I imagine that right this moment many are probably screaming in their heads at my choice of words—only a corporate hack would characterize Bernie as far-left, I imagine, is what is going through the heads of many reading this. However, Bernie is not particularly far-left. In the broader international scheme of things. He is very far-left in his particular context; contemporary American politics. And I don’t mean far-left as an insult in the sense that it is often flung around, I am trying to use it as, insofar as is possible, neutral descriptor. For instance, I am a progressive, and depending on the issue, there are plenty where I would be described as far-left.
Now, Bernie Sanders jumped in the Presidential race this year, even though Warren was already running and attempting to be the leftist opposition to Biden. The answer to why he ran, is because he viewed himself as the best candidate to stop the establishment and thought that he had a unique, durable political coalition and that 2016 showed the American electorate was very interested in what he had to sell. This is my starting premise. It’s also the premise for Jonathon Chait’s article in New York Magazine, which is a great read for a more narrow critique. Disclaimer: Chait was a big Hillary booster, and politically, he is more professional center-left to center, meaning he is a natural political opponent of Sanders. The stark reality, as Chait eloquently put it, is:
The second Sanders campaign has shown conclusively how badly the left misunderstood the electorate. It is not just that Sanders has failed to inspire anything like the upsurge in youth turnout he promised, or that he has failed to make meaningful headway with black voters. White working-class and rural voters have swung heavily against him. In Missouri and Michigan, those voters turned states he closely contested four years ago into routs for his opponent. Some rural counties have swung 30 points from Sanders 2016 to Biden 2020. The candidate in the race who has forged a transracial working-class coalition is, in fact, Joe Biden.
I like Chait, he wrote a great piece called “Two Cheers for Socialism, Liberals Need Enemies on the Left”, and In this piece too, he shows a keen and reality-based critique of leftist movements and limitations, that same way he wrote some of the most insightful pieces about the 2016 primary and general election. It seems like just yesterday, I was writing in 2016 about the pattern of Sanders’ voters, especially the gaudy margins he was getting in many white, rural areas, where it seemed obvious that protest votes from the right-wing party members (and to a lesser degree sexism) where playing an outsized role. I received quite a fierce backlash even, when I said, looking deeper into Bernie’s numbers, it was clear a large portion of people voting for him in the primary in many areas, were people that wouldn’t even vote for him in the general, legacy Democrats and disgruntled, increasingly conservative working class white voters who are disenchanted with government, not looking to expand it, and who mainly wanted to stick it to Clinton in the primary.
Yet, it became something of a shibboleth of Leftist commentary, particularly in the more mainstream elements of the far-left (because yes, there is a very mainstream, reasonable far-left, as well as a rump end of assorted radicals of all sorts of idiosyncratic political beliefs and traditions), that the 2016 election showed that voters voted for Trump to destroy the contemporary political system, and that if Democrats would only embrace that anger, that Bernie showed we could mobilize a broad coalition for radical, far-reaching reforms. For a lot of Democrats, they take it as a point of faith that Bernie would have won while Clinton lost, a counterfactual they usual point to polls for, but which overlooks the fact Bernie Sanders wasn’t really attacked in 2016. Hillary Clinton was nicer to Bernie than anyone running in 2020 was, even Elizabeth Warren, and Trump spent the election trying to goad some Bernie voters into voting for him, so he never really needed to attack him. However, Bernie’s opposition file was more than a foot deep, and I have had many of the things rumored to be there by the media (video of Sanders at a Sandinista rally where people were shouting “Death to America”) confirmed to me by an acquaintance who has become a Never-Trump Democrat, but previously was quite connected in Republican campaigns and was working for a Republican affiliated media relations firm. It seems ridiculous to even need to relitigate this, but 2016 polls don’t represent a good argument that Bernie would have been so much better in 2016 than Hillary Clinton, nor that he would have held on to more blue-collar white working-class voters.
The problem I’ve always seen is twofold. One, America is a very conservative country. Two, it’s political system, the entire political system, is designed to hamper rapid and radical reforms of all types—even Trump has only been able to rollback Obama’s extensive administrative reforms and policies, not to completely rollback decades of progress. Make no mistake though, if Trump gets another term, radical conservatives will have control of the judiciary for 20-30 years, and the consequences for that are so devastating that it would take a separate essay to describe. So, it has long been with a sense of bafflement that I have watched people with worldviews and politics largely concurrent with my own (I am between being a Chait-style liberal, and being a self-described Democratic socialist; in essence, look at Elizabeth Warren, and you basically have my political outlook on everything, including to implementing Medicare for All, which I also think will take a long-term plan and a tiered transition), have no sense for being a minority, which they are.
The far-right has a persecution complex, born out of a deep sense that they are marginalized and threatened by contemporary society and cultural trends that they don’t like, and this has an aral of truth in that the conservative movement is a reactionary minority movement in America; albeit the largest and most privileged minority in the country. This means, on a practical level, everything the right does, from Stephen Miller to Ben Shapiro to Kevin McCarthy, is informed by that sense of being a minority. They make political decisions, give up fights and pivot on, and punt on certain issues and keep punting them until they gain the political power to get what they want or, like abortion and the ACA, have methodically destroyed what they don’t like through a decade(s) long war of a million tiny cuts and administrative actions/legislative bills of small scope. The intense group unity means the group sticks together, and the leaders’ usually rightly redirect blame on a morally flawed opposition for why everything the group wants isn’t being done overnight, while generating cheers and adulation for the continuous small steps being made to defeat that opposition. Now that the neo-Nazis and alt-right have taken hold of the Republican party, those minority organizing techniques and desperate measures are stronger than ever.
Quite the opposite to that, the far-left seems to think it is actually the vast majority, and acts like it is the vast majority (there is no one, cleanly delineated ideological group in America that constitutes a vast majority). Hence the far-left in particular tends to latch onto a narrative of oppression and marginalization (much as the right does), but it is always of a small minority oppressing the majority. Thus, the endless DNC wars (that’s also a subject for an entire piece on its own), and the preoccupation with Wall Street and wealthy interests (this is very rightly done; like Warren I view this as the preeminent problem of our political system). The popularity of voter suppression narratives and election fraud also fit into this narrative (election fraud not so much, but voter suppression is real, and Republicans use it as a tactic to win elections). But the far-left (I feel that if I used “we” here, many might take issue with it, sense ideologically, I am not purely far-left, and I have bounced and drifted a lot in my political priorities and beliefs since becoming political active at 13), always conceives of itself as a Nixonian “Silent Majority” with all the privileges of a vast majority. That is why even within the far-left, the amount of petty squabbling over minor details is widespread, to say nothing of the long, glorious tradition of many on the far-left viewing folks in the center of the political spectrum as being no better than reactionary fascists (hey, that’s how Hitler came into power, because the communists sabotaged and refused to cooperate with the Social Democratic Party or entertain any coalitions with the Centrists). There is no group unity. But there is also not much strategy.
Conservatives started running for lower office in the 1970s, they built large political networks of operatives, fundraisers, allies, and slowly took over the establishment of the Republican party, an establishment which is now being taken over by the second wave of conservatives, the Alt-Right. Conservatives have been plotting and organizing to take over the judiciary (and 1930s style gut any government policy or program they don’t like with unelected judges operating on hypocritical/overly narrow constitutional dogma), since the 1970s. The Federalist Society was formed in 1982 (9 years before I was even born!). Conservatives and the Alt-Right even more, have been taking over our political system; the Alt-Right and neo-nazis in particular, encourage and recruit people to become police officers, join the military, take jobs in government bureaucracy and most of all, get involved in tech and internet companies. They view it is as a lifetime program, slowly undermining the foundation that, if you include Nixon (who embraced the welfare state and Keynesian economics, for all his deep flaws in every other respect) that 48 years of U.S. Presidents created and oversaw with few major changes (other than some economic deregulation that occurred under Carter). Meanwhile, the far-left tends to view any reform program that doesn’t happen over the course of 4 years as a sell-out, not worthy, and destructively dangerous. I still can’t wrap my head around how extremely slow progress is worse than negative progress, but the majoritarian mentality on the far-left has created a mindset where, like Ocasio-Cortez’s one-bill solution to climate change, that massive, globally intertwined structural issues of economics and politics can be solved quickly and in one-shot bills.
I saw in 2009 too, as many on the far-left quickly began trashing Obama when it became clear we weren’t getting everything we’d wanted for decades passed in a single year of government (disclaimer, I was one of them). Indeed, by the time 2010 came around not just the far-left, but vast segments of the left in general, had lost interest in the entire process. There was no energy on the leftist side, none at all. Wide chunks of the Obama coalition, including new voters (my fellow millennials) shrugged and didn’t vote in 2010, when the demographic realignment gave Republicans the House and most of the gubernatorial races in America. Whereas Republicans would spend a minimum of 38 years plotting to take over the judiciary, over 42 years of prioritizing overturning Roe vs. Wade, or 50 years for cutting social security and destroying the Estate Tax, the culture of the left was such that broad swaths essentially shrugged, declared their frustration with the political system, and quit (or at least quit being advocates, quit their campaigning and shut their wallets), after a single year of unified Democratic governance.
This is majoritarianism, and it is also a form of self-centered privilege. I see it far too often among the online culture of my generation in particular, where knifing someone in online comments, and engaging in a kind of puritanical moralism on every kind of complex issue, is the default setting. Much more, is the fanatical need for instant gratification, that I have watched in 2010, in 2012, in 2014, in 2016, and even in 2018, and now see in 2020 as well. Republicans are willing to take a few drops of sugar every day for 40 years until the time comes they can finally open the bag and stuff themselves. Leftists get a few drops of sugar and then if they don’t get to open the bag immediately and eat all they want, throw the whole thing in the trash, ending their daily trickle of sugar and eliminating the possibility that they will get open the bag at some point in the future. Even more deeply, I can’t help but be concerned with how communitarian Republican activism is, how general and cultural it is, while activism on the left, particularly the far-left, is riven with ideological distinctions, mutual distrust, and distrust of political systems and institutions.
This very, very wide arc returns me to Bernie Sanders. Bernie Sanders got started in the 1960s leftist movements. As many of Sanders’ boosters are quick to note, he marched on Washington with MLK Jr., and he was so involved with the Chicago Freedom Movement and with CORE. Bernie Sanders has in a sense, been deeply committed to fighting for political reform, for a very broad, far-reaching reform of American government and society for his entire adult life. Sanders’ has dealt with many bitter experiences and mistreatment at the hands of American institutions (like many others who have dedicated themselves to progressive change). As a result, Bernie Sanders is also distrustful of political institutions, mistrustful of people who don’t share his ideological perspectives, and views himself as speaking for a silent majority, always silenced by the corporate media (yes, to a degree), and the DNC, and voter suppression (Michigan was a case of same-day voter registration and very high turnout for the resources and polling stations allocated by the budget, set by the Republican state legislature).
Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez just bemoaned the fact that American political parties are big tents; the fact that she and Joe Biden are in the same party. Well, she was only half right. The Republican party is not a big tent party and hasn’t been since the 1990s. It’s a reactionary conservative party (and now is a white nationalist party) and that worldview is at least partially shared by nearly every elected Republican congressperson, governor, or President since 1992 destroyed the old, genial, business elite-oriented establishment wing of the party. The Democratic party, on the other hand, is a big tent party, and this point, it’s a party where you could say the only connective tissue is being anti-fascist. The Democratic party is like if the German Bundestag consisted of the AfD (Alternative for Deutschland) neo-Nazis, and everyone who was anti-Nazi. Bernie Sanders too, seems angered and exasperated by the suggestion that his platform, in its entirety, is not embraced by the wide-majority of primary voters, nor understand that some may be like me, and like the platform but dislike the candidate promoting it. The idea of moderating in the slightest to expand his coalition was a non-starter from the beginning, because as I outline prior, and as Elizabeth Warren discovered, the far-left will drop you like a sack of rocks the moment you deviate from their ideology, driven as it is by instant gratification and the demand for instant change even in the face of ideological and institutional opposition across a broad swath of America.
Where Bernie (and Warren) went most wrong was in misreading the electorate. This point also came down in my breakdown of Warren’s campaign failings, namely that Bernie and Warren have been running issues campaign. I can’t think of a single Presidential campaign I have watched, since watching politics in 2004, where an issues candidate won. In 2004 Kerry won by pushing an electability argument with his profile, and by pitching himself as an all-rounded experienced politician ready to take the Presidency in an uncertain time. Barack Obama ran on change and hope for progress. Hope, his campaign slogan, was not a government policy. In 2016 Clinton’s campaign was centered on incremental progress, rallying around Obama’s accomplishments—the slogan was Forward, and her campaign was nearly all about experience and competency. In 2020, both figures from the far-left of the party made their campaigns all about issues, Warren worst of all (and it was something that hampered her). Bernie sort of has a class struggle rhetoric to lean into, and his anti-Wall Street populism, but what exactly is he selling? How would you describe the Sanders’ campaign to someone who works 60 hours a week at a job they hate, has only a high school education, a spouse, two kids, and really isn’t all the interested in politics, but votes out of civic duty. Biden is selling “Fuck Trump. And I can beat him.” That’s it. It’s a very simple message and takes very little effort to digest.
Bernie is selling a dozen or more different policy programs and taking down billionaires and big corporations. Many of these policy programs cost trillions. Medicare for All (which for the record I think should be the long-term goal of all leftists), would raise taxes on people, even the working-class person above. Even if, say, this person hates billionaires and corporations just like Bernie, and hates his insurance, they just don’t care about or trust politics all that much, and are wary of big government promises. This person wants to make a quick and simple decision; one they aren’t studying greenhouse gas emissions plans and economic modeling of Medicare for All in order to make. This is the simple truth that broad spectrums of the financially stressed working class, as well as educated middle class professionals, are hesitant to embrace massive structural changes that might cost them their jobs or lead to tax increases. A broad swath of the electorate, even among middle class professionals, is also not particularly engaged with politics, most probably couldn’t name their own congressperson. So asking them to pick your campaign on the basis of a policy platform never works, instead they gravitate towards candidates that look like and sound like they can win, who have relatable profiles. That’s the insipid and under-looked genius of the Biden campaign, which was to nearly avoid all policy debates and policy talk, and make the whole theme of the campaign beating Trump, and Joe Biden being a likeable, goofy, electable old uncle. Sticking it to the establishment or breaking the system are both abstract, impersonal concepts; they don’t build a brand nor do they bridge the gaps between the multiple voting groups required to win a Democratic primary.
Because Bernie and Warren both thought what the Democratic primary electorate was hankering for was a radical and ambitious platform, they both found the hard way that the number one thing on people’s mind is the desperate question of who can beat Donald Trump, and who can beat him by the biggest margin. One of the only things Biden has seemed cognizant of during this campaign is that Democratic voters are interested in beating Trump, which is why it’s the center piece of Biden’s campaign. I found it interesting, but not conclusive, that in the brief time Bernie had clawed his way to a frontrunner status, he doubled-down on Castro-nostalgia and Democratic voters panicked, because that kind of rhetoric is toxic in the critical swing state of Florida. I have a friend from Seattle who after his initial wave of disgust with a Biden candidacy, back-stepped and commented “Maybe after years and years of nominating super qualified, intelligent candidates and losing, Democrats have finally found their own relatable idiot.” Politics has shown that for all its complexities and diverse fields, the advantages of being a well-known old white man are powerful, and that campaigns are truly KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) or Miss.
The far-left is not the dominant force in primaries. Yet. As demographic change continues, and if the far left ever unifies and operates on the same strategic level that conservatives have, the far-left will become the main force in the Democratic primary. Right now, the important thing is how to leverage the power (financial, organizational, volunteer-based) that the far-left has, and to examine the hard realities of Bernie Sanders’ and Elizabeth Warren’s failures to build broad coalitions or gain the support of working-class voters and Black voters.
Some Last Notes
I had a few other varied observations about Bernie’s campaign issues. He’s running as a Democrat. Tens of millions of primary voters are dedicated Democrats, they like their party, admire many in its leadership, and take pride in the accomplishments the party has over the years, even those who are to the left of the party and think it should have done a lot more. Bernie, and his campaign (like his official Press Secretary) and many of his most prominent and ubiquitous boosters (Cornell West for one) spend most of the time on the campaign trail and in media ruthlessly trashing the Democratic party and its leaders, including Barack Obama has something like an 90% favorability rating among registered Democrats, 70+ percent strongly favorable. There seems to be a bit of a lead ear on this issue for Bernie and his supporters, many of whom come from non-politically engaged families, conservative families, or families with a tradition of anti-Democratic or anti-establishment ideology (think the ex-Hippie’s and their grandkids). That was the conclusion me and my Bernie supporting friend came to in 2016 in our discussion on what things both camps failed to understand about the other camp.
My friend came from a modestly upper class, white Mississippi family with highly educated parents doing professional white-collar work, so they were in essence, McCain-Romney Republicans, and his exposure to the Left came from Noam Chomsky and reading anti-capitalist critiques—getting involved in Democratic politics was a matter of ends for those reforms. His observation was that a lot of the very dedicated Bernie supporters he knew came from similar backgrounds, or from anti-establishment backgrounds, as many Black activists do. I came to Democrats from my family, particularly the grandfather I was closest to as a child, who was a die-hard fan of Bill Clinton and Al Gore (and later became, probably the only 60ish year old white southern man from the rural south with a photo of Barack Obama on his wall, right beside the computer where he did radio ads). For me Democratic party identification was tribal, a source of pride from an early age and it was also sort of the way I defined myself against the rest of my family, most of whom were Republicans or drifted that way over time. I have grown beyond the tribalism as I became more educated and gained more experience with many marginalized communities, listening to their frustrations and concerns, but I understand the tribalism, I lived the tribalism for over a decade. I understand the communal and tribal sense of party politics in the U.S., on a personal level at that, and so I am often baffled at the people who have a solely personal, isolated, often academic perspective on politics. As Bernie does, as Bernie operates on and continues to fail to understand why this hampers his movement when he runs into primaries full of dedicated tribal Democrats, even those sympathetic to many of his ideas.
At a fundamental level, you can’t run against the establishment and be the anti-establishment candidate, and then get utterly outraged and have your Press Secretary and Boosters eviscerating the establishment because it’s campaigning for your opponent. That’s like….having your cake and eating it too; you can’t be blatantly anti-establishment and expect the establishment is going to stay neutral. After watching official campaign members, boosters, and supporters across the internet, I’m seeing a similar thing to 2016, even as the margins are way more lopsided to Biden—anytime Bernie loses, nearly all the energy is expended on conspiracy theories, attacks on the DNC, and claims of voter fraud. If Bernie’s campaign and his boosters spent 1/3rd the energy evaluating what the candidate and the movement could do better, instead of trying to invalidated election results they don’t like, his campaign would probably be a lot better off.
One of the better comments I have seen on my own social media, from an Indian-American friend who is also a fellow writer, is.
I avidly supported him in 2016, I really wanted him to beat Biden in 2020, but at the end of the day, I've had to regretfully conclude that the core of the issue is that Bernie is simply not a leader. He's just not. It's not a diss on him, very few people are. It’s just the truth. He has no idea how to build community that doesn’t seek him out themselves and he has no clue how to control his supporters and I'm honestly not even convinced he can or that the army of mostly white social media malcontents will even listen to him if he tries.
While talking with another friend who went from being a mid-level Hillary campaign coordinator to working for Bernie’s campaign, that friend always emphasized, in a very Russian style, that every campaign’s boosters said offensive stuff about some issue or some other candidate. And that is a common defense I’ve seen. The difference is that like the Trump campaign, in Bernie’s case, people get their cues from the candidate himself, from his Press Secretary, from his senior campaign officials, from his most prominent and most-used boosters, from his speakers at his biggest rallies. The abuse heaped on other politicians (including Elizabeth, and including a volunteer distributing offensive characterizations of her for use in Iowa, using Trumpian talking points), and on people that don’t support Bernie or have slightly different implementation plans and policy plans for Bernie’s key issues, is not some false narrative, and it’s not some organic, uncontrollable thing, it, like MAGA-hat waving Trump supporters behavior, is something that emerges from the character of the campaign and from the tempo set by the leaders of the movement at the highest level.
Thus, while Bernie is running a simple, well-honed message of radical reform and trying to tap into universal anger with the rich, with corporations, and with establishment failings, I think he falls flat another way, because he, like Warren, is also relying on Academics and political theorists, decades long would-be revolutionaries who also have a political theorist’s conception of the electorate and a religious like sentiment to political ideology. Most Americans have a degree of flexibility on their politics, and many of their “politics” are more informed by broad impressions and moral sentiments, of which tribal loyalty to the Democratic party is a huge part. You can’t take on the system without understanding and to a degree respecting these sentiments, and understanding that theoretical critiques of systematic problems are not going to move a lot of low-information voters and particularly working-class voters, for whom those concerns seem remote and inaccessible. The point is that Bernie Sanders, not the establishment, Progressives, not moderate beltway insiders, have to reach out to these people, connect to them, and make them feel included and comfortable with our movement. The blame game and resentment around Bernie’s disappointing showing this time around (obvious since the Iowa caucuses), is a feature of his campaign’s and the movement’s failing. Such energy is better spent trying to improve the way we communicate, and reducing the sweeping, often puritanical ideological commitments we require as an upfront fee for participation.