Mondoweiss
Before Trump’s revolution, there was Sanders’
Philip Weiss on November 11, 2016 34 Comments
Rep. Keith Ellison
Before it was such an upsetting political year, 2016 was glorious. Back in the
spring, Bernie Sanders said he was leading a political revolution for greater
equality and against war, and I was among many idealists who believed that he
might actually win the Democratic nomination.
Before Trump’s Michigan, there was Bernie’s Michigan. He surprised the pundits
and the pollsters last March by coming from way down in the polls to beat
Hillary Clinton there. Eight months later Trump would shock the pollsters and
pundits by doing the very same thing in Michigan. Obviously, team Clinton
failed to learn the political lesson. It was too entitled and insular. (Who
else needed a committee of eight to sign off on a tweet about Pope Francis’s
statement on climate change?).
The Trump revolution is fearful to many people today because he was so openly
racist and sexist, but his revolution was built from some of the same political
materials and instincts that Bernie tried to build his out of. In fact, the
great thing about Bernie’s revolution is that even though he was incapable of
the anger that may have been required to topple Clinton, and Wikileaks hadn’t
come along yet with its bald evidence that the system really was rigged, he
cobbled together the coalition that is the future of the left in America, and
it was non-racial. His movement embraced working- and middle-class white people
who have now become the bugaboo of the elites, and some on the left too, in the
wake of Trump’s victory. He embraced Muslims and African-Americans and of
course millennials too. He was 75, but his movement was generational.
Sanders has maintained that populist ethos through Tuesday’s carnage. He’s
declared, “I do not believe that most of the people who are thinking about
voting for Mr. Trump are racist or sexist.” And he has pushed for Keith
Ellison, the great Minnesota congressman who happens to be a Muslim, and who
visited Gaza, and boycotted Netanyahu, to be the chair of the Democratic
National Committee. It may even happen.
Sanders’s rhetorical brilliance of the spring now comes back to haunt us.
Hillary Clinton refused to release her speeches to Goldman, Sachs, and at rally
after rally, Bernie said, I’ll release all my speeches to the Wall Street
bankers, and he threw his hands in the air — There they are. Well months later
Wikileaks released Clinton’s speeches, and they surely helped Trump. So did a
comment that is entirely alien to Bernie Sanders’s worldview: Clinton’s
sneering claim that Trump was supported by a basket of “deplorables.” No doubt
Clinton stood for a lot of good inclusive things in her often inspiring October
campaign against Trump. But she also stood for shallow elitist careerism. It
was no coincidence that she was supported by billionaires 20-to-1 over Trump.
And though Colin Powell branded Trump as a “national disgrace” in a leaked
email, he also branded Clinton: “unbridled ambition… not transformational.”
That is the great frustration of this political season: that transformational
populist political materials so important to the left were abandoned by the
establishment Democratic candidate, and Trump picked them up instead, and won
with them. On election night, it was a Republican commentator who said on one
network or another that 13 million people lost their homes in the Wall Street
credit meltdown and no banker went to jail. An echo of Bernie. And though Chris
Matthews talked every night about America’s costly and brutalizing wars in the
Middle East, Clinton couldn’t seize that issue either. Nor could the pundit
class that supported her so fervently. Because they too supported those wars;
and Clinton surrogate Hilary Rosen was pushing regime change in Syria on CNN;
and the neoconservatives were looking forward to regrouping in the shadows of
the Clinton administration.
One good thing about the Trump victory is that the shakeup of the Democratic
Party that we all hoped was going to happen in the next couple few years is
happening right now. The party is smashed to bits. And when it is reformed in
the months and years to come, this will be a generational revolution. The
millennials who came out to those Bernie rallies by the tens of thousands will
be taking over the ideological and political reins of the party. It will be an
antiwar party and a small-d democratic party, concerned with social justice and
equality. Palestinians will be honored at last; BDS will not be spat upon, as
it was day after day in the Clinton braintrust. Haim Saban and the rest of the
hard-core Israel lobby megadonors will have to go Republican, and good riddance.
There is obviously a Jewish piece to this reformation. Modern Jewish identity
is at stake; and here too Bernie Sanders shows the way forward.
In the last days of the campaign the establishment punditocracy was caught up
in the question of whether a Trump ad that showed three Jewish faces, among
many others, in an attack on the Clinton establishment was anti-Semitic. But
all three Jewish faces are powerful people, Janet Yellen, George Soros, and
Lloyd Blankfein. And the price of power in our society is scrutiny. The Jewish
establishment was an important part of the Clinton campaign– as everyone from
Jeffrey Goldberg to J.J. Goldberg to Stephanie Schriock to Steven Cohen stated.
Bernie Sanders offered a different way. His campaign was based on small
contributions, and when he dared to criticize Israel’s bombing of Gaza and say
that Netanyahu is “not right all the time” in the April debate in New York, it
was a liberating moment for the Democratic Party, and for non-Zionist Jews.
Jonathan Tasini and Norman Finkelstein were both over the moon. Critics of
Israel could open their mouths inside the mainstream discourse and live another
day. The Democratic Party will never be the same.
Just as important were Sanders’s expressions of humility and egalitarianism,
which he said he had gotten in part from Jewish tradition. In an era of Jewish
wealth and nationalism and particularism, this too is a different way. Sanders
is a proud universalist. He drew directly on the life of the Jewish Bundists in
eastern Europe: they believed that Jews should participate fully, politically
and socially, in the societies they belong to, and they should be part of a
broad-based movement for democratic socialism (as James North states it).
Sanders’s personal mythology was Jewish but pointedly not sectarian. He honored
his paint salesman immigrant father, and Roosevelt and Churchill, too, but when
asked if he believed in God he was a modern, and gave one of the best
statements of his campaign:
The answer is yes and I think when we talk about God, whether it it is
Christianity, or Judaism, or Islam, or Buddhism, what we are talking about is
what all religions hold dear, and, that is, to do unto others as you would like
them to do unto you.
I am here tonight, and I’m running for president– I’m a United States Senator
from my great state of Vermont– because I believe that. Because I believe
morally and ethically we do not have the right to turn our backs on children in
Flint, Michigan, who are being poisoned or veterans who are sleeping out on the
street. What I believe as the father of seven beautiful grandchildren: I want
you to worry about my grandchildren and I promise you I will worry about your
family. We are in this together.
One of the most obscene DNC emails leaked after the campaign showed that the
Democratic leadership wanted to smear him as an atheist.
Does he believe in a God. He had skated on saying he has a Jewish heritage.
While former party chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz said,
The Israel stuff is disturbing.
Sadly, it required Donald Trump to smash that old sclerotic establishment. But
now they’re gone, and Sanders’s populist revolution will not end. It is in the
best hands, the next generation’s.
H/t Scott Roth, James North, Adam Horowitz.
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Before Trump’s revolution, there was Sanders’
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Philip Weiss on November 11, 2016 34 Comments
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Rep. Keith Ellison
Before it was such an upsetting political year, 2016 was glorious. Back in the
spring, Bernie Sanders said he was leading a political revolution for greater
equality and against war, and I was among many idealists who believed that he
might actually win the Democratic nomination.
Before Trump’s Michigan, there was Bernie’s Michigan. He surprised the pundits
and the pollsters last March by coming from way down in the polls to beat
Hillary Clinton there. Eight months later Trump would shock the pollsters and
pundits by doing the very same thing in Michigan. Obviously, team Clinton
failed to learn the political lesson. It was too entitled and insular. (Who
else needed a committee of eight to sign off on a tweet about Pope Francis’s
statement on climate change?).
The Trump revolution is fearful to many people today because he was so openly
racist and sexist, but his revolution was built from some of the same political
materials and instincts that Bernie tried to build his out of. In fact, the
great thing about Bernie’s revolution is that even though he was incapable of
the anger that may have been required to topple Clinton, and Wikileaks hadn’t
come along yet with its bald evidence that the system really was rigged, he
cobbled together the coalition that is the future of the left in America, and
it was non-racial. His movement embraced working- and middle-class white people
who have now become the bugaboo of the elites, and some on the left too, in the
wake of Trump’s victory. He embraced Muslims and African-Americans and of
course millennials too. He was 75, but his movement was generational.
Sanders has maintained that populist ethos through Tuesday’s carnage. He’s
declared, “I do not believe that most of the people who are thinking about
voting for Mr. Trump are racist or sexist.” And he has pushed for Keith
Ellison, the great Minnesota congressman who happens to be a Muslim, and who
visited Gaza, and boycotted Netanyahu, to be the chair of the Democratic
National Committee. It may even happen.
Sanders’s rhetorical brilliance of the spring now comes back to haunt us.
Hillary Clinton refused to release her speeches to Goldman, Sachs, and at rally
after rally, Bernie said, I’ll release all my speeches to the Wall Street
bankers, and he threw his hands in the air — There they are. Well months later
Wikileaks released Clinton’s speeches, and they surely helped Trump. So did a
comment that is entirely alien to Bernie Sanders’s worldview: Clinton’s
sneering claim that Trump was supported by a basket of “deplorables.” No doubt
Clinton stood for a lot of good inclusive things in her often inspiring October
campaign against Trump. But she also stood for shallow elitist careerism. It
was no coincidence that she was supported by billionaires 20-to-1 over Trump.
And though Colin Powell branded Trump as a “national disgrace” in a leaked
email, he also branded Clinton: “unbridled ambition… not transformational.”
That is the great frustration of this political season: that transformational
populist political materials so important to the left were abandoned by the
establishment Democratic candidate, and Trump picked them up instead, and won
with them. On election night, it was a Republican commentator who said on one
network or another that 13 million people lost their homes in the Wall Street
credit meltdown and no banker went to jail. An echo of Bernie. And though Chris
Matthews talked every night about America’s costly and brutalizing wars in the
Middle East, Clinton couldn’t seize that issue either. Nor could the pundit
class that supported her so fervently. Because they too supported those wars;
and Clinton surrogate Hilary Rosen was pushing regime change in Syria on CNN;
and the neoconservatives were looking forward to regrouping in the shadows of
the Clinton administration.
One good thing about the Trump victory is that the shakeup of the Democratic
Party that we all hoped was going to happen in the next couple few years is
happening right now. The party is smashed to bits. And when it is reformed in
the months and years to come, this will be a generational revolution. The
millennials who came out to those Bernie rallies by the tens of thousands will
be taking over the ideological and political reins of the party. It will be an
antiwar party and a small-d democratic party, concerned with social justice and
equality. Palestinians will be honored at last; BDS will not be spat upon, as
it was day after day in the Clinton braintrust. Haim Saban and the rest of the
hard-core Israel lobby megadonors will have to go Republican, and good riddance.
There is obviously a Jewish piece to this reformation. Modern Jewish identity
is at stake; and here too Bernie Sanders shows the way forward.
In the last days of the campaign the establishment punditocracy was caught up
in the question of whether a Trump ad that showed three Jewish faces, among
many others, in an attack on the Clinton establishment was anti-Semitic. But
all three Jewish faces are powerful people, Janet Yellen, George Soros, and
Lloyd Blankfein. And the price of power in our society is scrutiny. The Jewish
establishment was an important part of the Clinton campaign– as everyone from
Jeffrey Goldberg to J.J. Goldberg to Stephanie Schriock to Steven Cohen stated.
Bernie Sanders offered a different way. His campaign was based on small
contributions, and when he dared to criticize Israel’s bombing of Gaza and say
that Netanyahu is “not right all the time” in the April debate in New York, it
was a liberating moment for the Democratic Party, and for non-Zionist Jews.
Jonathan Tasini and Norman Finkelstein were both over the moon. Critics of
Israel could open their mouths inside the mainstream discourse and live another
day. The Democratic Party will never be the same.
Just as important were Sanders’s expressions of humility and egalitarianism,
which he said he had gotten in part from Jewish tradition. In an era of Jewish
wealth and nationalism and particularism, this too is a different way. Sanders
is a proud universalist. He drew directly on the life of the Jewish Bundists in
eastern Europe: they believed that Jews should participate fully, politically
and socially, in the societies they belong to, and they should be part of a
broad-based movement for democratic socialism (as James North states it).
Sanders’s personal mythology was Jewish but pointedly not sectarian. He honored
his paint salesman immigrant father, and Roosevelt and Churchill, too, but when
asked if he believed in God he was a modern, and gave one of the best
statements of his campaign:
The answer is yes and I think when we talk about God, whether it it is
Christianity, or Judaism, or Islam, or Buddhism, what we are talking about is
what all religions hold dear, and, that is, to do unto others as you would like
them to do unto you.
I am here tonight, and I’m running for president– I’m a United States Senator
from my great state of Vermont– because I believe that. Because I believe
morally and ethically we do not have the right to turn our backs on children in
Flint, Michigan, who are being poisoned or veterans who are sleeping out on the
street. What I believe as the father of seven beautiful grandchildren: I want
you to worry about my grandchildren and I promise you I will worry about your
family. We are in this together.
One of the most obscene DNC emails leaked after the campaign showed that the
Democratic leadership wanted to smear him as an atheist.
Does he believe in a God. He had skated on saying he has a Jewish heritage.
While former party chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz said,
The Israel stuff is disturbing.
Sadly, it required Donald Trump to smash that old sclerotic establishment. But
now they’re gone, and Sanders’s populist revolution will not end. It is in the
best hands, the next generation’s.
H/t Scott Roth, James North, Adam Horowitz.
