Later published at Egalitarian Planet (June 27th, 2020)
“Now these candidates are trying to carry water on both shoulders. They declare they will give both labor and capital a square deal, and I want to say that is impossible. No man can be for labor without being against capital. No man can be for capital without being against labor… If you increase the share of the capitalist, don’t you decrease the share of the workers? Can a door be open and shut at the same time?” —Eugene Debs, Labor & Freedom (1916)
“All political parties are alliances of groups with disparate interests, but the contradictions in the Democratic Party coalition seem unusually sharp. The Democrats posture as the ‘party of the people’ even as they dedicate themselves ever more resolutely to serving and glorifying the professional class. Worse: they combine self-righteousness and class privilege in a way that Americans find stomach-turning. And every two years, they simply assume that being non-Republican is sufficient to rally the voters of the nation to their standard. This cannot go on.” —Thomas Frank, Listen Liberal (2016)
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Let’s begin bluntly. Over the past three years, the Democratic Party has avoided like hell any discussion about its philosophical future.
The biggest evidence of this is the non-stop discussion of the “Russia meddling” scandal among Democratic establishment figures and mainstream media. This, despite the fact that former DNI chief James Clapper, former CIA director Michael Morrell, Representative Maxine Waters, and Senator Dianne Feinstein have all publicly stated that there has been no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, and a Washington Post report concluding that alleged Russian meddling would have made “little difference”, if any, in the outcome of the election. And yet the frenzied claptrap surrounding the investigation of President Trump’s “Russia ties” continues to convince Democrats that Robert Mueller—Stoic G-Man of Truth, Justice, and the American Way—is going to uncover a “smoking gun” that will persuade senate Republicans to pass articles of impeachment against all party interest.
This retreat into paranoia and fantasy has purposely been indulged in, all to avoid facing a very important question the Democrats should have asked after the defeat in 2016: What is the Democratic Party? Is it progressive or centrist? Is it the party of Main Street or Wall Street? Is it New Deal or Third Way? For the past three years, the Democratic establishment has done everything it can to avoid answering with anything more substantial than “We’re the party against Trump.” Because to attempt an answer with more meat on its bones would mean admitting the existence of a party civil war.
In a Nation piece titled Russiagate Is More Fiction Than Fact, journalist and former Democracy Now host Aaron Maté zeros in on the convenience of the “Russia scandal” to a broken party, when he writes:
“Some who focus on Russiagate may be acting from the real fear and disorientation that follows from the victory of the most unqualified and unpredictable president in history. But those who partake, particularly those in positions of privilege, should consider that Russiagate offers them a safe and anodyne way to ‘resist’. For privileged Americans to challenge Trump mainly over Russia is to do so in a way that avoids confronting their own relationship to the economic and political system that many of his voters rebelled against… Economic discontent—along with voter suppression, the Democratic Party’s failures to reach voters, and corporate media that gave endless attention to Trump’s empty promises and racial animus—are among the issues cast aside by the incessant focus on Russiagate.”
Here, Maté states a truth Democratic leadership and mainstream media already know, but unfortunately don’t care about: That nobody—nobody—making under $30,000 a year in this country gives a rat’s ass about “Russiagate”. That no single mom needing welfare while working full time, or blue collar worker unable to pay his medical bills, is tuning in to hear the latest about the Mueller investigation. It’s not happening. Instead, the question middle and lower income voters will ask in this upcoming election is the same question they have asked in every election: “Which party, and which candidate, is going to do the most for us economically?”
The progressive author and intellectual Chris Hedges recently echoed this point in a recent CBC interview, when he observed:
“This gets to the heart of the issue of the failure of elites to address the social inequality that is deforming and destroying the country, and that created Trump. Russia had nothing to do with it, and neither did Comey, or the Podesta emails. It had to do with a rapacious greedy myopic elite that embraced an ideology that was ridiculous from its start, neoliberalism, in order to enrich themselves and their class.”
In the absence of a “smoking gun”, then, that they could desperately cling to and babble on about in 2020, establishment Democrats will no doubt try some other way to avoid answering the economic question (as it would entail having to discuss the philosophical future of the party more broadly). But they may be thwarted in their effort by candidates in the progressive-populist wing; candidates unwilling to allow their party to continue engaging in fantasy to avoid having to hash out a comprehensive plan for America’s working class. Which brings me to next year’s Democratic presidential primary.
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If there’s one thing the Democratic establishment loves, it’s not a politician, but a modeltician. The difference being that while a politician traditionally had concrete philosophies and policy positions they held (or at least pretended to hold), the modeltician—either young, or at least a new face from the usual suspects—regurgitates cultural moods, spouts bromides, and has a general air of passion and warmth about them, but in truth is a completely ambiguous figure. A bright shining abyss. The party elite, by offering the modeltician to the masses, is saying to us: “Here is the new boy or girl wonder. The one foretold. The messiah. A pretty face with some feel-good slogans, shareable soundbites, and an inspiring origin story; now project all of your vague political sentiments onto him or her and don’t ask about specifics.” The modeltician is one of the very few ways, then, that populism can actually be used to work against the populace and for the ruling powers. Hence, when you go from being the party of the working class to being the party of the hip urban professional class, the firebrand—the raging prophet in the wilderness—has no place. Democratic primaries function only as Democratic runways.
In this race, there are plenty of modelticians to choose from: Kamala Harris, who traveled to the Hamptons to raise funds from major corporate donors before announcing her bid, and who refused—as California attorney general—to prosecute the head of OneBank in the wake of its violation of state foreclosure laws; Corey Booker, who joined 12 other senate Democrats in 2017 in killing a budget amendment that would have allowed importation of cheaper prescription drugs from Canada (an action which may be explained by the fact that he received $267,300 from pharmaceutical companies); Kirsten Gillibrand, who phoned Wall Street executives personally to ask if they would support her financially through the race if she were to run; and finally Amy Klobuchar, the senator from Minnesota who still hasn’t managed to remove the glue attaching her tongue to the floor of her mouth, is also “rnng fr d’ prsdncy”. Her decision to announce her candidacy in the middle of a blizzard has been held up as proof of her being “a woman with grit” rather than proof of her being a woman with toluene poisoning. But aside from the senator’s lack of a weather app, a more troubling fact is that Elmers has taken more PAC money than all the other aforementioned candidates.
Yet unlike in 2016, where only one progressive choice mounted a serious challenge to the party establishment, this upcoming primary will also see plenty of leftwing mavericks. Tulsi Gabbard, an Iraq War veteran who supports a non-interventionist foreign policy; Andrew Yang, the Venture for America entrepreneur running on a platform of universal basic income; and Elizabeth Warren, who’s made an academic and political career out of challenging Wall Street, including establishing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and taking on the CEO of Wells Fargo at a senate hearing. Yet if it’s revolution you are asking for—if it’s a total shakeup of the system you really want—I would argue to look no further than the progressive who ran in 2016. I would argue to look no further than Bernie Sanders.
Bernie Sanders woke me up three years ago when it came to political philosophy. Before him, I had no idea what the difference was between neoliberalism and progressivism, nor had I ever heard of any such thing as Democratic Socialism. Until his candidacy in 2016, I was aware only subconsciously of a distant, alien, “plastic” essence to rising Democratic stars at the state and national level (and to the stiff-grinning groupies who surrounded them) that bothered me in a way I couldn’t articulate. I often ask what kind of liberal I would be today had Bernie decided not to run that last primary, and a cold shudder runs up my spine when I picture myself in an alternate timeline turning to Ezra Klein or Jonathan Chait for smart political analysis instead of Bhaskar Sunkara or Thomas Frank.
Yet my support for Bernie Sanders cannot make sense without first looking back—not on the last three years of Donald Trump—but on the previous eight of Barack Obama. And the reason it is not as useful to merely look back on the past three years of Trump is because Trump, in many ways, is not so much a problem as he is a symptom of a problem. His election did not happen for no reason, but came about as a misguided response to a toxic brew of cutthroat capitalism, job automation/outsourcing, extreme identity politics, urban snobbery, and lawlessness among the country’s elites; and because of this, any endorsement of a potential opponent of his must take account of the American political system as it was before him, and must also be the result of an honest evaluation concerning who among the opposition candidates is best suited to acknowledge and address a very justified rural rage in our country.
In November 2008, the historic election of the first African-American president went from dream to reality all because of the promise of change. Was Obama a change from the past eight years of wasteful war, crumbling infrastructure, and tax cuts for the rich? Was he ushering in a broader idea of change, meant to signal the end of white dominance of government and the beginning of a more diverse body of representatives? No idea, but the campaign slogan was “Change we can believe in”, and after eight long years we did. 65,899,660 Americans did. What we didn’t know, was that Citigroup had emailed our new president a list one month before his election with “recommendations” of people they wanted working in his administration, all of whom were subsequently hired. What we didn’t imagine, was that he would decline to prosecute the Wall Street bankers who caused the recession. We also didn’t believe that he would pursue whistleblowers like Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning with the full force of the state. Additionally, we didn’t think he would deport more migrants than any president before or after him (that’s right, Obama surpasses Trump in number of deportations, and not by a little bit).
Whenever media talking heads or professional biographers and historians wonder aloud in interviews what the Obama legacy will be when we look back with some distance, I can’t help but think that it will still be something along the lines of: “You were the hope! You fucking failure, you were supposed to be the change! What happened?” To put it all into perspective, the Obama years were such a waste, that the Democratic primary in 2020 will almost definitely be about the exact same issues as the primary in 2008. Whether it was eliminating profit motive in foreign policy, digital privacy, action on climate change, or better immigration law, you will find candidate Obama presenting himself as the progressive alternative to Hillary Clinton. And it was a lie. He lied. He was a liar.
Yet the aforementioned actions and inactions are not even the former president’s worst betrayal. Not by a long shot. 44’s biggest betrayal was healthcare. Here was an administration that, in the first two years, held a Democratic supermajority in both the House and Senate, but couldn’t manage to pass single payer or even a public option. “But Joe Lieberman killed the public optio-” Bullshit. Lyndon B. Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act in a chamber full of Dixiecrats by straight-up calling and threatening each of them with the FBI, and you’re telling me the first African-American “messiah president” couldn’t bring Joe Lieberman to heel? Obama and the corporate Democrats included the public option in the original healthcare legislation because they knew an attempt would be made to strip it, which they would happily let happen to appease their donors, whilst still allowing them to look at the party’s progressive wing and say “Aw shucks we tried.” What passed instead, of course, hasn’t helped poor people at all. The Affordable Care Act is an insurance mandate. That’s all it is. It means that the struggling single mom or the part-time waiter has one extra monthly expense they must pay, or they get fined when tax season rolls around. “Well at least they have medical coverage that will pay for expenses if they get hurt.” Yeah, because that’s what health insurance companies are known to do! A vote for Sanders, by contrast, is a vote to eliminate health insurance companies and drive corporate greed out of healthcare.
And this is a big reason why I argue that a vote for Bernie Sanders is not just the better choice, but is in fact the only choice which makes any strategic, historic, and moral sense. Because while other Democratic candidates make Donald Trump out to be an aberration, and promise us that we can “go back to the way things were before” when it was the way things were before that brought us Trump, only Sanders’ platform takes on the system itself, as well as the current circus it most recently (and unwittingly) produced. And healthcare is just one example of this. There are other issues where Sanders’ boldness really comes crashing through the typical wonkish noise that so often hijacks discourse surrounding primaries: his advocacy for breaking up tech monopolies, for instance, and implementing a 70% tax on income above $10 million; signing Green New Deal legislation that would break our dependence on foreign oil, and erasing all student debt.
But it isn’t just his unwavering campaign proposals that testify to his reliability and trustworthiness as a progressive. Rather, it is a man’s personal history that normally provides a window into his integrity, and Bernie Sanders certainly has a history he should be damn proud of. Not only has he been a champion of single payer healthcare and criminal justice reform the entire 38 years he’s been in politics (through times where these issues were deeply unpopular among Democrats just as much as Republicans), but Sanders is the only presidential candidate who has a photograph of himself as a young man being arrested at a Civil Rights march in the 1960s. While most of his primary challengers either were not yet born or too small to walk, let alone march, one potential opponent Sanders might face—former Vice President Joe Biden—is only a year younger; but instead of marching with Civil Rights activists like Bernie at a time when it really meant something, Biden was working at a prestigious Wilmington law firm run by a powerful Republican, and when asked about his years at that firm, Biden remarked that he “thought of himself as a Republican” at that time. Lest you think this a harmless decade to identify as a Republican before having a later change of heart and becoming liberal, keep in mind that the representative of the Republican Party from the mid-to-late 1960s was Barry Goldwater, who openly opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Of course I could digress briefly and observe once again that progressive candidates, more broadly, differ fundamentally from the centrist Democrats who merely want to serve their donors. Ask yourself, in what way—in regard to policy—is the campaign of Kamala Harris different from the campaign of Corey Booker? In what way—in regard to policy—is the campaign of Amy Klobuchar different from the campaign of Kirsten Gillibrand? Do some digging and you realize very quickly that nobody in this primary so far is unique in any way except Bernie Sanders, Tulsi Gabbard, Andrew Yang, and Elizabeth Warren; among these four progressive candidates, each has a unique policy proposal or campaign emphasis that distinguishes them, not only from the centrists, but from one another. Gabbard wants to end so-called “nation building” interventions, Yang wants to establish a basic income for everyone in the United States, Warren is the “two-cent tax” candidate, and Sanders is the Medicare for All candidate. But none of the corporate centrists are unique in any way at all. A vote for Harris is a vote for Booker is a vote for Gillibrand is a vote for Klobuchar. Really.
Between 1949 and 1952, an estimated 50,000 Americans were lobotomized. Though the exact whereabouts and circumstances of most of these individuals still living today are unknown, you can catch glimpses of a few among the Democratic base who attend the rallies of these centrist politicians chanting “Vote Blue No Matter Who” thinking it’s clever advice because it rhymes. In actuality, the mantra just signals to the victimized listener that the spouter is an idiot rain-gobbler who has no real grasp of ideology or policy distinctions between the candidates, but only takes solace in the warm fuzzy false sense of belonging that comes with “being on the right team”.
With my saying this, I end my short substance-driven endorsement of Bernie Sanders by answering the inevitable questions from those still unsure that he is the best progressive candidate of 2020: Why not Tulsi Gabbard? Why not Andrew Yang? Why not Elizabeth Warren?
But before tackling problems I have with each candidate individually, I’d like to point out a minor issue I have with all three as a collective: their unwillingness to get blood on their teeth. I hated when Michelle Obama dispensed the advice three years ago regarding political opponents that “When they go low, you go high” and loved when then-Attorney General Eric Holder rebutted “No, when they go low, you kick ‘em!” Politics is not tea time, and primaries are about showing how you are different not only from the opposing party’s nominee, but are different from your own party’s other contenders. This will involve going on the offensive, and if you’re unwilling to do so, voters are justified in doubting your strength. It’s not enough to simply have the best policies, you have to be a bulldog about why your policies are the best, and you have to be willing to expose how rivals are either liars, cowards, copycats, dimwits, or simply unable to follow through. Otherwise why have a primary at all if everyone stops at “having great respect for one another”? (As a related aside, this is why I can’t stand it when politicians and commentators decry “the politics of division” and urge those prominent in national discourse not to “generate more heat than light”. Politics by its very nature is division, and where do the Gandhis-of-mediocrity think light comes from? If we cannot have refuge from attempts at bipartisanship and “united parties” at least give us refuge from bad clichés).
Democrats’ insistence on keeping primary campaigns “positive” reminds me of what Matt Christman said once on a Chapo Trap House episode last December:
“They have this weird sense that no one should be criticized—no candidate should be criticized, at all—you sort of just have to let all of these campaigns wash over your totally smooth marble-like brain, and then, I dunno, pick one out of a hat, or pick whoever calls your house the most… There’s no sense that you’re supposed to come to this decision based on actual political beliefs or policy red lines. They don’t think of it that way. It’s just an extended marketing campaign, and they bring out the new hot product.”
In short, another term for “negative campaigning” is campaigning. Presidential candidates without blood on their teeth will never be president, and I don’t feel like any of the progressive candidates in the Democratic field outside of Sanders have the chops to rip anyone to shreds (as will be required in a race filled with “moderates” who are backed by private interests).
As for my specific objections to each of the other progressive candidates running in the primary, they are briefly as follows:
Tulsi Gabbard does not have a lot of name recognition, and though progressive, does not have as big a reputation in progressive circles as Warren or Sanders. I wish I could say her military service would give her enough standing to beat Donald Trump in an election, but that just isn’t so. Trump had no problem insulting John McCain for being a prisoner of war, and his supporters had no problem still voting for him. And it’s not as if the Republican machine hasn’t had experience in the past of denigrating the military service of opposition candidates, as evidenced by the “swiftboating” of John Kerry during the 2004 election. It’s unfortunate, but military service just doesn’t carry you a long way in a presidential race. As a matter of personal opinion, Gabbard’s insistence on allowing Bashar al-Assad to maintain rule in Syria, rather than support the Kurdish freedom fighters and the creation of a long-overdue independent Kurdish state, bothers me a great deal. But this objection of mine toward Gabbard pales in comparison, still, to my resolute opposition to the corporate modelticians running alongside her. At the end of the day, I don’t think she would make a bad vice presidential pick for Sanders.
Andrew Yang knows he will not be president. Yang’s bid has never been about becoming president. Yang’s campaign is about promoting awareness. Awareness of the danger job automation poses to the economy, and awareness about a possible solution to that danger: universal basic income. His campaign is bold and forward-thinking, but progressives should not give Mr. Yang anything more than an admiring pat on the back. We certainly shouldn’t give him a valuable primary vote assuming he even makes it on the ballot. While I fully believe that Andrew Yang could be the politician of the future, he is simply not the politician of today.
Elizabeth Warren spent her academic career studying—and then teaching—bankruptcy law, while advocating for tough corporate and banking regulations. Clear evidence that, early on, she had the desire to take on Wall Street. Her spearheading the establishment of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau saved Americans $12 billion by cracking down on phony bank accounts, predatory lending, for-profit colleges, and bad mortgage practices. Watching CSPAN footage of her grilling the CEOs of Equifax and Wells Fargo, as well as the Secretary of Education, Chair of the Federal Reserve, and the Secretary of Health & Human Services over their lobbying pasts is really really entertaining. And throughout her academic and political careers, Warren has authored books that display a passion for helping middle class families and fixing our economic system; books like As We Forgive Our Debtors (1989), The Fragile Middle Class (2001), The Two-Income Trap (2004), and All Your Worth (2006), as well as appearing in the documentary Maxed Out (2006) and giving a warning about “the coming collapse of the middle class” at Berkeley in 2008 just months before the financial crisis. I take issue with those who suspect that Warren is a neoliberal in progressive clothing. She’s proven otherwise. However, while Warren may be similar to Sanders in terms of attitude and even in policy to some regard, her message is one of reform and not revolution.
To be clear, I don’t doubt that Elizabeth Warren or Tulsi Gabbard or Andrew Yang would be aggressive in regulating Wall Street, but Sanders will go further. His administration will be a gateway to a new order entirely. A new order where those “too big to fail” are too big to be trusted, where all workers can earn a livable wage, and trickle-down economics is history. A new order where committers of nonviolent offenses are not locked in cages, where we don’t destroy our forests and our mountains and our oceans before our children can enjoy them, where vast inequality of income and opportunity is abolished and we learn—finally—to speak as one nation and to be one nation. With the planet currently being poisoned by major world powers including the United States, with working class wages currently stagnant as cost-of-living (and corporate profits) reach record highs, with private prisons currently conspiring with legislators to turn misdemeanors into an ever-expanding list of confinable offenses, it should be apparent that the choice before us as voters is a new order or death. The death of America as an idea, a democracy, and a civilization. Contrary to the belief of the Democratic establishment, 2020 is about so much more than beating Trump. With Sanders, 2020 offers us the chance to save ourselves; not as a party, but as a people. If we know what’s best for us, we’ll have the damn sense to nominate him, rather than harken back to a rosy image of the eight years before Trump that were never a reality.