Tag Archives: Bernie Sanders

Don’t fear the Bern.

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23

With Super Tuesday primaries concluded, it is looking like the Democratic presidential nomination will be a two horse contest much like it was in 2016, with Joe Biden replacing Hillary Clinton as the centrist pick backed by the Democratic National Committee (DNC). Bernie Sanders once again carries the underdog aspirations of the progressive wing of the party. This year Sanders represents a more significant threat to the centrists than he did in 2016, and they have worked very hard to disparage him as “unelectable” and “”too radical” for the American voting public. I believe that this may be a wrong assumption to make.

Let’s address the issue of Sander’s socialism first. He professes to be democratic socialist, running as such under the banner of “Independent” throughout his political career until registering for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016. But his “socialism” does not include socialising the means of production or doing anything other than using tax policy to redistribute wealth downwards, reforming health and education so that they become affordable to lower and middle income earners, promoting public works projects, re-establishing the role of the State as a macro-manager in economic areas prone to excess or abuse and diminishing support for fossil fuel production and defence spending.

Everything else on his policy agenda, while different than those of his opponents (say, when it comes to the US relationship with Israel and Palestine), may be alternative but are not socialist per se. In fact, all of his policy prescriptions are more akin to those of European social democracy than to democratic socialism (where the decisions about socialising the economy are done via democratic processes) because capitalism as a socio-economic construct is not challenged or replaced. It is just humanised and re-oriented towards the welfare of the majority, not of the elite minority. Sanders himself has pointed out that the stress is on the “democratic” in his democratic socialism, so it does not appear that he is doctrinaire when it comes to policy outcomes.

To this intrinsic aspect of his political philosophy can be added the extrinsic constraints on what he can do. The structural power of capital in the US is not going to be seriously challenged, much less undermined by a Sanders presidency. The US economy and its social relations of production are deeply rooted in notions of private property, self-initiative, “free” enterprise and a host of other market-focused orientations that transcend the business world. The US remains a huge economic engine that, even if it has lapsed into cowboy, crony and parasitic capitalism in places (such as the financial and health industries) and is very dependent on the State for its competitive edge (say, in awarding of defence- and other technology-related contracts), is largely impervious to whole-scale reform or collapse.

Along with an economy that is “too big to fail,” it is best to think of the relationship between US capitalism and the presidency as that of a monkey driving a machine–it is not so much the monkey that matters but the ongoing movement of the machine. In that light, Sanders can play the role of the monkey, acting as a corrective that tries to reign in the baser urges of the cowboys, cronies and parasites now dominating the US economic engine without impeding the forward momentum of the entire combine.

Added to the sheer structural inertia that must be overcome in order to reconstitute US capitalism is the political influence that it wields. Corporate influence permeates all levels of the US political system. Its influence is corrupting and often corrosive in places, and it extended deep into the Democratic Party–particularly the Party’s centrist, corporate-friendly faction. As Poulantzas wrote, the capitalist elite is not homogeneous and is divided into ascendent and descendent class fractions. The GOP defends the interests of the descendent class fractions that represent fossils fuels, auto manufacturers, agricultural interests, the military-industrial complex and traditional financial sectors. Democrats represent high tech, telecommunications, renewable energy, new financial sectors and other nascent and ascendent industries. The Democrats also represent, however diminished in presence when compared to the 1960s and 70s, the organised labour movement in traditional manufacturing industries as well as the public sector.

The capitalist class divisions in the US are not razor sharp and there is some overlapping in their political representation (for example, pharmaceuticals and insurance), particularly when the lobbying interests incorporate cultural idioms (such as the case with the gun lobby). Needless to say, there a host of other non-economic interests represented in the political system, although identity and value-based groups tend to aggregate in polar fashion (say, among ethnic, LBGTQ and religious communities). The main point is the centrist Democrats are corporate Democrats, not progressives, and for all of the talk of the “Gang of Four” leftist female representatives, the majority of Democrats in Congress are underwritten by and represent the corporate interests of the capitalist class fractions that they are associated with.

A Sanders presidency will therefore confront not only a hostile Republican opposition in Congress and in states dominated by Republicans. It will also have to contend with the very centrists that tried to impede his nomination in the first place. These corporate/centrist democrats will demand concessions and challenge anything that see as too radical to pass as law. That means that a Sanders policy agenda is likely to be watered down if it is to be implemented, which means that the final product will be anything but radical. The end result will be an incremental approach to policy reform, not revolution.

Sanders has already reframed the narrative on universal health to the point that some variation of single-user pay is likely to meet with congressional majority approval (assuming that the Democrats hold the house in 2020). He would be smart if he allowed for private health insurance schemes to co-exist with the public option (as in many other liberal democracies), since that will allow those with disposable incomes to afford things such as elective or cosmetic care outside of the public health system. The larger point is that he has offered some alternatives and initiatives that could well find support in Congress, especially if his election victory over Trump is significant. The greater the margin of his victory, the more a mandate he has within the Democratic Party as well as amongst the national electorate, and a large win will also help diminish GOP resistance to post-Trump corrections because in defeat Trump will have few political friends.

All of which is to say that although Sanders has many constraints on what he can do once in office, he potentially will have enough political clout and flexibility to pass legislation and enact significant reforms even if they cannot be described as “radical” or “revolutionary.”

It is true that Trump and the GOP dirty tricksters relish the opportunity to run against Sanders, who they see as easily beatable in a general election. The Republican smear machine is primed to go all out with its Cold War style fear-mongering. For them, Biden is a harder opponent to defeat because he cannot be painted into an ideological corner and tarred by spurious associations with the demons of the bi-polar world past.

But just like the centrist Democrats, the GOP may be wrong in its appraisal. Many younger voters are not frightened by the epithet “Socialist!” and have no memory of the Cold War. Bernie’s cantankerous independence from machine politics is seen as a positive. It is therefore possible that they will turn out in numbers that otherwise will not be seen in support of a Biden candidacy. The defensive “anyone but Trump” vote might be enhanced rather than diminished by Sanders. After all, Bernie represents a true break with the Swamp, whereas Biden is its product and Trump is basking in it while trying to monetarily benefit from the immersion. So it could well be that dismissals of The Bern are premature because his strengths as an honest alternative within the Democratic Party outweigh his weaknesses as an outsider in a system that is rigged in favour of insiders (for example, via the use of Superdelegates as tie-breakers in the Democratic National Convention).

What is clear is that the DNC fear a Sanders nomination not so much because they think that he will lose to Trump but because he represents a threat to THEIR interests. Even if diluted, his policy reforms will target them as a first order of business, as a way of clearing the path for substantive reforms in the policy areas in which they are vested.

Hence the disparaging of Sanders and downplaying of his chances at a general election victory. The proof of whether the anti-Sanders campaign has worked will come in the next two weeks when a cluster of primaries are held, including in Florida where I, just as a did in 2016, voted (via absentee mail ballot) for the Bern. If nothing else, just like then, my rationale is that even if Sanders does not win the nomination, if he gets a substantial amount of delegates he will have influence on Biden’s policy platform. Biden needs Sanders’ supporters to back him–and many “Bernie Bros” have said that they would rather sit on the couch or vote for Trump than see another corporate Democrat dash their progressive aspirations–so my thinking is that if the convention vote is close or at least not a Biden landslide, then the centrists will have to negotiate with Sanders over the campaign platform in order to get him to endorse Biden and encourage his followers to join the “anyone but Trump” camp.

Given the obstacles in front of him, Sanders may not be able to implement the progressive agenda that he campaigns on and which his supporters yearn for. But when compared with Biden, he certainly is not more of the same. Building on the momentum of the 2018 mid-term elections, perhaps that is the best we can hope for.

Moment or Movement.

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13

Barring some disaster, Hillary Clinton will win the US presidential election in November. That poses an interesting question for the US Left, because the defensive support for her offered by Sanders supporters and other progressives in the face of the Trump alternative can only be considered to be more than a short-term tactical ploy if her administration adopts progressive policies. Otherwise it is, as many have accused, continuation of politics as usual or Obama 2.0. This is, of course, at the heart of the negotiations between the Sanders camp and Clinton’s people at the DNC policy platform meetings, and it remains to be seen if the Clintonites will make good on their promises.

That brings up the perennial problem for political activists: how to turn a moment into a movement. US commentators are already using the phrase with regard to the Sanders primary run and the impact it will have on a future Clinton presidency. Some think that he has run his course, that status quo Democratic policies will prevail, and that the forces that his campaign galvanised will either go mainstream or dissipate into another pool of apathy and disenchantment. Others believe that to the contrary, the Sanders campaign has stirred new life into the American Left and that his campaign legacy will have an impact on how Clinton approaches the Oval Office.

It is a tough one to call. It is clear that Clinton needs to cater to Sander’s supporters in order to win the election. She cannot dismiss them before November 8 but could in theory do so afterwards, especially if the Democrats regain control of the Senate (they only need to win four seats) and make inroads into the Republican House majority (the Democrats would need a turnover of more than thirty seats to regain control of the lower chamber). The situation is made worse for progressives if Clinton wins by a landslide (anything over seven points) because she can point to a “mandate” that does not include them. That will be also be the case if political nihilists on the Left opt to “blow up the system” by voting for Trump or minor party candidates in large numbers. The latter will tighten the race unnecessarily (in Clinton’s eyes) and will, should she win, see her turn her back on the post-modern New Left wing of her party (I use the term “New Left” not in the sense of the 1960s Left but in the sense that post-modern progressives in the US are not in their majority affiliated with unions or other traditional organisational sources of Democratic electoral power). After all, she can say that they turned on her and she still won because the US political centre preferred her over Trump. She can feel justified in believing that she does not need the New Left to govern and therefore should not push policy initiatives at their behest.

Assuming a Clinton victory, the ideal situation for US progressives is twofold: most of Sanders’ supporters and others on the Left opt to vote for Clinton and she wins by a relatively close margin (say, between 3-5 points); and vote for Democratic candidates in key congressional districts knowing that a progressive presidential agenda needs congressional support in order to become law. That requires voter education (on the whys and hows of linking down-ballot choices to the presidential race and how executive-legislative relations can impact decisions with long-term consequences such as Supreme Court nominations) as well as mobilisation in favour of the progressive policies adopted by the DNC at the platform negotiations (and perhaps more).

In that preferred scenario, because Clinton will understand that she absolutely required a groundswell of New Left voters to win a close race, it will be harder to abandon them once victory is achieved. Even more so, it will be virtually impossible to renege on the progressive agenda if key wins by Democrats in Congressional races were owed to the participation of New Left voters.

So the Bernie “moment” in the primaries also has to become a dual proposition in the general election and post-election phases of the campaign if it is to become a movement. The New Left need to continue to mobilise in support of Clinton during the weeks leading up to November 8 and they need to continue to pressure her administration, both directly and through the elected Congressional candidates who needed their support to win, after she assumes the presidency and the 115th US Congress is convened in January 2017.

In other words, the transformation of the Sanders moment into a New Left movement requires one other “M:” momentum. That momentum has to be sustained through November and into the next administration and congressional term if the moment is to become a movement.

That is where some dark clouds arise on the Clinton electoral horizon, and they are not caused by Trump. In the purported interest of “balance” (regardless of the outright campaigning on his behalf by conservative media outlets), mainstream news organisations are delving into her emails while Secretary of State, into her relationship with Clinton Foundation donors while in office, into why she does not hold press conferences (which is patently self-serving on the news agencies part) and even into spurious conspiracy theories about her health. These investigative efforts go beyond reporting on official FBI investigations of Clinton’s use of a private email server during her tenure as SecState and in spite of the fact that none of her activities while in office have been linked to any policy decision or personal favour offered on her part. For reasons known only to Julian Assange and his comrades, Wikileaks has targeted her communications and those of the DNC, both independently as well as in cooperation with Russian-based hackers, while neglecting to do so with those of Trump and the RNC.

Any one of these lines of inquiry have the potential to divert attention and resources away from her policy agenda and could even derail her campaign if found to contain seriously negative substance (nothing of which has been found so far in spite of the best efforts of the Trump campaign and its media lackeys). So the onus is on Clinton to re-energise her support base in the face of these dishonest and scurrilous attacks and to re-focus on the policies that she will bring to the Oval Office and share with her Congressional colleagues. That is where the New Left vote is vitally important. Just as Trump has his core base in middle aged white working class lower educated people, Clinton has a core base in urban professionals. But both of them need to expand their appeal outside of those cores, and it is the New Left that Clinton needs to court most assiduously. That gives the New Left leverage on her and they need to know how to judiciously take advantage of it.

To be sure, the GOP is working to separate the New Left from Clinton. It may not get the attention that trying to divorce Trump from down-ballot GOP candidates has received from the RNC, but Republicans clearly want the Sanders crowd to alienate from Clinton whether or not they vote for another candidate like Jill Stein (Green). For the GOP, getting the New Left to stay at home rather than vote is just as important as getting them to adopt the nihilist approach of voting for spoilers.

This is made interesting by the fact that Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson is polling at around 10-12 percent and has received financial backing from erstwhile big GOP donors, while Jill Stein is polling around 5 percent. Usually third party candidates barely receive 10 percent of the vote in a US general election, so the fact that these candidates could receive 15  percent or more changes the dynamics of the presidential race quite dramatically. That reinforces the need for Clinton to get out the New Left vote on her behalf in significant numbers, something that will allow her to build momentum in the run up to election day and which in turn means that she must accept the fact that the Bernie moment has become a progressive movement. This will annoy her backers on Wall Street and corporate America, but they also can see the dangers of having a populist demagogue with Tea Bagger tendencies occupying the White House. For them as well as many on the New Left, she is the lesser evil.

It will be interesting to see how things play out over the next 9 weeks. Two things are certain: every vote will count this time around and what is now a moment of opportunity can only be transformed into a sustainable movement if the New Left puts, however reluctantly or sceptically, its collective weight behind the Clinton campaign in order to build the momentum of progressive change beyond election day.

Let’s hope that I am not wishful thinking.

Bernie the spoiler.

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12

Things are getting interesting on the Democratic side of the US presidential primaries. Although Hillary Clinton is on pace to win the nomination, Bernie Sanders continues to dog her steps with wins that keep him, if not within striking distance of securing the nomination himself, close enough in delegate count and popular support to narrow the gap between them to the point that she cannot claim a decisive mandate as the nominee. That is important because if the trend continues, and especially if he can stay close or win in California in early June, he can arrive at the convention armed with demands that will have to be met if he is to throw his support behind her in the general election. There is already talk of him running as an independent (which is what he was until he entered the Democratic primary). That would prove disastrous for the Clinton campaign and could turn the presidential race into a mirror image of two divided major parties having candidates from within their ranks running as spoilers against their convention nominees.

Let us be very clear on one thing: Bernie is right when he says that the Democratic nomination process is stacked against him. Between interest group super delegates whose loyalty is pledged to Clinton regardless of primary results to the closed primary process itself, there has been concerted effort by Democratic party bosses to keep his numbers down by denying independents the right to vote and counter-balancing the popular vote with super delegate selections. He has, quite frankly, been cheated on more than one occasion and that does not even take into account the more underhanded tactics used against him by the Democratic National Committee.

This spilled over recently in the Nevada Democratic convention, where a pro-Clinton state party chairperson overruled Sanders supporter’s motions and sat Clinton delegates rather than those pledged to Bernie. The convention descended into chaos and the chairperson, a woman, was inundated with vicious misogynistic physical threats mainly from the so-called “Bernie Bros,” presumably angry young men. Although Sanders issued a one line sentence condemning violence in a three paragraph statement about that convention, the bulk of it was dedicated to highlighting the underhanded moves made by the chairperson and her minions. He followed that with a victory speech after the Oregon primary (which he won handily) in which he remained defiant, belligerent and determined to take his campaign to the convention. He does not appear to be in the mood for reconciliation with Ms. Clinton.

Needless to say, Democratic Party leaders, Clinton supporters and many liberals are freaking out over this. They see Sanders as a sore loser given that he knew what he was getting into when he joined the party last year in order to run for the nomination. They see his candidacy as interfering with the streamlined selection process that was supposed to result in a unified consensus backing Clinton. More importantly, they see his intransigence and talk of a third party run as handing the keys to the Oval Office to Donald Trump, especially given that some Republican Party luminaries are lining up behind the Orange Crush as a matter of partisan duty regardless of what the consequences may be should he become president. In fact, however reluctantly, the Clinton haters within the GOP and their media surrogates appear to be coalescing behind Trump at the same time that the fractures within the Democratic Party are getting more pronounced. No wonder Democrats are freaking.

I am less concerned than my liberal US friends about this because I think that Sanders is playing his cards correctly. The reason is because I think that what he is playing is a variant of the “moderate-militant” strategy. A moderate-militant strategy is one where a militant objective is announced as a first negotiating point and pursued until an opposing actor makes moderate concessions to the militant. Rather than the militant goals, the real intent is to secure moderate gains. The militant starting point is just a negotiating ploy designed to force the opposing side to move towards it in the hope of securing an agreement.

In the Sanders version, the strategy is to run his campaign on “socialist” principles all the way to the convention. By playing hardball and not wavering before it, he forces the Clinton camp to accept the fact that without him they cannot win and with his supporters opposed they will certainly lose the general election. If Sanders arrives at the convention armed with a strong contingent of delegates in spite of all the manoeuvres against him, he can threaten to tell his supporters to either not vote or cast their ballots against her in the general election. In that case it is very likely that Clinton will concede on important issues and incorporate them into her policy platform before she is declared the nominee. This decision will be made easier by the GOP partisan consolidation around Trump, which brings closer to reality the heretofore unimaginable prospect of his presidency. Given her own negatives, she can no longer rely on loathing of Trump as a guarantee of a defensive vote turnout against him. She needs Bernie more than he needs her, and his playing tough all the way to the convention is a way of underscoring that point.

The worst thing that Sanders can do is concede or pull out of the race before the convention. Were he to do so he would lose any bargaining position he might have had at the convention because for the militant-moderate strategy to work it must be held steadfast until the other side makes a conciliatory move. Given their differences, including opposing views on whether to embrace corporate reform and accept special interest political financing among many other things (such as the US position on Israel-Palestine), it would be a waste of all the time, resources and effort he and his supporters have put into his campaign to abandon it before they have a chance to make their case at the common gathering. Instead, the best bet for his voice being heard strongly at the convention is to press on all the way to it, and then some.

Under no circumstances should Sanders accept Clinton’s assurances on key policy issues in return for his quitting the race and throwing his support to her. I would not trust the DNC and Clinton camp as far as I could throw them. Instead, he must make a condition of his support that the party write in the concessions to his policy demands into the presidential campaign platform adopted at the convention. It may not make for an airtight guarantee once she is elected but it will be much better than relying on her good faith that what was promised will be delivered come January 2017.

If the Clinton camp is smart they will realise that Sanders has brought something new into the party, which given the polarisation of the country and who they are running against, can be a key to their success in November. They must understand how he is playing the game and why he is doing so. They must understand that offering him a position in a Clinton administration is not what he is after and would not suffice to mollify his supporters in any event. They must study their positions in advance and see where they can concede readily and where negotiations on substantive issues will be harder. But what they must understand most is that the chances of a Clinton victory in November rest as much on gaining his support as they do on her own qualifications and experience.

If that is understood, the remaining primaries can be contested vigorously (if not honestly) with a mind towards clearly demonstrating the policy-based platforms of the Democratic candidates versus the empty rhetoric, simple-minded prescriptions and opportunistic bombast coming from the other side. Once that is done, the convention can become not only an arena of contestation between contending ideas about how to take the country forward, but also an opportunity to exchange concessions in order to present a unified front to the voting public. Therein lies the recipe for success in November.