There is nothing more exhausting for me that the continual, pointless relitigation of the 2016 Democratic Primary. It just goes on and on and nothing new or interesting or valuable comes of it. Not even the posts are good, it’s the same set of arguments: donut libs think Sanders spoiled Mother Clinton, despite her decades of baggage, and #OurRevolution retweeters think Bernie got robbed by a corrupt superdelegate system, despite the fact he made critical strategic errors in campaigning. Well, I mean in all fairness, the superdelegate system is entirely undemocratic AND OH GOD I’M DOING IT.
Sanders’ base is a diverse group and the bad faith namecalling of “Bernie Bros” is just an attempt to erase women’s and POC’s support for him and PLEASE STOP ME PLEASE *shoots captive bolt gun into own head*
Alright, I’m better now. Forcibly lobotomizing the part of my brain that engages in circular internet debates was cleansing.
If the past 3 years have taught us anything, it’s that liberal entrenched political power simply does not want to learn a lesson from 2016 election. Also that they are deathly afraid of ceding one inch to the left. Also that being part of the Democratic brand is a powerful motivator to do absolutely nothing but show up at the polls. And considering voter turnout is only 50.4 percent of eligible voter in 2018, the highest percentage in a century, it’s not even a particularly compelling one.
The political brand names are different, but the result is the same: climate change doesn’t get fixed, pointless wars happen, money flows upstream.
This is a fundamental paradox of electoral politics: the math makes a genuine third party run virtually impossible, and the two major parties are wretched and debased in uniquely different ways. The Republican Party establishment is a nihilistic white nationalist death cult, and the Democratic Party establishment is a group of smug Bill Mahers smirking in contempt at poverty while enjoying a Trump New Yorker cartoon. The political brand names are different, but the result is the same: climate change doesn’t get fixed, pointless wars happen, money flows upstream.
The recent video of Sen. Dianne Feinstein hand-waving away the existential terror of climate change and a permanent underclass to a group of schoolchildren particularly proves my point. Her entire argument is that the Green New Deal can’t pass a Republican Senate, which is accurate. The thing that’s hilarious is the Green New Deal IS the compromise she keeps droning on and on about. It’s the gentlest form of incrementalist reform. It’s a soft hand. It’s not radical in the slightest, just radical in the Overton window we blankly stare out of.
It makes sense that centrism and corporate politics have to make it about celebrity, demographics, and aesthetic: because their actual policies, brutal extractivism, endless war, a corporate monarchy, align more with their so-called ideological opponents than they want us to know. It’s majorly on the social progressive issues they stand in contrast, hence the new brand of woke capitalism.
A hallmark of the 24/7 hyperreality TV show known as 2019 is a thirst for something celebrity and online ephemera cannot provide. Trump has effectively obliterated any distinction between entertainment and politics for the foreseeable future. Yet, it’s not enough. More than anything, more than slam tweets or laugh lines, what people crave is authenticity. It’s not the ambiguous political capital, but craving someone who was right all along and rarely wavered in their moral commitment.
It’s incredibly surprising but also not surprising to see a grumpy, elderly Senator from Vermont have a serious shot at becoming the Democratic nominee. He’s a charisma black hole, doesn’t check any liberal identity politics boxes, and someone so alien to the celebrity political spotlight it feels like he dropped out of an alternate dimension. But he’s a rare one who actually engages in serious policy-first politics, not theatrics or branding, and has done more to change the conversation than any other Democratic candidate in this country.
Despite his popular social democratic values that would lift millions, his ethical fundraising, and ambitious call for a million volunteers, there’s still a major hurdle that he needs to overcome. A Sanders presidency would be completely ineffective without a full down-up takeover of the Democratic Party. A groundswell of populist uprising would need to follow to change the internal machinations of the DNC to a working class party in tandem with a campaign.
The building of this new political movement/party/thing would be amassing class power and class consciousness: two things nearly absent in America. If you plan on campaigning for Sanders, any act of campaigning that does not build class power is a waste of your time. Also, log off. Politics do not happen on your TL.
The vast majority of Americans see politics exclusively through the lens of electoralism. It makes strategic sense to meet them where they already are.
This is my largest critique of Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal: it’s FDR 2.0, even borrowing its name, but not bold enough to imagine a completely new world we so desperately need. It doesn’t challenge the fundamental material issues. The enemy is not greed, which is an ambiguous emotion, but the tangible system that makes capitalist extraction of labor, wealth, class warfare, and ecological collapse impossible to avoid.
Injecting class consciousness into campaign rhetoric is a tricky proposition, since it’s a fair argument that electoral politics are bourgeois politics, and perhaps we as this new emergent left should avoid them entirely. The problem is the vast majority of Americans see politics exclusively through the lens of electoralism. It makes strategic sense to meet them where they already are. The left in America is fragile, even with the 50,000 DSA members currently on the rolls. 50,000 is not a national movement, not yet, and that number would need to swell into the millions in order to affect real, lasting change. There is currently an internal process to formally endorse Bernie Sanders by DSA National, and idea that I, as you can probably tell, am of 2 minds about this.
If the Sanders campaign and its million volunteers can push more increasingly radical ideas into the limelight, it will be worth it. If not, we’ll Pokemon Go headfirst into climate apocalypse, dabbing on Mother Earth. Also, if Sanders becomes the nominee and loses to Trump in 2020, we’ll never hear the fucking end of it. It’s a lot to risk. We would need something that endures beyond a Sanders Presidency.
Campaigns can be seen as reactions to the last administration. If anything, a Bernie campaign would be the perfect response to the Trump chaos of the last 3 years: a potentially raw and unapologetic accounting of capitalism’s failures that not only made Trump possible, but inevitable. If you are not arguing for a change in the material conditions of the world, you’re just helping an old man with some good ideas move into a big house on Pennsylvania Ave.
Carl Wilhoyte is the co-editor and co-founder of Zero Balance. His work has appeared in Street Fight Radio, District Sentinel, Abomination Magazine, Bourbon Penn, and Farmhouse Magazine.