There is more than a dime’s worth of difference between Bernie Sanders, the self-styled democratic socialist from the state of Vermont, and Hillary Clinton, the unrepentant Democratic centrist from the U.S. State Department.
The former’s brand of watered-down socialism may look a lot more like New Deal-era liberalism than Full Communism — capitalism with stricter regulation and more money for social welfare, not workers breaking their chains and seizing the means of production — but the latter does not even purport to aspire to anything greater than efficient management of the corporate-controlled status quo. It’s unsurprising, then, that those who are young and aspire to more than a studio apartment and part-time underemployment are flocking to the old and angry Sanders; say what you will about his liberal reformism and the generally bleak history of reformers who achieve power, free college and healthcare at least form a more inspiring vision of the future than the bleak promise of the Clinton campaign to, essentially, not screw things up too much.
Sanders the man explains part of the appeal of his candidacy. As with the right-wing Ron Paul, people seem to like the style of the straight-shooting uncle arguing politics at Christmas dinner; passionate, no-bullshit, but ultimately non-threatening, a marked contrast to the overproduced feeling one gets from a Clinton campaign event, where inspiration gives way to tone-deaf threats from the most dull and dreadful the Democratic Party has to offer.
But, like Paul before him, Sanders is the beneficiary of a moment: his campaign’s success thus far is less about him and more about the inability of the U.S. political system to respond to public concerns about economic stagnation and growing inequality, and the failure of President Barack Obama in particular to fundamentally the change the system he has competently administered. The Occupy movement that swept U.S. cities in 2011 was this frustration made palpable in the streets, and Sanders’ more serious-than-expected challenge to the Democrats’ long-presumed nominee is this frustration taking the form of electoral politics.
Sanders is not nearly as radically different as supposed by his detractors and more passionate followers alike.
Sanders’ campaign may not end with a victory. It could end with an endorsement of his now-hated Democratic rival, or as the Green Party’s Jill Stein has argued, a stab-in-the-back campaign during the general election like the one faced by George McGovern in 1972, led by a Democratic establishment that prefers defeat to losing its grip on the party. It could also end like Obama’s two runs for the White House: with disappointment for those who expected a lot more than more of the same.
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It’s not that Sanders is Barack Obama, anymore than he is Hillary Clinton, but he is also not nearly as radically different as supposed by his detractors and more passionate followers alike. That is not an argument against those who suppose themselves more radical supporting his candidacy, at least for the time it takes to cast a ballot, but it is something of a lecture — a reminder to keep in mind, in the midst of a heated campaign, the critical necessity of critically support any politician. These are, after all, politicians, with Sanders having shown the ability to navigate for the last 25 years “the establishment” he derides, and they won’t be coming over to your house to watch "The Big Bang Theory," unless perhaps you live in an early-primary state.
Politicians are at best temporary allies of those who seek a more equitable, democratic and peaceful world, not life partners, and they should be treated and discarded accordingly. This means subjecting them not to some leftier-than-thou sectarian litmus test that’s impossible to ace in a fundamentally impure political system — the cynicism of stay-at-home purists is no more likely to lead us from capitalist state to communist utopia than one gray-haired senator from Vermont — but to constant critique, with a smile or a scowl depending on the crime. When those we hope will do good behave badly, it does no one any good to keep quiet.
An Ally, Not a Friend
Bernie Sanders, then. Keeping in mind the system within which the operates, not to spare him but to keep in check our expectations, the smiling critic might note: He is a pro-Israel imperialist who thinks Edward Snowden should be punished for blowing the whistle on U.S. spying; he has spent three decades proclaiming himself “independent” of the Democratic Party while never once seeking to help those trying to build an alternative to it; his emphasis on 1930s Keynesianism is far from radical, and he has been standoffish toward social movements seeking to broaden his agenda beyond economics; and he’s the best hope for something less than awful that has arisen within the two-party system that memory can recall.
The left cannot be taken for granted, and it will be heard.
And yet saying this, in some circles, is akin to treason — and objectively neoliberal. When The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates critiqued Sanders, from the left, as a supporter, for dismissing as “divisive” the idea of reparations for the descendants of slaves, the left-wing publication Jacobin posted a critique that accused this radical black author of joining “the chorus of red-baiters.” Of less interest was debating the actual merits of reparations, a subject on which [the reasonable can disagree -- the argument that critique, at this stage, of the great left hope was by its nature disingenuous, serving in effect if not intent (wink) the ulterior purpose of electing Hillary Rodham Clinton as the 45th president of the United States.
Red-baiting, in this context, doesn’t mean equating a social democrat with the USSR’s Joseph Stalin — sort of like Sanders did when he called Hugo Chavez, the former democratically elected president of Venezuela and patron saint of teleSUR, a “dead communist dictator” — but having the temerity to “attack” the author’s preferred candidate for president. As if the deleterious effect electoral politics can have on open and honest intra-left critic were not apparent enough, the concept of “institutional racism” was dismissed in the webpages of Jacobin with the brush of “Cold War liberalism,” the concept of reparations labeled a “race-baiting” complement to liberalism promoted by “Black elites,” not as Coates intended: as a complement to, not a substitute for, broader class-based analysis and policies (“Good grief,” said Charlie Brown).
Hundreds of regular Black people gathered just a week ago here in Chicago to insist that the UN call for reparations. NOT the Black elite.
— Ida's Disciple (@prisonculture) February 4, 2016
A good deal of defensiveness is to be expected during any political campaign, nuance giving way to a narrative of good versus evil, one that admittedly bears a closer relationship to truth during this Democratic primary than in most. But good-faith critique from honest critics is exactly what BerniePersons should want: The more conservative-minded voter is not going to withhold their vote because a leftist complains Sanders is insufficiently to the left, but it will remind Sanders and others who seek to replicate his success that the left cannot be taken for granted, and it will be heard.
More than Just Class War
Reading defenses of Bernie against the attacks of far-to-his-left “red-baiters,” one might well suspect he isn’t ripe for critique; there are more essays defending and attacking his more obnoxious online supporters than there are, for instance, essays commenting on his support for the open-ended occupation of Afghanistan, the United States’ longest-running foreign war.
“Clearly, we do not want to see the Taliban gain more power,” Sanders said during an appearance on ABC, “and I think we need a certain nucleus of American troops present in Afghanistan to try to provide the training and support the Afghan army needs.” Those comments came in October 2015, but the same argument was made in 2001, back when the war began; Sanders supporters may be excused for their ignorance because no one, left or right, has bothered to make the comments an issue, reflecting as they do the bipartisan consensus in Washington.
Sanders casually embraces militarism, not just in Afghanistan, but in Iraq and Syria
As veteran war correspondent Anand Gopal argues in his book, “No Good Men Among the Living,” however, it is the U.S. presence in Afghanistan that has provoked a resurgence of the Taliban, the reason offered for extending the U.S. occupation. Initially, many Afghans welcomed the downfall of the religious extremists and the Taliban’s authoritarian brand of social conservatism; 15 years of airstrikes, botched raids and exquisitely corrupt warlords using U.S. special forces to have their rivals and critics killed or sent to Guantanamo Bay has, alas, rather changed the locals’ perception of America’s intentions.
The Vermont senator has made much of his opposition to the war in Iraq, as well as he should: it was an illegal invasion that created a devastating conflict where peace, albeit tyrannical, had previously existed — the supreme war crime, according to international law. But as an ignorant, stoned 18-year-old, I could figure that out. Unfortunately, Sanders’ seeming unfamiliarity with world affairs has led him to casually embrace militarism, not just in Afghanistan, where 100,000 people have met violent deaths since the U.S. invasion, but in Iraq, ironically, and Syria, where he supports airstrikes that have likely killed hundreds of innocent civilians.
"I am not a pacifist," Sanders announced at the first Democratic debate, and few people are — when a politician says such a thing, we should understand it as code for a willingness to deploy battalions, and the left should critique accordingly. Silence, especially to a politician, can be read as consent.
Sanders, for his part, consents to a good deal of state killing. He isn’t even sure if he opposes the extrajudicial assassinations that have outraged his base, hundreds of which have been carried out from Pakistan to Yemen by a president he campaigned alongside.
“I think that when you have an American citizen killed by the United States government, it raises some real questions,” he told CNN after the Obama administration aerily executed radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki without charge or trial (and, later, his 16-year-old son). “On the other hand, when you have somebody who's a terrorist and at war with the United States, that's the other side of that equation.”
A centralist, Sanders made no effort to democratize city governance.
On Israel, the recipient of around US$3 billion in military aid every year, Sanders has again been a typical Democrat: occasionally critical, particularly of the current prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, but generally supportive. When it comes to U.S.-funded war crimes, he has preferred to keep quiet, while ensuring the checks clear, as during the summer of 2014 when in the span of a few weeks the Israeli military killed more than 2,200 Palestinians trapped in Gaza. “That’s not where my mind is right now,” he curtly remarked when asked for his opinion on the slaughter. “Excuse me, shut up!” he yelled a few weeks later at protesters who interrupted one of his town hall meetings.
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Sanders is nowhere near the most gung-ho militarist on Capitol Hill. His statements on foreign policy during this campaign often suggest ignorance more than bellicosity, but such ignorance has lent itself to absurd warmongering-by-proxy, namely his suggest that the burden for fighting the Islamic State group be shifted onto allies like Saudi Arabia, who he has suggested should deploy ground troops to fight the extremist group — a good way, it would seem, to make a bad situation even worse.
It shouldn’t be assumed, either, that Sanders’ calls for cutting waste, fraud and abuse at the Pentagon are anything like the calls for radical cuts to the world’s most bloated military budget voiced by his left-wing supporters. Indeed, Sanders has fought like any other politician to bring military pork like the F-35 fighter jet home to his state. Those jets will kill people, but at least they will be made in Vermont.
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As mayor of Burlington, Vermont, Sanders also showed his critics wrong: he got things done, for better and for worse. “Sanders has out-Republicaned the Republicans,” argued Burlington resident and libertarian socialist Murray Bookchin. By that he meant that Sanders’ style of democratic socialism lent itself to capitalism, with a human face and “trickle-down” benefits for the poor, albeit ones dictated by the law of the state, not the market. The waterfront development scheme that Mayor Sanders put forward was like waterfront development schemes found in any U.S. city: condos with a view for the rich and a sidewalk for the poor.
A centralist, Sanders made no effort to democratize city governance, nor, as Bookchin put it, did he much concern himself with “environmental, feminist, and communitarian issues,” seeing them “as ‘petit-bourgeois’ frivolties by comparison with the material needs of ‘working people.’” That economics-only focus has been a constant source of critique for Sanders, though less so since the dawn of his presidential campaign for an important reason: he’s been pushed.
To the annoyance of many of his supporters, activists associated with Black Lives Matter last year began targeting Sanders with protests, even interrupting one of his campaign rallies; he’s responded by answering their demands. Where once his stance on criminal justice issues was an afterthought, now it’s spelled out in a platform on his website, and his positions — including support for marijuana legalization and the demilitarization of law enforcement — are much more progressive than they were when he voted in 1994 for the Crime Bill responsible for ramping up the U.S. prison population. Politicians learn through pressure, appears to be the lesson.
While Bernie and Hillary partisans argue and bicker over who is the more progressive Democratic candidate, and who has the worst fans — they’re both insufferable, in this author’s view — those who prefer him to the other would do well not to forget that the man is a senator, not a saint, and that he’s heard worse in his 74 years than the sort of criticism offered by critics inclined to support him with a vote.
History shows that if the left spares him this critique, then it will be the right that is heard, and to the right he will drift. History ignored also tends to repeat, and 2008 was really not so long ago that those on the left should have already forgotten its lesson.
Charles Davis is an editor at teleSUR. Follow him on Twitter @charliearchy
Photos: Reuters
