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Sunday, September 27, 2015

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

Salon




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








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

Saturday, September 26, 2015

The problem with Bernie Sanders


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The problem with Bernie Sanders


Ashley Smith writes from Vermont on Bernie Sanders' plan to run for president.
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders (Paul Morigi | Brookings Institution)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.
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.
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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.

Interjections on Bernie Sanders by Paul Street





Interjections on Bernie Sanders




A Response to David McReynolds
I never cease to be amazed by U.Smajor party and candidate-centered electoral (and especially presidential) politics’ continuing power to muddle, mystify, and mar liberal, progressive, and even Left hearts and minds. Recently the very clever, decent, and likeable U.S. democratic socialist and pacifist David McReynolds (himself a former Socialist U.S. presidential candidate) published an essay titled “Why Bernie?’ It is a thoughtful reflection in support of Sanders’ campaign to win the Democratic Party presidential nomination – a campaign whose early successes I (unlike McReynolds and from the vantage point of Iowa, ground zero for the “quadrennial electoral extravaganza” in the third year of the four year U.S. election cycle) find thoroughly unsurprising. It is especially provocative coming from a self-described pacifist for reasons that I hope are clear in what follows. What follows is a detailed response through staggered interjection to McReynolds’ defense and support of the Sanders presidential run.
McReynolds: “There has been debate and discussion about the Bernie Sanders candidacy – I’m backing him, here are my reasons why, and the probable limits of his campaign…Back in the 1960’s when Michael Harrington was pushing the argument that we should all go into the Democratic Party, I thought he should have entered the New Hampshire primary, as a socialist, running for the Democratic nomination. I didn’t urge this in a mocking way – I thought it would be very healthy for a democratic socialist to press the flesh, meet ordinary folks, let them see what a socialist looked like, and what socialism stood for. He wouldn’t have won the nomination, but he would have introduced a discussion of socialism into the public dialogue. He was a charming guy, a good speaker, and might actually have helped shift the Democrats away from the their support of the Vietnam War (alas, as followers of socialist history know, Mike’s approach to the Democratic Party was to support the war, until in 1972 he shifted).”
Street: I notice three differences between Harrington and Sanders right off the bat. First, Bernie is not particularly charming; in fact, he’s pretty prickly and outwardly pissed-off (which is fine, but it’s a difference). Second, I seem to recall Harrington in his public presentation always self-identifying as a socialist. Sanders doesn’t generally do that (a point to which I shall return below). Third, while antiwar Leftists might (or might not – I really don’t know the full history here) have had reasons in the early-mid 1960s to think that Harrington might oppose the Vietnam War (my understanding is that his pre-1972 failure was quite predictable in light of his earlier positions vis a vis the early New Left), Sanders has (while opposing “bad wars” like George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq) pretty much advance-aligned himself with the American imperial military project during and before the global war on/of terror. He supported the bombing of Serbia, the bombing of Libya, Israel’s vicious U.S.-equipped attacks on the people of Gaza, the $400 billion F-35 fighter jet project, and more. Beyond some carping about military bloat, he utters barely a word against the planet-cooking Pentagon System, which eats up 57 percent of federal discretionary U.S, spending, accounts for nearly half the military spending on Earth, and maintains more than 1000 U.S. military installations across more than 100 “sovereign” nations.
It is healthy no doubt for “ordinary” Americans to come into contact with a charismatic (charming or not) “democratic socialist” who denounces economic inequality and plutocracy. But it is not particularly healthy for ordinary Americans to be encouraged in the false belief that progressive, even socialist ideals and programs can be meaningfully advanced through U.S. electoral politics and either of the two capitalist political parties (once rightly described by the great American Socialist Upton Sinclair as “two wings of the same bird of prey”). As the International Socialist Organization’s Lance Selfa shows in his carefully researched history of the Democratic Party, “history’s second most enthusiastic capitalist party” (the Democratic organization) has “time and again betrayed the aspiration of ordinary people while pursuing an agenda favorable to big business and U.S. imperial ambitions.” It has also proven itself time and again to be the leading graveyard of grassroots protest and social movements beneath and beyond the nation’s recurrent staggered electoral spectacles, which are deceptively sold to the populace as the only politics that matters. As Noam Chomsky noted eleven years ago:
“The U.S. presidential race, impassioned almost to the point of hysteria, hardly represents healthy democratic impulses…Americans are encouraged to vote, but not to participate more meaningfully in the political arena. Essentially the election is yet another method of marginalizing the population. A huge propaganda campaign is mounted to get people to focus on these personalized quadrennial extravaganzas and to think, ‘That’s politics.’ But it isn’t. It’s only a small part of politics….The urgent task for those who want to shift policy in progressive direction – often in close conformity to majority opinion – is to grow and become strong enough so that that they can’t be ignored by centers of power. Forces for change that have come up from the grass roots and shaken the society to its foundations include the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the peace movement, the women’s movement and others, cultivated by steady, dedicated work at all levels, everyday, not just once every four years…The main task is to create a genuinely responsive democratic culture, and that effort goes on before and after electoral extravaganzas, whatever their outcome.”
McReynolds: “Now we have another socialist doing what I thought then, and still think, is a good idea. Bernie Sanders, whom I met in 1980, and who kindly came down to New York City to speak to a Socialist Party convention (I have lost track of the year), and who put together real coalitions of real people and got elected as Mayor of Burlington, then as the Congressman from Vermont (they only have one member of the House) and then as Senator, is off and running, to huge and enthusiastic crowds.”
Street: I’ve heard a number of Sanders speeches since he announced his presidential candidacy. He does not call himself a socialist. He does not call for socialism. He is not running as a socialist. More importantly, perhaps, he does not criticize or even refer to capitalism or the profit system, the underlying political-economic regime that is wired for the endless upward distribution of wealth and power and also, frankly, for the ruination of livable ecology. This is all very different from Eugene Debs, to say the least. (It may even be somewhat different than Norman Thomas, though here I don’t really know.) Sanders rails against “the billionaire class,” against economic inequality, against the paulstreetRepublicans, against FOX News, against the Citizens United decision, and especially against those terrible Koch brothers. He’s running as a strident populist Democrat. In that regard, he’s not really all that different from Dennis Kucinich in 2003-04, Jesse Jackson in the 1980s and even John Edwards in 2007-08, all of whom struck strong populist chords in efforts to reach the Democratic Party’s “progressive base.” I’ve been struck by how reluctant Sanders has been to mention the corporatized Democratic Party as part of the nation’s oligarchy problem. Crazy John Edwards fulminated consistently against “corporate Democrats as well as corporate Republicans” when he ran in the Iowa Caucus eight years ago. During the first Sanders talk I heard last winter, it was left to a smirking graduate student to remind Sanders and his liberal audience that the dismal dollar Democrats and their power-serving president are as much a part of the ruling class assault on equality, democracy, and livable ecology as the Republicans.
Of course the crowds are big! As Sanders notes, the top 10th of the top 1 percent nearly owns more wealth than the bottom 90 percent of Americans. The Walton family has a bigger net worth than the bottom 40 percent. Poverty and inequality and joblessness and yet overwork work plague the populace, whose not-so democratically elected officials are shockingly beholden to the wealthy few. The media is in the hands of the 1 percent, with deadly results. The Republicans are in fact pathological on numerous levels. The arch-plutocratic Koch brothers are beyond disgusting. The citizenry has been angry about the nation’s savage class disparities and abject oligarchy – America’s “unelected dictatorship of money” (Edward S. Herman and David Peterson) – for many years. I saw Edwards blow the roof of one Iowa town hall after another – to large and enthusiastic crowds – by denouncing the same national plagues in 2007. The Occupy Movement rapidly became a coast-to-coast sensation because of the citizenry’s anger over the New Gilded Age we currently inhabit. Any effective public figure who speaks honestly, knowledgably, and angrily about and against the current reigning corporate and financial oligarchy is going to draw some big and enthusiastic crowds right now.
McReynolds: “I have heard some on the Left criticize Bernie’s determination not to take part in personal attacks on Hillary. I think that is a refreshing stand on his part – I salute him for it.”
Street: It’s way beyond not making personal attacks. I have (in an Iowa City bookstore last winter) heard Sanders call Hillary Clinton “a good friend.” I was taken aback. What kind of democratic socialist is “good friends” with the corporatist and imperialist Hillary Clinton? And what’s so refreshing and salutary about not attacking her? In his bitter but valuable book No One Left to Lie To (a study of the Clintons written in 1999), the late and formerly Left Christopher Hitchens’ volume contained a chapter documenting Mrs. Clinton’s richly triangulation-ist history along with much to suggest that she (like her husband) is a power-mad sociopath.  Especially memorable was Hillary’s response, in her role as head of the White House’s health reform initiative, to Harvard medical professor David Himmelstein, head of Physicians for a National Health Program.  Himmelstein told her about the remarkable possibilities of a comprehensive, single payer “Canadian style” health plan, supported by more than two-third of the U.S. public.  Beyond backing by a U.S. citizen super-majority, Himmelstein noted, single-payer would provide comprehensive coverage to the nation’s 40 million uninsured while retaining free choice in doctor selection and being certified by the Congressional Budget Office as “the most cost-effective plan on offer.”
“David,” Hillary commented with fading patience before sending him away in 1993, “tell me something interesting.” Along with the big insurance companies the Clintons deceptively railed against, the co-presidents decided from the start to exclude the popular health care alternative – single payer – from the national health care “discussion.” (Obama would of course do the same exact same thing in 2009.)  What she advanced instead of the social democratic Canadian system that bored her was a hopelessly complex and secretly developed system called “managed competition.” Mrs. Clinton’s plan went down in flames, thanks in no small part to her inflexible arrogance.
An excellent article by the Left commentator Doug Henwood in Harper’s Magazine last November provides a clever and concise catalogue of Mrs. Clinton’s conservative, corrupt, corporate-neoliberal, and imperial record from her years at Yale Law and the Arkansas governor’s office (held by Bill for all but one 2-year term between 1978 and 1992) through her stints in the U.S. Senate (2001-2009) and atop the Department of State (2010-2013). Henwood’s essay is particularly valuable on how the Clintons during their tenure in Arkansas helped “lay…the groundwork for what would eventually hit the national stage as the New Democrat movement, which took institutional form as the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC).” The essence of the DLC was dismal, dollar-drenched “neoliberal” abandonment of the Democratic Party’s last, lingering commitments to labor unions, social justice, civil rights, racial equality, the poor, and environmental protection in abject service to the “competitive” bottom-line concerns of Big Business. The Clintons helped launch the New Democrat/DLC juggernaut by assaulting Arkansas’ teacher unions (Hillary led the attack) and refusing to back the repeal of the state’s anti-union “right to work” law – this while Hillary began working for the Rose Law firm, which “represented the moneyed interests of Arkansas” (Henwood). Connection with one of the sleazier players among those interests, a Savings and Loan charlatan named Jim McDougal, got them involved in the Whitewater scandal, which involved the Arkansas Governor’s spouse (Hillary) doing legal work at Rose (work about which Hillary lied upon outside investigation) for a shady land speculator (McDougal) who had enticed the governor and his wife (the Clintons) to foolishly invest in a badly leveraged development project.
When the Arkansas-based community-organizing group ACORN passed a ballot measure lowering electrical rates residential users and raising them for commercial businesses in Little Rock, Rose sent Hillary into court to argue a business-backed challenge. As Henwood notes, Hillary “helped to craft the underlying legal strategy, which was that the new rate schedule amounted to an unconstitutional ‘taking of property’…now a common right-wing argument against regulation…”
Is it a “personal attack” to recount this history? No, it’s just factual reporting. If Sanders did criticize Hillary on a personal level, it would probably be politically unwise but it would also be pretty darn understandable. While I tend to resist the tendency to describe the nation’s political and economic elites as sociopaths and evil (I have argued in Z Magazine and elsewhere that the nation’s deeper and more relevant socio-pathology and evil is institutional), I have no doubt that both terms are accurately applied to both of the Clintons.
McReynolds: “Others on the Left feel that Bernie is leading voters into the trap of supporting Hillary when he doesn’t, himself, get the nomination. They feel he should run as an independent if he loses the race for the nomination.”
Street: Well, Sanders has repeatedly said he will “not be a spoiler” and will therefore back the mainstream corporate Democrat (HRC in all likelihood) who wins the nomination to run against the Republican nominee in the 2016 presidential election. Having signed up for the Democratic Caucuses and primaries, Sanders cannot practically run as a serious third party candidate in the general election. Anyone who thinks they can talk him into trying to do that (as a write-in candidate perhaps) is being delusional. Sanders makes no secret of his readiness to lock progressive voters down into the standard old Stockholm-Syndrome Lesser Evilist holding cell. In that and other ways, he is part of what the brilliant writers and activists at Black Agenda Report call a Hillary-Bernie “tag team.”
I do think Sanders should have chosen to run outside the two party system –for the governorship of Vermont under the ticket of the Progressive Party. Had he gone that route, he would win that election and then very possibly redeem single payer health insurance (shamefully abandoned by the state’s Democratic governor) in Vermont – something that would qualify as a great progressive triumph.
McReynolds: “Let’s have a little sense of history here – independent candidates for President might help throw the election to one or the other major party candidate but they have absolutely no chance of winning election. Go back to the Henry Wallace campaign in 1948, to the later efforts by Barry Commoner, John Anderson, Ralph Nader. (I leave aside the campaigns of the truly minor party candidates, of which I was one, and of which Norman Thomas was the most distinguished example, because such campaigns were not aimed at winning the office but at providing a platform for dissenting views). These were good men but the enthusiasm of their supporters did not reflect the reality of American politics. In 1948 I  was a student at UCLA, the Cold War had just begun, Henry Wallace has been a Vice President under Roosevelt, and his supporters (at least those on campus) were convinced he might win – in the end he didn’t carry a single state (though I think he helped push Truman to the left on domestic issues)…Bernie is not running as a spoiler, but as a serious candidate, reflecting that part of the Left which is, in my view, most important – it is not locked into any of the small ‘officially Left groups’ but it is there, a sometimes almost invisible left in the labor movement, among the elderly, the youth, the people who know our politics is rotten and really want a change.”
Street: “Spoiler” is a deceptive and unduly pejorative term for Nader, Jill Stein, and others who have tried run for the presidency outside the corporate-captive two party duopoly. Speaking about lessons of history, maybe really addressing and changing “our” “rotten” politics and society is not about running as a “serious” (or silly) candidate for president under the existing U.S. electoral regime. The best thing that can be hoped from Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign is that it might remind people yet again that, in the words the great radical American historian Howard Zinn, “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.” As Zinn elaborated in a 2008 essay on “the election madness engulf[ing] the entire society, including the left” with special intensity in the year of Barack Obama’s ascendancy:
“The election frenzy seizes the country every four years because we have all been brought up to believe that voting is crucial in determining our destiny, that the most important act a citizen can engage in is to go to the polls and choose one of the two mediocrities who have already been chosen for us. …Would I support one candidate against another? Yes, for two minutes – the amount of time it takes to pull the lever down in the voting booth…But before and after those two minutes, our time, our energy, should be spent in educating, agitating, organizing our fellow citizens in the workplace, in the neighborhood, in the schools. Our objective should be to build, painstakingly, patiently but energetically, a movement that, when it reaches a certain critical mass, would shake whoever is in the White House, in Congress, into changing national policy on matters of war and social justice…. Let’s remember that even when there is a ‘better’ candidate (yes, better Roosevelt than Hoover, better anyone than George Bush), that difference will not mean anything unless the power of the people asserts itself in ways that the occupant of the White House will find it dangerous to ignore…..”
Now, to the candidate’s credit, Sanders’ current stump speech shows some solid understanding of this very basic and critical point (though he does not address “matters of war”). He has been saying that corporate plutocracy is so entrenched that it wouldn’t matter who the next U.S. President was without a mass grassroots movement for social and economic justice and ecological sustainability. Of course, that raises the question of why he is focusing people’s energies on a vitality-sucking run as a major party presidential candidate in the latest of “these personalized quadrennial extravaganzas” that Chomsky has described with reason as “yet another method for marginalizing the populace.”
McReynolds: “Bernie has been properly criticized for not being perfect on all issues. I agree with that, he is not perfect. He has a record of supporting some of the worst aspects of the Military/Industrial complex, and, while not nearly as uncritical a supporter of Israel as some think, he has been silent when he should have spoken out. I urge my friends in the Jewish peace movement to reach out to Bernie and try a serious dialogue (not shouting) about why the US links to Israel should be ended (or at least weakened).”
Street: “Not perfect” strikes me as quite an understatement in light of Sanders’ foreign policy record. Bearing in mind that Sanders has supported U.S. client state Israel’s repeated mass murder of Palestinians trapped in the Israel-imposed open air apartheid prison of Gaza, McReynolds should reconsider this statement after going to a quiet place to read aloud the name of some of the 504 children Israel slaughtered with U.S. weapons last summer. Recalling the democratic socialist Michael Harrington’s failure to oppose the U.S. “crucifixion of Southeast Asia” (Chomsky’s phrase at the time) in the middle and late 1960s, think of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. looking at photographs of burned and murdered Vietnamese children in Ramparts Magazine in 1965. The dead Gaza children’s names are listed here.

Beyond that grave moral question (also relevant to Sanders positions on U.S. military actions in Serbia, Afghanistan, and Libya), Sanders’ ambitious “homeland” agenda is undermined in a practical political-economic sense by his silence on Empire. This is no small and peripheral matter. It is not an afterthought that only slightly qualifies the overall excellence of Sanders’ candidacy. It’s a huge and central problem, for Sanders’ ambitious and genuinely progressive domestic and environmental agenda cannot possibly be enacted without the conversion of the military industrial complex to peaceful and sustainable production and infrastructure. The veteran peace activist Bruce Gagnon notes, progressive social and environmental policy “victory won’t be within their grasp unless we can talk about the US imperial war project that is draining our nation, killing people all over the world, and helping to increase climate change as the Pentagon has the largest carbon footprint on the planet.  Sure taxes on Wall Street speculation will help some, but until we get our hands on the Pentagon’s pot of gold nothing really changes around here.”
McReynolds: “The peace movement should also dialogue with Bernie. He should not get a free pass from any of us.  And it is urgent that the “Black Lives Matter” movement meet with Bernie. But let’s be real – the candidate who can prove right on every one of the issues which concerns us is not going to have a very wide base of support.”
Street: I’m really not sure why this passage puts the onus on peace and racial justice activists to initiate discussion with Sanders. Those activists are not purporting to run for the White House. Sanders is. If he’s serious about peace (not likely) and racial justice (probably), then it’s on him to reach out to movements. But here’s another and perhaps more important thought: if you really have to sacrifice the issues of peace and/or racial justice in order to win mass support in a U.S. presidential race, then maybe “serious” U.S. presidential politics isn’t a particularly useful avenue for morally serious Left activism. The great democratic socialist Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was asked by antiwar and antiracist progressives to consider running for the U.S. presidency in 1967. He turned them down since (among other things) he was unwilling to take the moral short-cuts involved in that kind of politics.
McReynolds: “Bernie is dealing with what I think are the real issues – the control the 1% has over the country, the obscene power of money in our elections, the massive disparity between the handful of the ultra-rich and the millions who live in genuine poverty. I’m delighted Bernie is doing so well – much better than I had thought he would.”
Street: Why does the imperial warfare state – the Pentagon system that accounts (to repeat) for more than half the nation’s discretionary federal spending and creates the largest single institutional carbon footprint on Earth – not count among “the real issues”? Why not here give Sanders credit for speaking out strongly against anthropogenic global warming, arguably (actually) the single biggest issue of our or any time? And why the surprise at how well Sanders is doing? His big crowds and energy should be absolutely no surprise (for reasons explained XX paragraphs above). The same was true of John “Two Americas” Edwards in Iowa in 2007.
McReynolds: “There are a couple of practical questions. If he doesn’t get the nomination, what will he have accomplished? He will have done something very important, and God help the left sectarians who don’t understand this: he will have made it possible to discuss socialism. He will have made it respectable to use the term. He will have shown there is a mass of people willing to hear a genuinely radical attack on the current corporate structure.”
Street: Here McReynolds gives way too much credit and praise to his friend Bernie Sanders. “Socialism” (rather vaguely understood) has been rising in popularity for some time now in the U.S. The causes include the end of the Cold War, the horrendous performance of U.S. and global capitalism, and even the FOX News’ ironic dissemination and dilution of the term and its meaning. Occupy showed the existence of a “mass of people willing to hear a genuinely radical attack on the current corporate structure.” At the same time, again, Sanders isn’t really talking about socialism (or, for that matter, about capitalism) on the campaign trail. His critique of corporate and financial power is populist, not socialist or radical.
McReynolds: “And what happens if Bernie doesn’t get the nomination and Hillary does? I do not personally dislike Hillary – I’ve never met her. But she has no principles other than power.” 
Street: “If Bernie doesn’t get the nomination” – that’s a good one! For a democratic socialist and pacifist like McReynolds, wouldn’t it be enough to know that someone (a) is a warmonger (Hillary is an open Hawk) and (b) “has no principles other than power” to dislike that person? I’ve never met Hillary either. I hope I never do! I’ve certainly learned more than enough about to cultivate a healthy dislike. (Obama, by the way, I met. Couldn’t stand him.)
McReynolds: “I think it will be profoundly outrageous if, in November, the choice is between a Bush and a Clinton.”
Street: Nothing is certain, but those are certainly the Dollarocracy betting odds. Welcome to the oligarchy, comrade. Bernie’s not going to fix it. Let’s hold a new Constitutional Convention to draft a new governmental charter for popular sovereignty (the U.S. Founders’ ultimate nightmare) in the U.S.
McReynolds: “Those of us in the ‘lucky states,’ where the electoral votes are already sure to go one way or the other, can vote our conscience (as I voted Green in New York when Obama ran, and as I will vote Green in 2016) …Whoever the Democratic candidate is, they will be as sure to carry New York as the Republican candidate will carry Texas. But, in swing states, conscience is not so easy to satisfy – because the next President will have Supreme Court nominations to make, and in this country, those nominations are deeply important.”
Street: So lucky McReynolds get to protest-vote for Jill Stein (she of the urgently needed and many sided Green New Deal) but I (in Iowa) don’t. I’d like to see leftists who make the “safe state/contested state” argument move to a contested state and actually mark a ballot for a corporate war Democrat. I can’t do it, personally; conscience won’t let me. But the more relevant point goes to Zinn and Chomsky: “before and after those two minutes, our time, our energy, should be spent in educating, agitating, organizing our fellow citizens in the workplace, in the neighborhood, in the schools” (Zinn). Far better to spend the lion’s share of one’s activist energies on “the urgent task” of social movement-building beneath and beyond the quadrennial personalized major party “electoral extravaganzas, whatever their outcome” (Chomsky).
McReynolds: “So yes, in this imperfect world I happily support the man who is not perfect on every issue, but very good on some key ones – and that is Bernie Sanders, a decent, smart, and very serious fellow. So serious that he has even taken to using something on his hair to keep it from flying off in all directions.”
Street: See my comments above on “not perfect.” Harrington had better hair. Debs had none at all. I agree that Bernie seems decent and (very) smart for the most part, but I just can’t shake all those names of murdered Palestinian children that appear in the back of my mind every time I think of Sanders. They just don’t go away. But it’s not really about supporting any specific man or woman, any candidate or politician. We are citizens, not politicians and it’s about issues, institutions, and (as Sanders seems to sense, to his credit) grassroots organization beneath and beyond leaders and elites.
Paul Street’s latest book is They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy (Paradigm, 2014)
Weekend Edition
September 25-27, 2015
JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
The Rich Boy: the Art of Trump L’Oeil Politics
ANDREW LEVINE
The New Repression: If Only Sanders Were More of a Corbyn and Less of a Clinton
MIKE WHITNEY
Markets Gone Mad
PAUL STREET
Bad History: Bernie Sanders’ Specious Take on Barack Obama’s “Big Mistake”
ROBERT FANTINA
U.S. Doublespeak on Palestine
ERIC DRAITSER
The Refugee Crisis: Separating the Conspiracies from The Conspiracy™
DAVID D’AMATO
A Bloodstained Legacy: Police Violence and the Fourth Amendment
RALPH NADER
Mass Media: Raise Your Expectations for Your Country
FRED GARDNER
Veterans Suicide Epidemic Proves Lucrative for Therapists
JOEL NORTHAM
The Black Lives Matter Schism: Towards a Vision for Black Autonomy
BRIAN CLOUGHLEY
Of Refugees and Rebels
COLIN TODHUNTER
GM Mustard in India: a Case of Monumental Fraud and Unremitting Regulatory Delinquency
PEPE ESCOBAR
Live from New York, It’s ‘Putin the Great’
AMY DICKENS
Selling Modernity: How Global Greenwashing is Destroying Tribal People
TED RALL
Let VW Face the Same Penalties as We Do–or Let Us Go Unpunished, Too
URI AVNERY
Netanyahu’s Ministry of Fear
STAUGHTON LYND
The Alinksy Method: a Critique
ANDREW STEWART
But What Kind of Muslim President?
JOHN GRANT
Pope Francis Drops a Bomb on Washington: Mainstreaming the Preferential Option For the Poor
PETE DOLACK
Chinese Stock Bubble No Panacea for Low Wages
MEDEA BENJAMIN
Ten Reasons to Oppose the Saudi Monarchy
JOHN FEFFER
Whatever Happened to Brazil?
DAVID SWANSON
The War to End Slavery Didn’t
LAWRENCE DAVIDSON
The Decline of the Western Ethnic State
LEE BALLINGER
Slavery is the Root of All Evil
PATRICK BOND
UN Millennium Development Goals Replaced by New ‘Distraction Gimmicks’
JOYCE NELSON
Paris Climate Agreement Threatened by Trade Deals
MICHAEL WELTON
Dare to Know! The Enlightenment Imaginary
QUINCY SAUL
From Manila to Mindanao with Marx and Mao: Talking With : Talking with José María Sison
BRETT S. MORRIS
Japan Should Devote Itself to Peace, Not Remilitarization
PAUL BUHLE
Labor’s Crisis: Is There Still a Path to Workplace Democracy?
JACK RASMUS
Global Corporate Cash Piles Exceed $15 Trillion
TAMARA KUNANAYAKAM
The US Draft Resolution on Sri Lanka: “a System Change”
GRAHAM PEEBLES
What’s the Point in Any of It?
LAURA FINLEY
The Grass Isn’t Greener
MISSY COMLEY BEATTIE
The Fundamental Reality
DAVE RANDLE
The Emissionary Position: Volkswagen Takes the N0x
RAOUF HALABY
Last Week Tillie and Phoebe Shamed Mankind
KIM NICOLINI
Wrecking Crew: The Unsung Musicians Behind the Hits
ALICE SLATER
Pope Francis’s Condemnation of Nuclear Weapons
KOLLIBRI TERRE SONNENBLUME
Love Letter to a Dying Friend: Joshua Tree Country
BEN TERRALL
Eastwood Babylon: Clint’s Cinematic Brutalism
LOUIS PROYECT
Chess as Metaphor
CHARLES R. LARSON
Shaggy Dog Bites Back: Valeria Luiselli’s “The Story of My Teeth”
DAVID YEARSLEY
The Piano as Vessel of Hope and Fear