Miriam:
This came from Time Magazine this week. I thought you might be
interested. It seemed of interest to me and maybe of some value.
R. E. (Dick) Driscoll, Sr.
The Gospel of Bernie
* Sam Frizell <http://time.com/author/sam-frizell/> @Sam_Frizell
<https://twitter.com/Sam_Frizell>
Sept. 17, 2015
Stephen Voss for TIME The surging presidential candidate on Sept. 15 in
his Washington Senate office.
The man who brought fire back to the Democratic Party
Was it Opposite Day at Liberty University? Here was Bernie Sanders, who
spent his 20s preaching sexual liberation and social revolution, taking
the stage to speak to a student body of fresh-faced Christian
conservatives at the school founded by televangelist Jerry Falwell.
Liberty students pay a $25 fine for “attendance at a dance” and $50 for
“visiting alone” off campus with a member of the opposite sex. At 74,
Sanders was an old man among young people, a self-described “democratic
socialist” in the boiler room of the Christian right. And you could
argue that his presence was the opposite of clever. After all, why was
this overachieving underdog of the Democratic Party–the breakout star of
a season that was supposed to be all about Hillary–stumping for votes in
a place where he had virtually no chance of finding them?
Why does a missionary venture out among the heathen? Bernard Sanders, a
paint seller’s son from Flatbush, an early-’60s campus radical, a
rumpled transplant to progressive Vermont who worked his way gradually
up a small ladder in a small state to become the unlikely embodiment of
a very large yearning–leads with his heart and his sermons. He seeks
conversions, not just votes.
If that strikes you as insufficiently calculating, you are starting to
understand Bernie’s momentum. And to understand the Sanders surge is to
understand the spirit of 2016. Look around at the candidates who are
stumbling and fumbling toward the first balloting less than five months
away. Republican Jeb Bush of the White House Bushes learned to count
delegates when most kids were still counting fireflies. Democrat Hillary
Clinton is part of a family that once commissioned a poll to choose a
family vacation that would endear them to voters. So far, calculation is
getting them nowhere. The surging candidates–rampant Donald Trump,
novice Ben Carson and retro Bernie Sanders–represent the opposite.
Slickness is out, conviction is in.
“I am not a theologian. I am not an expert on the Bible,” Sanders told
the crowd of 13,000 at Liberty. “I am just a United States Senator from
the small state of Vermont.” With that caveat, Sanders painted scenes of
a progressive utopia: free higher education, health care for all,
bolstered wages and chastened billionaires. The audience in Virginia
received him politely, though their biggest wave of applause went to the
student who asked why his compassion for the weak did not extend to
unborn babies. Sanders’ real audience–the roughly 1 in 4
Democratic-primary voters who have lifted him into contention against
former Secretary of State Clinton–could only love him more than ever. He
was defending the faith. Daniel, as they might put it at Liberty U., in
the lion’s den.
See Bernie Sanders' Career in Photographs
Special Collections Research Center/University of Chicago Library
Bernie Sanders (R), member of the steering committee, stands next to
George Beadle, University of Chicago president, who is speaking at a
Committee On Racial Equality meeting on housing sit-ins. 1962.
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With each twist and wrinkle of this election season, which is as
wide-open and unscripted as any presidential cycle in living memory, we
see more clearly that these are special times in American politics,
baffling times, times to challenge categories and scramble expectations.
The Internet has killed the kingmakers. Freshness beats incumbency,
while the perception of sincerity beats all. There is no room for focus
groups in the elevator to the top of the polls; America wants its
candidates straight up and packing a kick. This is how a squinty-eyed
New Yorker goes from shooting his cuffs and hawking condos to the head
of the GOP pack. It’s how Bernie Sanders can join the Democratic Party
in April and by August be battling for first place in Iowa and New
Hampshire.
Without a single TV ad–or a single congressional endorsement–Sanders has
exposed the weakness of the party’s Clintonian establishment while at
the same time spotlighting its hunger for an ideological savior. Polls
now indicate that if the nominating contests were held tomorrow, Sanders
would edge out Clinton in Iowa and beat her in New Hampshire by 10
points. Nationally, he has cut Clinton’s lead from an impregnable 46
points to a crumbling 21 points in just two months.
But even those metrics don’t convey the extent of the Sanders
phenomenon. At Clinton events, campaign staffers section off floor space
before her speeches to make her crowds look densely packed. Sanders
needs no barriers. His audiences are authentically huge–28,000 in
Oregon, 11,000 in Arizona, 7,500 in Maine. His volunteer army,
meanwhile, though mostly self-organized online, numbers more than
182,000 people spread out from rural Alaska to the Florida Keys, people
who have asked the campaign how to improvise events, knock on doors and
spread the gospel from campus quad to living room to farmer’s market.
Win or lose, Sanders seeks to transform his party and redeem American
politics through an epic battle against some of the wealthiest powers in
human history. “A lot of people have given up on the political process,
and I want to get them involved in it,” he tells TIME. “In this fight we
are going to take on the greed of the billionaire class. And they are
very, very powerful, and they’re going to fight back furiously. The only
way to succeed is when millions of people stand up and decide to engage.”
This is not just a campaign, says Sanders. It is a “movement,” a
“revolution.” He is not only after delegates; he plans to “raise the
political consciousness.” Contrast this with the message Clinton
conveyed during a meeting this summer with a group of activists.
Consummate political engineer, virtuoso of the knobs and dials of public
opinion, Clinton said, “Look, I don’t believe you change hearts. I
believe you change laws, you change allocation of resources, you change
the way systems operate.” David Axelrod, the onetime guru to Barack
Obama, brutally mocked the plodding story line. “Hillary: Live With It,”
tweeted Axelrod, “is no rallying cry.”
Sanders is all rallying cry. When the Wall Street Journal attempted to
tally the cost of his agenda–trillions in new government spending on
health care, 90% tax rates on the superwealthy, free public college, a
Scandinavian-style safety net–his defenders criticized the effort. It’s
time, Sanders says, for billionaires storing their cash in the Cayman
Islands to pay up. He is tapping into a recurring desire among Democrats
for an outsider to purify the party. “Carter, Clinton and Obama all ran
against the party,” Simon Rosenberg, Democratic strategist and veteran
of Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign, observed of the last three Democrats to
reach the Oval Office. “We don’t do coronations. It’s not our thing.”
What better way to convey his purity than to take his message to Liberty
U., where abortion is murder and gay marriage apostasy. “We are living,”
Sanders told the students, “in a nation and in a world which worships
not love of brothers and sisters, not love of the poor and the sick, but
worships the acquisition of money and great wealth. I do not believe
that is the country we should be living in.”
For Phil Boyd, the revolution began in August, when the 24-year-old
manager at Barnes & Noble started marching door to door in his town of
Clayton, N.J., seeking Sanders recruits. Within weeks, he decided to
drive six hours to New Hampshire to hear the firebrand in person.
Sanders delivers stump speeches that are equal parts economics and
jeremiad. His numbers have an apocalyptic feel: the 15 wealthiest people
in America saw their net worth grow $170 billion in the past two years;
99% of all new income today goes to the wealthiest 1%. Meanwhile, the
earth trembles in the face of global warming–“more drought, more floods,
more extreme weather disturbances, rising sea levels,” Sanders preaches.
“It means more acidification of the ocean with calamitous impact on
mammal life.”
What Boyd really wanted, though, came after the fire and brimstone.
“Yes, I am here,” Sanders told the crowd in his gravelly Brooklyn
accent. “I want to win the Democratic nomination. But I need something
more than that–I need your support the day after the election.” Like
many others who are rallying to Sanders, Boyd was seeking more than a
candidate. He wanted a cause for the long haul. “We have to keep our
foot on the pedal, whether it’s Bernie or anybody else who wins,” Boyd said.
Truth be told, many Sanders supporters would have preferred a fresher
standard bearer to expose the injustice of income inequality and rail
against the buying of elections. Senator Elizabeth Warren of
Massachusetts comes to mind. But Berniemania is about more than just the
candidate, and more than one election. “The end goal is to build a
political movement that pushes beyond whatever the campaign is or does,”
says Corbin Trent, a 35-year-old who sold his food-truck business in
Tennessee and now travels the state on behalf of the movement.
Such stories of abandoning careers and setting aside studies to join the
Sanders brigades are common. Stephanie Rountree, a 17-year-old high
school senior in Baltimore, spends upwards of 20 hours a week analyzing
data and helping train volunteers. In Concord, N.H., palliative-care
doctor Bob Friedlander left medicine to volunteer full time, rallying
health care workers. Alayna Josz, a manicurist in nearby New London,
N.H., paints red, white and blue Bernie slogans on her customers’ nails.
“He says the things I always wanted to hear, that I knew were true,”
Josz, 27, gushes. “All day long, I find myself thinking about Bernie and
this revolution.”
The challenge Sanders faces is to build a campaign that can harness this
energy effectively. His paid staff is growing rapidly, from four to
nearly 40 in New Hampshire in just a month’s time. In Iowa, Sanders is
quickly catching up to Clinton, with 54 paid staff to her 78 organizers.
He’s set his sights on hiring in the Super Tuesday states.
He has volunteers eager to be involved in 47 states from Alabama to
Michigan, where the campaign has no staff and no offices. In a largely
unproven experiment, two staffers at the Burlington, Vt., headquarters
are using conference calls, Internet chats, organizing parties and
digital seminars to train hundreds of Sanders enthusiasts–who in turn
are supposed to train other volunteers in rippling circles of
self-sufficiency.
The results so far have been unpredictable. Over 100,000 people have
said on Facebook that they would attend an “Enough Is Enough” rally on
the Washington Mall to support Sanders. But the campaign hasn’t
sanctioned the event. In San Antonio, 50 Sanders acolytes picketed a
prominent Clinton backer–which came as a surprise to Sanders when he
read about it in the newspaper the next day. “Sometime, I’m sure we’ll
get in trouble because one of these groups will say something we’ll have
to disavow,” Sanders tells TIME.
We’ve seen this movie before: a grassroots darling surges to early
stardom only to lose to a better-organized moderate. In 2003, the
Sanders role was played by progressive Democrat Howard Dean, another
Vermonter, who attracted huge crowds and an avid Internet fan base but
failed to win a single nominating contest. Republican Ron Paul in 2011
drew partisans so sincere that many quit their jobs to volunteer for
him, but he was just a blip in the Republican primary race.
“The whole notion of self-organizing is a pipe dream,” says Marshall
Ganz, a Harvard-based adviser to both the Dean and Obama campaigns. “One
of the great values of the Internet is it’s a way to share information,
but it’s not a substitute for relational structure and accountability.”
Sanders is undeterred. There must be a way to make it work, he muses on
a warm afternoon shortly after Labor Day as he slouches on a sofa in his
Capitol Hill office. A poster-board cutout of a happy Holstein stands
sentinel and pastoral scenes from the Green Mountain State line the
walls as Sanders talks about the power of the presidency.
LIFE's Best Convention Photos: The Democrats
John Phillips—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
Scene at the 1960 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles.
1of 34
It’s all about the movement, Sanders admonishes in the deep bass voice
that he reserves for one-on-ones. What President Obama didn’t understand
when he took office is that you have to keep your movement alive.
“Barack Obama ran one of the great campaigns in American history. The
biggest mistake he made is that the day after the election, in so many
words, he said, ‘Thank you very much, but I will take it from here,'”
Sanders says.
Then he paints one of his word pictures. Imagine President Sanders
facing a vote in Congress on free college tuition paid for by a tax hike
on the wealthy. He’d have to persuade Speaker of the House John Boehner
to help him pass the bill. That’s where his army of activists comes in.
“How do I convince John? Is my personality that much better than Barack
Obama’s?” Sanders says. “The answer is to say, ‘Hey, John, take a look
out your window. Because there are a million young people there that are
in support of the legislation. They are voting. They know what’s going
on. If you refuse to make college affordable, they’re going to vote your
people out of office.’ That’s the offer you can’t refuse.”
This kind of insurgent idealism has driven Sanders all his life. His
education began at home, in a 3½-room apartment in Brooklyn’s Flatbush
neighborhood, which stamped his character as well as his accent. His
father, the paint salesman, was a Polish immigrant and high school
dropout, and the family lived paycheck to paycheck. Teenage Bernie
studied Karl Marx and Greek democracy with his older brother, who
brought him to neighborhood Democratic Party meetings. When his mother
died unexpectedly, Sanders fled New York for the University of Chicago,
where he threw himself into activism. By his 23rd birthday, Sanders had
worked for a packinghouse union, joined Martin Luther King Jr.’s March
on Washington, signed up with the university socialists and been
arrested at a civil rights demonstration. He was a sloppy student but an
ardent radical of the sweater-and-slacks, nonviolent early-1960s variety.
In his second year at college, Sanders made national news. One frigid
Tuesday in January 1962, the 20-year-old stood on the steps of the
administration building and railed in the wind against the college’s
housing-segregation policy. “We feel it is an intolerable situation when
Negro and white students of the university cannot live together in
university-owned apartments,” the bespectacled Sanders told a few dozen
classmates. Then he led them into the building in protest and camped the
night outside the president’s office. It was the University of Chicago’s
first civil rights sit-in, and a first taste of victory for Sanders.
See the 2016 Candidates' Campaign Launches
Tom Williams—CQ-Roll Call/Getty Images
Sen. Ted Cruz kicked off his campaign for 2016 Republican presidential
nomination at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va. on March 23.
1of 20
From there he made his way to Burlington, Vt., where he staged
unsuccessful bids as a socialist candidate for governor and Senator in
the 1970s. His winning campaign for mayor of Burlington in 1981 was a
notable counterpoint to Ronald Reagan’s conservative uprising, and it
launched Sanders on an upward trajectory that took him to Congress in
1991 and the Senate in 2007.
Now, as most of his Kennedy-era comrades have faded from the scene,
Sanders has become ubiquitous in Democratic politics–to the irritation
of the front-running Clinton. At a recent event in Iowa, for example, a
student fired his name at Clinton like a spitball. “Hi, I really wanted
to ask about your political views for Bernie Sanders?” a young man
clumsily asked at his earliest opportunity. “My political views?”
Clinton parried. Then she dodged–a bad habit to have this year. “I don’t
have any issue whatsoever in having a really good, strong contest for
the Democratic nomination,” she said.
Clinton’s aides say they prepared for a strong challenger and they’re
not changing course. The insurgent has been unable to break through with
African-American voters, who could prove decisive in the later
primaries. “Sanders may be rocking her with white progressives,” says
Joe Trippi, a veteran Democratic strategist. “His problem is whether he
can break Clinton’s domination of minorities. It’s a huge hurdle if it
can’t be solved.” Clinton is still far ahead in nationwide polls,
leading Sanders by around 20 percentage points. And her minions have
begun to attack, sending out fact sheets that draw comparisons between
Sanders and former Venezuelan ruler Hugo Chávez. “That is the kind of
politics that I’m trying to change,” Sanders says of team Clinton’s attack.
Characteristically, Sanders professes to be uninterested in such
details. “This campaign is about begging you to fight for your kids and
your parents, to fight for your planet, fight for the future of your
country,” he says. There is no calculation in that answer. Let the other
candidates worry about the horse race; Bernie Sanders is worried about
forever. It is the opposite of everything we’ve come to expect from the
political process–and this year, being an opposite is the secret to success.
On 9/20/2015 10:48 AM, Miriam Vieni wrote:
Here's an article that pretty much explains my position.
Miriam
The Far Left Needs to Relax a Little and Support Bernie Sanders
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_far_left_needs_to_stop_worrying_and_
support_bernie_sanders_20150919/
Posted on Sep 19, 2015
By William Kaufman, CounterPunch
A crowd listens to Sen. Bernie Sanders at a town hall meeting in Phoenix
in July. (Gage Skidmore / CC BY-SA 2.0)
This piece originated at CounterPunch. It appears here with the kind
permission of the author.
In this presidential summer of our discontent, the radical left has been
fighting hard—not chiefly against capitalism and its galloping calamities,
it seems, but against . . . Bernie Sanders. Scarcely a day passes without an
ominous recitation of Sanders’s manifold political shortcomings—Sanders
exposés (read examples here, here, here and here) seem to have become a
thriving cottage industry for the far-left commentariat.
It should come as a startling revelation to no one that Sanders is not and
has never aspired to be the next Lenin or Trotsky or even Bob Avakian. We
readily concede that his record will not pass every litmus test of
anti-imperialist and revolutionary probity—no need to belabor this point any
further. But then what are we to make of Syriza, Podemos, Jeremy Corbyn, or
even Jill Stein—and other assorted leftish flavors du jour—all of them
seemingly quite palatable to these same ideological arbiters of the radical
left? These other examples and Sanders are cut from essentially the same
political cloth: left social democrats or democratic socialists inclined to
challenge entrenched corporate interests through established political
institutions rather than overthrowing them from without. Then why the
radical cheers (however mixed and muted in some cases) for these other
leftish types and jeers for Sanders, even though they all represent
essentially the same political impulse?
The answer lies in a hallowed, inviolable principle of the U.S. far left, in
fact its most revered first commandment: thou shalt not support, endorse, or
even smile at a Democrat. This prohibition is not merely a mindless
ideological reflex—it arises from the hard truth that the national
Democratic Party is as much a subsidiary of the corporate class as the GOP.
Obama’s crass subservience to the interests of the one percent has erased
any doubts about this institutional fealty except among hardened
neoliberals, tribal Democrats, and the entire on-air lineup of MSNBC. And
there is no doubt that past left-talking presidential primary challengers
such as Jackson and Kucinich have functioned more as safety valves than
catalysts for popular unrest, dissipating it and re-channeling it into the
manageable confines of the two-party arena of mock combats. The question,
then, is this: Is there something different about the Sanders campaign that
warrants support from radicals who have rightly spurned previous forays into
the Democratic Party?
This key question immediately begs another, even more fundamental one: How
to awaken tens of millions of people from the entrapments of mass hypnosis,
prostration, and indifference and into the first halting steps toward
recognition and self-emancipation? The quandary is as old as the parable of
Plato’s cave—that mythic netherworld of darkness and illusion inhabited by
us fallible mortals. The solution—the way out of the cave into the
liberating light of knowledge—is as stubbornly elusive now as it was then.
But simply naming the problem of the “false consciousness” that stymies the
oppressed—as endlessly and vehemently reiterated by the legions of the far
left for a small eternity—does not by itself yield a solution, as the long
history of leftist impotence and isolation attests. It is understandably
frustrating for the leftist sects and sages to have all the answers except
that most important one: how to lead the “masses” out of the darkness of
ignorance and ideological deception into enlightenment. The leftist
groups—with their obscure tomes of theory, their blogs, their conferences
and meetings, their tinker-toy bureaucracies, their streams of manifestoes
and critiques, their insular feuds and splits and fiery excoriations of
left, right, and center—are self-declared leaders without followers,
generals with an invincible plan for battle who lack only one small detail:
an army.
Ten parts bellowing grandiosity to zero parts real influence, the far left
fails a litmus test more important than any it applies to Bernie Sanders:
Marx’s call not merely to interpret the world but to change it. So we must
ask: at this moment of gathering darkness for our species and planet, in
this pivotal presidential campaign season, who is making greater strides
toward triggering the mass enlightenment that is the key to empowering the
oppressed: Sanders or his left critics? If politics is the art of
communication, then Sanders must be judged the winner, hands down.
In fact, the Sanders campaign represents a breakthrough for progressive
“messaging” of remarkable scope and impact. Sanders, with his calls for
political revolution against the billionaire class, is not just another
standard-issue, forked-tongue, feel-your-pain Democrat; at each MSM-covered
appearance he blasts out piercing alarms about the radical inequities and
irrationalities of the status quo, along with sorely needed solutions—primal
truths that would otherwise lie dormant and buried in the scattered isolated
islets of far-leftdom.
To dismiss these crucial inroads into mass consciousness as mere diversion,
to deride his proposals as milquetoast Keynesian stopgap, betrays the old
far-left allergy to the complexity and cacophony of the large stage of life,
a debilitating preference for the safety and certitude of the tiny left echo
chamber. Sanders’s campaign, whatever its flaws, is thrusting front and
center to a mass audience a whole series of principled, critical demands and
issues (many of which overlap with those raised in splendid isolation by
Jill Stein and the Green Party), the realization of which would markedly
advance the material well-being and future prospects of ordinary Americans:
$15 an hour minimum wage; union card check to expand organizing rights;
improved Medicare for all; expansion (not retrenchment) of Social Security;
revamped progressive taxation to reduce income inequality; a Wall Street
transaction tax; a rapid transition to renewable energy to combat climate
change; opposition to the ecocidal, neo-fascist TPP, NAFTA, and WTO; an end
to the militarization of local police forces; cracking down on hate groups;
free tuition at all public universities and colleges to alleviate student
debt peonage; paid family leave; and so on. If realized in the aggregate,
these demands would challenge the neoliberal logic of the prevailing order.
As a tactical matter, then, the Sanders upsurge is an invaluable tool for
the mass dissemination of left themes and solutions right now—a priceless
benefit that far outweighs the realpolitik lapses that preoccupy the
left-echo-chamber Sanders refuseniks. Now notice that I just used the word
tactical. Allow me to explain. Whatever the rough spots in Sanders’s
progressive resume, especially on foreign policy, it remains a stubborn
tactical reality (and perhaps I will also be forgiven for using the word
reality) that it is only through the vehicle of the his presidential
campaign as a Democrat that these kinds of progressive issues and solutions
can flood the airwaves and touch the tens of millions of desperate but
ill-informed Americans who most need to think and hear about them—in most
cases, for the first time. This is the unique and irreplaceable value of the
Sanders candidacy: it is strewing seeds of mass consciousness around issues
of class and inequality and the environment in a way that no other person or
party could accomplish right now. Radicals need to ask themselves: How is
that a bad thing?
Whatever the outcome of Sanders’s campaign, the sheer scope of the audience
for his progressive checklist, his slashing denunciations of the economic
and political tyranny of the billionaire class, are green shoots in an
otherwise barren political landscape—and who knows how they might flourish
in the future? This is a major breakthrough that has the potential, in
countless molecular ways, to burst through the Democratic institutional
framework in which it is now embedded—and, by the way, Sanders would not be
commanding that mass audience were it not in that framework: hence the
Sanders Paradox. To be sure, it’s an inconvenient paradox for inveterate
anti-Democrats of the left, but one to be acknowledged and exploited rather
than condemned or ignored. The near-zero collective political IQ of the
country urgently needs raising by any means possible and necessary, and
sooner rather than later, given the catastrophes that are bearing down on
us. We can’t afford to disdain any advances right now, no matter how messy
or divergent from our ideal scenarios.
Yes, we urgently need an independent activist left party, one that can have
a real impact. We also need socialism now, drastic carbon reductions and
crash investment in renewable energy ten years ago, and so on. But the
realization of those all imperatives presupposes the power of an aroused
citizenry armed with at least a rudimentary understanding of the major
issues. That is, most assuredly, not the American electorate as of 2015—not
by a long shot. Buffeted by outsourcing, unemployment, underemployment,
consumer and student debt peonage, underwater mortgages, and the rolling
thunder of environmental/climate/resource crisis, the mass of Americans
still lead lives of quiet desperation—and it remains mostly quiet because
they are diverted from their gnawing anxieties and uncertainties by the
toxic glitter of corporate culture, a ceaselessly dripping toxin that
mollifies, numbs, and stupefies. In the words of Robert Crumb,
What we kids didn’t understand was that we were living in a commercial,
commodity culture. Everything in our environment had been bought and sold.
As middle class Americans, we basically grew up on a movie set. The
conscious values that are pushed are only part of the picture. The medium
itself plays a much bigger part than anyone realizes: the creation of
illusion. We are living surrounded by illusion, by professionally created
fairy tales. We barely have contact with the real world.
The result is a woefully detached and undereducated populace, in most of its
leisure hours transfixed before glowing rectangles. Walk down the street of
any average American town or city (not Berkeley or Seattle or Brooklyn) and
ask people if they know who Bernie Sanders is, much less Jill Stein, or even
who the vice president is or what the three branches of government are. Then
ask them if they’ve ever heard about anthropogenic global warming. You’ll
get a surprising number of blank stares, because an alarmingly large
percentage of Americans spend most of their waking hours either (a) at work;
(b) watching the NFL, professional wrestling, NASCAR, “reality” TV shows, or
cotton-candy dramas and comedies; (c) surfing the Internet (and mostly not
for news); or (d) chasing down sales at Wal-Mart or Sam’s Club to try to
make ends meet. As for civic engagement, the closest most Americans come is
when they wait in line at the DMV, pay their taxes, get stopped by the
police, or watch Judge Judy. And the small percentage who do take in a bit
of news are getting hosed with a steady stream of lies from the Fox News
Channel, MSNBC, CNN, or the happy talk crew on the late local news.
So this is the audience the left must address: not the doughty, battle-ready
proletariat of far-left daydreams, but the massively depoliticized and
demoralized casualties of the culture industry and neoliberal piracy. In the
face of the major inroads Sanders is making against this mass reign of
indifference and ignorance, urging the virtues of an independent left party
and movement as an alternative is like urging the virtues of fusion energy
over solar panels—a great-sounding idea, but one that has no purchase on
reality for the foreseeable future. The mass of Americans is not going to
advance miraculously from widespread political nescience to applying for
membership in the ISO in a single great leap. The far-left push for an
independent “solution” is a practical nullity right now and will remain so
for some time to come—and hence amounts to self-indulgent posturing in the
face of the calamities looming on a near horizon. Blind to these tactical
exigencies, Sanders’s far-left detractors merely reinforce the political
isolation that they seem to brandish as a badge of virtue; in reality it is
a symptom of political debility, a fatal estrangement from the tactical
challenges and possibilities of the moment.
Lest some radical critics feel sullied by the intrusion of the word
tactical, I must insist that there is no shame in leftists’ thinking
tactically at times—in fact, it is a necessity if we are to stay attuned to
masses of people in a way that gives heft impact to any conceivable movement
against the status quo. Here’s an example of such a critical tactical
consideration: At the height of the anti-Vietnam War movement in the late
1960s and early 1970s, I was part of a coalition that was mobilizing
hundreds of thousands of people in the streets around the concrete (and
principled!) slogan, “Out Now!”, peaking in the April 1971 march on
Washington DC that brought 1 million people to the nation’s capital to
demand an immediate end to the war. At that time a chorus of very
“principled” far leftists scorned these powerful outpourings—which
materially aided the besieged Vietnamese workers and peasants—because the
key demand did not, in their view, go far enough or did not address an array
of other issues: they argued that we should declaim “Victory to the NLF” or
“Smash Imperialism” or “Defend the Rights of Palestinians” and so on. Now
the tactical consideration was that pinning the actions to these far-flung
ultimatist, simon-pure demands would have winnowed the million marchers to
maybe five thousand, thus depriving the action of all material impact on the
war while deepening the delusional self-regard of a few enraged middle-class
radicals—and damn the Vietnamese workers and peasants in the process.
So much for the general considerations that make at least some degree of
critical support for the Sanders campaign a no-brainer for radicals hoping
to make even minimal headway against the headwinds of mass ignorance and
indifference. Now let’s tick off a checklist of some of the most common
far-left complaints about the Sanders campaign, along with brief rebuttals:
Sanders is “sheepdogging” for the Democrats: This is self-fulfilling
prophecy that presupposes that the mass of Americans are indeed sheep that
can be easily herded into to this or that politician’s pen. This argument
would carry more weight if Sanders were merely feinting left, with vague
Obama-esque marketing slogans. But clearly he is propounding a refreshingly
frank and specific set of policies to reverse the ever-intensifying
inequalities and injustices of the status quo, slashing with finely honed
specifics against the abuses of the billionaire elite. Even if Sanders loses
the nomination, the progressive issues and solutions he is purveying to a
mass audience will embed firmly in popular political thought and action,
making a future breakaway into political independence easier, not harder.
Sanders has vowed to support whoever is nominated by the Democratic Party:
This is really a corollary of the “sheepdogging” thesis, and the answer to
it is simple: So what? A bald, rumpled seventy-three-year-old is commanding
a mass audience not for sex appeal but for his passion and clarity on
substance; he is galvanizing a huge groundswell of issue-focused voters and
activists who would otherwise not be engaged in politics at all. A whole
generation of voters will be more receptive to any future left
campaigns—including independent ones—thanks to his exertions,
notwithstanding any personal endorsements he makes a year from now.
Sanders is not a “true” socialist: This is another “so what?” coupled to a
“who cares?” Any of the 5,757 varieties of socialists ranging from Bernie
Sanders to the Spartacists will tell you that they alone are the true
socialists and that all the others are frauds. The Fox News Channel
considers Obama a socialist; the Democratic Socialists of America would
ridicule this foolishness, but they in turn would be called out as faux
socialists by Trotskyist groups like the ISO and Socialist Alternative, who
would in their turn be denounced as fraudulent by the ultra-Trot World
Socialist Web Site (Socialist Equality Party), who would in yet another turn
be reviled as mountebanks by the Mad Hatter-Trot Spartacists. Who, then, has
unearthed the Holy Grail of “true” socialism? It’s a hopeless, absurd quest,
on a par with defining “God” or the meaning of being. We need only recall
that the Bolsheviks, socialists who actually made a revolution rather than
merely bloviating about it, deployed as their main agitational slogan not
“socialism now” or “nationalize the means of production”—they reached the
masses by advancing the very concrete “land, bread, and peace,” sensibly
grasping that desperate workers and peasants were more interested in
tangibles than abstractions. This is a lesson well worth pondering for the
armchair revolutionaries leading the charge against Sanders.
Elections are a trap and diversion from real organizing: See once again the
Bolsheviks, who regularly ran in election campaigns as a means of purveying
their ideas—it worked pretty well for them. As long as elections are viewed
as a tactic in a broader movement-building strategy, it is simply foolish to
abstain from the reachout opportunities they afford. This leads to the next
point:
The Sanders campaign subtracts energy and resources from independent parties
like the Greens: Supporting the Sanders campaign right now vs. building an
independent party and movement is not a zero-sum game in which every dollar
or ounce of energy devoted to the former is necessarily subtracted from the
latter. Sanders is posing progressive and class-based issues with a boldness
and bluntness and honesty that set him apart from past progressive
Democratic primary aspirants. And no recent left-leaning Democratic
presidential aspirant has sparked anything close to the firestorms of
enthusiasm springing up around the Sanders campaign. This combination of
mass momentum and programmatic boldness make the Sanders campaign a uniquely
explosive force in American politics right now. If Sanders cannot win the
nomination and endorses Clinton (or whomever) with the usual less-evil
incantations, he will, by dint of the power of his campaign, have unleashed
energies and insights into the political sphere that will have a life of
their own well beyond his campaign and will redound to the benefit of future
independent organizing efforts.
Sanders cannot win the nomination or the general election: This is the most
curious of the far-left objections to the Sanders campaign. Arun Gupta wrote
a whole article for CounterPunch on just this issue. The entire essay
traffics in MSM horse-race probabilities rather than political substance, as
though Gupta were a hedge-fund manager assessing a possible investment
rather than a radical seeking the most favorable vehicle for spreading his
ideas. He adduces from various sources that (1) Sanders cannot win the
nomination and (2) he cannot win the general election—a point that would
seem to be moot in view of (1). He prophesies, “Simply put, you have a
better chance of Jennifer Lawrence or Idris Elba calling you up and saying
they want to be your friend with benefits than Bernie Sanders has of
becoming the next president.” But many of those who deride Sanders’s chances
will be supporting Jill Stein of the Green Party, whose likelihood of
winning the general election is on a par with any of those critics winning
both Powerball and Mega-Millions on the same day. Yet Jill Stein’s
statistical-hopelessness-unto absurdity will not deter the Bernie contras
from touting Stein or some other quixotic lefty independent in the general
election. So it appears the far-left deriders of Sanders’s steep odds are
not so averse to lost causes after all—purists in this as well, they simply
prefer causes that are lost unto near-invisibility. And let’s pose this
question to those who argue from probability: What if the long shot Sanders
comes through and wins the nomination and/or general election? Then what
would you do?
Sanders will not be able to implement his proposals even if elected because
he will face opposition in the Congress and the Courts: Sanders himself is
the first to acknowledge this point, which is based on a misunderstanding of
his purpose in running—he is not presenting himself as a personal savior and
cure-all for the world’s ills; he expressly states his intention of using
his campaign—and his nomination and election should they come to pass—of
spurring the American people to organize to win these goals for themselves.
As he stated in a campaign speech in Iowa last month:
Let me tell you something that no other candidate for president will tell
you. And that is [that] no matter who is elected to be president, that
person will not be able to address the enormous problems facing the working
families of our country. They will not be able to succeed because the power
of corporate America, the power of Wall Street, the power of campaign donors
is so great that no president alone can stand up to them. That is the truth.
People may be uncomfortable about hearing it, but that is the reality. And
that is why what this campaign is about is saying loudly and clearly: It is
not just about electing Bernie Sanders for president, it is about creating a
grassroots political movement in this country.
The case for radical support for Sanders amounts to this: before we can
arrive at point omega from point alpha, we have to traverse points beta,
gamma, delta, and so on. There are no magic superleft flying machines that
will propel us nonstop over all those intermediate steps from neoliberal
despotism to radical democracy—we know this if we are organizing on the
ground rather than theorizing in the clouds. The tempo of that journey will
depend chiefly on advances in the consciousness of the masses, not advances
in the vehemence of far-left declamation.
Some leftists can fantasize that they are doing a great service to humanity
by scoffing at the tactical tradeoffs that are essential to building a truly
massive, powerful grassroots movement—but in so doing, they’re merely
isolating themselves even further from the arenas of real political work and
potential mass outreach, like a swami meditating in a cave. Such radicals
remind me of the holy men described by Swami Vivekananda:
The highest men are calm, silent and unknown. They are the men who really
know the power of thought; they are sure that, even if they go into a cave
and close the door and simply think five true thoughts and then pass away,
these five thoughts of theirs will live through eternity. . . . These
Sâttvika men are too near the Lord to be active and to fight, to be working,
struggling, preaching and doing good, as they say, here on earth to
humanity.
The hour is late. We face planetary emergencies of unprecedented gravity.
Some reputable scientists say that it might be too late to avert them.
Plato’s vision of humanity trapped in the dark cave—our cave of collective
ignorance—is no mere parable: it a prophecy turned all too real. We must
nevertheless choose to act as though there is a way out, even if we suspect
that our choice is more an affirmation of faith than of reason. The Sanders
campaign has mustered enough of an audience to bolster that fragile belief.
It is not a panacea—it is a tentative first step of hope that Americans can
be roused in sufficient numbers to help save humanity from itself. No person
of conscience should refuse to join in that step and push it as far as it
can go.
William Kaufman is a writer and editor who lives in New York City. He can be
reached at kman484@xxxxxxxxxxxxx.
http://www.truthdig.com/ http://www.truthdig.com/
The Far Left Needs to Relax a Little and Support Bernie Sanders
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_far_left_needs_to_stop_worrying_and_
support_bernie_sanders_20150919/
Posted on Sep 19, 2015
By William Kaufman, CounterPunch
A crowd listens to Sen. Bernie Sanders at a town hall meeting in Phoenix in
July. (Gage Skidmore / CC BY-SA 2.0)
This piece originated at CounterPunch. It appears here with the kind
permission of the author.
In this presidential summer of our discontent, the radical left has been
fighting hard—not chiefly against capitalism and its galloping calamities,
it seems, but against . . . Bernie Sanders. Scarcely a day passes without an
ominous recitation of Sanders’s manifold political shortcomings—Sanders
exposés (read examples here, here, here and here) seem to have become a
thriving cottage industry for the far-left commentariat.
It should come as a startling revelation to no one that Sanders is not and
has never aspired to be the next Lenin or Trotsky or even Bob Avakian. We
readily concede that his record will not pass every litmus test of
anti-imperialist and revolutionary probity—no need to belabor this point any
further. But then what are we to make of Syriza, Podemos, Jeremy Corbyn, or
even Jill Stein—and other assorted leftish flavors du jour—all of them
seemingly quite palatable to these same ideological arbiters of the radical
left? These other examples and Sanders are cut from essentially the same
political cloth: left social democrats or democratic socialists inclined to
challenge entrenched corporate interests through established political
institutions rather than overthrowing them from without. Then why the
radical cheers (however mixed and muted in some cases) for these other
leftish types and jeers for Sanders, even though they all represent
essentially the same political impulse?
The answer lies in a hallowed, inviolable principle of the U.S. far left, in
fact its most revered first commandment: thou shalt not support, endorse, or
even smile at a Democrat. This prohibition is not merely a mindless
ideological reflex—it arises from the hard truth that the national
Democratic Party is as much a subsidiary of the corporate class as the GOP.
Obama’s crass subservience to the interests of the one percent has erased
any doubts about this institutional fealty except among hardened
neoliberals, tribal Democrats, and the entire on-air lineup of MSNBC. And
there is no doubt that past left-talking presidential primary challengers
such as Jackson and Kucinich have functioned more as safety valves than
catalysts for popular unrest, dissipating it and re-channeling it into the
manageable confines of the two-party arena of mock combats. The question,
then, is this: Is there something different about the Sanders campaign that
warrants support from radicals who have rightly spurned previous forays into
the Democratic Party?
This key question immediately begs another, even more fundamental one: How
to awaken tens of millions of people from the entrapments of mass hypnosis,
prostration, and indifference and into the first halting steps toward
recognition and self-emancipation? The quandary is as old as the parable of
Plato’s cave—that mythic netherworld of darkness and illusion inhabited by
us fallible mortals. The solution—the way out of the cave into the
liberating light of knowledge—is as stubbornly elusive now as it was then.
But simply naming the problem of the “false consciousness” that stymies the
oppressed—as endlessly and vehemently reiterated by the legions of the far
left for a small eternity—does not by itself yield a solution, as the long
history of leftist impotence and isolation attests. It is understandably
frustrating for the leftist sects and sages to have all the answers except
that most important one: how to lead the “masses” out of the darkness of
ignorance and ideological deception into enlightenment. The leftist
groups—with their obscure tomes of theory, their blogs, their conferences
and meetings, their tinker-toy bureaucracies, their streams of manifestoes
and critiques, their insular feuds and splits and fiery excoriations of
left, right, and center—are self-declared leaders without followers,
generals with an invincible plan for battle who lack only one small detail:
an army.
Ten parts bellowing grandiosity to zero parts real influence, the far left
fails a litmus test more important than any it applies to Bernie Sanders:
Marx’s call not merely to interpret the world but to change it. So we must
ask: at this moment of gathering darkness for our species and planet, in
this pivotal presidential campaign season, who is making greater strides
toward triggering the mass enlightenment that is the key to empowering the
oppressed: Sanders or his left critics? If politics is the art of
communication, then Sanders must be judged the winner, hands down.
In fact, the Sanders campaign represents a breakthrough for progressive
“messaging” of remarkable scope and impact. Sanders, with his calls for
political revolution against the billionaire class, is not just another
standard-issue, forked-tongue, feel-your-pain Democrat; at each MSM-covered
appearance he blasts out piercing alarms about the radical inequities and
irrationalities of the status quo, along with sorely needed solutions—primal
truths that would otherwise lie dormant and buried in the scattered isolated
islets of far-leftdom.
To dismiss these crucial inroads into mass consciousness as mere diversion,
to deride his proposals as milquetoast Keynesian stopgap, betrays the old
far-left allergy to the complexity and cacophony of the large stage of life,
a debilitating preference for the safety and certitude of the tiny left echo
chamber. Sanders’s campaign, whatever its flaws, is thrusting front and
center to a mass audience a whole series of principled, critical demands and
issues (many of which overlap with those raised in splendid isolation by
Jill Stein and the Green Party), the realization of which would markedly
advance the material well-being and future prospects of ordinary Americans:
$15 an hour minimum wage; union card check to expand organizing rights;
improved Medicare for all; expansion (not retrenchment) of Social Security;
revamped progressive taxation to reduce income inequality; a Wall Street
transaction tax; a rapid transition to renewable energy to combat climate
change; opposition to the ecocidal, neo-fascist TPP, NAFTA, and WTO; an end
to the militarization of local police forces; cracking down on hate groups;
free tuition at all public universities and colleges to alleviate student
debt peonage; paid family leave; and so on. If realized in the aggregate,
these demands would challenge the neoliberal logic of the prevailing order.
As a tactical matter, then, the Sanders upsurge is an invaluable tool for
the mass dissemination of left themes and solutions right now—a priceless
benefit that far outweighs the realpolitik lapses that preoccupy the
left-echo-chamber Sanders refuseniks. Now notice that I just used the word
tactical. Allow me to explain. Whatever the rough spots in Sanders’s
progressive resume, especially on foreign policy, it remains a stubborn
tactical reality (and perhaps I will also be forgiven for using the word
reality) that it is only through the vehicle of the his presidential
campaign as a Democrat that these kinds of progressive issues and solutions
can flood the airwaves and touch the tens of millions of desperate but
ill-informed Americans who most need to think and hear about them—in most
cases, for the first time. This is the unique and irreplaceable value of the
Sanders candidacy: it is strewing seeds of mass consciousness around issues
of class and inequality and the environment in a way that no other person or
party could accomplish right now. Radicals need to ask themselves: How is
that a bad thing?
Whatever the outcome of Sanders’s campaign, the sheer scope of the audience
for his progressive checklist, his slashing denunciations of the economic
and political tyranny of the billionaire class, are green shoots in an
otherwise barren political landscape—and who knows how they might flourish
in the future? This is a major breakthrough that has the potential, in
countless molecular ways, to burst through the Democratic institutional
framework in which it is now embedded—and, by the way, Sanders would not be
commanding that mass audience were it not in that framework: hence the
Sanders Paradox. To be sure, it’s an inconvenient paradox for inveterate
anti-Democrats of the left, but one to be acknowledged and exploited rather
than condemned or ignored. The near-zero collective political IQ of the
country urgently needs raising by any means possible and necessary, and
sooner rather than later, given the catastrophes that are bearing down on
us. We can’t afford to disdain any advances right now, no matter how messy
or divergent from our ideal scenarios.
Yes, we urgently need an independent activist left party, one that can have
a real impact. We also need socialism now, drastic carbon reductions and
crash investment in renewable energy ten years ago, and so on. But the
realization of those all imperatives presupposes the power of an aroused
citizenry armed with at least a rudimentary understanding of the major
issues. That is, most assuredly, not the American electorate as of 2015—not
by a long shot. Buffeted by outsourcing, unemployment, underemployment,
consumer and student debt peonage, underwater mortgages, and the rolling
thunder of environmental/climate/resource crisis, the mass of Americans
still lead lives of quiet desperation—and it remains mostly quiet because
they are diverted from their gnawing anxieties and uncertainties by the
toxic glitter of corporate culture, a ceaselessly dripping toxin that
mollifies, numbs, and stupefies. In the words of Robert Crumb,
What we kids didn’t understand was that we were living in a commercial,
commodity culture. Everything in our environment had been bought and sold.
As middle class Americans, we basically grew up on a movie set. The
conscious values that are pushed are only part of the picture. The medium
itself plays a much bigger part than anyone realizes: the creation of
illusion. We are living surrounded by illusion, by professionally created
fairy tales. We barely have contact with the real world.
The result is a woefully detached and undereducated populace, in most of its
leisure hours transfixed before glowing rectangles. Walk down the street of
any average American town or city (not Berkeley or Seattle or Brooklyn) and
ask people if they know who Bernie Sanders is, much less Jill Stein, or even
who the vice president is or what the three branches of government are. Then
ask them if they’ve ever heard about anthropogenic global warming. You’ll
get a surprising number of blank stares, because an alarmingly large
percentage of Americans spend most of their waking hours either (a) at work;
(b) watching the NFL, professional wrestling, NASCAR, “reality” TV shows, or
cotton-candy dramas and comedies; (c) surfing the Internet (and mostly not
for news); or (d) chasing down sales at Wal-Mart or Sam’s Club to try to
make ends meet. As for civic engagement, the closest most Americans come is
when they wait in line at the DMV, pay their taxes, get stopped by the
police, or watch Judge Judy. And the small percentage who do take in a bit
of news are getting hosed with a steady stream of lies from the Fox News
Channel, MSNBC, CNN, or the happy talk crew on the late local news.
So this is the audience the left must address: not the doughty, battle-ready
proletariat of far-left daydreams, but the massively depoliticized and
demoralized casualties of the culture industry and neoliberal piracy. In the
face of the major inroads Sanders is making against this mass reign of
indifference and ignorance, urging the virtues of an independent left party
and movement as an alternative is like urging the virtues of fusion energy
over solar panels—a great-sounding idea, but one that has no purchase on
reality for the foreseeable future. The mass of Americans is not going to
advance miraculously from widespread political nescience to applying for
membership in the ISO in a single great leap. The far-left push for an
independent “solution” is a practical nullity right now and will remain so
for some time to come—and hence amounts to self-indulgent posturing in the
face of the calamities looming on a near horizon. Blind to these tactical
exigencies, Sanders’s far-left detractors merely reinforce the political
isolation that they seem to brandish as a badge of virtue; in reality it is
a symptom of political debility, a fatal estrangement from the tactical
challenges and possibilities of the moment.
Lest some radical critics feel sullied by the intrusion of the word
tactical, I must insist that there is no shame in leftists’ thinking
tactically at times—in fact, it is a necessity if we are to stay attuned to
masses of people in a way that gives heft impact to any conceivable movement
against the status quo. Here’s an example of such a critical tactical
consideration: At the height of the anti-Vietnam War movement in the late
1960s and early 1970s, I was part of a coalition that was mobilizing
hundreds of thousands of people in the streets around the concrete (and
principled!) slogan, “Out Now!”, peaking in the April 1971 march on
Washington DC that brought 1 million people to the nation’s capital to
demand an immediate end to the war. At that time a chorus of very
“principled” far leftists scorned these powerful outpourings—which
materially aided the besieged Vietnamese workers and peasants—because the
key demand did not, in their view, go far enough or did not address an array
of other issues: they argued that we should declaim “Victory to the NLF” or
“Smash Imperialism” or “Defend the Rights of Palestinians” and so on. Now
the tactical consideration was that pinning the actions to these far-flung
ultimatist, simon-pure demands would have winnowed the million marchers to
maybe five thousand, thus depriving the action of all material impact on the
war while deepening the delusional self-regard of a few enraged middle-class
radicals—and damn the Vietnamese workers and peasants in the process.
So much for the general considerations that make at least some degree of
critical support for the Sanders campaign a no-brainer for radicals hoping
to make even minimal headway against the headwinds of mass ignorance and
indifference. Now let’s tick off a checklist of some of the most common
far-left complaints about the Sanders campaign, along with brief rebuttals:
Sanders is “sheepdogging” for the Democrats: This is self-fulfilling
prophecy that presupposes that the mass of Americans are indeed sheep that
can be easily herded into to this or that politician’s pen. This argument
would carry more weight if Sanders were merely feinting left, with vague
Obama-esque marketing slogans. But clearly he is propounding a refreshingly
frank and specific set of policies to reverse the ever-intensifying
inequalities and injustices of the status quo, slashing with finely honed
specifics against the abuses of the billionaire elite. Even if Sanders loses
the nomination, the progressive issues and solutions he is purveying to a
mass audience will embed firmly in popular political thought and action,
making a future breakaway into political independence easier, not harder.
Sanders has vowed to support whoever is nominated by the Democratic Party:
This is really a corollary of the “sheepdogging” thesis, and the answer to
it is simple: So what? A bald, rumpled seventy-three-year-old is commanding
a mass audience not for sex appeal but for his passion and clarity on
substance; he is galvanizing a huge groundswell of issue-focused voters and
activists who would otherwise not be engaged in politics at all. A whole
generation of voters will be more receptive to any future left
campaigns—including independent ones—thanks to his exertions,
notwithstanding any personal endorsements he makes a year from now.
Sanders is not a “true” socialist: This is another “so what?” coupled to a
“who cares?” Any of the 5,757 varieties of socialists ranging from Bernie
Sanders to the Spartacists will tell you that they alone are the true
socialists and that all the others are frauds. The Fox News Channel
considers Obama a socialist; the Democratic Socialists of America would
ridicule this foolishness, but they in turn would be called out as faux
socialists by Trotskyist groups like the ISO and Socialist Alternative, who
would in their turn be denounced as fraudulent by the ultra-Trot World
Socialist Web Site (Socialist Equality Party), who would in yet another turn
be reviled as mountebanks by the Mad Hatter-Trot Spartacists. Who, then, has
unearthed the Holy Grail of “true” socialism? It’s a hopeless, absurd quest,
on a par with defining “God” or the meaning of being. We need only recall
that the Bolsheviks, socialists who actually made a revolution rather than
merely bloviating about it, deployed as their main agitational slogan not
“socialism now” or “nationalize the means of production”—they reached the
masses by advancing the very concrete “land, bread, and peace,” sensibly
grasping that desperate workers and peasants were more interested in
tangibles than abstractions. This is a lesson well worth pondering for the
armchair revolutionaries leading the charge against Sanders.
Elections are a trap and diversion from real organizing: See once again the
Bolsheviks, who regularly ran in election campaigns as a means of purveying
their ideas—it worked pretty well for them. As long as elections are viewed
as a tactic in a broader movement-building strategy, it is simply foolish to
abstain from the reachout opportunities they afford. This leads to the next
point:
The Sanders campaign subtracts energy and resources from independent parties
like the Greens: Supporting the Sanders campaign right now vs. building an
independent party and movement is not a zero-sum game in which every dollar
or ounce of energy devoted to the former is necessarily subtracted from the
latter. Sanders is posing progressive and class-based issues with a boldness
and bluntness and honesty that set him apart from past progressive
Democratic primary aspirants. And no recent left-leaning Democratic
presidential aspirant has sparked anything close to the firestorms of
enthusiasm springing up around the Sanders campaign. This combination of
mass momentum and programmatic boldness make the Sanders campaign a uniquely
explosive force in American politics right now. If Sanders cannot win the
nomination and endorses Clinton (or whomever) with the usual less-evil
incantations, he will, by dint of the power of his campaign, have unleashed
energies and insights into the political sphere that will have a life of
their own well beyond his campaign and will redound to the benefit of future
independent organizing efforts.
Sanders cannot win the nomination or the general election: This is the most
curious of the far-left objections to the Sanders campaign. Arun Gupta wrote
a whole article for CounterPunch on just this issue. The entire essay
traffics in MSM horse-race probabilities rather than political substance, as
though Gupta were a hedge-fund manager assessing a possible investment
rather than a radical seeking the most favorable vehicle for spreading his
ideas. He adduces from various sources that (1) Sanders cannot win the
nomination and (2) he cannot win the general election—a point that would
seem to be moot in view of (1). He prophesies, “Simply put, you have a
better chance of Jennifer Lawrence or Idris Elba calling you up and saying
they want to be your friend with benefits than Bernie Sanders has of
becoming the next president.” But many of those who deride Sanders’s chances
will be supporting Jill Stein of the Green Party, whose likelihood of
winning the general election is on a par with any of those critics winning
both Powerball and Mega-Millions on the same day. Yet Jill Stein’s
statistical-hopelessness-unto absurdity will not deter the Bernie contras
from touting Stein or some other quixotic lefty independent in the general
election. So it appears the far-left deriders of Sanders’s steep odds are
not so averse to lost causes after all—purists in this as well, they simply
prefer causes that are lost unto near-invisibility. And let’s pose this
question to those who argue from probability: What if the long shot Sanders
comes through and wins the nomination and/or general election? Then what
would you do?
Sanders will not be able to implement his proposals even if elected because
he will face opposition in the Congress and the Courts: Sanders himself is
the first to acknowledge this point, which is based on a misunderstanding of
his purpose in running—he is not presenting himself as a personal savior and
cure-all for the world’s ills; he expressly states his intention of using
his campaign—and his nomination and election should they come to pass—of
spurring the American people to organize to win these goals for themselves.
As he stated in a campaign speech in Iowa last month:
Let me tell you something that no other candidate for president will tell
you. And that is [that] no matter who is elected to be president, that
person will not be able to address the enormous problems facing the working
families of our country. They will not be able to succeed because the power
of corporate America, the power of Wall Street, the power of campaign donors
is so great that no president alone can stand up to them. That is the truth.
People may be uncomfortable about hearing it, but that is the reality. And
that is why what this campaign is about is saying loudly and clearly: It is
not just about electing Bernie Sanders for president, it is about creating a
grassroots political movement in this country.
The case for radical support for Sanders amounts to this: before we can
arrive at point omega from point alpha, we have to traverse points beta,
gamma, delta, and so on. There are no magic superleft flying machines that
will propel us nonstop over all those intermediate steps from neoliberal
despotism to radical democracy—we know this if we are organizing on the
ground rather than theorizing in the clouds. The tempo of that journey will
depend chiefly on advances in the consciousness of the masses, not advances
in the vehemence of far-left declamation.
Some leftists can fantasize that they are doing a great service to humanity
by scoffing at the tactical tradeoffs that are essential to building a truly
massive, powerful grassroots movement—but in so doing, they’re merely
isolating themselves even further from the arenas of real political work and
potential mass outreach, like a swami meditating in a cave. Such radicals
remind me of the holy men described by Swami Vivekananda:
The highest men are calm, silent and unknown. They are the men who really
know the power of thought; they are sure that, even if they go into a cave
and close the door and simply think five true thoughts and then pass away,
these five thoughts of theirs will live through eternity. . . . These
Sâttvika men are too near the Lord to be active and to fight, to be working,
struggling, preaching and doing good, as they say, here on earth to
humanity.
The hour is late. We face planetary emergencies of unprecedented gravity.
Some reputable scientists say that it might be too late to avert them.
Plato’s vision of humanity trapped in the dark cave—our cave of collective
ignorance—is no mere parable: it a prophecy turned all too real. We must
nevertheless choose to act as though there is a way out, even if we suspect
that our choice is more an affirmation of faith than of reason. The Sanders
campaign has mustered enough of an audience to bolster that fragile belief.
It is not a panacea—it is a tentative first step of hope that Americans can
be roused in sufficient numbers to help save humanity from itself. No person
of conscience should refuse to join in that step and push it as far as it
can go.
William Kaufman is a writer and editor who lives in New York City. He can be
reached at kman484@xxxxxxxxxxxxx.
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