Much of the criticism of ‘neoliberalism’
has been led by economic geographer
David Harvey, himself a Marxist. Much of the criticism against it involves
politicians of the 1980s including Bruce Babbitt, Gary Hart, Paul Tsongas, Bill
Bradley and it is considered a critical factor in Bill Clinton’s becoming
elected President in 1992. Because the policy was deeply prevalent in the conservative
administration and was at the center of so much of the formulation of the
conservative movement, the argument goes that during the end of the 20th
century both parties moved fundamentally to the right. The Democrats have taken
far more criticism than the GOP on the part of the left because it is seen as a
betrayal of the liberal cause.
There is a truth to this when
one considers the policies unfolded. But left out of the discussion are the
outside factors when one considers the results of two very different GOP landslides:
Nixon’s in 1972 and Reagan’s in 1984. In both cases they managed to win 49 out
of fifty states against an old style liberal Democrat. Walter Mondale may have
been less to the left of McGovern but it couldn’t have been a clearer message
for the Democratic Party. In the case of Reagan’s massive electoral victories
the Democrats could not have gotten a clearer message from the electorate: embracing
the liberal order would be a death sentence for the party.
Political theorists and activists
have a difference obligation then elected officials and it is something that
both progressives and conservatives have been fundamentally unable to grasp. A
political party is supposed to listen to the message of the electorate and govern
based on the message they got. Every four years both parties have to reshape their
message based on previous elections.
In the case of the ‘Atari
Democrats’ – the so-called neoliberals I mentioned above – they had gotten the message of political winds
of the 1980s and shaped their message accordingly. When Bill Clinton ran for
office in 1992 he was the first Democrat since Carter to try and run from the
center more than the left. After twelve years of Republican leadership and
having lost four of the five previous Presidential elections the Democratic
Party was facing the possibility of never winning the White House again with a
traditional liberal message.
Activists like Nader and his ilk
never accepted that fact and still can’t. During Clinton’s Presidency (and
later on, Obama’s) activists continued to argue that there was no real
difference between the two parties because the Democratic party had abandoned what
they considered its traditional leftist values. The fact that those values
might not be shared by the electorate at large didn’t matter; the fact that
both men managed to win reelection on those messages and were immensely popular
was, to many, proof of their distrust of the electorate at large.
There has always been two types
of progressive politicians. One type - Lincoln,
both Roosevelts, Hubert Humphrey as a senator and in his domestic policy Lyndon
Johnson understand that rhetoric alone
doesn’t lead to sweeping change. One must have the will of the people, be
willing to make compromises and build coalitions to achieve your goals. The
other types – Thaddeus Stevens and the Radical Republicans, Robert LaFollette,
Henry Wallace, Eugene McCarthy through much of his active political life - care little for public opinion and believe
that it is their job to get their vision through regardless whether their
colleagues in the Senate or the White House or even the electorate itself want
it done. They generally never move beyond their seat in Congress and most of
their visions end up never being achieved. Like Mondale’s description of
McCarthy, they are big on rhetoric but reluctantly to do the ‘heavy lifting’
which is how policy gets made in a democracy.
And it is for that very reason,
I believe, that so many of today’s scholars then and now admire them so much.
In a movement that has increasingly become more based in ‘performative activism’
rather than achieving policy and where principles and purity have always held
the left back more in winning elected office than the right, these elected
officials are held by some as heroes because they had a vision and did not compromise
in it. That they failed spectacularly and the nation is worse because they didn’t
agree to compromise is also why they are valued: increasingly over the 21st
century the left admires candidates who lose by huge margins rather than
compromise rather than win and have to govern.
For that reason I suspect many
young voters in particular were drawn to Bernie Sanders when he ran for the
Democratic nomination, a decision that I increasingly believe has done as much
damage to the Democratic Party as the rise of Donald Trump.
It’s worth remembering something
that academics almost always refuse to mention when they talk about Sanders: he’s
not a Democrat, he merely caucuses with them. Sanders is everything the
activist left wants him to be because he was primarily an activist. And he has
been a proud socialist since his 20s and
was part of the anti-war movement as well as part of SNCC and CORE. He actually
tried to run as a member of a social party multiple times during the 1970s. He
actively ran for the as a Socialist when he was Mayor of Burlington, praised
Noam Chomsky. He was the first socialist elected to Congress since Vito Marcantonio
who’d run for office in 1946 (under the mantle of Henry Wallace)
Sanders’s presence in Congress for
the first eighteen years of his life was one of someone who alienated allies
and colleagues. It is unlikely he would have been tolerated as much as he was
had he not spent the majority of his tenure in Congress (1991-2006) when
Congress was under Republican control. The fact that he has been a constant critic
of so many conservative causes (including the Patriot Act and the War in Iraq)
no doubt helped him.
When Sanders ran for the Senate
in 2005, the only way he managed to win was to align with the Democratic Party.
In large part he was endorsed by the establishment and it helped that the
Democrats needed him in 2007 to win back control of the Senate.
Throughout his career however,
in the Senate, he was just as much pissing inside the tent as he was when he
was on the outside. When he gave ‘The Speech’ against TARP in 2010 the bill still passed the Senate by a
huge margin. But it did what leftists have always wanted: it made him a name.
In 2007 he helped kill a bill for comprehensive immigration reform, arguing its
guest worker program would depress wages for American workers. He has spent his
career advocating for progressive causes but rarely forging actual legislation.
According to the Times: “Big legislation largely eludes Mr. Sanders because his
ideas are usually to the left of the majority of the Senate.” He has a
far lower legislative effectiveness then the average Senator and is also one of
the most popular politicians in America.
Sanders is, in other words,
everything the left could ever hope for in a candidate. He shouts at the top of
his lungs about the causes they care about, they fail because they go against
what Congress believes in, and then he can campaign about how corrupt ‘the
establishment’ is even though he himself is part of it. He was in fact
considering challenging Obama in a primary campaign in 2012 because of Obama’s betrayal
of the cause. Obama had been one of the first Senators to campaign for Sanders
when he was running for office the first time and Sanders was going to need his
help to win reelection that year. Harry Reid had to intervene to stop him.
When he chose to run for
President in April of 2015, he was essentially the opposition to Hilary Clinton
who everyone was sure was going to be President in 2016 and whom nobody really
seemed happy about. Clinton had never been popular among the left even though
she should have been. The author is far from Hilary’s biggest fan but one can’t
help but think this has much to do with the fact that Hilary was connected to
reality in a way that the left never liked.
When she had first run for
President in 2008 she had been harshly criticized about a statement she had made about the Voting Rights Act: “John Lewis marched for the
Voting Rights Act but it took a President to sign it.”
Clinton was accused by many –
including the Obama campaign – of diminishing Lewis’s work as an activist.
Clinton’s larger point was true – all the marching in the world does no good if
you don’t have the political headwinds at your side and Lewis, himself a
Congressman, knew this very well. But in the binary world of activism and the
media Hilary was seen as shitting on the accomplishments of a black activist to
bolster a white President.
I feel to this day that much of
Sanders’s success in the Democratic Primary of 2016 was based on the lack of
opposition in that primary. Clinton was never a skilled campaigner, could not
win over crowds and was never an inspiring speaker. Considering the bias
against her compounded by sexism and the right-wing media throughout her political
life, I believe sincerely that had she been challenged seriously by Joe Biden,
she would have lost. But the field for Democratic candidates for the Presidency
was essentially dry by that point and the disastrous 2014 midterms had
essentially stripped the cupboard bare of opposition. Even by the time Sanders
announced there was no one of consequence running against her.
Clinton could no doubt have made
political hay had she chosen to point out that Sanders had no real business running
for the Democratic nomination for President as he was no more a Democrat
than George W. Bush. She could have pointed out that Sanders had been a gadfly
to the Obama administration while she was Secretary of State and for all his
claims of being an outsider had been in Congress for three times as long as
Hilary. She did point out, multiple times, about the increasingly Populist
tone of Sanders’s campaign and how his bringing down the institutions were not conducive
of a man running for the Presidency.
But that never came out at
Sanders’s speeches – or should I say, his speech. At the end of every primary
or caucus during the spring and summer of 2016 Sanders would regardless of the
results make the same speech. It would advocate for taxing the top one percent,
raising the minimum wage, fighting climate change, gun control, realizing citizenship,
campaign finance reform and ‘billionaires owning the political process’.
He made his campaign, it should
be noted, with no real endorsement from the establishment. Many had wanted Elizabeth
Warren to run for the Presidency but she decided not to. She welcomed him into
the race but in the most neutral terms possible: “I’m glad to see him get out
there and give his version of what leadership in this country should be.” She never endorsed him, with good reason. Warren
was part of the Democratic Party and Sanders was not part of it.
Sanders no doubt drew huge crowds
because of his use of social media and much his coverage was the most favorable.
Because of this he was immensely popular on college campuses, who no doubt were
inclined to vastly admire his politics. Because the majority of them knew
nothing about his standing in the Senate and assumed, because he was
campaigning in a Democratic primary he was de facto a Democrat and because he
didn’t sound like the typical politician because he wasn’t one, he had the same
kind of appeal on campuses that had been unheard of among primary voters since
the era of McCarthy and McGovern. That in itself should have been a sign to
anyone how limited his appeal would be nationwide but no one ever accused cable
news of having common sense either.
Much of this must be blamed on
the media’s desperate need to turn what was looking to be a coronation of
Hilary Clinton, someone that was already an old face on cable news and had
never been popular with them before. The media must be considered an unindicted
co-conspirator in everything that happened in the leadup to 2016 and that
includes the Democrats as well as the Republicans. There has always been a tendency
on the media to try and make excitement where there isn’t one and the
Democratic primary was shaping up to be dullsville. Cable news hadn’t liked
Hilary Clinton when she’d run in 2008 and no one was any happier about her
running now. So they seized on the early
excitement over Sanders as something genuine.
And because of that, everybody
ignored the very real fact that Sanders’s polling was never high nationally
from the start of the race to the end of it. The reason it seemed like Sanders
had momentum was because of the narrowness of Clinton’s victory in Iowa and
Sanders’ overwhelming victory in New Hampshire (which was of course, right next
to Vermont. In February Hilary won Nevada by a small margin and trounced
Sanders by nearly three to one in South Carolina.
On Super Tuesday Clinton swamped
Sanders winning eight primaries and caucuses to his four. She was dominant in
the South while Sanders could only win in Colorado, Minnesota, Vermont and Oklahoma.
Her narrow victory over Sanders in Massachusetts showed the weakness of the
Sanders campaign but he decided to stay in the race in anticipation of more favorable
territory in New England, the Great Plains, the mountain states and the Pacific
Northwest. There was the troubling sign that the only primary he’d won was in
Oklahoma and Vermont – Minnesota and Colorado were caucuses
Sanders won Kansas, Maine and
Nebraska - all caucus states. He would
also narrowly win the Michigan caucus. However Hilary managed to win the
majority of the primary states especially in the South – Florida, Louisiana, North
Carolina and Mississippi went to here by overwhelming margins. This pattern
continued throughout the rest of the primary season: with Hilary maintaining a
nearly insurmountable lead as early as the end of March.
Sanders’s campaign, in
summation, very much resembles McGovern’s primary campaign in 1972. Sanders did
very well in the caucus states, all of which were smaller and involved less
organizing and did horribly in the primaries. His performance in the Southern
states can’t be measured the same way because the McGovern campaign more or less
yielded them to Wallace but compared to the larger states the comparison is
undeniable: he lost Texas by a huge margin (Wallace won that state) Florida (McGovern
finished dead last in a field of six) narrowly lost Illinois (McGovern didn’t
contest the state) lost Ohio (McGovern narrowly lost to Humphrey) lost
Pennsylvania (he finished third there). Indeed in many ways he did worse then
McGovern, losing California and New York and being swamped in New Jersey, all
states McGovern carried. Only in Michigan did he do better than McGovern,
winning a state where McGovern finished a distant second to Wallace in.
So many of the victories that
Sanders had in the caucuses gave his supporters the illusion that he had the
will of the electorate. But most of them were small states that gave him very
few delegates and in most of them Clinton was always able to negate his gains
by finish just as strongly. In terms of delegate count the Democratic primary
was over by mid-March but the media promoted the narrative. The contest was
heating up rather than cooling down. And as a result to this day millions
believe that Sanders had the will of the people on his side but the ‘establishment’
stole the election for Hilary. In fact all he did was overperform expectations.
Sanders’s campaign shifted the
Democratic Party to the left and by and large much of the platform acknowledged
it: calling for a $15 minimum wage, a carbon tax, wall street reform and
pathway to legalization for marijuana. But either many Sanders voters never
read the platform or they were so furious about ‘Bernie’ being defeated’ that
they basically refused to go along with Sanders call for party unity. It is
calculated that somewhere between 9 to 11 percent of all Sanders’ primary
voters chose to vote for Donald Trump. Combined with the 2 percent that Jill
Stein received as a Green Party candidate – much of it in states like Michigan
and Wisconsin – there is an argument that the left played a small but
measurable role in the shocking election of Donald Trump in 2016.
And perhaps it is not a shock. Both
the campaigns of Sanders and Trump were described by scholars as ‘Populist’ and
using the definition of the term, there is truth in that. Sanders chose the
path of the economic populism that was the foundation of the Populist Party in the
West by farmers in the Plains states, while Trump’s took on the mantle of the
racist demagoguery held in the South by such men as Thomas Watson and ‘Pitchfork’
Ben Tillman. Sanders’s campaign as well as Trump’s was powered as much by rage
and economic anger, in this case following the Crash of 2008. Sanders railing
against the corporate interests; Trump’s was founded on illegal immigration and
was just as racist and sexist as those of the far southern politicians of
another era. And for all of his measured tones Sanders’s did use the measure of
demagoguery in his speeches when he was railing against the corporate interests
and greed that has been part of the campaigns of those such as the Dixiecrat
campaigns of Strom Thurmond. Sanders blamed the status quo as much as Trump does.
He just has a different set of scapegoats.
Bernie Sanders has been a huge influence
on the Democratic Party ever since and there’s an argument it has not always
been positive. There remains no evidence
– certainly not based in the elections in the eight years since Sanders’s
arrived on the national stage – that the rest of the nation wants any of the policies
that Sanders and so many of his followers advocate for. His policies as well as
those of so many of the so-called Justice Democrats that have come to the part
since then are non-starters in Congress even when both it and the White House were under Democratic
control during the first two years of Biden’s administration. Justice
Democrats, like the Peace Democrats half a century earlier, have a limited
electoral appeal nationwide that has shrunk ever since their major campaign in
2018 managed to land them eleven members in Congress. As of the last election
only ten remain in Congress and they did not gain a single newcomer for the
first time since their founding. They
have no presence in the South, as is the tendency for most far left parties.
Yet they have a disproportionate voice in Congress compared to most Democrats.
And there’s an argument that by staying loyal to them, the Party at large has
suffered nationwide.
Of course fans of AOC and Ilhan
Ohmar would argue that they are the future of the nation. I’d argue that they
and the Squad are little more than the other side of the coin that Marjorie
Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert represent. The Squad, for all its youth,
diversity and photogenic nature has done nothing substantial in terms of legislation
or advance the party nationwide. What they are good at is advocating for their
issues on camera on social media and in the halls of Congress. Whether or not
they know that this was the strategy of Newt Gingrich – to bloviate in empty halls
for the cameras while making it seem it was speaking truth to power – is unclear.
That it has done as much to make them popular in certain circles as it has done
with the Freedom Caucus in theirs is unmistakable.
And for all the supposed
inspiration they have among the youth of America, they also demonstrate the
technological savvy as opposed to common sense. As representatives of Congress
they have responsibilities to the party, the voters and the country but by and
large they behave very much like they only owe a responsibility to their causes
and their own self-promotion. They are more interesting in advocating for
change than actually compromising and making sure it happens. The fact that many
Justice Democrats chose to vote against Biden’s infrastructure bill in large
part because he had to ‘compromise’ with Joe Manchin in order to get it to pass
in the Senate shows that they cared more about making a point then helping the
public. That they were defended in progressive outlets such as Daily Kos – who spent
the last decade vilifying Manchin as a Democrat in Name Only – shows how little
their common sense is.
And many of them chose to turn
on their idol later on. After Biden’s election in 2020 Sanders was given major committee
assignments and enormous influence well outside his standing or the fact he was
a Democrat. Sanders seems to have understood that the only way to get his
agenda passed was to work with the administration. Yet he received large sums of
hate mail arguing that he had ‘completed betrayed the supporters of his 2016
and 2020 run for the Presidency by working with the administration. Sanders was
actually trying to bring about the causes he had thought for into some form of
reality, however watered down. In the minds of many of his most ardent
followers, that was the worst kind of betrayal possible. In their minds
marching for a cause was important. They still fail to understand that it takes
a President to sign it.
In the next article this series
I will discuss so much of the left’s activities and policies today and how technological
savvy has prevailed among the young even more than intelligence then how they
should be achieved.
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