SALON


SUNDAY, DEC 13, 2015 02:00 PM EST

Age of the Fabricating Faker: All the Republican candidates embody this condition — but none so much as Donald Trump

Calling Trump out on his lies renders the skeptic as the problem child, in denial of "common sense"

DAVID THEO GOLDBERG

TOPICS: DONALD TRUMP, 2016 ELECTIONS, MICHEL FOUCAULT, EDITOR'S PICKS, ELECTIONS NEWS, POLITICS NEWS

(Credit: Reuters/Christopher Aluka Berry)

We live in a time of dramatic make-believe. Almost half the voting population in the United States is at best skeptical about well-established scientific evidence, at worst in utter denial, when the evidence runs counter to their ideological beliefs. Corporations brand products more or less divorced from the outcomes they credibly are able to effect. Individuals increasingly advance their own interests by fabricating résumés and memoirs partially if not completely at odds with their actual biographical achievements. And politicians and political interests increasingly make up claims about the world, other candidates and themselves so at odds with any semblance of reality it should take a nanosecond of fact-checking to refute. And yet significant swaths of the electorate and of publics more generally are not merely convinced by the claims but seemingly have their base beliefs reinforced by such representations.

The bandwidth of this now increasingly proliferated phenomenon is sufficiently broad to suggest it has become a defining condition of our time. I will call our moment one of make-believe. Make-believe here is not just fantasy, a making up, with the intention to deceive. There may well be a heartfelt commitment to the claim embedded in the fabrication. But it is more than deceit. The fabrication is a function of a social fabric of woven tales about the world, one meant at once to reinforce a social vision with the view to a certain sort of end-oriented action (or inaction, as the case may be). The reinforcement itself is usually shored up by recourse to force or its threat, to cutting off (hence the political currency today of walls and closing borders), to physical violence (from bomb-dropping to roughing up at political gatherings).

It follows that the “make” in make-believe is not just a making up, a cosmetic veneer to make oneself or one’s cause look good. The making signals also a compulsion, the forcefulness of the making in the make-believe, the compelling of belief on both sides of the utterance. An “or else” sits implicitly in the disposition of “you better believe,” suggestive of the threat. Implicit in the threat is the insinuation that ultimately the world constituted in and through the sustaining fabrication would unravel were the belief to evaporate.

Of course, pretty much all politicians make things up to secure interest and ultimately votes. Politicians, as the Sophists were among the first to see, are concerned foremost with the rhetorical arts of securing the belief of followers, if need be window-dressed as — or more extremely at the expense of any relation to — truth-telling.  But there seems something larger, deeper, more prolific at work in the turn we have taken over the last 30 years. The “Big Lie” of the fascist 1930s gave way in the 1980s to narration of the “Great Communicator.” But now, I am suggesting, we have come to inhabit the age of the “Fabricating Faker,” the “Monster Make-Believer.”

Most, if not all, the Republican candidates for president represent this turn, to more constrained or unbridled degree. All deny the science of climate change, pretty much all the way down. All deny a widespread problem with police racial profiling, with deadly consequence, despite almost daily evidence. All at least insinuate, if not simply declare, that terrorists are crossing the southern border from Mexico, along with “illegal” migrants, even if they can point to no actual instance. All seem to think the largest threat to homeland security are Syrian refugees, despite almost weekly evidence that the danger is far more readily from violent, gun-toting alienated white men at home. All seem to think that robust deregulation and tax reduction for the wealthy principally will ignite an endless economic boom despite repeated evidence of cycles of boom and bust that have left larger and larger segments of the population impoverished (they are perhaps right about the “ignite” and “boom” part). Some seem to think that America can close its borders, cut itself off increasingly from the interconnected world we inhabit and live out our lives in perpetuated bubble cultures that will never burst, until they pop repeatedly and violently in our collective faces. All seem to think that repealing the Affordable Care Act and replacing it with some version of a voucher system will magically provide healthcare to the deinsured. Some remain “birthers,” and “truthers,” where the “evidence” in each instance is out and out fantasy, at best, “compulsion” at worst.

All the Republican presidential candidates embody this condition of make-believe more or less without reservation. Yet the two candidates that have led the nomination process much of the way to date are those who best represent the condition. Donald Trump and Ben Carson have been willing to make things up more or less from whole cloth to a greater degree than the others. Carson has circulated a completely debunked theory about the Egyptian pyramids being built to store grain. And he has insisted that he was offered a full scholarship at West Point officer academy as he was completing high school though he never applied, while claiming he threatened to kill his mother as a young teenager though no one recalls him expressing violence in any outward way. Trump, for his part, long denied President Obama’s U.S. citizenship in the face of reams of counter-evidence. And he has emphasized repeatedly that Muslims in New Jersey were cheering the fall of the World Trade Center on 9/11 though no one can point to any evidence bearing this out, and plenty to the contrary.

When both have been called out on their fabrications, their recourse has been to deny they are fabricating, to reassert the claim as though repeating it often enough will render it true, and to deny their denials. By erasing the traces of their make-believe they reinforce the respective claims as if their content must be true. Any skeptic is rendered the problem child, in denial of “common sense.” Believers are turned into truth-bearers, witnesses to the gospel; non-believers are made maniacal, in denial of the make-believe any “ordinary” person can easily “see.”

Trumpeting — the bellowing of any made-up claim to political purpose — is a strategy of trumping one’s political opponents, drowning them out both in the making of the claim and especially in the calculated media frenzy prompted in its wake.  It is the technique of outplaying the less agile by sidestepping the charge and deftly turning the thrust against the critic. And the moment of trumping is loudly proclaimed, trumpeted from the political stage, further drowning out critics and skeptics.

In his seminal lectures on the history of neoliberalism, the French philosopher Michel Foucault argued that “homo economicus” — Economic Man — of classical liberalism was replaced by neoliberalism’s Man of Enterprise. Homo economicus is defined in terms of economic agents rationally pursuing their self-interest to optimize self-identified preferred outcomes for themselves. By contrast, Enterprising Man emphasizes social fabrication for the sake of leveraging social and political networks, securing self-advantage, closing the deal and satisfying passing desires. He is one who competes and invents, makes things up, saying the damnedest things for the sake ultimately of nothing but self-advantage, self-possibility, self-profit. He makes things happen by inventiveness and self-invention. Fabrication and self-making, creation and re-creation serve as his presiding sensibilities, reflective of those of our moment. Looking good and acting awesome, he is self-minded in flaunting prowess and profit. But he also projects braggadocio and whatever he can get away with. He looks to be in total control even while bordering on being out of control. And he networks only with those who think and look like him. He is “Mad Men” reprised, “American Psycho” revived.

The Trumpet Man, the Donald, is the pitch-perfect embodiment of the Man of Enterprise. As such, he represents the optimal political candidacy to suit the increasingly troubling times we have come to inhabit. Nothing is beyond the phantasmic  molding: History is bent to self-profit, endorsements are spun out of mere agreements to meet with him to discuss concerns notably with his candidacy, people — especially people of color — are reduced to props in the political maneuvering. Mexicans are to be sent “home” no matter their having lived much of their lives or been born in the USA, Muslims are to be prevented from entering or re-entering the “homeland” no matter their being American citizens or the constitutional violation. Persons in the concrete are exploited for his political advantage, only to be told by Trumpeting Trump how much he loves “their kind” in the abstract — and how much those abstractions love him! Even excludable Muslims supposedly now love him in his fantasy life-world.  It’s less now that the emperor has no clothes than that he has made them from whole cloth. Donald Trump, Geert Wilders, Marine Le Pen, the axis of totalizing make-believe nativisms today. The Mussolinis of our moment.

Donald the Trumpeter for president. We get, alas, the trickster we bargain for. The basement bargain sale has begun.

Salon

WEDNESDAY, OCT 21, 2015 12:07 PM EDT

Democrats’ destructive Bernie Sanders myth: Stop saying he can’t win!

Polls show Dems don't think Sanders can win the nomination -- or the general. That's a mistake

SEAN ILLING

TOPICS: BERNIE SANDERS, 2016 ELECTIONS, HILLARY CLINTON, 2016 DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY, ELECTIONS NEWS,NEWS, POLITICS NEWS

(Credit: Reuters/Joshua Roberts/AP/Jae C. Hong/Photo montage by Salon)

As the Democratic presidential race heats up, we’re going to hear more and more about how unelectable Bernie Sanders is. And that’s not entirely unfair. It’s true that Sanders has exceeded expectations so far, particularly in terms of fundraising. And in places like New Hampshire, Sanders is either leading Clinton or it’s a virtual tie.

But even Democrats remain skeptical of Bernie’s chances. The latest Washington Post-ABC poll shows that Democrats, including those who support Sanders, don’t believe he can win the party’s nomination, much less a general election. Chris Cillizzasummarized the results well yesterday:

Asked who they thought would win – no matter which candidate they supported – only one in 10 Democrats (11 percent) named Sanders. By contrast, 65 percent chose Clinton and 14 percent opted for Joe Biden – even though he’s not actually running just yet. Isolate just self-described liberals – who comprise Sanders’s base – in that same poll and the result doesn’t change much; 67 percent name Clinton as the party’s most likely nominee while 13 percent chose Sanders and 12 percent Biden. Take Biden out of the equation and the numbers are even more stark: nearly three in four (73 percent) of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents say that Clinton will be their nominee while just 21 percent choose Sanders.

These are not encouraging numbers if you’re a Sanders supporter. It seems that many of the liberals and progressives campaigning for Sanders are doing so out of protest, a kind of symbolic rejection of Clinton’s inevitability. But if these numbers are even remotely true, then most of these people know – or perhaps believe – that the Sanders experiment is destined for failure.

If this is the case, that’s unfortunate. If Sanders doesn’t win the Democratic nomination, it will be because Democratic voters decided he couldn’t. Clinton is only inevitable if Democrats believe she is. No matter what the talking heads say, in the end it’s the votes – and the voters – that matter.

It will be interesting to see how many Democrats vote for Clinton only because they don’t think Sanders can win. As Cilliza notes, it’s clear that many Democrats like Sanders and would be happy if he won; they simply don’t believe he can. That belief may be enough to gift Clinton the Democratic nomination.

Clinton will probably make a stronger general election candidate than many believe, especially in light of her competition. However, a Sanders general election campaign would be a fascinating test of the proposition that Democrats would do much better if they owned their progressivism, something Clinton is unlikely to do.

I’ve long believed that Democrats have a branding problem, not an issue problem. On practically every issue that really matters to the middle class – from income inequality to health care to student debt to wage increases to campaign finance – the Democrats are on the right side. Republicans are more skilled at politics and rhetorical diversions, and so they manage to obscure the differences between the parties. Sanders, however, cuts through that like no other candidate I’ve seen in recent years, including Clinton and Obama and every other prominent Democrat.

Sanders is making a big mistake when he self-identifies as a “socialist” because that’s not really what he is – at least not in the classical sense. He’s a populist supporting a social democratic system grounded in capitalism, as a recent New York Times piece argues. While there’s no doubt Republicans would have a field day in a general election labeling Sanders a “socialist,” the fact is that Sanders would still speak directly to the issues progressives and liberals most care about.

It would be extraordinarily difficult for Sanders to win the presidency – there’s no way to avoid that conclusion. But it’s not as preposterous as many assume. There’s no way to know how the rest of the country would respond to Sanders’ message, but, according to the latest Real Clear Politics poll averages, Sanders performs about the same (or even better) against Republican candidates like Trump and Bush than Clinton does – although it’s worth noting that this is before Republicans have had time to pummel Sanders with malicious ads. Do these very early polls mean Sanders is more likely to win a general election than Clinton? No. But it ought to undercut the narrative that Sanders can’t win a general election.

Democrats would do well to at least consider this before voting one way or the other. If you support Clinton, vote for Clinton. If you support Sanders, however, don’t vote for someone else because you think he can’t win. We don’t know if that’s true or not, but believing it is will make it all the more likely.

Sean Illing is a USAF veteran and a former political science professor. He is currently a staff writer for Salon. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter. Read his blog here.

Is Hillary Clinton a Real Populist? It Doesn't Matter.

Is Hillary Clinton a Real Populist? It Doesn't Matter.

Written by  Brian Beutler | The New Republic

Progressive distrust of Hillary Clinton goes back a long way. Much of it stems from her husband’s centrist presidency, and still more of it from her own record as a senator, which included early and sustained support for President George W. Bush’s invasion and occupation of Iraq (she has since renounced that support). Some liberals fear that both Clintons lack deep ideological convictions, and thus can’t be depended upon to govern in liberal fashion.

Yet in the earliest days of her presidential campaign, Clinton has committed herself to several progressive positions. Even in absence of a committed primary challenger, Clinton is sawing off all the illiberal limbs that, to the dismay of committed liberals, she had climbed upon in the past.

In the past two weeks, Clinton has embraced a constitutional amendment to govern campaign finance, a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, and drivers’ licenses for unauthorized immigrants, neither of which she supported in 2008. If you’re a liberal Democrat with presidential ambitions, like former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley, this seems all too convenient.

"I’m glad Secretary Clinton’s come around to the right positions on these issues," O’Malley told reporters. “I believe that we are best as a party when we lead with our principles and not according to the polls. And every election is about the future. And leadership is about making the right decision, and the best decision before sometimes it becomes entirely popular."

Fair enough. Clinton hasn’t exactly covered herself in glory by wading behind the tide of public opinion. But is she, to quote the headline of a recent piece by the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent, “a populist of convenience?”

The truth is it doesn’t matter—not in any meaningful, lasting way. Whatever heuristic you use to explain it—necessity, expediency, or conviction—Clinton's movement to the left is unalloyed good news for liberals. Because if she wins the presidency as a result, that would change American politics in perpetuity.

There’s an ongoing debate in American politics over the extent to which the Obama coalition is unique to Obama, who is himself a unique historical figure. Are the younger, more progressive Democrats who swept him into office ready to do the same for a candidate who doesn’t check all of the same characteroliogical boxes—youth, charisma, diversity?

Recent scholarship on this basic question suggests the answer is yes—or rather, that partisan tendencies are fairly fixed, and largely driven by ideological antipathy.

Perhaps more importantly, Hillary Clinton also thinks the answer is yes—if, that is, you buy the cyncial (but possibly accurate) interpretation of her leftward shift. In fact, this might be the most hopeful interpretation as far as liberals are concerned. Because if Clinton doesn’t have any core convictions, and is only saying whatever she thinks she has to say to win—if indeed she's merely betting that things like campaign finance reform, same-sex marriage, and immigration reform will add up to a winning platform—then it's a nod to her belief that the Obama coalition is stable, loyal, and larger than the Republican electorate. 

“[T]his movement is an outgrowth of a broader Democratic Party shift towards the cultural priorities of the coalition that powered Obama victories in the last two national elections — nonwhites, millennials, socially liberal college-educated whites — and away from a reliance on culturally conservative blue collar whites,” the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent wrote recently. “Clinton’s movement on gay rights and immigration is probably less about making the left happy, and more about keeping pace with what has become broad Democratic Party consensus — it is inevitable, and part of a much bigger story.”

That story is a big part of Barack Obama’s legacy. But it can just as easily be framed as a story about the rising electorate, the national political divide, and which side ended up with more people on it. 

If Clinton believed Obama’s most loyal voters were unlikely to support her candidacy in great numbers irrespective of her campaign platform, she wouldn’t tailor her candidacy to suit to them but rather to suit blue collar white voters. She clearly hopes to improve on Obama’s dismal performance with the latter, but her leftward tack on issues like immigration and same-sex marriage suggest she knows she can win even if that doesn’t happen. And if she does win, it will make Obama theReagan-like figure he's always hoped to be, but for Democrats.

It would also, finally, undo the rightward shift that Clinton's husband initiated more than 20 years ago.

“This new party consensus,” writes National Journal’s Ron Brownstein, “has allowed—and even required—both Obama and Hillary Clinton to replace Bill Clinton's cultural centrism with reliably liberal positions on social issues, including immigration and gay rights.”

And if those reliably liberal positions turn out to be reliably winning positions with the national electorate, that would mean America itself has moved durably to the left.

The original article on The New Republic

Salon

SUNDAY, SEP 20, 2015 12:00 PM EDT

The media’s big Bernie Sanders myth: Here’s how we build the coalition that shatters Clintonism, neoliberalism

Hillary-bots argue that Sanders only appeals to white Iowa & New Hampshire voters. Here's how he proves that wrong

ANIS SHIVANI

OPICS: BERNIE SANDERS, HILLARY CLINTON, RACE, EDITOR'S PICKS, ELECTIONS 2016, NEWS, POLITICS NEWS

(Credit: AP/Steve Helber)

Bernie Sanders is showing swift-footedness in making all the moves necessary to not only establish but consolidate his new front-runner position in Iowa and New Hampshire. Some in the media may not yet have caught on to the way the momentum continues to shift, but eventually the reality will sink in.

There are three things Sanders needs to do—and has already started doing in a noticeable way—to move clearly and permanently ahead of Hillary Clinton at the national level: a) dramatic emphasis on minority outreach; b) expansion of his economic message to one of social harmony; and c) delegitimization of the negative populism pervasive in the Republican primary.

Already, Cornel West has given a rousing introduction to Sanders in South Carolina. Sanders has been trying to reach out to the Congressional Black Caucus, though not yet with much luck. They might as this message becomes clearer: Sanders is a much better deal for minorities of every stripe—from embattled African-Americans to Hispanics and Asians and others—because of what his policies of economic justice represent compared to the neoliberal repressiveness of Clinton and the establishment Democratic Party.

The Clintons talk a good game when it comes to African-Americans (Bill, after all, was supposed to be our first black president before the real first black president showed up) but the truth is that Clintonian neoliberalism really tightened the screws on African-Americans by legitimizing extreme income inequality as the normal course of things—smashing, in effect, the Democratic Party’s bargain with minorities since the New Deal.

The Clintons ended welfare as we knew it, for example, by delusionally hoping that technology-driven productivity would somehow make poverty cease to exist, or by expanding the surveillance, prosecution and incarceration capacities of the state, building on the war on drugs initiated by Ronald Reagan to impose a stark omnipotence much less forgiving of mistakes made by poor people. Rhetorically—and emptily—the Clintons may align themselves with African-Americans, and claim some sort of honorary status with that community, but their policies have been death—literal death on the streets—for African-Americans.

It is a myth created by the establishment media that Sanders’ appeal is limited to well-educated white coastal liberals, particularly males, and that he has a natural barrier to how far and deep his support can extend. The claim is that South Carolina—and then Nevada with its Hispanic population—will be the firewalls that will break Sanders’ momentum if he wins in mostly white Iowa and New Hampshire.

But the truth is that Sanders’ potential appeal to minorities is unlimited—unlike Clinton’s upper limits due to the nature of her past and present policies and her utter incapacity to enunciate anything real that resonates with people beyond recycled neoliberal micro-platitudes. Therefore, Sanders must go for broke in reaching out to African-Americans, Hispanics and Asians as their natural candidate, and in the process rewrite the whole script for how the Democratic Party courts voters. New, and unprecedented, promises must be made to shatter the silence around issues that neoliberal candidates have zero interest in highlighting.

Secondly, while it has so far been a necessary and indeed winning strategy for Sanders to emphasize a straightforward recital of agenda items—especially single-payer healthcare, free college tuition and a $15 minimum wage (outlined by Jonathan Tasini in “The Essential Bernie Sanders and his Vision for America“)—Sanders needs to open this up to a message of optimism that reaches well beyond the listing of economic policy items. Britain’s Jeremy Corbyn has already shown how to do this.

Of course, these need to continue being hammered into consciousness until they became accepted parts of liberal discourse again (as the necessary antidote to Reaganite social darwinism that we never got from the Democratic Party), but I’m sure that Sanders will also figure out a way to connect these policy prescriptions to a radically expansive vision of the good life, part of which must involve reimagining America as an honest and responsible citizen in the world community.

There’s a reason why Hillary Clinton—like Tony Blair in Britain—has always been utterly incapable of humor. It is not a character flaw, per se, as it wasn’t for Blair, but the fact that neoliberalism demands a pure administrative outlook, managing at the margins with faith in private enterprise as the only salvation, that simply does not allow any glimpse of humor—by which I really mean humanity—to peek through.

Young people everywhere are looking for this streak of humanity in an increasingly robotic, unforgiving, rules-based world. Perhaps Sanders, despite his age, or perhaps because of it, can tap into his bona fide countercultural heritage to establish new norms for millennial liberal discourse, making a rousing case for old-fashioned liberty based in economic justice.

This is the ideal Martin Luther King Jr. and other visionaries at the time were beginning to fashion when we got sidelined, for nearly half a century, by an entirely different vision—Nixonian and ruthless and divisive (Donald Trump is playing from the same script). Neoliberals, it should be noted, will continue to indulge in the false bromides of the culture wars when pressed to the wall; they remain immersed in this methodology of false attack and counterattack, rather than seeking the roots of liberty in economic fairness.

Finally, Trump has gifted almost the perfect platform for Sanders to work against: a dark populism rooted in xenophobia and protectionism, a Machiavellian worldview pitting true Americans versus the racially unacceptable other, setting the stage for Sanders’ authentic populism, rooted in participatory democracy, to make all the more sense. The contrast with Trump is one big reason why Sanders has had so much resonance.

Here, Sanders’ outreach, such as when he spoke at Liberty University and was introduced by Jerry Falwell Jr., is a longer-term investment, and it will be more difficult to gain traction with this voting constituency than with African-Americans and other minorities. But fascistic populism of the talk radio variety needs a strong counterweight, which neoliberalism for the past quarter-century, coinciding with the rise of the Clintons, has refused to provide.

One way Sanders is correcting this extreme imbalance in the propaganda wars is by correctly insisting on usage of the term “democratic socialist” to describe himself. His actual policies might not be very socialistic, considering the European use of the term, but it’s a brilliant move on his part to shift the terrain of discourse away from neoliberal policy contending with neoliberal policy, which would be the case, for example, if Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush were to duke it out in the end.

The power imbalance, in favor of corporations, has become so extreme that a new vocabulary for building a movement is needed; note how Barack Obama, because of his lack of access to such a language, never intended to nor succeeded in any way in building a lasting movement for progress and justice.

Since he gained the upper hand in both Iowa and New Hampshire in the last few days, Sanders seems to have quickly shifted gears and opened up his message and vision. Although dramatic gestures are not his style, he needs to say and do some unexpected things of a radical nature to place a bet on minorities moving quickly toward him. When that strategy starts clicking, no one in the neoliberal camp will be able to catch him.

If there is a moment in the first debate where Sanders can convey, through humor, the humanity of his vision—a kind of genuine vulnerability we have not seen for at least 15 years at the national level—he will become invincible from that point on. And never worry, Hillary Clinton will neither try to outdo him on progressive policy nor demonstration of humanity; that is not the way of neoliberals.

Anis Shivani’s novel Karachi Raj (HarperCollins/Fourth Estate) was released this summer. His next book is the poetry collection Whatever Speaks on Behalf of Hashish, out in October.

The problem with Bernie Sanders

The problem with Bernie Sanders

Ashley Smith writes from Vermont on Bernie Sanders' plan to run for president.

May 5, 2015

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders (Paul Morigi | Brookings Institution)

THE UPCOMING presidential contest was shaping up to be one of the most underwhelming in electoral history. An heir to the Bush dynasty, real estate magnate Jeb, looked like the safest bet to become the Republican presidential nominee, and challenge the anointed frontrunner from the Democrats' leading dynasty, corporate drone Hillary Clinton.

Few people on the left or even among liberals could manage any excitement or conviction about getting "Ready for Hillary Clinton," the former Walmart board member, regardless of the populist veneer she is trying to put forward as her campaign gets underway.

Thus, for many, the decision of Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders to challenge Clinton for the Democratic nomination offers an alternative. For example, Jacobin magazine's founding editor Bhaskar Sunkara argued, "Sanders' candidacy could strengthen the left in the long run. The tensions among Democrats are serious and raise the possibility for the realignment of progressive forces on a totally different basis."

Sunkara joined more than 50 activists, mainly from the Occupy Wall Street movement, in forming People for Sanders. Their founding statement says, "[W]e support Bernie Sanders in his bid to become the presidential nominee of the Democratic Party. We stand firmly behind Senator Sanders as the strongest progressive possibility in the race right now. His commitment to our values is one of longstanding commitment. Sanders is the bold alternative."

But in running for the Democratic presidential nomination as the liberal outsider with almost no chance of winning, Sanders isn't very "bold"--no more so than the fizzled campaigns of Dennis Kucinich in past presidential election years. And by steering liberal and left supporters into a Democratic Party whose policies and politics he claims to disagree with, Sanders--no matter how critical he might be of Hillary Clinton--is acting as the opposite of an "alternative."

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SANDERS HAS positioned himself as a hero of America's downtrodden workers. He doesn't run from the label "socialist," but instead embraces it in his condemnations of corporate greed. He even has a portrait of the great Socialist Party leader Eugene V. Debs hanging in his office.

Certainly Sanders will bring all sorts of issues to the Democratic primaries that Clinton would prefer to tiptoe around or avoid altogether. He has promised to call attention to inequality in the U.S., the corporate hijacking of American politics and the imminent crisis of climate change.

With refreshing bluntness, he told George Stephanopoulos on ABC News' This Week, "We need a political revolution in this country involving millions of people who are prepared to stand up and say "Enough is enough," and I want to help lead that effort."

But if Sanders really wanted to participate in mobilizing millions to resist the status quo in U.S. politics, he had other options to launching himself into the circus of a Democratic presidential campaign as the designated marginal renegade. And he rejected them.

For one, he could have set a very different example, with a far greater chance of success, if he ran for governor in Vermont against the Democratic Party's incumbent Peter Shumlin, who hasbetrayed promises to implement a single-payer health care system, create green, union jobs and much more.

Faced with a budget crisis, Shumlin and the state's Democrats refused to raise taxes on the rich to fulfill their promises. Instead, they imposed cuts in social services, education, and environmental programs, and laid off scores of state workers. Shumlin even went so far as to call for the banning of teachers' right to strike.

Sanders is Vermont's most popular politician. With the backing of the Progressive Party, he could have run for governor as an independent and easily defeated both the Democratic and Republican nominees, and never faced the accusation of being a spoiler that is inevitably thrown at any third-party challenger.

A victory for a truly independent campaign by Sanders would have been even bigger than Kshama Sawant's election to the Seattle City Council as an open socialist. In so doing, Sanders could have built momentum for a national third-party alternative to represent workers and the oppressed.

If Sanders had his heart set on national politics, he could have run for president like Ralph Nader as an independent, opposing both capitalist parties, the Democrats and Republicans. He would have been appealing for a protest vote, rather than any real chance to win, but Sanders rejected this possibility out of hand for a different reason. "No matter what I do," Sanders said in January, "I will not be a spoiler. I will not play that role in helping to elect some right-wing Republican as president of the United States."

In other words, Sanders refused to consider an independent presidential campaign not because he had little chance of winning, but because he didn't want to compete for vote with the Democrats' eventual nominee. There's no reason to believe he will be a "bold alternative" at the end of his doomed campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.

In jumping into the Democratic Party primaries, Sanders appointed a quintessential corporate party insider, Ted Devine, to be his campaign manager. Devine has worked for a series of Democratic presidential campaigns, stretching back to Walter Mondale and running through to John Kerry.

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THE DEMOCRATIC establishment can breathe a collective sigh of relief. It doesn't, in fact, fear liberal Democrats like Kucinich or Sanders, but third-party challenges like Nader's that have the prospect of breaking their stranglehold on votes from workers and the oppressed, as several local and statewide campaigns have shown over the last few years.

Hillary Clinton certainly doesn't regard Sanders as a threat. She knows that the election business follows the golden rule: Whoever has more gold, wins. Clinton is expected to amass a war chest of more than $1 billion, mostly from Wall Street and Corporate America, to pay for advertising, an army of paid staff and Astroturf support. This will overwhelm Sanders' fundraising goal of $50 million and his underdeveloped volunteer infrastructure.

In fact, Clinton regards Sanders as an asset to her campaign. He will bring enthusiasm and attention to Democratic primaries that promised to be lackluster at best. He will also help her frame the election on populist terms that have widespread support. That benefits the Democrats and undermines the Republicans, who have little to say about inequality, except that they like it.

As liberal writer Paul Waldman wrote in the Washington Post:

Bernie Sanders isn't going to pull her to the left because she was already moving that way. She's talking about issues like inequality and criminal justice reform in terms that she might not have used 10 or 20 years ago...Talking about them in more liberal terms isn't just good for her in the primaries, it's good for her in the general elections.

No wonder Clinton celebrated Sander's entry into the race. "I agree with Bernie," she wrote on Twitter. "Focus must be on helping America's middle class. GOP would hold them back. I welcome him to the race."

You can expect that Clinton will agree with Sanders during the campaign, rearticulating some of his themes in a "more realistic" fashion and occasionally chiding him for taking things too far. Sanders can be counted on to concentrate most of his fire on the Republicans, the Koch brothers and their reactionary positions, as he has been doing for years.

Sanders admitted the truth in what was perhaps a Freudian slip: "If I decide to run, I'm not running against Hillary Clinton. I'm running for a declining middle class."

At this stage, Clinton is the overwhelming favorite to emerge as the Democratic nominee. If she stumbles in some irreversible way, the corporate establishment that controls the Democratic Party will come up with another more mainstream candidate, like Obama in 2008. Either way, the eventual Democratic presidential nominee will toe the capitalist line.

However much he disagrees with that candidate, Sanders will agitate for trade unionists and social movement activists to vote for the lesser of two evils. The result is that he will help corral people on the left from taking any steps toward building a genuine alternative to the two-party status quo.

Thus, Sanders will follow the well-trodden path of other liberals like Kucinich. In the 2004 Democratic primaries, Kucinich excoriated Kerry and other candidates for voting for George W. Bush's wars, implementing neoliberal trade agreements like NAFTA, and supporting the racist death penalty.

But Kucinich was very conscious of keeping the left and liberals from building a third party. At one point during the campaign, he said: "The Democratic Party created third parties by running to the middle. What I'm trying to do is to go back to the big tent so that everyone who felt alienated could come back through my candidacy."

Kucinich thus became the bait on the hook for the Democrats to catch their liberal base. After he lost the primaries, he called on his supporters to support the very candidate he had roundly criticized.

Sanders' campaign will serve the same function. He is already serving that function by luring people on the left, like the Occupy activists who launched People for Bernie, into a Democratic Party campaign when they might have concentrated their energies on politics outside the Democrats.

This is especially ironic when you remember that the Occupy Wall Street encampments were attacked and cleared on orders from Democratic Party mayors--many of them known for being liberals--from Boston to Chicago to Portland to Oakland.

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SANDERS' DECISION to jump into Democratic Party presidential politics represents a decisive break from the man he calls his hero: Eugene V. Debs. Debs spent his whole life building the Socialist Party as an alternative to the two capitalist parties. Year in and year out, he insisted that "[t]he differences between the Republican and Democratic Parties involve no issue, no principle in which the working class have any interest."

Debs understood that his call for working-class people to break with the two capitalist parties meant supporting a political alternative that might not win--but he believed this was a necessary challenge to a two-party system that offered nothing to workers. "I'd rather vote for something I want and not get it," Debs once wrote, "than vote for something I don't want and get it."

Sanders' retreat is based on a liberal strategy of attempting to transform the Democratic Party from within that has failed for generations. Instead of shifting the Democrats to the left, the leftists who join the Democrats get dragged to the right. Sanders himself is, in many ways, a prime example of this process.

Back in the 1980s, as mayor of Burlington--the largest city in Vermont, known back then as "the People's Republic"--Sanders did genuinely challenge the two-party system. He went so far as to build solidarity with the left-wing Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua at a time when Republicans and Democrats were supporting the Reagan administration's dirty wars in Central America.

In the 1990s, however, Sanders set his sites on higher office--not by building an alternative party, but by running as an independent who maintained a collaborative relationship with the Democrats.

Once ensconced in Washington as a member of the House and Senate, he abandoned his principled opposition to the two-party system. As Vermont Democrat Howard Dean--a former candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination himself--stated, "He is basically a liberal Democrat, and he is a Democrat at that--he runs as an Independent because he doesn't like the structure and money that gets involved...The bottom line is that Bernie Sanders votes with the Democrats 98 percent of the time."

Since he made his arrangement with the Democrats, Sanders has uncritically supported them in Vermont elections. As a result, when his ally, Gov. Peter Shumlin, declared war on state workers, Sanders didn't even issue a statement in opposition. His silence led many in Vermont to ask: "Where's Bernie?"

Nationally, Sanders supported Barack Obama in both of the last two elections, despite the president's betrayal of his progressive promises and his record of continuity with many Bush policies, from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to the bailout of Wall Street.

And the Democrats have rewarded Sanders. They instructed their Vermont candidates not to oppose him and sent corporate lackeys like Sens. Charles Schumer and Barbara Boxer to campaign for him. Even worse, Sanders accepted a $10,000 donation from Hillary Clinton's Hillpac back in 2006, during his first run for Senate.

Sanders, the supposed independent, was a bitter opponent of third-party challenges Ralph Nader's campaigns against Al Gore and John Kerry. In 2004, he announced, "Not only am I going to vote for John Kerry, I am going to run around this country and do everything I can to dissuade people from voting for Ralph Nader...I am going to do everything I can, while I have differences with John Kerry, to make sure that he is elected."

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WITH HIS slide into becoming a Democrat in everything but name, Sanders became less and less radical on a host of issues, including cherished ones like class inequality. For example, Sanders rightly denounces the minimum wage as a "starvation wage," but he doesn't support the low-wage workers' movement demand for $15 now. Instead, he proposes a more "realistic" increase to $15 "over a period of years, not tomorrow."

Sanders has similarly moderate positions on many social issues. While he boasts a good voting record on the rights of oppressed groups, it doesn't stand out among most other liberal Democrats.

In fact, on the decisive issue today of racist police brutality, Hillary Clinton is actually posturing to Sanders' left. She has raised questions about the drug war and ending mass incarceration--though, of course, largely to cover her complicity with Bill Clinton's vast expansion of both. By contrast, in a recent CNN interview, Sanders, after expressing sympathy for cops' supposedly "difficult job," managed to call only for jobs and community policing.

His foreign policy positions are to the right of many liberal Democrats. Sanders voted in favor of George W. Bush's original Authorization for Use of Military Force resolution that gave the administration a green light to launch the war on Afghanistan. While he did vote against Bush's invasion of Iraq, he repeatedly supported funding resolutions for both U.S. occupations. He is also a Zionist who supports Israel consistently, even after its recent escalations of the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza.

Sanders' backing of U.S. imperialism compromises his support for workers' rights. For example, Sanders supports the basing of the new F-35 warplane at Burlington's airport, despite the fact that the fighter-bomber's ear-shattering noise made scores of working-class housing unsafe for habitation.

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LIKE MANY leftists before him, the Democratic Party has co-opted and changed Bernie Sanders, using him to help hinder the development of a genuine alternative to the capitalist parties.

His campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination will be, at best, a re-run of Jesse Jackson's primary runs in 1984 and 1988. Jackson's campaigns galvanized an entire section of the left, channeled it toward the Democratic Party and directed its remnants to vote for a succession of corporate candidates like Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis.

Based on his experience as Dennis Kucinich's former press secretary, David Swanson has drawn the conclusion that the left should not support Sanders. "The best place to put our resources is into uncorrupted, principle, policy-driven, nonviolent, creative activism--including activism needed to create fair, open, verifiable elections," Swanson wrote.

He's right. As the great socialist historian Howard Zinn argued, "The really critical thing isn't who is sitting in the White House, but who is sitting in--in the streets, in the cafeterias, in the halls of government, in the factories. Who is protesting, who is occupying offices and demonstrating--those are the things that determine what happens."

The recent uprising in Baltimore proves this. Without that revolt, the Baltimore state's attorney would never have charged the six cops who killed Freddie Gray. Without more struggle, they will certainly not be convicted.

At the same time, the left shouldn't abandon the electoral arena to the two capitalist parties. If we do, we create a vacuum that the Democrats will fill, co-opting movement activists, demobilizing unions and social movements, and redirecting their precious time, money and energy into electing candidates who then betray workers and the oppressed.

We need to win the new left born out of Occupy, public-sector union struggles and the Black Lives Matter movement to breaking with the Democratic Party and building an electoral alternative as a complement to struggle from below. Bernie Sanders' campaign inside the Democratic Party is an obstacle to that project.