A bit over three years ago, I published “Bernie Sanders and the Graveyard of Social Movements” on this site, the day of the Iowa caucuses. It represented my evolving view of the Democratic Party, as I went from a 2008 Obama campaign volunteer to a 2011 Occupy activist, to a 2014 member of a Marxist organization most known for electing a socialist as a socialist, outside the two party hegemony. I decided to revisit the post and see how my analysis panned out, given what we know about the 2016 primaries, and the development of a social democratic/democratic socialist presence within the Democratic Party that has never been as loud and disruptive to entrenched party power.
To begin with, here’s a quote I pulled for the article by Lance Selfa, author of The Democrats: A Critical History:
The 2016 primaries came in a markedly different economic and social period than the 2008 election. Democrats benefitted greatly from the Bush administration’s quagmire in Iraq, the botched response to Hurricane Katrina, and the swift economic collapse that began in earnest about three years before Election Day, and rapidly intensified during the party primaries and the general election campaign.
By 2015, when candidates were announcing for the election the following year, there had been eight years of President Barack Obama. His ultimate legacy is difficult to pin down- it’s too early, and he benefits from being sandwiched between two historically terrible presidents. But while there was at some level an economic recovery- unemployment dropped steadily through his entire presidency- there were still severe and systemic problems.
Job recovery was largely part-time, contract, and freelance work with lower pay and benefits than the jobs that were lost in the Great Recession. Deindustrialization and the loss of blue-collar (and often unionized) jobs continued. Urban areas continued to feel the effects of Clinton-era welfare reform that made people ‘time-out’ of benefits, or never be able to get them in the first place. And while the ACA did improve coverage for some and reduce the overall uninsured rate, it failed to achieve price stability or affordable, usable insurance for those that could only afford the low-level plans. Deportations skyrocketed, despite Bush still being seen as the anti-immigrant president. Obama never withdrew from Afghanistan, leaving the country in the same violent stalemate that defined his predecessor, and indeed the post-9/11 era as a whole. Drone warfare was escalated in several countries, particularly Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia.
The response to the crisis by the Democrats was neoliberalism with a human face- progressive rhetoric masking a policy package marked by cuts and anti-labor practices. Into this void stepped Donald Trump, who made promises that this would all go away- the legacy of Obama would be swept away, the jobs would come back, and everything would return to some vague past encapsulated in “Make America Great Again.”
Returning to the article:
This is a meandering way of getting to the relationship of Bernie Sanders and the Democratic Party. As Matt Karp writes today, the inner core of the Party has been nearly unanimous in endorsing Clinton, or at least not endorsing Sanders. Even second and third-tier primary candidates of elections past got at least a small handful of national figures, even if they never polled in the double digits.
Sanders is far from the first major candidate that the leading cadre have despised. The Democrats did have a chance to move leftward (to essentially the social-democratic politics that Sanders triumphs) in the late 60s and early 70s, but conflict with the conservative establishment caused so much chaos that there was little time to, ya know, campaign and win elections. If you’re wondering whether the Party will ever embrace a truly different direction, ask whether the people that control it would benefit from higher corporate taxes, more regulation, and eliminating industries like private health insurance.
This still holds true. The Party leadership remains firmly against the social democratic programs Sanders advocated for, even as more Democratic politicians (and even more so, the party base at large) embraces them, at least in form if not in substance. Sanders in the 2020 race will still have to contend with low levels of prominent party endorsements, and a leadership that aims to stymie his political programs. We can see this in Nancy Pelosi’s attitude to Medicare for All and the Green New Deal. No matter what polling says, Sanders will never be a frontrunner in the classical sense. The party leadership will not rally around him now, and there is a non-zero chance they will never do so. The spectre of a moderate Michael Bloomberg or Howard Schultz torpedoing Sanders in the general election remains real. Finance capital has made it clear what the acceptable spectrum of candidates. Sanders (and possibly Elizabeth Warren and Tulsi Gabbard) are not in that range, and they will face an uphill climb the whole way unless they capitulate.
Bernie Sanders is not a Democrat and has never been one. I’ve run into plenty of people for whom party identification is a core part of their personal identity. They are Democrats. Their parents and grandparents, going back to the New Deal, were Democrats. Partisanship has an ideological component, but it also has the same nationalist substitute you get with sports teams and Kirk v. Picard. The instant Sanders decided to run as a Democrat he entered foreign turf that he doesn’t fit into well.
The 2016 primaries definitely did see that many people were willing to vote for an independent in the Democratic primary. But the establishment in the media and among party loyalists still do not trust him- and they will use this as a cudgel when possible. That the question of party affiliation came up in the CNN town hall (which, given how it was stacked with party officials and lobbyists, represented what will become standard among attacks on Sanders’ program and character) indicates it remains unresolved.
If history is our guide, the Sanders movement is not going to fundamentally change the structure. My stance on the Party has been consistent to the point that friends are surprised when someone else invokes it- “the graveyard of social movements.” The radicalism of groups since the 19th century has been neutered to the point that once the most militant of working class organizations run away from any genuine progressive politics. Clinton, who has never supported a $15/hr minimum wage, won the endorsement of the SEIU. Currently, their signature campaign is Fight for 15. Much of labor has been so institutionalized that its leadership will choose party loyalty, even if it undermines fast food workers who have lost their jobs advocating for $15.
This is the meat of the thing. Anecdotally, the Sanders supports I know have made strides in becoming party delegates and influencing (or outright taking over) local and state party committees. However, there are still hard limits that have not been overcome. The DNC core is still much like it was in 2016. There was no Bernie-esque left challenge to Nancy Pelosi, despite her great power and opposition to most social democratic programs. And while more modest ballot referendums on the minimum wage and marijuana legalization have fared well, the ones that Sanders and his supporters invested the most time into, like Proposition 61 in California (2016) and Issue 2 in Ohio (2017) that aimed to control prescription drug prices, and Proposition 10 in California (2018) on rent control, failed. In the latter two, quite badly. If the progressive left of the Democratic Party wants things that can be reconciled with capital (like marijuana legalization), they will find a relatively easy path. If their policy goals directly cut into profits, look only at the $100,000,000+ spent by industry on the two California propositions.
Inertia should always be considered:
The best predictor of the future is the past, and the Democratic Party has been around for about two hundred years now. American party politics has flipped multiple times, but the Democrats were never radicals.
The Sanders insurrection, and the new figures like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez that continue the spirit, are not trying to take the party back to some sort of mythic progressive past. They lionize the New Deal, but the New Deal was an attempt to stymie further radicalism. It was a compromise with capital that has since been mostly reversed. A true social democratic (or, gasp, democratic socialist) Democratic Party would be a heretofore-unseen force in American politics. It would be by far the biggest shift in American politics since the Civil Right Movement.
It would. But will it?
Can Bernie Sanders end up President, and not in the graveyard of social movements?
Unspoken Politics 
Andy,
Another solid post. Do you think that, at 77, Bernie is too old to run, no matter his positions? I do. His presence during the campaign may push some Democrats a bit to the left, but I am concerned about the age of anyone running for president. I hope the winner of the election would be able to live out the duration of her/his term, but so many of the household names are pretty old and I say that as a 66 year old woman. The office ages you inevitably, unless you have massive amounts of executive time and don’t give a shit.
Witness Pence as our next president should Trump kick the bucket. So many vice-presidential nominees are to balance the ticket. I get that as a strategy for winning, but I don’t think that works when the main job of the VP is to stand around in case the Big Guy bites it.
I talked to Dad about this and he told me thinks racism is this country’s original sin. I have to agree. Capitalism has added many problems, but racism is at the core of what is wrong with this country.
I am a little scattered here, but these are the things I thought about reading this post.
Is Gene Sharp the photo on your Twitter feed?
Love,
Mom
>
LikeLike
Let’s break things down here:
1) Yes, Bernie’s age is a problem. But no candidate who has entered the race has the same history of commitment to these key policies (which are wildly popular among Democrats and independents, and at least somewhat supported by Republicans). Kamala Harris was a prosecutor and AG that substantially contributed to California having the worst mass incarceration crisis in the country. All of her progressive stances have come in the past three years, as polls showed them gaining ground. Gillibrand is having Wall Street firms hold expensive fundraisers and ‘bundling’ donations, even though she said she wouldn’t take PAC money. Warren thinks capitalism can be saved with regulatory changes, but how long did Obama’s changes last when a Republican got into office? Not to say that she’s almost as old as Sanders in.
This can all be solved by selecting a progressive VP with the same values, rather than ‘ticket balancing’ by selecting a moderate. Please watch Nina Turner’s speech at the Sanders rally today. She’s the campaign national co-chair, a former Ohio state senator, and has run Our Revolution, the group that came out of the 2016 campaign and has been instrumental to getting young progressives of color like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez into power. Depending on how Bernie’s health holds up, he could just be a one-term president. But nobody has the name recognition, fundraising ability, and long history of consistency that he has. Anyone who tells you he’s not fundamentally different is trying to sell you on half-measures.
2) Dad’s talk about racism being the original sin is missing the sequence of American history. Race was not originally a concept in the Western world until colonialism. It was used as a way to maximize capitalist exploitation of labor and resources, and justify treatment that was otherwise unacceptable- under the guise that certain people were sub-human and thus had no rights. Observe how we went from mostly a white indentured servitude that worked Southern agriculture to an all-black, enslaved labor force. Race was also used to divide a working class that was far, far larger than the planter class in the South. If poor landless whites and slaves/free blacks recognized their common enemy, the slave system would collapse. Why did so many poor whites with no slaves die in the Civil War, often volunteering to do so? Because they had a racist ideology that they were socialized in, which was constructed by the elites to maintain their capitalist supremacy.
Malcolm X said ‘You can’t have capitalism without racism’. I trust him on that. But racism is a way to support capitalism, which is the fundamental force that worsens the lives of everyone but the elite, white or non-white.
3) My twitter avatar is C. Wright Mills, famous sociologist who coined the terms ‘sociological imagination’ and ‘the power elite’. Was also the one who coined the term ‘New Left’ in the early 1960s.
Love,
Andrew
LikeLike