire to win by any means—led him to conclude that the American environment will not, as of now, sustain a party formation outside the system structured in the mid-19thcentury precisely to circumscribe popular political discourse. He had no choice but to pose as a Democrat, then.