The Energizer Bernie and the Power Behind Him
By Norman Solomon, Reader Supported News
21 January 20
To corporate media, Bernie Sanders is incorrigible. He won't stop defying
the standard assumptions about what's possible in national politics. His
2020 campaign - with feet on the ground and eyes on visionary horizons - is
a danger to corporate capitalism's "natural" order that enables wealth to
dominate the political process.
When The New York Times published its dual endorsement of Amy Klobuchar and
Elizabeth Warren on Sunday night, the newspaper patted Sanders on the head
before disparaging him. "He boasts that compromise is anathema to him," the
editorial complained. "Only his prescriptions can be the right ones, even
though most are overly rigid, untested and divisive."
Such complaints have been common for centuries, hurled at all the great
movements for human rights - and their leaders. The basic concept of
abolishing slavery was "rigid, untested and divisive." When one of the
leading abolitionists, William Lloyd Garrison, was cautioned to cool it
because he seemed on fire, Garrison replied: "I have need to be all on fire,
for there are mountains of ice around me to melt."
Bernie Sanders has ample reasons to be all on fire, and so do the social
movements that are propelling his campaign for president. They refuse to
accept the go-slow advice from the liberal establishment about fighting
against systemic cruelties and disasters - healthcare injustice, vast
economic inequality, mass incarceration, institutional racism, the climate
emergency, perpetual war and so much more.
The Bernie 2020 campaign is a crucible of broader activism from the
grassroots that can spark uprisings of heat and light. To the extent that
passivity and fatalism melt away, possibilities for gaining power become
more tangible.
Martin Luther King Jr. readily acknowledged that "power without love is
reckless and abusive" - but he emphasized that "love without power is
sentimental and anemic." So, where does that leave us in relation to seeking
power?
"Power, properly understood, is the ability to achieve purpose," Dr. King
wrote. "It is the strength required to bring about social, political or
economic changes. In this sense power is not only desirable but necessary in
order to implement the demands of love and justice."
That's what the Bernie 2020 campaign is about - the necessity of gaining
power "in order to implement the demands of love and justice." And that
helps to explain why the campaign is so profoundly compelling at the
grassroots. It is oriented to meshing electoral work with social movements -
however difficult that might be at times - to generate political power from
the ground up. And that's where genuine progressive change really comes
from.
"The parties and candidates are not the agents of change," a former chair of
the California Democratic Party's Progressive Caucus, Karen Bernal, said a
few days ago at a pro-Sanders forum in San Rafael. "It's the other way
around. They respond to the outside forces of movements."
Bernal was elected as co-chair of California's Sanders delegation to the
2016 Democratic National Convention, and she is strongly supporting the
Bernie 2020 campaign. While remaining intensely engaged with elections,
Bernal keeps her eyes on the prize. "We don't want to turn this into a cult
of personalities," she said. "It's about the movement."
Much of the energy behind the Sanders campaign is generated by what
corporate media outlets often criticize or mock - Bernie's consistency as he
keeps denouncing massive income inequality and corporate power. In the
process, he confronts head-on the system that enables huge profiteering by
such enterprises as the healthcare industry, fossil-fuel companies, private
prisons, and the military-industrial complex.
By remaining part of social movements, Bernie has made himself especially
antithetical to the elite sensibilities of corporate media. Elites rarely
appreciate any movement that is challenging their unjust power.
The electoral strength of the Bernie Sanders campaign is enmeshed with
intensities of feeling and resolve for progressive change that pollsters and
editorial writers are ill-equipped to measure or comprehend. The potential
has sometimes been called "the power of the people." Whatever you call it,
such power is usually subjugated. But when it breaks free, there's no
telling what might happen.
Norman Solomon is co-founder and national coordinator of RootsAction.org. He
was a Bernie Sanders delegate from California to the 2016 Democratic
National Convention and is currently a coordinator of the relaunched
independent Bernie Delegates Network. Solomon is the author of a dozen books
including War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to
Death.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission
to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader
Supported News.
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