Bernie Is Not the New Obama—And That’s a Good Thing

Bernie Is Not the New Obama—And That’s a Good Thing

Jedediah Purdy  January 21, 2016

Bernie Sanders speaking in Des Moines, Iowa, January 9 (Gage Skidmore / Flickr)

Bernie Sanders’ surge in recent national polls, and hints he might win both the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primaries, have brought inevitable comparisons to an insurgent candidate whose enthusiastic young supporters took Hillary Clinton by surprise eight years ago. But Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign is not the right comparison. Sanders’s campaign is a very different kind, with deeper potential and a different measure of success.

Sanders is running on ideas and policies. Deep, institutionalized inequality is the country’s biggest problem in his view—from gaps in wealth and income to racialized policing and incarceration. The responses are policies that buttress and expand the middle class, protect workers from insecurity and exploitation, and open learning and training to everyone. Sanders argues that economic power and political power are closely linked, and that both need to be widely shared for democracy to work. This means, he argues, a redistribution of effective citizenship from organized money to organized people.

Sanders calls this socialism. It’s extraordinary to older heads that a majority of Democrats and young people now report a positive attitude toward this idea, but maybe it shouldn’t be so surprising. For most of the last 100-plus years in much of the developed world, the parties of democratic socialism have stood for economic security, the dignity of work, and the need to understand the link between economic power and political power. They have offered the most robust and convincing definition of citizenship in a complex economy. In the United States, the word was anathema mainly because it was associated with the Soviets’ undemocratic, unequal and frequently brutal regime, and the copies that the Russians imposed on their communist empire. In Western Europe, though, democratic socialism remained a great tradition. As Cold War memories fade and economic inequality grows, it isn’t so strange that the United States should catch up with the rest of the North Atlantic. Anyway, as anyone who listens to Sanders knows, much of his “socialism” is updated New Deal and Great Society liberalism—a comfortably American tradition that has been under attack for four decades and badly needs a full-throated revival.

The Sanders campaign, if it succeeds, will build both a movement and a cohort—a political generation—around the ideas and policies of this new American socialism. The voters, the networks and above all, the ideas that the campaign is cultivating will remain for other candidates to tap and develop, at all levels of government, from city councils and state legislatures to presidential elections.

This is very different from anything Barack Obama did. The first Obama campaign was an instant mass movement. In Durham, North Carolina, to take one example, there was an active local Obama group, canvassing and registering voters, well before the official campaign showed up. Anyone who participated in the 2008 campaign can remember the heartfelt sense of being part of something, of moving history a little.

But the Obama campaigns were ultimately about the candidate: his intelligence, charisma, integrity, and almost preternatural rhetorical gifts. After the long darkness of the Bush years, he brought alive the wish for progress, solidarity, and unity around a better version of the country. Nothing he said was unfamiliar; it was just that he said it—embodied it—so well.

Those campaigns gave a generation knowledge of how a movement feels, but not what a movement is. Viewed hopefully, the Sanders campaign is the next stage of maturation in a rebirth of American progressivism. This time, people understand that no personality, however compelling, can ever change a country. Youthful progressive politics is growing up.

This is why the efforts to identify “Bernie’s charisma”—plain talk! half-remembered Jewish grandfathers!—is thankfully misplaced. It’s not that he entirely lacks charisma, but that—unlike in 2008—charisma is not the key to the campaign.

Better points of comparison are the ideas-based campaigns of the New Right. Barry Goldwater lost badly to LBJ in 1964, but sixteen years later his anti-government program had taken over much of the Republican party, and Ronald Reagan rode Goldwater’s ideas to power in 1980. For real analogues on the left, you have to go back to earlier in the twentieth century, when Progressive reformers worked in cities, statehouses, unions, courtrooms, and universities to build an alternative to the concentrated economic power and laissez-faire political cant of the first Gilded Age. These ideas finally rode into Washington, and then back out into the countryside, with the New Deal, which drew on generations of intellectual work, policy experiment, and movement building.

Sanders supporters are often accused, like Trump’s, of being irascible and self-indulgent—flocking to the guy who shouts the loudest. This is just wrong. The parallelism confuses the emotions of some of their supporters—indignation at institutions they regard as rigged—with the substance of their politics. Returning the focus to substance is what it means to run a campaign of ideas. The fact that some critics can’t see this is a reminder of how driven our recent politics has been by image, personality, and sentiment. So-called sophisticated commentary is lagging behind reality in this respect, looking for the branding angle or the social-psychology hot take when the issue is back where it’s always belonged: in the substance of policies.

Equally absurd is sticking Sanders with “an idea that died in 1989,” as Thomas Friedman recently did. The ignorance of political thought, history, and movements that can even pretend in public that the Sanders campaign is a program of authoritarian state ownership, rather than the standard and mild social democracy that it straightforwardly is, is another symptom of politics without substance—a chronically recurring disorder of the neoliberal 1990s, when Friedman became an authority on a political-economy consensus that no longer exists.

This campaign doesn’t end in Iowa, South Carolina, or even on Inauguration Day, because it isn’t foremost about “the Bern” at all. It’s about rebuilding a progressive politics in which ideas matter, and people mobilize year in and year out for a more just and inclusive future, though candidates come and go. Mobilized people are learning to take the candidate as their vehicle, not the other way around. That is what democracy looks like, when it is worth fighting to build.

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Jedediah Purdy teaches at Duke and is the author, most recently, of After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene (Harvard University Press, 2015).

This article originally appeared at Huffington Post.

The Times Endorses Hillary: Heinous Non-Surprise

The Times Endorses Hillary: Heinous Non-Surprise

by Steve Breyman / January 31st, 2016

What is it about some radicals’ (including this one) problem with the inevitable, the predictable? Given our accurate worldview—the world is run for the rich and powerful, by the rich and powerful—we ought not be perturbed when the rich and powerful do what’s in their perceived interest. Is it because the expected is so loathsome? Could it be we still harbor some jot of hope that right makes might?

The latest example of disgusting normal is the New York Times’ endorsement of Hillary Clinton—its fourth across the years (twice for US Senate, and for the Democratic nomination in 2008). What makes it so vile is the editorial board’s feigned “confidence and enthusiasm” on behalf of “one of the most broadly and deeply qualified presidential candidates in modern history.”

Clinton’s broad and deep qualifications, and the record she carved while earning them, make up one half of what’s wrong with her as prospective president. The Timescites her Senate experience, her stint as secretary of state, and “her experience on the national stage as first lady with her brilliant and flawed husband, President Bill Clinton,” but says little about her ‘accomplishments’ in these roles.

We learn nothing from the endorsement about her ingrained corruption, her pay to play existence, including service on Wal-Mart and other corporate boards, her repellent speaking fees, or her role in soliciting large foreign contributions for the Clinton Foundation.

The Times breezes past her militarism and jingoism, her readiness to invade anywhere at anytime “but we have no doubt that Mrs. Clinton would use American military power effectively and with infinitely more care and wisdom than any of the leading Republican contenders.” There’s very little, if any, distance between the Republicans and Clinton on defense and foreign policy, including the former’s grotesque promises to kill even more innocents in the War on Terror. Unable to cite a single example of the “effective” use of American military power from the past seventy years, the paper must keep it vague.

The editorial forgets and thus forgives Clinton’s awful record in Haiti, her demonization of Chavez in Venezuela, and her central role in the Honduran coup. Instead, the paper coos, “As secretary of state, Mrs. Clinton worked tirelessly, and with important successes, for the nation’s benefit. She was the secretary President Obama needed and wanted: someone who knew leaders around the world, who brought star power as well as expertise to the table.”

There’s no mention of Clinton’s support for nuclear weapons modernization or her critical role in ginning up the new cold war with Russia. The paper apologized for its own role in enabling George Bush’s invasion of Iraq; it ignores Hillary’s. As Senator and Secretary of State, Clinton favored force over negotiation at every juncture, but you wouldn’t learn this from the Times endorsement. The paper lauds Clinton’s lecture to Arab leaders to neoliberalize their economies and polities, “before the Arab Spring,” as if she weren’t a personal friend of Hosni Mubarak, who helped him hang on longer—resulting in the deaths of hundreds of nonviolent protesters—than he would have without her and Obama’s support.

The endorsement misses Clinton’s role in spreading lies about Gaddafi regime atrocities, propaganda indispensable for NATO’s campaign of regime change. We’re not reminded of her cold-blooded quip—“We came, we saw, he died”—upon the occasion of the despot’s murder at the hands of a street mob. The horrors of post-Gaddafi Libya are conveniently ignored.

The Times acknowledges that “certainly, the Israeli-Palestinian crisis deepened during her tenure,” but quickly adds, “she did not cause that.” Not singlehandedly, of course, but her unwillingness to stand up to Netanyahu, her continued and unwavering defense of Israel in international bodies, and her failure to threaten an aid cut off, surely helped to sustain the occupation.

Clinton’s current policy prescriptions make up the second half of the case for why she’d be at least as bad a president as Barack Obama. Clinton was and is a cheerleader for assassination by drone. She voted for the Patriot Act, and its reauthorization, and remains a supporter of mass surveillance. She’s as vindictive and wrong headed about whistleblowers, including Edward Snowden, as Obama. She’s ready to go to war in Syria, a bridge too far even for the Times: “We are not convinced that a no-fly zone is the right approach in Syria.”

The paper defends Clinton’s proposals for tweaks to the inadequate Dodd-Frank, and lauds her milquetoast proposals for “controls on high-frequency trading and stronger curbs on bank speculation in derivatives” as if they are enough to defend Main Street from Wall Street.

The editorial writers likely cramped up with their stretch defending Hillary’s “pledge to support the well-being and rights of working Americans.” Where was Clinton as labor unions shriveled following sustained attacks from business lobbies, offshoring of manufacturing jobs, and the anti-labor policies of recent presidents including those of “her brilliant and flawed husband”? Seen her at a Fight for $15 rally? Opportunistic labor leaders may endorse Hillary, but the rank and file is hardly enthused.

Like the candidate herself, the Times highlights her feminist icon status, as if reproductive rights and verbal support for equal pay were all American women need.The paper is satisfied by her underwhelming proposals for paid family leave, child care and work schedule stabilization. The contradictions between her brand of feminism and the substance of her corporate Democrat economic policies—including eager backing for “free trade agreements”—go unaddressed. The Times explains her recent reversal on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a corporate domination scheme for which she robustly campaigned as Secretary of State, as “a refreshing willingness to learn.”

The editorial finds in Clinton a “steeliness that will serve her well in negotiating with a difficult Congress on critically important issues like climate change.” It ignores that she waited to oppose the Keystone XL pipeline until it was going down to defeat. There’s nothing about her years-long sales pitch for fracking overseas. The deluge of oil money flowing to the Clinton Foundation is skipped. Her support for offshore drilling and lack of leadership on climate change go unraised. At best, Hillary Clinton’s energy and environmental policies would look like Barack Obama’s third term. At worst, they’d look like Bill Clinton’s.

The Times case against Bernie is the same thin gruel dished up by the Washington Post, and the growing chorus of liberal attacks on the Vermonter as he catches on with publics in early primary states. He lacks experience (after serving as a mayor, member of Congress, and US Senator), exhibits insufficient “breadth of policy ideas” (while his program puts everybody but Jill Stein’s to shame), and lacks realism (the editorial flags his calls for dismantling too big to fail banks and for Medicare for All).

Like the Clinton campaign, the editorial writers gun control-bait a guy with a D- rating from the NRA, and suggest Hillary is the better women’s advocate because she came out against the Hyde Amendment before Sanders did.

The Times apparently believes Hillary is more electable than Bernie, despite polls showing that Sanders matches up as well against the Republican field as does Clinton. The timing of the endorsement is telling, coming right before the Iowa caucuses (just like its endorsement of Clinton in 2008). The editorial board must be nervous that someone besides their preferred candidate wins in Iowa, again.

Steve Breyman works with 100%RenewableNowNYS. Reach him at:breyms@rpi.edu. Read other articles by Steve.

This article was posted on Sunday, January 31st, 2016 at 6:53am and is filed under Corruption, Drones, Elections, Libya, Media, Obama, Politics, Unions.