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№38 / SUMMER 2020

R E A S O N I N R E VO LT

J AC O B I N M AG .C O M

AFTER BERNIE

“The long, dark night of the end of history has to be grasped as an enormous opportunity. The very oppressive pervasiveness of capitalist realism means that even glimmers of alternative political and economic possibilities can have a disproportionately great effect. The tiniest event can tear a hole in the grey curtain of reaction which has marked the horizons of possibility under capitalist realism. From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again.” — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (200 009)

Citoyens E D I TO R & P U B L I S H E R

R E S E A RC H E R

Bhaskar Sunkara

Jonah Walters

C R E AT I V E D I R E C TO R

D E V E LO P M E N T

Remeike Forbes

Roz Hunter

D E P U T Y E D I TO R

C I RC U L AT I O N

Micah Uetricht

Hadas Thier

M A N AG I N G E D I TO R

R E A D I N G G RO U P S

Amelia Ayrelan Iuvino

Julia Damphouse

AS S O C I AT E E D I TO R S

JAC O B I N A /V

Emma Fajgenbaum Shawn Gude

Cale Brooks Conor Gilies

G RA P H I C D E S I G N

PUBLICITY

Benjamin Koditschek Lauren Traugott-Campbell

Wes House A DV E RT I S E M E N T

AS S I STA N T E D I TO R S

Aqsa Ahmad Louisa Nyman

Pardise Amirshahi E D I TO R I A L AS S I STA N T

Piper Winkler

E U RO P E E D I TO R

David Broder STO RY E D I TO R

Connor Kilpatrick F E AT U R E S E D I TO R

Daniel Finn

E D I TO R I A L B OA R D

Nicole Aschoff Alyssa Battistoni Mike Beggs Megan Erickson Peter Frase C O N T R I B U T I N G E D I TO R S

STA F F W R I T E R S

Meagan Day Branko Marcetic Alex Press Luke Savage C O LU M N I ST S

Ben Burgis Liza Featherstone Dawn Foster Abi Wilkinson AS S O C I AT E P U B L I S H E R

Jason Farbman E X E C U T I V E E D I TO R

Seth Ackerman E D I TO R AT L A RG E

David Sirota

Bashir Abu-Manneh Nicolas Allen Loren Balhorn Jonah Birch Sebastian Budgen Ronan Burtenshaw Sabrina Fernandes Belén Fernández Benjamin Fogel Hilary Goodfriend Eileen Jones Matt Karp Cyrus Lewis Daniel Lopez Chris Maisano Karen Narefsky Paul Prescod Catarina Príncipe Kate Redburn Corey Robin Miya Tokumitsu

Jacobin is a leading voice of the American left, offering socialist perspectives on politics, economics, and culture. The print magazine is released quarterly. SUBSCRIPTION PRICE

$29 US (print) $39 Canada (print) $59 international (print) $19 (digital) Solidarity $59 Institutions $69 Lifetime $295 388 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11217 jacobinmag.com/subscribe/ [email protected] © 2020 Jacobin Foundation ISSN: 2470-6930 B O O K STO R E D I ST R I B U T I O N

Central Books (Europe) Disticor Direct Media Solutions One Source Small Changes tng C I RC U L AT I O N ( J U N E 2 0 2 0 )

Circulation: 61,083 Web Visitors: 2,137,260 Jacobin (ISSN: 2470-6930) is published quarterly by Jacobin Foundation Ltd., 388 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11217-3399. Periodical postage paid at 1050 Forbell St., Brooklyn, NY 11256-9602 and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Jacobin, 388 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11217-3399.

Features 55

MATT KARP

Bernie Sanders’s Five-Year War

74

JARED ABBOTT

The Two Paths of Democratic Socialism: Coalition and Confrontation

90

RONAN BURTENSHAW

How the Labour Party Lost the Chance of a Lifetime

Contributors cover art by Zohar Lazar

Jared Abbott is a PhD candidate in

Briahna Joy Gray is an American

the Department of Government at Harvard University.

Alex Niven is lecturer in English

political commentator, attorney, and political consultant who served as the National Press Secretary for the Bernie Sanders 2020 presidential campaign.

literature at Newcastle University and editor-at-large at Repeater Books. His latest book is New Model Island: How to Build a Radical Culture Beyond the Idea of England.

Seth Ackerman is Jacobin's

executive editor. Marilyn Arwood was a field

organizer for the Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign, and is presently the chair of the Philadelphia chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. Phoebe Braithwaite is a PhD

student at Harvard University working on Stuart Hall and British Cultural Studies. David Broder is Jacobin’s Europe

editor and a historian of French and Italian communism. Ronan Burtenshaw is the editor

of Tribune. Meagan Day is a staff writer at

Jacobin. She is the coauthor of Bigger than Bernie: How We Go from the Sanders Campaign to Democratic Socialism. Daniel Finn is the features editor

at Jacobin. He is the author of One Man’s Terrorist: A Political History of the IRA.

Anton Jäger is a doctoral student

at the University of Cambridge, working on the history of populism in the United States. Cedric Johnson is associate

professor of African American studies and political science at the University of Illinois at Chicago and editor of The Neoliberal Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, Late Capitalism and the Remaking of New Orleans. Matt Karp is an associate professor

of history at Princeton University and a Jacobin contributing editor. He is the author of This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy. Dominik A. Leusder is an economist

and writer. He is currently a graduate student at the London School of Economics.

Hannah Proctor is a Wellcome

Trust Research Fellow at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, interested in histories and theories of radical psychiatry. Ari Rabin-Havt served as deputy

campaign manager on Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign and deputy chief of staff in his Senate office. David Sirota is editor-at-large

at Jacobin. He edits the Too Much Information newsletter and previously served as a senior adviser and speechwriter on Bernie Sanders's 2020 presidential campaign. Jeff Weaver is a political strategist

who served as campaign manager for the Bernie Sanders 2016 presidential campaign and an advisor for the Bernie Sanders 2020 presidential campaign.

Departments FRONT MATTERS

MEANS OF DEDUCTION

READING MATERIEL

08

12

32

35

39

43

party lines

the soapbox

field notes

Letters

uneven & combined

canon fodder

We Won’t Forget the Questions Bernie Asked

vulgar empiricist

The Social Democracy Index

How We Lost Michigan

The Prophet of Inequality

The Enemy Within

13

14

52

the soapbox

struggle session

canon fodder

Internet Speaks

The Oral History of the Bernie Campaign

Reading Victor Serge from the Depths of Defeat

CULTURAL CAPITAL

THE TUMBREL

LEFTOVERS

101

104

113

116

123

126

bass & superstructure

beyond a boundary

girondins

worst estate

popular front

popular front

Don’t Look Back in Anger

Where Have All the Political Footballers Gone?

Did Americans Want a Political Revolution?

We Don’t Live in Weimar Germany

We Knocked on a Million Doors for 45,000 Votes

Let’s Talk About South Carolina

109

132

ways of seeing

means and ends

Mark Fisher’s Popular Modernism

The Victory to Come

8

№ 37  /  SPRING 2020

Front Matters GLORY DAYS

PANDEMIC POLITICS

9

FRONT MATTERS PARTY LINES

BY MEAGAN DAY

ILLUSTRATION BY DANIEL HASKETT

We Won’t Forget the Questions Bernie Asked After half a decade of Bernie Sanders, the genie doesn’t go back in the bottle.

I didn’t know I was a socialist until Bernie Sanders’s first presidential campaign. I knew I was repulsed by exploitation and oppression, and I even understood that capitalism perpetuated much of the injustice I saw around me. But I had never even once considered the possibility that I myself was a socialist. No one had ever asked. It was Bernie Sanders, eventually, who asked. He asked: Why should

10

you tolerate a system that privileges the profit-making activities of a tiny minority over the humanity of the vast majority? He asked: Are you willing to fight for someone you don’t know? He asked: Which side are you on? These questions cut right to the core of what it means to even have a society: what we believe to be the purpose of the institutions we’ve erected to facilitate our coexistence,

№ 38  /  SUMMER 2020

on whose terms they do and should operate, and to what ends. These are the questions that have always animated the socialist movement. They are also the questions that Bernie himself grappled with as a student when he first experienced a political awakening as a member of the Young People’s Socialist League. “It helped me put two and two together, in my mind,” Sanders recalled of his time in the YPSL.

“We don’t like poverty, we don’t like racism, we don’t like war, we don’t like exploitation. What do they all have in common?... What does wealth and power mean? How does it influence politics?” Bernie encountered an institution dedicated to exploring those questions just in time, as the socialist movement was poised for decades of obscurity. During those dark decades, the questions were not

AFTER BERNIE

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PARTY LINES

routinely posed in politics or popular culture. They were, in effect, already answered. This is what the cultural theorist Mark Fisher has called “capitalist realism,” the naturalization of the reign of profit and the total foreclosure on other possibilities, even in the imagination. It’s best exemplified by the words of Margaret Thatcher, who understood the deep unpopularity of her neoliberal agenda of austerity and privatization, but who leveled, “I believe people accept there is no real alternative.” It is exemplified, too, by the accidental slogan of the Joe Biden campaign, words of reassurance that he spoke to a private audience of wealthy donors: “Nothing will fundamentally change.” Biden rose to prominence in this period of capitalist realism, and he belongs to it. His nomination has naturally left many crestfallen, fearing that the Democratic Party has successfully stamped out the promise of the movement that coalesced around Bernie Sanders.

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We wanted the presidency, and we didn’t get it. Even so, Bernie Sanders’s two national campaigns have left an indelible impression on the American political imagination. They asked the unasked questions once again, and it’s impossible, now that tens or even hundreds of millions of people have been put on the spot to answer them, for our political landscape to simply revert to its previous configuration. Tens of thousands of people have answered these questions by becoming organized socialists. Workers around the country have answered these questions by becoming union activists and taking workplace action without a union at their back. People who never cared about a political campaign before in their lives answered these questions by becoming not just voters but volunteers. Where they will apply their newfound confidence and skills next is anybody’s guess. Some of them have already become workplace organizers and party builders, particularly in the Democratic Socialists of America. A few will no doubt run for office themselves.

№ 38  /  SUMMER 2020

We Won’t Forget the Questions Bernie Asked

Since Bernie ended his campaign, unprecedented numbers have filled the streets amid a global health crisis to demand justice for George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, two black Americans murdered by police officers. According to an analysis published in the Washington Post, this is the broadest protest movement in the history of the United States, taking place in more cities, towns, and suburbs than any before it. Its chief slogan is “Black Lives Matter,” and its central demand is to defund the police and invest instead in public safety alternatives as well as other necessary and sorely lacking social programs. This is not Bernie’s movement, nor can it simply be described as the next phase of his movement. It has its own character, its own influential figures, and its own politics. But on the streets, in the masked crowds, demanding racial equality and the reversal of austerity, are many whose political consciousness was elevated and transformed by or against the backdrop of the Sanders

campaigns. They have quickly found themselves acting in a different capacity, but their presence at these protests reveals a continuity in their devotion to collective struggle — a commitment to being the “us” in “Not Me, Us.” They are politicized and here to stay. We are living through one of the most volatile situations in modern political history, marked by a pandemic, mass unemployment, and intense social unrest. Nobody knows what happens now. But after half a decade of Bernie Sanders in the spotlight, forcing the nation to entertain the notion that our society has not reached the final stage of its evolution, the genie doesn’t go back in the bottle. There will be many more struggles to come for democracy, equality, and human freedom. And from this point onward, wherever such struggles take place, we will find among the ranks of the resisters those who chose their side during these last five years. They heard Bernie Sanders ask: Will you fight for someone you don’t know? And their answer was yes.

AFTER BERNIE

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FRONT MATTERS THE SOAPBOX

[email protected]

Letters Send us your deepest thoughts — we’ll try to publish them.

On “Health Care Heroes”

East Harlem’s Socialist Past

I am a first-year internal medicine resident in New York City, working on the front lines since the beginning of this pandemic.

I came across your magazine while researching the socialist congressman Vito Marcantonio. My grandmother’s family came from Italian Harlem, and one relative worked for Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, Dominic Felitti.

People cheer us for putting our lives on the line, but in reality, we don’t have much choice. We don’t voluntarily come into work everyday knowing we will be unprotected. We risk our lives, or we risk our livelihoods. We need to redirect our focus from idolizing martyrdom to policies that guarantee the protection and safety of all. The fact of the matter is, nobody wants to be a hero right now. We just want to live to see another day. – Zaki Azam, New York, NY

Uncle Mimi, as we called him, would sometimes discuss Marcantonio with my dad. They would say he was a good guy, just a little “too left.” I knew he was for civil rights and that he was a suspected communist during the McCarthy era. Anyway, thanks for writing about him [“New York’s Last Socialist Congressperson” by Benjamin Serby], and I loved the photo of him with Paul Robeson and W. E. B. Du Bois. He was AOC before AOC. – Claudia Tedesco-Colmer, Los Angeles, CA

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№ 38  /  SUMMER 2020

Credit Where Credit’s Due Let’s be fair here, John Bolton has always been known first and foremost for the ridiculous walrus stache. At least have the common courtesy to mention that before bringing up the fact that he’s been one of the early 21st century’s biggest warmongers. — Travelling Curmudgeon

Internet Speaks It was another fine quarter in the comments section.

Stay Tuned for the Summer 2036 Issue of Jacobin Social democrats betraying the working class and undermining their struggle in the pursuit of shallow electoralism? What a completely unprecedented and unexpected turn of events. — Alexander Goldhill, London, England Spawn Campers for Socialism Just remember that gamergaters are a small minority and that the poor working conditions of games developers are major issues. The 4chan dwellers can stay and rot. Plus you can point out big issues with loot boxes, games as service, and pay to win aspects of games and you’ll always find a larger audience.

Too Bad AVALANCHE Are Ultra-Left Adventurists

Say “No” to Essentialism

Final Fantasy 7 was formative in my move to the left.

Sartre! One of the Frenchest thinkers of all time. We salute him!

— Kathyrn Till, Peekskill, NY

— Alex Roberts, Paris, France

Woke Capitalism to the Rescue

We Need a National Health Service

I was just thinking about the “Join the Conversation” Kylie Jenner advertisement. If only we could dispatch cans of Pepsi to all in these troubled times. — Bill Zeiser, Detroit, MI

— Ralph Long, Columbus, OH

I’ve been a bedside RN for over 25 years. My career has been a horror story. From the anti-labor environment you work in to watching people get jacked by the profit driven system. This virus will open the eyes of many. Sadly, the system will probably win. — Rich Barber, Philadelphia, PA

AFTER BERNIE

15

FRONT MATTERS STRUGGLE SESSION

BRIAHNA JOY GRAY ARI RABIN-HAVT DAVID SIROTA JEFF WEAVER

ILLUSTRATION BY

The Oral History of the Bernie Campaign

DANIEL HASKETT

Four key figures in Bernie Sanders’s quest for the White House on what really happened.

Joining the Revolution Jeff Weaver (JW) I got thrown out of school for protesting against apartheid in 1986. So I went back to rural Vermont, where I was from. I discovered that the progressive mayor of Burlington was running for governor. With no electoral experience, I was made the county coordinator in the county I lived in in Vermont. It should have been a big warning to me about the campaign, but I was overjoyed. I met Bernie not long after at a dairy festival that I staffed with him, holding a sign and handing out buttons to 16

people. He invited me to work in Burlington two days a week, which turned into seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day. And the rest is history. David Sirota (DS) I met Bernie in 1999. I applied for a job — back then, you didn’t know who you were applying to. I remember that I got a call from Jeff Weaver after I sent my résumé in. He said, “It’s Congressman Bernie Sanders’s office.” I didn’t know who he was — or certainly wasn’t very familiar with him. I remember some moment where it was like, “Oh, that’s the socialist guy.”

№ 38  /  SUMMER 2020

Ari Rabin-Havt (ARH) My first contact with Bernie was not with Bernie, but with Bernie’s world. It was in ’06, when I was working for Harry Reid. I was obviously excited when Jim Jeffords retired, and Reid and [Chuck] Schumer quickly coalesced around Bernie as the preferred Senate candidate in Vermont. I fantasized to my colleagues about Bernie filibustering — what it would be like when he would no longer be limited to one minute but get to spend nine hours speaking! Briahna Joy Gray (BJG) I met Bernie when I covered an event for the Intercept — his Martin Luther King Day speech in Jackson, Mississippi, and in Memphis, Tennessee. I was invited to do it off the record, to travel with him between those places, and I traveled with him in the car and had an off-the-record conversation. It was the first time I met him and got to know him — though he’s exactly the

THE PARTY WE WANT

9

STRUGGLE SESSION

same in person. There’s literally no difference other than, you know, he’ll plop down on a sofa more casually and loosen his tie, take his jacket off, maybe use language that’s a little bit more colorful ... ARH I always viewed my work for John Kerry, Harry Reid, and others as a kind of training ground for when I could work for an ultimate fantasy candidate. And that was Bernie Sanders, a candidate who actually fulfilled the vast majority of the agenda that I personally believe in. DS I wish my foundational story with Bernie was more of a lifelong-dream, movie-scripted kind of thing, where I always wanted to work with Bernie. Actually, the night before I took the job, I almost turned it down because I was afraid that — and you have to remember, this was the late ’90s — I was afraid that going to work for a self-described socialist would mean getting blacklisted for the rest of my life in politics. JW I became Bernie’s driver and constant companion, his “guy Friday,” and he got 14 percent of the vote in a three-way race against a liberal Democrat incumbent and a moderate Republican. So, in the traditional metric of “did you win,” [his gubernatorial campaign] did not go well. But he had a strong base of support in the working-class parts of Burlington, where he was still mayor at the time. But he also did disproportionately well in the northern parts of Vermont, 18

the more rural parts of Vermont. Bernie was incredibly popular with French Canadian folks living in northern Vermont. I remember distinctly being at a place with Bernie called Saint Anne’s Shrine, which is a religious shrine in the islands between New York and Vermont. We went to the cafeteria at Saint Anne’s Shrine, and it was an old-style cafeteria, with metal rails where you run your tray down and shelves of food, the Jell-Os with the whipped cream on it, the cellophane on top. It was everything you’d think of in an old-style cafeteria. It was staffed by a lovely group of French Canadian grandmothers, much like my own. When we were in there, Bernie Sanders was not hugely known, but they were literally, and I mean literally, crawling through the food to get to shake hands with Bernie Sanders. It really was a powerful demonstration of the way he could connect with ethnic communities that have faced oppression and economic disadvantage.

congressional office that — you’re in the foxhole. You’re behind enemy lines and surrounded by the enemy on all sides. You don’t know exactly who the hell your allies are. Sometimes your best allies are right-wing Republicans on certain issues, and the Democrats are your huge problem; other times, the rightwing Republicans are your problem, and the progressive caucus is your best ally.

ARH On the Kerry campaign, I saw Democrats being scared. It was a carryover from the post-9/11 period, where Democrats were just fearful and didn’t want to fight and didn’t have the moral fortitude. It wasn’t ideological. It didn’t have to do with economic progressivism. It didn’t have to do with an issue difference. It had to do with the fact that they were so scared of taking on people and fighting.

The First Run for the White House

DS It was such an eye-opening experience. It was very much a № 38  /  SUMMER 2020

ARH The demarcation moment of those years that to me demonstrated, beyond policy, the separation between insiders and outsiders was the reaction to Stephen Colbert’s speech at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. DS There was a me — a political me before Bernie, and a political me after Bernie, and they’re not the same people. It’s just not the same human being. It absolutely, positively changed my entire life, working for him for about two and a half years.

JW I left the Hill in 2009 and had a comic book store, which I love. I love sitting in the back room with my old books. And then Bernie tells me he’s going to run for president — I said, if this isn’t a campaign to win, if it’s just an educational campaign, where we’re going to go out and you’re going to talk about some issues, raise consciousness and whatever, then I said, “I’ll send you the

The Oral History of the Bernie Campaign

“You’re behind enemy lines and surrounded by the enemy on all sides. You don’t know exactly who the hell your allies are.”

maximum contribution, and I’ll talk you up, but to upend my life to do that? I’m not willing to do that.” He assured me that it was a campaign to win. Having worked with him on so many campaigns, I knew it was a long, long shot but that it was possible. ARH To be frank, I didn’t think I wanted to be part of what was coming in 2016, when Hillary Clinton was going to just waltz through. JW Everybody has this notion that Vermont is a deep blue, hippie-dippie place, where

everybody’s socialist. But that is not what Vermont is. And I saw, over the years, Bernie’s incredible appeal with working-class people, both in Burlington and in rural parts of the state, so I knew the potential. And, as we saw in his career in Vermont, the more people got to know him over time, the better he did electorally.

person is. What’s going on?” She was like, “Oh, I’ve always loved Bernie Sanders! He’s one of the few people in Congress who actually reflects my values.” I started watching the debates, and it became immediately clear that Bernie was, for the first time in my life, I think, someone I could unreservedly get behind.

BJG In 2015, I remember I was at work one day, working on a weekend, and I had a Skype call from my mom and my brother, who were at a Bernie rally. I was like, “I don’t even know who this

JW The media derisively called July and August 2015 the “Summer of Sanders,” which suggested that Bernie would get big crowds in the summer, but they wouldn’t vote for him when

AFTER BERNIE

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STRUGGLE SESSION

the time came. But that summer, the events that he held across the country — tens of thousands, in some cases, came out to a single event — I think that took everybody by surprise. ARH Then Bernie was thinking of running, and early on, before he officially announced, I was thinking, “I hope they do well enough that it doesn’t diminish progressive ideological causes.” That’s the fear — that you run a Dennis Kucinich campaign. That fear was quickly dissipated in one day of his campaign. Literally one day after seeing the public reaction to his campaign. JW At the end of July 2015, we had twenty-eight staffers total, including the people we had on the ground in Iowa and New Hampshire. So we told people, “You should self-organize,” and they did, incredibly. You know, farmers’ markets, they did

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door-knocking, they did all kinds of things on their own. BJG It was enormously frustrating to watch the coverage of those debates, and the coverage of the campaigns being so enormously biased — not reflecting what you could see with your own eyes as a viewer. That very quickly can push you from being a casual supporter to being a radicalized, active person. JW Suddenly, you had this army of people, and the campaign had the financial resources to deploy all the modern tools of campaigning, and that put Bernie Sanders in a position that nobody else with his politics has been in, maybe not ever in US history. On top of that, critical to that, is that you have a trusted messenger, an authentic messenger — he hates the word “authentic” — but an authentic messenger, with a clear vision of where the country should

№ 38  /  SUMMER 2020

go, and an incredibly sharp analysis of why things were the way they were. BJG It was easy to forget how much work it was in 2016, how simplistic the argument was. It was really, “How could you like Bernie? Black people don’t,” and you’re literally saying it to a black woman’s face. I was getting into fights with everybody at the workplace — all of my friends — because the only comeback they had to why Bernie was superior was that black people didn’t like Bernie. JW Just by looking at the outcomes and where the votes come from, you can see that you do have this split [in the Democratic Primary electorate], and it’s not so much progressive versus moderate; it’s called wine track versus beer track. Hillary Clinton was the beer-track candidate in 2008. In 2016, she

The Oral History of the Bernie Campaign

was the wine-track candidate. Bernie Sanders was the beer-track candidate. DS Bernie benefited from a relatively unique situation in which it was a one-on-one race, and the candidate he was running against was arguably uniquely unpopular. JW As people got to know Bernie, when we started off the campaign, he was at 3 percent in Iowa, and by the end of the Iowa caucuses, with state delegate equivalents, we were tied with Hillary. Given what I know now about the Iowa caucuses, I’m fairly confident that he won the popular vote in Iowa quite handily in 2016. DS I don’t want to second-guess the ’16 campaign — I wasn’t on it — but if he had hit a little harder ... People who say, “Oh, he was so negative on Clinton” — that’s a joke, that’s a complete

joke. I think there’s a much better argument to be made — not a criticism, but a “What could Bernie have done more in ’16?” It would have been to be far more contrasting with Hillary Clinton. I always go back to the ’08 race between Clinton and [Barack] Obama, which wasn’t even one of the nastiest races ever, but it was a lot of back-and-forth! If Bernie Sanders in ’16 had done the kind of daily, every-single-day, sharp contrast with Hillary Clinton that Barack Obama did in 2008, I don’t know — maybe he would have won! JW I know a lot of people have feelings about 2020, which I share, but the posture of the party as an institution in 2016 was very different than in 2020. The truth of 2016 has come out over time, in WikiLeaks, and in Donna Brazile’s book, and in other places — the party as an institution, the dnc

[Democratic National Committee] as an institution in 2016, was actively trying to keep Bernie Sanders from [winning] — and that was not the case in 2020, by the way, in my opinion. I’m not saying that the establishment wing of the party wasn’t opposed to him, but the institutional party was not deployed against us in 2020. ARH I covered election night at the Javits Center for Sirius. At that point, I thought that Hillary was going to win, and that it would be progressives’ job to fight her administration every day. It was very early in the night, and I was interviewing Mary Kay Henry from SEIU [Service Employees International Union]. A Hillary staffer came into the hall and literally ripped all of the surrogates out. Mary Kay was at my table, and the staffer was trying to physically pull her away.

“That’s the fear — that you run a Dennis Kucinich campaign. That fear was quickly dissipated in one day of his campaign.”

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STRUGGLE SESSION

At first, I was like, “Oh, she has to go to another interview. That happens.” And then I look around, and I see that she’s running around the hallway, getting all of the surrogates out of there. That’s when I went on air and said, “I think Hillary’s lost.”

The Second Run for the White House DS I was wondering if he was going to do it in early 2019, and to be honest, I really didn’t think he was going to do it. I knew he had concerns about the slog of doing another national campaign against the odds, and how a campaign would once again require him to be away from Vermont and his grandkids for long periods of time. Then all of a sudden, I got a call, and it was like, “This is going to happen. Would you want to do it?” ARH The first big conversation about 2020 took place in January 2018, in my apartment. Bernie was there, Jane was on the phone, and many of the people who ultimately became part of the senior team were there. Also, the dml [Devine Mulvey Longabaugh, the campaign strategists] guys were there — specifically Julian Mulvey and Mark Longabaugh — and some prominent surrogates. One of the variables that got discussed was: Does Joe Biden run? Does Elizabeth Warren run? Each scenario would create a different dynamic in the race. BJG I had a reporter’s relationship with some of the Sanders communications team. 22

Around early 2019, they reached out and asked if I was available. It became clear that they were interested in me coming onto the campaign. It was a big decision to make, because I was very happy at the Intercept, and it wasn’t clear to me that it would be useful for Bernie to take one of these reporters who openly shared their politics, especially a black reporter who was a progressive, and prevent me from speaking freely as an independent party. ARH I know this sounds like pure bullshit, but Bernie did not make his decision to run for president until January 2019. When we started talking about what 2020 would look like, there were lots of side conversations. We figured that somebody would rise out of nowhere, but nobody thought that it would be Pete Buttigieg. People generally believed Kamala Harris and Cory Booker would be more formidable candidates than they ultimately were. Whether or not Biden would run would hugely impact our strategy. If Biden wasn’t in, we would be number one in the polls from the start. If Biden was in, we would be number two in the polls. This would heavily influence how the campaign was treated by the media and other candidates. JW I don’t want to just beat up on the media, but let’s be clear of the extent to which Bernie Sanders was discounted. There was a huge period of time which is well known as the Bernie Blackout.

№ 38  /  SUMMER 2020

ARH The Bernie Blackout had a silver lining, because unlike other candidates, our base would not turn on us based on a cable news narrative. Bernie’s 15 percent was never going anywhere. Nobody else had a floor like that. Everybody else had a base that was extremely reactive to the national media narrative. At some points in the campaign, that was to our advantage. In the doldrums of the summer, while we weren’t moving forward, we could hold our 15 percent. And post–heart attack, our floor remained high.

The Heart Attack DS It wasn’t a good summer. The campaign was languishing. The polls showed that. BJG We were all at work, and they called us into an impromptu meeting, and they told us, minutes before the rest of the world knew. It was really sad and scary. It was very quiet; it was a very solemn atmosphere. Some people started to cry. DS I don’t want to say I thought the race was over with the heart attack, but the campaign had not been going in the right direction for a while now. And now this! We had navigated some icebergs, and the hull of the ship had been scratched up, and now we just hit the big one. That’s really how it felt. BJG The reality of what Bernie represented and how unique it was, and how there was no substitute for that, really hit

The Oral History of the Bernie Campaign

home. With him, if he hadn’t pulled through, all of those ideas would have died with him, is how it felt. There are a lot of amazing progressives coming up the ranks. But in terms of having that kind of stature and ability to command attention, there is only Bernie. ARH In terms of electoral position, we had a 15 percent base that wasn’t leaving, regardless of the national media narrative, whereas every other candidate had a 15-point swing. Look at Kamala Harris’s campaign. She bounced into second place in the polling after the first debate and then fell off the face of the earth. DS The aoc [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] thing was huge in the sense of creating a comeback-kid narrative, which served us really, really well. Bernie

handled it really well. The upsurge in support for him after that was — some of it was people suddenly realizing what politics would be like without somebody carrying the torch. I think that shook people up, like, “Wow, we would really lose something here,” and that was a big boost to the campaign.

The Comeback BJG First the news trickled in — I think it was Ilhan Omar, and then Rashida Tlaib, and then aoc. It really did feel like the end of an action movie, where your hero’s down and out, and there’s that nice ending, the figure that steps in ... I felt a level of affection for those women, a gratitude, a sense of camaraderie.

I will never forget what they did for us. The office was jubilant. If I recall correctly, the news came out after a debate in which Bernie had done well, and it was the first debate after the heart attack. Two weeks after the heart attack. They had a bus for us, and we went down to New York. It felt like anything was possible. Standing in that crowd, it could not have been a more beautiful day. It could not have been more perfect. It felt like it was — I joined the campaign, and I didn’t think about whether we were going to win or lose; it just felt like something I had to do. But in that moment, I think it was the first time I allowed myself to think, truly, that this was possible, despite all we know about all of those institutions that are going to line up to try to block us. It was so beautiful.

“I know this sounds like pure bullshit, but Bernie did not make his decision to run for president until January 2019.”

THE PARTY WE WANT

15

STRUGGLE SESSION

ARH The truth is, electability arguments were a real problem that we knew about from the start. It’s why you saw the “Bernie Beats Trump” messaging constantly echoed by our campaign. We needed it to sink in with those voters. JW At the heart of this is the fact that Bernie Sanders is a principled candidate. He doesn’t like scorched-earth politics. I will say that, in this campaign, we did run contrast ads against Joe Biden on Social Security. It was the first time in Bernie’s career that he ran those kinds of ads; we ran them in Iowa, and they, in fact, were effective, frankly. ARH The Social Security contrast was effective against Biden and did help Bernie move up in Iowa. In Iowa, the more voters got to see Biden, the less they liked him. The more voters see Bernie, the more they were reminded of why they liked him. JW After Iowa, with Pete Buttigieg rising rapidly in the polls and gaining 2 points a day, about to overcome us, Bernie went to a traditional political event in New Hampshire called Politics & Eggs — a breakfast event. Bernie Sanders took out a sheet that had headlines about Pete Buttigieg’s corporate ties and bad positions, and basically just read the headlines. ARH And it worked. You could see immediately, in the tracking polling, that [Buttigieg’s] momentum just ceased once we did that.

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JW That was very effective at blunting Pete Buttigieg’s momentum, allowing Bernie to win in New Hampshire. ARH In early 2019, if you asked me, “What is the ideal world for the Bernie campaign coming out of Iowa?”, it would be to win Iowa without Joe Biden coming in second. Ideally, second place in Iowa would go to a clearly weak candidate, who was unlikely to win the Democratic nomination elevating them. That happened. JW I’ve also heard some criticism that we were not focused enough on the activist left. We were trying to mobilize young people, who are on college campuses, trying to mobilize working-class people who have given up on the political process, trying to mobilize Latino voters. You have to reach people who are beyond the normal reach of the activist left. It’s just not a big enough pool of people.

The Warren Factor ARH In 2018, I remember hearing reports from people that Elizabeth Warren was calling them. These are people who would never have endorsed Elizabeth Warren, even if Bernie wasn’t in the race. JW Obviously, Elizabeth Warren was a complicating factor in the race. I don’t think that would come as a shock to anyone. And it was more complicating in the early fall, when she almost had the nomination sealed up. She was

№ 38  /  SUMMER 2020

almost at 30 percent in Iowa and New Hampshire, and rising steadily. ARH Warren’s campaign could have killed us in October. I remember conversations where we’d say, “She’s going to go on air and could blow us out of the water.” She had the financial resources to do it in the early fall. Instead, they stayed off tv, except for a few minor buys. That allowed us to start rising. Remember, the Des Moines Register poll had us in fourth in Iowa, and her in first, in early October. JW I don’t like to Mondaymorning-quarterback other people’s campaigns, because obviously I could be Mondaymorning-quarterbacked myself. It’s justifiable — you make decisions in the moment that you believe are right and that turn out not to be right, but you make the best decision you can in the moment. But I will say that structurally, her campaign and her reliance upon inside-the-Beltway actors, at the end of the day, became a huge problem that cost her the nomination. If they had, in the fall, when they were ascendant, gone on TV in a massive way, I think she would have locked up the nomination probably by November, and the campaign would have been over. But in my view, they had an almost digital-exclusive notion of politics, which in 2080 may be the way to run a race, but in 2020 is not going to do it. ARH If you are asking me what Bernie could have done to

The Oral History of the Bernie Campaign

convince Elizabeth Warren not to run, I don’t think there was anything. BJG I’d never run a campaign before. I didn’t really have a sense of what was normal, or what kind of position you should expect to be in at a given moment. At that point, it did feel as if Warren was a much bigger threat, because she was getting a lot of positive media attention, and the argument was that if you care about these policies, why not take them coming from a woman, and then you also get the representational value? ARH With the heat they took on Medicare for All, they created that problem for their campaign. Bernie was willing to acknowledge that the middle class would pay more in taxes but save money overall. Warren was unwilling to acknowledge this, which put their campaign in a position of having a difficult time raising the revenue, if you accept the claim that you have to pay for it. But you just have to be willing to have that conversation and understand that Republicans are going to say you’re raising taxes anyway. And if you are going to make the argument, do it early on in the campaign. Not in October or November. DS [Warren] had it in the bag. But she couldn’t close the deal. Her campaign collapse is one of the most epic political collapses in modern history. We had our mistakes — sure, absolutely. But the collapse of the Elizabeth Warren campaign is one of the

biggest acts of political malpractice that has ever happened in the Democratic Party.

be above the fray for most of the race and then made her big thing “I’m going to attack Bernie” — what is wrong with you?

JW Electoral politics is a very specialized endeavor. In many ways, it is like a war. And you require soldiers to win a war. And I think our campaign was better staffed with soldiers.

BJG It’s very difficult [to counterattack], for all the reasons you understand. We had a month-long media cycle about the snake emojis, and Elizabeth Warren’s internet post — at the same time that someone brought a Nazi flag to a Bernie Sanders rally, and it wasn’t covered once.

The Accusation ARH That was probably the most difficult moment in the campaign. DS My first reaction [to the sexism accusation] was: “Let me get this straight. You haven’t criticized or juxtaposed yourself against [Biden]? You’re the anti-corruption candidate who will not ever mention, now, the corruption in your own party, won’t punch to the right in the primary, but the one time you’re going to get in the squabble, you’re going to punch left? That’s what you’re going to do?” BJG Well, has Bernie ever had a conversation where he said, “It’s going to be tough, given [Donald] Trump and his misogyny, and how misogynistic America is — it’s going to be tougher for her to win this cycle”? I can believe that. I can believe something like that, but it’s very different from what Warren said, and what Warren hoped to imply was very clear. DS I don’t even want to engage in the “Oh, was it true, did he say it?” You only have a certain number of proverbial punches to [throw in a campaign]. She tried to AFTER BERNIE

DS I was a fan of Elizabeth Warren; I’ve known her for a long time. How she goes from Joe Biden’s biggest critic — which is literally how she’s been in American politics since the mid-2000s, it’s who she is — and then she finally gets into the championship match with her longtime nemesis, and she suddenly goes silent? I mean, it’s unbelievable. I’ll never be over that.

The Front-Runner BJG People say a lot of things, but folks tend to be surer with their money. [After the Nevada caucuses,] when the betting markets had us winning every Super Tuesday state, or close to every state ... it was thrilling. We had just won, depending on how you see it, the first three states. Depending on how you feel about Iowa, which was ultimately havoc, we had just won. Even the polls in South Carolina had showed us within 5 points.

25

STRUGGLE SESSION

JW That week after Nevada — we had a theory of the case, as every campaign does, about how you win, including how you consolidate the party at some point, and if you look at the week after Nevada, what clearly set in was panic among establishment players in the party and their allies outside the party. Bernie had just gone three for three. BJG In February, Bernie was number one with both black and Latino voters in the polls. Both. Both! Okay? I never saw a single news story on that. I never turned on the TV once and saw anybody mention that fact. ARH Chris Matthews compared Bernie Sanders winning Nevada to the Nazi army advancing across Europe, while Chuck Todd compared our actual supporters to Nazis. BJG And in Nevada, he completely exploded the Bernie Bro myth by overwhelmingly winning the Latino vote, although people still don’t appreciate the extent to which the Latino vote helped to propel him in Iowa in 2020. ARH We thought we were going to win Nevada, but those fifteen Strip caucuses? That would be a tough climb. The Culinary Union controls those rooms, and we were obviously not in a good place with their union’s leadership. We were staying at an mgm property, and we did a back-of-house visit at the Grand. So, we walk in. All of these culinary workers are super

26

excited, hugging Bernie and getting selfies. We turn in to the employee cafeteria, which is a big meeting and congregating place. In the front of the room, it was the same atmosphere. We turn right, and there is a guy who is clearly a Culinary Union organizer, who begins coordinating a group of workers, sending them over to Bernie, reading stories like, “My kid has this disability. Why are you trying to take away my health care?” I don’t begrudge it at all — it was good organizing, but you could see it happening. Now, Bernie’s really good in those situations, and he responded that, of course, they would have health care under his plan. He wasn’t taking it away. They were organizing against Medicare for All and essentially against Bernie. And it was a complete failure. We won every Strip caucus except one, which are nearly all Culinary. JW The demonstration he had to make in terms of electoral strength to force a surrender was a much higher bar for him. Nevada almost got us there, but with Joe Biden’s better-than-expected performance in South Carolina, we needed Super Tuesday, really, and the delegate lead to create the environment where the party establishment would acknowledge defeat. ARH There was a concerted effort to work hard to get more mainstream endorsements. Bernie did call a bunch of the candidates who had dropped out. He actually did make those calls. The thing we did not do, that people have № 38  /  SUMMER 2020

criticized — he did not want the campaign pushing on Elizabeth Warren to drop out. He did not feel that was the right thing to do. BJG Right after Nevada, I remember Soledad O’Brien — they were having the same conversation; they were saying, “Oh, Bernie maybe can do this,” and she tweets, “I’ll wait to see what happens when a diverse state votes.” [Laughter.] You know, complete Latino erasure — this is a woman of Cuban descent. Complete Latino erasure, like, literally, Latinos did not matter in this election. Nobody cared about them. If you were at all paying attention, you realized that the states that are electorally relevant in a general election are very heavily Latino. We’re talking about the swing states in the Southwest, and we’re talking about Texas, we’re talking about Florida. Bernie Sanders had 60, 70 percent of the Latino vote. I think it was 70! It was an outrageous supermajority. JW It sure looked like the wheels were coming off our opponent — Joe Biden had not only lost but was just decimated in those first three states. They were in panic and rapidly trying to figure out what to do. And I think there were other people who were Berniesympathetic or, let’s say, open to Bernie, who were waiting for just a little bit more of a push, and the expectation was that that push would come after Super Tuesday, with a demonstration of support broadly across the country.

The Oral History of the Bernie Campaign

DS You don’t lay back on your laurels, you double down on the offense on Joe Biden, who had been destroyed in New Hampshire. The campaign just didn’t. ARH We had been talking for months about how we were going to blow out Nevada on the strength of our Latino base. JW What we could not have anticipated is the collapse, the literal folding of the tent, of Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar after Biden won South Carolina — essentially by the same margin that we won Nevada. DS The couple of days after Bernie lost South Carolina, somebody added the rough equivalent of $100 million in three days of essentially free good press — the ad equivalent of $100 million of “Joe Biden is going to win.” That has a huge effect.

“Bernie took out a sheet that had headlines about Pete, and basically just read the headlines.”

AFTER BERNIE

ARH Think about how amazingly incredible it is that you have somebody like Pete Buttigieg, who comes out of nowhere, has a delegate lead over Joe Biden, and who knew that his campaign was going to get blown out in Nevada. He then drops out of the race before Super Tuesday. If he stays in, he splits the moderate vote and, you could argue, has a better rationale than Biden going into a brokered convention. JW It’s not as though [Biden] had done something unique. But [Buttigieg and Klobuchar] folded their tents pretty quickly and coalesced around him.

27

STRUGGLE SESSION

ARH Buttigieg makes the decision to drop out simply to prevent Bernie from winning. JW The media narrative in that period, that short period between South Carolina and Super Tuesday, was overwhelming. ARH That was what ultimately beat us. The question is, what could the campaign do to stop that collective action among moderates that took place over the course of basically twenty-four hours? JW If you look at the Warrenplus-Bernie total in Texas, Bernie wins; Bernie wins Massachusetts, Bernie wins Maine, Bernie wins Minnesota. Everybody’s voting base is complicated and diverse. I don’t just mean racially diverse, I mean politically diverse. Motivations are diverse. But I think it is fair to say — certainly the research I saw showed that the overwhelming [majority] — not entirely, but the vast majority — of Warren voters were second-choice Bernie. With Biden consolidating the center and us having votes split on the Left, we just were not able to get over that last hurdle. When people conflate the fact that the establishment rallied around Joe Biden after Nevada with the rigging that went on in 2016 — to me, those are very different things. It’s not a shock to me, nor do I think it’s out of line that the establishment would rally around their candidate in the election. DS Bernie said, “If you elect me, the next eight years are going to be all struggle and fighting, because

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these problems we have are so enormous.” And Biden said, “If you elect me, for the next eight years, you can all just go back to sleep! I’ll fix everything, and it will go back to normal.” And if you’re the average voter, you’re like: “You’re telling me I can vote for Joe Biden, and everything will be easy? Cool!”

The End of the Campaign ARH Now lockdowns are starting, and there are two elements — Bernie rightfully believes his voice is important. He wants to make sure the issues he cares deeply about are still part of the national dialogue. It’s not about him, it’s about the issues. DS I reject the idea that in the 2020 campaign, the problem was that Bernie didn’t reach out [to the Democratic establishment]. I just fundamentally reject that idea. I think folks with that analysis fundamentally do not understand campaigns in general, and specifically the challenges of what we were trying to accomplish. ARH Bernie actually met with [Jim] Clyburn a number of times in 2018 and 2019. They were meeting about community health center legislation. That’s much more effective and important than a conversation between Bernie and Clyburn focused on “will you endorse me in the primary,” which was always an impossibility. BJG You can sit around and talk about black voters and Barack

№ 38  /  SUMMER 2020

Obama and all of that stuff, but at the end of the day, 30 percent of voters in North Carolina and Michigan, some of those earlier voting states — that’s why I know, because it’s before we went into quarantine — thought that Joe Biden supported Medicare for All. Sanders was thought to be the best, most trusted person on health care, close next to Joe Biden, who was up there. Enormous percentages of Joe Biden supporters, people who actually pulled the lever for him, thought that he supported Medicare for All. That’s true. The vast majority of voters have no idea about his record on Social Security, including black voters. ARH The secret about Social Security is that older voters are not as impacted by Social Security messaging. Whereas voters approaching Social Security age are very responsive. People in their fifties are much more responsive to messages about Social Security than people in their eighties. BJG I think it’s a mistake to give up on older voters. I think it was a mistake for the campaign not to target older voters. I felt like a lot of times, our advertising on Twitter was preaching to the choir. Bernie had a platform for older voters. He had Social Security expansion and protection — a record of actually protecting it. He had home health care. DS Former vice presidents have never run for president and not won their party’s nomination.

The Oral History of the Bernie Campaign

They are the archetype of the inside establishment, by definition. BJG Literally no one, of the twenty-six candidates or however many there were, took any meaningful aim at Joe Biden, with the exception of Julián Castro, who basically got slapped on the wrist for it — for being a mean, ungrateful boy! For dipping his toe in that water. And Cory Booker had one little line — he had a post-debate interview where he hinted at it, and I think the mood in the room shifted such that he basically petered off and dropped it because it was toxic. ARH Bernie is a fighter. If he’s punched, he will punch back. But he does not like personal attacks. That is not how he believes politics should work. DS If you’re like, “I realize I’m running for a real political revolution; that means I understand that I’m going to need to take down and defeat the former vice president in a singular way, and I’m going to wake up every day knowing that that is my job,” I think that would have given us the best chance to win. I’m not sure we would have won. Really, I’m not. But I think that would have given us the best chance to win. BJG It seems that, out of the tragedy that was the coronavirus crisis, there was an opportunity to break through on messaging. And remember, what we had was that last debate — we immediately went into quarantine after the

debate. That was the last time I went to the office, watching the debate. Bernie did a good job, but he needed to eviscerate Biden — it didn’t happen that way. It probably wasn’t his fault; the media coverage just allowed Biden to lie repeatedly throughout that debate, didn’t call him on it, so it was perceived to be an even draw. But then, that same night, you had Symone Sanders telling people that it was safe to go and vote, when the cdc [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] had just issued recommendations that it was not, in fact, safe to be in a group of more than fifty people. ARH I think those of us who are more ideologically inclined or on the activist left, we underestimate the extent to which a lot of working-class people who vote in Democratic Party primaries like their party and its leaders. Unlike in the Republican field, voters wouldn’t stand [it] if Bernie started making comments like Trump made about Ted Cruz in 2016 — which Bernie would never do. Especially with regard to Biden, who was generally well liked, even by those not voting for him. DS It is very, very difficult, arguably impossible, to run from the actual outside. Not the fake outside, but the real outside — to represent an actual challenge to the system. And we haven’t had a candidate who has really mounted a serious campaign challenging the system from the Left in ... I mean, at the presidential level, I can’t name one in a hundred years. The one-foot-in-the-tent, AFTER BERNIE

one-foot-out-of-the-tent ... it probably won’t work. If you’re going to run as a revolutionary, and that’s Bernie’s word — “political revolution” — if you’re going to run as a revolutionary, you’re off-brand when you are trying to show or behave in a way that suggests that you’re on the inside. BJG We had tools in our arsenal that, I think, could have put a dent in Joe Biden’s support. But Joe Biden was in the lead the entire time, and there were other moments in the campaign when the other candidates rallied together to come for the one who had emerged at the top. Sometimes that was Bernie, obviously — pretty much every debate — but there was a moment when it was Michael Bloomberg. There is strength in numbers, and it’s interesting that nobody ever tried that with Joe Biden, either because they didn’t see him as a real threat, which would have been naive, or because they didn’t want to hurt him. Depending on how conspiratorial you’re feeling at a given moment ... JW Bernie had said from the beginning of 2020, just as he had in 2016, that he was going to support the Democratic nominee. And it became clear after Super Tuesday, and confirmed by the contests after that, that Biden was going to get the requisite number of delegates; Bernie was not. But the fight for a more equitable, more progressive America is not over.

29

STRUGGLE SESSION

ARH What I am amazed by sometimes, in the online discourse, is that sometimes you get, “You should have just gotten Bernie to do x, and then everything would have been better.” I don’t think silver bullets exist, or they rarely exist in politics. There is the occasional Todd Akin moment, but they are very rare, and it’s usually a mistake by your opponent, not something you’ve done. BJG It’s hard for me to sit here and Monday-morningquarterback when, in many ways, 2016 was more successful. It was very different. We won more states; the race was closer; the race went longer; the opposition was openly disgusted; the Stop Bernie movement was less explicit, or something. It felt like the

gaslighting was worse — it was like they hadn’t organized yet; it was less effective. It felt, in some ways, more hopeful, looking at it from the outside. There’s not a ton you can do to push back against millions of dollars in free advertising for your opponent, unless you’re willing to take on a truly outsider position, the way that, frankly, Donald Trump did, and go whole hog on the media, completely invest in your own independent messaging, throw money at Facebook ads and your own videos, and do stunts that command the attention of the media, draw strong contrasts with your opponents. ARH The problem we faced in the end, the deficit that existed, was not the amount of paid media or field staff we had. That was not

our problem. Our biggest problem at the tail end of the primary was the sheer quantity of negative messages being directed at us and positive messages about Biden on cable news and other media. There was a study that showed we faced a more than $70 million earned media blitz in the three days between South Carolina and Super Tuesday. But I don’t know what another $10 million in paid media does for us on Super Tuesday, especially considering the fact that Joe Biden wasn’t spending shit. BJG Sometimes I do wonder if a last-ditch Hail Mary, where Bernie morphed into the person that he was portrayed as but never was — you know, actually loud, actually aggressive, actually in your face and critical of the other candidates — then it might have

“We walked into that meeting, and it was like a procession of exotic animals that people had never seen, from another planet.”

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№ 38  /  SUMMER 2020

The Oral History of the Bernie Campaign

turned it around. But I don’t know how helpful it is to imagine, because I also want to respect that not doing it that way did [in 2016], I think, contribute to Bernie’s being the most trusted, most liked, most popular politician in the country. DS This whole “revolutionary versus reformer” thing — Bernie tried to thread the needle, and by the way, I think you can thread the needle as a legislator. I actually think you can as a senator or as a House member. I do think you can represent a political revolution and also operate in the system. But I think if you’re running to actually run the system and change the paradigm at the very, very top, you’ve got to pick one or the other.

Where We Go Now JW One of the areas we have seen progress is in the composition of the party. I remember the first dnc meeting that I was with Bernie at in 2015 — the summer meeting held in Minneapolis. We walked into that meeting, and it was like a procession of exotic animals that people had never seen, from another planet. We were so removed from their world. That shouldn’t be surprising, because with the ascendancy of the neoliberals in the 1990s, the orientation of the Democratic Party switched to being one controlled by neoliberal professional classes — but that retained a wing which is

AFTER BERNIE

progressive, or social democratic, or in some cases even socialist. But even if we are successful, that other part of the party is not going to go away in the two-party system. You have got to make sure that the social-democratic wing of the party is the dominant wing. The good news is the seeds of that change are happening. In the wake of 2016, there were huge numbers of Bernie-aligned people who were elected to the dnc as a result of Bernie winning in states across the country. You go to a meeting now, and 25, 30 percent of the dnc-elected officials are Bernie people, maybe more. And the tone — the room is just different. You can’t believe the progressive wing of the party doesn’t exist when a third of the room is Bernie people.

31

STRUGGLE SESSION

DS My hope is this scenario where Trump is defeated but you have a president who is not beloved, coming into office feeling like people are not giving deference, and people are at that president’s throat, forcing that president, kicking and screaming, where they have to deliver. I think the scenario is, at least right now, looking like a very real possibility. Nobody loves Joe Biden. JW To be clear, we are also winning the policy battle in the party and across the country. Exit polls in state after state showed strong and, in most cases, majority support for Medicare for All among Democratic voters, even in states Joe Biden won handily. But we have a lot of challenges. ARH Millions of dollars were spent by insurance companies and drug companies attacking Medicare for All. There are institutions that fight for Medicare for All on a daily basis, and while we have great organizations in the field, we have no group like the Partnership for America’s Health Care Future. Frankly, you have to solve a problem where there’s no funding mechanism that exists for an institution like that. JW So much of the Left today is not rooted in any consistent ideology — which is why it’s going through this bout of defeatism at the moment, when it has been more ascendant than it has been in decades. I have recently reread one of my favorite political tracts, Lenin’s “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder. I come back 32

“I doubt Bernie would run again. He doubts it. But let me tell you ... that guy is Wolverine! His genetics are ridiculous.”

to it every decade or so, but it’s particularly appropriate in this moment, when so many folks are threatening to check out of politics altogether or vote for nonviable third parties when we are confronted by Trump. As bad as he is, what comes after him can be even worse if his brand of authoritarianism is not defeated, even if that means electoral alliances with non-socialdemocratic factions. DS There were, especially during the campaign, not an infrequent number of days when I would say to my wife, “Not only did I wish I didn’t do this campaign, but I wish I had never met Bernie.” And then she would yell at me and be like, “You’re crazy!” And then there were days when I was like, “My God, it’s so crazy to me — what would I be if I hadn’t met Bernie?” It’s like that stupid old movie, Sliding Doors. Had Jeff Weaver

№ 38  /  SUMMER 2020

not answered ... had I sent in my résumé and he never called me — it’s mind-boggling to think about. BJG Biden is not beholden to anyone; his only obligation is to be a smidge better than the Republican alternative is. There’s no one else coming to save us. There’s no existential aoc that’s going to swoop in in the ninth inning, in the third act, that’s going to pull us out from this. We have to think, really consider what power we have and leverage it wisely, and if you aren’t doing something that makes people angry, it’s probably pretty impotent. JW We have to have a long-term vision. I reject the idea that suggests if Bernie Sanders had been elected president, that every social and economic ill in the country would have been cured. Clearly that is not the case, and he’d be the first one to tell you that that is not the case. ARH I doubt Bernie would run again. He doubts it. But let me tell you ... that guy is Wolverine! His genetics are ridiculous. You never know. JW We have to keep moving forward, but we have to keep focused on the goal: building democratic power for workingclass people of all races. Because at the end of the day, if that’s not your reason for being in politics, if that’s not the goal, then you’re just a militant liberal, whether you support Medicare for All or not.

Means of Deduction NUMBERS DON’T LIE

MEANS OF DEDUCTION VULGAR EMPIRICIST

The Social Democracy Index We looked at the best polling from the 2020 primary season. Turns out, you can spot a Bernie Sanders supporter not just by their age, but by their support for social-democratic policies. In the survey, each respondent was randomly assigned a selection of questions to answer, including the following six: •

Raise the minimum wage to $15/hour

•

Guarantee jobs for all Americans

•

Enact a Green New Deal

And three questions about single-payer health care, each worded differently: •

Provide government-run health insurance to all Americans

•

Enact Medicare for All

•

Abolish private health insurance and replace with government-run health insurance

Although each individual respondent was asked a different list of questions, the randomized assignment of questions ensured that different demographic groups, taken as a whole, tended to receive questions in roughly the same proportions.

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Bernie Supporters Know What They Want This chart divides registered voters into ten income groups and six age brackets, making a total of sixty subgroups, each of which is represented by a red circle. It turns out that social-democratic policy views are uniquely correlated with favorable views of Sanders. The chart shows that a given group’s score on the social-democratic index (horizontal axis) reliably predicts how favorably that group views Bernie Sanders, as measured by his net favorability (vertical axis). The r₂ — a measure of correlation — is a robust 0.74.

They Also Know What They Don’t Want An even clearer way of illustrating this pattern is to take the respondents who rated one candidate more favorably than the other — who had, say, a “very favorable” view of Biden but only a “somewhat favorable” view of Sanders, or vice versa — and calculate the percentage preferring Sanders. This chart plots “Sanders-Biden preference” (vertical axis) against social-democratic attitudes along the horizontal axis. Again, it yields a strong correlation, with an r₂ of approximately 0.50. Thus, socialdemocratic attitudes not only strongly predict favorable views of Sanders, but a preference, specifically, for Sanders over Biden.

№ 38  /  SUMMER 2020

The Social Democracy Index

80% 75% 70%

Social-democratic policy views Sanders net favorability

65% 60% 55% 50% 45%

R² = 0.7492

40%

Sanders net favorability 35% -35%

-25%

-15%

-5%

5%

15%

25%

35%

45%

55%

115% 105% 95%

Social-democratic policy views

85% 75% 65% 55% 45%

R² = 0.5437

35% 25%

Sanders-Biden preference 15% -65%

-45%

-25%

-5%

AFTER BERNIE

15%

35%

55%

35

VULGAR EMPIRICIST

NO COLLEGE

SOME COLLEGE

BA+

Net Clinton 2016 Margin

SocialDemocratic Attitudes

Net SandersBiden Preference

Low Income

-15%

0.58

+1%

Middle Income

-27%

0.54

+1%

High Income

-21%

0.48

-4%

Low Income

-8%

0.58

+5%

Middle Income

-20%

0.46

-5%

High Income

-23%

0.44

-3%

Low Income

-10%

0.57

+5%

Middle Income

+2%

0.51

+1%

High Income

-3%

0.46

-8%

Total

-11%

0.50

-2%

Social Democracy Is Working-Class Politics The chart divides white registered voters into nine groups, defined by three education categories (no college, some college, and fouryear degree) and three income categories (the lower, middle, and upper thirds of the income distribution). Importantly, we have adjusted incomes for differences in age, so that a person in, say, the “top third” income category is in the upper third of their age group, rather than of Americans as a whole. This way we can be sure that the income differences we see here aren’t merely due to differences in age.

36

Despite their very real Republican leanings, non-college-educated whites are more supportive of Bernie Sanders’s core socialdemocratic policy agenda than are whites with college degrees, even though levels of Democratic identification are much greater within the latter group. Taken as overall averages, the difference between the two education groups isn’t that large — 0.54 versus 0.49. But within each education group, income levels move steeply and negatively with scores on the social-democratic index.

№ 38  /  SUMMER 2020

The average social-democratic score for lower-income whites without college degrees (0.58) is 0.12 points higher than that for upper-income whites with college degrees (0.46). That difference is large — amounting to more than 20 percent of the gap between the average liberal Democrat and the average conservative Republican. Data from: Tausanovitch, Chris and Lynn Vavreck. 2020. Democracy Fund + UCLA Nationscape, October 10-17, 2019 (version 20200131). Retrieved from voterstudygroup.org, compiled by Seth Ackerman.

MEANS OF DEDUCTION UNEVEN & COMBINED

How We Lost Michigan The Sanders campaign routed Hillary Clinton in Michigan in 2016, winning seventy-two of the state’s eighty-four counties. The victory seemed to vindicate Bernie’s appeals to working-class Rust Belt voters: in Michigan’s open primary, Sanders commanded significant backing from independents, young voters, and others outside the typical Democratic Party electorate. And nowhere was this support more obvious than in the rural and deindustrialized areas that liberal commentators had earlier dismissed as irredeemably conservative and backward. Michigan experienced another stunning result in 2020 — but this time, Bernie was on the losing end. Joe Biden won every single county in the state. There were undoubtedly many factors contributing to this loss, including the Democratic field’s

In 2016, Bernie won a major upset in Michigan, thanks in part to a groundswell of support in the state’s rural areas. In 2020, he lost every county in the state — and the numbers show he lost many of his rural supporters, too.

consolidation around Biden and the accelerating coronavirus pandemic, which, at the time of Michigan’s primary, had not yet reached crisis proportions but nonetheless suppressed turnout. Another component seems to be that Bernie lost much of the rural support he enjoyed in 2020. It’s impossible to say exactly what’s to blame for Bernie’s steep drop-off in Michigan’s rural counties. Some have suggested that 2016’s results

AFTER BERNIE

reflected antipathy for Hillary Clinton more than genuine support for Sanders’s political revolution; others have emphasized voters’ heightened sensitivity to electability concerns in 2020. But it’s clear that, for Bernie Sanders, a great many of the voters who had earlier delivered him the state either stayed home or pulled the lever for his opponent.

37

UNEVEN & COMBINED

2016 Michigan Democratic Presidential Primary

Urban counties (less than 50% rural) won by Clinton Rural counties (more than 50% rural) won by Clinton Urban counties won by Sanders

Rural counties won by Sanders

38

№ 38  /  SUMMER 2020

How We Lost Michigan

2020 Michigan Democratic Presidential Primary

-30%

-10%

+10%

Signifies percent change in margin between 2016 and 2020 for Sanders. The one pointing right (Livingston) is the only county where his margin improved against Biden compared to Clinton.

Urban counties won by Biden

Rural counties won by Biden

AFTER BERNIE

39

Reading Materiel TAKE A LOOK, IT’S IN A BOOK

READING MATERIEL CANON FODDER

BY ANTON JÄGER & DOMINIK LEUSDER REVIEW OF: Capital and Ideology by Thomas Piketty, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Harvard University Press, 2019).

Before Thomas Piketty, there was Bernard Sanders. “The American people are angry,” he declared on the Senate floor in 2012. “Angry that the middle class is collapsing because of the Wall Street-caused recession ... angry that unemployment is sky-high, that 50 million people lack health insurance, and that working families can’t afford college for their kids.” Sanders went on to recite statistics about the skewed income distribution in a country still reeling from a severe recession. It was another year until Piketty’s magnum opus on the dynamics of inequality in capitalist societies, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, burst onto the scene. Battles for economic redistribution found a new intellectual undergirding. But we still seem a long way from enacting such a program in practice, especially with the electoral defeats of Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn. Piketty’s long-awaited sequel, Capital and Ideology, might help us understand why. If the goal of his first book was to describe the evolution of income and wealth inequality in the industrial countries, this new work focuses on the persistence and legitimation of such inequalities. Every capitalist society comes up with its own justification for a particular set of property rights. Piketty defines ideology rather straightforwardly as a “set of a priori

The Prophet of Inequality Whatever its shortcomings, Thomas Piketty’s latest book, Capital and Ideology, is a serious attempt to map our social world without resorting to easy abstractions.

plausible ideas and discourses describing how society should be structured.” Capital and Ideology describes at length the ownership regimes in Europe’s eighteenth- and nineteenth-century “proprietarian” societies, where the sacralization of property rights was carried to extremes. The abolition of slavery may have been viewed as a crowning achievement for liberal, enlightenment values, but the slaveholders were — in perfect harmony with prevailing norms — lavishly compensated for their lost property. Haiti spent more than a century paying off its “debt” to the slavers; the West AFTER BERNIE

would never forgive its people for being the first nation to decolonize. Although the French Revolution had proclaimed a formal equality of rights, the right of property was then sanctified as a new religion. Part of this consecration, Piketty argues, stemmed precisely from a lack of agreement over where redistribution might stop if it was to happen at all, and persistent fears that it might go too far. This kind of argument will sound eerily familiar to those who have followed recent attempts to obstruct progressive reforms with vague reference to “unintended consequences” and “moral hazard.” 41

CANON FODDER

The constant invocations of nominally socialist regimes as a bogeyman are another modern equivalent of the eighteenth century’s “thin end of the wedge” argument. One prominent example is the idea that gardenvariety redistributive measures, such as publicly funded health care — which, in the United States, would amount to a transfer of income from corporate profits to wages — might lead to a Venezuelan-style outcome.

Back to Normal However, Piketty’s main concern lies not with the inequality regime itself or its legitimacy problem, but with the development of progressive taxation. The book tells the familiar story of how the rise of marginal income-tax rates made the modern state possible. The tax haul of European states rose steadily from a modest average of 1–3 percent of national income in the centuries preceding the Industrial Revolution to 30–50 percent in the postwar era. Progressive fiscal policies and welfare regimes stabilized capitalism by resolving the problems associated with widening inequalities. Piketty echoes other economists and historians of our time by arguing that the 42

subsequent “neoliberal” period has simply been a case of capitalism reverting back to normal: the old regime of sacralized property rights has reasserted itself after three decades of war-induced fever dreams. Capitalism’s default trajectory was always unequal. As the forces that had counterbalanced the proprietarian ideology either sold out or dried up — mainly social-democratic parties, who, according to Piketty, have “Brahminized” themselves into exclusively middle-class layers and are now hemorrhaging support outside of ethnic-minority working-class constituencies — the “hypercapitalism” of the last thirty years has emerged triumphant. Piketty follows up his diagnosis with a prescription. The solution, he argues, lies in the restoration of a progressive tax regime, now at a global level, allowing for a peaceful, policy-driven transition to a kind of “participatory socialism,” in which everybody will enjoy “a universal right to education and a capital endowment, free circulation of people, and de facto virtual abolition of borders.” But Piketty’s socialist vision goes further than this call for permanent redistribution through the tax system. His plan openly questions bourgeois property rights, and thus, it reaches well beyond the proposals of the Bernie Sanders campaign. This is — from a prominent, mainstream economist — a straightforward guide to transcending today’s capitalism. № 38  /  SUMMER 2020

Specters of Marx It’s surprising, then, that most commentary on Piketty’s work from the socialist left has been dismissive — insofar as there has been any serious engagement with it at all. The most common response has been to accuse Piketty of being insufficiently Marxist, irrespective of the homages in his book titles. However, there is a legitimate question as to how far socialists should follow Piketty. Capital and Ideology promised to correct the shortcomings of his previous work, whose quantitative focus on equality left the issue of how elites justify those inequalities unaddressed. As with his previous volume, the most impressive aspect of Piketty’s work is empirical: he brings together a medley of sources — inheritance documents, census lists, tax receipts, cadastral maps — to form massive quantitative data sets. Some Marxist economists might complain about Piketty’s seeming inability to grasp some of the more esoteric concepts associated with their tradition. Where he

Running Hed

plainly outclasses most of them, however, is in sheer empirical curiosity: here is a serious attempt to map our social world without resorting to easy abstractions. Piketty loves a good graph, and it’s often a joy to behold. But data sets are ultimately no substitute for a theory of history. Too often, Capital and Ideology feels like a form of structuralism for the ted Talk age. Though Piketty has read the literature and mastered the statistics, his analysis lacks the glue needed to tie all these facts together. There is, after all, some merit to the “Marxsplaining” criticism of the great economist’s work. As the French philosopher Frédéric Lordon noted, Piketty is effectively “playing the Marxist” without having learned the instruments, Auto-Tuning his way

into an established discourse without a proper grasp of the notes. When asked whether he had read Karl Marx’s Capital at all, Piketty replied that he found the work “too difficult.” In the end, Piketty’s notion of capital is too rigidly economic, lacking the rich social context in which Marx embeds it, caught on the surface level of balance sheets and inheritance sums. Piketty’s methodology is quantitative, after all. Mesmerized by numbers, he barely explores the question of how certain forms of wealth differ across historical periods.

Modern Times Even so, Marxists can learn a lot from Piketty’s work. What it lacks in synthesis, it makes up for in sheer sophistication and scope. No AFTER BERNIE

society is destined to be unequal, he insists. Sweden was formerly one of the most unequal countries in the Western hemisphere — only after a decades-long struggle waged by the country’s labor movement did it become an exemplar of social mobility. Inequality declined, not because of culture or nature, but through the political will to replace one dominant ideology with another. Piketty summarizes his book’s central argument near the beginning: “every society must attempt to answer questions about how it should be organized, usually on the basis of its own historical experience but sometimes also on the experiences of other societies.” In this context, “ideology” is a way of justifying social arrangements that might disproportionately benefit certain groups. Each society will one 43

CANON FODDER

day have to come up with its own intellectual justification for how it is organized. But Piketty also overstates the importance of ideology — in his sense of the term — as an explanation for the stability of modern capitalism. That stability probably owes far more to a mood of resignation, as people make peace with a world that is hostile to their flourishing. They know this world to be a product of human agency, but they cannot control it. Our everyday relationship to markets is a perfect example of this dynamic at work. Although we know that the action of human beings is what establishes prices in a market, we can’t simply decide collectively to change those prices. We depend on markets for survival, and we have to accept them as if they were an immutable product of nature. “Ideology,” here, is not so much a matter of conscious elite manipulation as it is a fate to which we resign ourselves. In the end, it’s easier to rationalize our own suffering than to imagine that things could be different. The Bernie Sanders campaign asked Americans to make a bet on “political revolution”: many of them found that bet too risky.

Economic WikiLeaks Piketty himself found resignation to be an obstacle for his political endeavors in recent years. Despite Corbyn and Sanders’s best efforts, union density is still plummeting across the developed capitalist

44

world, and a new round of quantitative easing is turbocharging inequality. In this landscape, Piketty risks becoming a political equivalent of WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks played a courageous role, exposing the crimes that were being committed by governments all over the world: mass surveillance, extrajudicial killings, and illegal wars. Yet the public impact of such revelations was limited. In the absence of a credible social agency that could challenge the status quo, whistleblowing alone can’t rouse people out of their complacence. Sure, things may be bad, but what difference does that knowledge make if we see no way of ever improving them? Over the last ten years, we have witnessed an explosion of empirical scholarship on inequality, driven partly by a data revolution in econometrics and increasingly digitized archives. Political movements challenging these inequalities have wielded Piketty’s data sets as intellectual weapons. But without a practical strategy and the organizational weight to bring it to fruition, these movements struggled to win the broad popular support they needed to effect change. In the end, “inequality” becomes a problem once we’ve decided to make it one, and not a moment before. And, as Machiavelli reminds us, the only prophets to have emerged victorious were the ones who armed themselves.

№ 38  /  SUMMER 2020

READING MATERIEL FIELD NOTES

In April 2020, someone leaked an internal British Labour Party report to journalists. Party officials had produced the report at the request of Jennie Formby, Labour’s general secretary from 2018 to 2020. It had been intended to serve as part of Labour’s submission to the Equality and Human Rights Commission (ehrc). The new party leader, Keir Starmer, decided not to send the report to the ehrc. The ehrc opened an investigation into Labour at the request of two groups that accused the party of “institutional antisemitism.” In contrast, the government-funded body has repeatedly refused to investigate the Conservative Party for racism, despite having received a lengthy dossier from the Muslim Council of Britain documenting the party’s track record. The leaked Labour report sought to demonstrate that several other party officials who were hostile to Jeremy Corbyn had been negligent in their handling of antisemitism complaints. Those officials had appeared in a BBC documentary in July 2019, where they were presented as “whistleblowers,” accusing Corbyn’s leadership team of frustrating their efforts to combat discrimination. As well as the specific issue of antisemitism, the report sheds light on Labour’s wider organizational culture during the first three years of Corbyn’s leadership. Jennie Formby’s predecessor, Iain McNicol, remained in his post until March 2018, along with many other staffers who effectively controlled the party’s considerable resources. The report reproduces WhatsApp conversations between those staffers, where they discussed their work for Labour. It shows that they were bitterly hostile to Corbyn’s leadership at all times on ideological grounds, and that they wanted Labour to suffer a heavy defeat in the 2017 general election. They greeted Labour’s unexpectedly strong performance in that election, depriving the Conservatives of their parliamentary majority, with unconcealed horror. The report also reveals a deeply troubling attitude toward racism on the part of Labour’s anti-Corbyn old guard, along with their strong commitment to a militarized, neo-imperial foreign policy. One

The Enemy Within Leaked messages from Labour Party staff littered with casual racism and sexism show that they worked against Jeremy Corbyn and wanted to keep the Tories in power.

comment on the Manchester Arena bombing of May 2017 captures both aspects of their mentality: “In the face of a terror attack, normal people do not blame foreign intervention. They blame immigration.” Most British journalists have ignored the report, citing vague legal concerns, although nobody has questioned the authenticity of the messages between party officials. Keir Starmer set up an inquiry that bore all the hallmarks of a cover-up, though he had to abandon plans to appoint one of the people who features heavily in the report as Labour’s new general secretary. At a time when the history of British politics from 2015 onward is being frantically rewritten to the detriment of Jeremy Corbyn, the leaked report confirms in abundant detail one of the principal claims made by Corbyn’s supporters: from the very beginning of his leadership, he had to grapple with a campaign of sabotage from Labour’s intransigent right-wing faction, who preferred a Tory government of any kind to a Labour Party with a left program.

AFTER BERNIE

45

FIELD NOTES

In February 2017, Labour officials discovered that the MP Diane Abbott was crying in a toilet cubicle because she had been overwhelmed by the racist and sexist abuse she was receiving online. 13:04

of all abusive tweets sent to women MPs were directed at Abbott. 15:52

Diane in Leon on vic street 15:52

Patrick Heneghan

Fiona Stanton Shall we tell michael crick

Abbott found crying in the loos

Michael Crick was the political correspondent for Channel 4 News until 2019.

13:27 Julie Lawrence :’(

One Labour MP, Jess Phillips, launched her media career by falsely claiming to have told Abbott to “fuck off.” Phillips has since gone on to publish two books: Everywoman: One Woman’s Truth About Speaking the Truth and Truth to Power: 7 Ways to Call Time on BS. On becoming leader, Keir Starmer appointed her to a position in his shadow cabinet. 13:27 Tracey Allen Abbott memorial cupboard works well

A study found that Abbott — the first black woman elected to Westminster — received far more abuse than any other British MP during the 2017 election campaign. Nearly half 46

Patrick Heneghan

15:53

Patrick Heneghan Already have

Heneghan went on to serve as chief executive for the antiBrexit People’s Vote campaign, bankrolled by the millionaire Roland Rudd, although he was forced to resign under controversial circumstances in November 2019. On May 22, 2017, a suicide bomber blew himself up at a pop concert in Manchester, killing twenty-three people and wounding 139, the majority of whom were children. The election campaign was temporarily suspended. On the morning of May 26, Corbyn resumed the campaign with a speech that addressed the Manchester Arena

№ 38  /  SUMMER 2020

Leaked Labour Report

bombing and the wider issue of terrorism. Two Labour Party officials, Francis Grove-White and Jo Greening, discussed the speech and its likely impact.

I have never been more ashamed to work for this party 09:06

Francis Grove-White Ditto

09:06

May 26, 2017

Jo Greening and I have been very ashamed in the past! they are vile

09:06

Francis Grove-White

you are right

How are we actually in the same party as these vile, opportunistic morons?

have you seen the line on soldiers?

Having paid tribute to the victims and their families, and praised the emergency services for their response, Corbyn noted that “many experts, including professionals in our intelligence and security services, have pointed to the connections between wars our government has supported or fought in other countries, such as Libya, and terrorism here at home.” He stressed that this observation “in no way reduces the guilt of those who attack our children,” who would “forever be reviled and implacably held to account for their actions.” 09:06

Corbyn addressed British soldiers directly with the following message: “You are doing your duty as you have done so many times before. I want to assure you that, under my leadership, you will only be deployed abroad when there is a clear need and only when there is a plan and you have the resources to do your job to secure an outcome that delivers lasting peace.” 09:06

Francis Grove-White Yep

09:10

Jo Greening I am furious FURIOUS

AFTER BERNIE

Francis Grove-White The speech is astonishing on so many levels. It’s so woefully written, intellectually incoherent, factually inaccurate and devoid of any attempt to be constructive or analytical that it is in effect a Donald Trump speech. It’s easy to forget that only yesterday morning they were briefing that they would be easing back into the

47

FIELD NOTES

campaign slowly and not doing anything political

and the polling was done after the Manchester attack

I despise these people more than ever

so with a bit of luck this speech will show a clear polling decline

Corbyn praised “the solidarity, humanity and compassion that we have seen on the streets of Manchester this week” and urged people not to hold Muslims collectively responsible for the actions of the terrorist, Salman Abedi.

and we shall all be able to point to how disgusting they truly are (now obviously we know it was never real — but that isnt [sic] the point in politics! 09:13 Francis Grove-White Yeah I’m sure that’s right 09:16

09:10

Francis Grove-White

My fears are that: a) the speech won’t go down as badly as it deserves to thanks to the large groundswell of ill-informed opposition to all western interventions. And b) they will use that poll to claim they were on course to win and then Manachester [sic] happened.

I actually felt quite sick when I saw that YouGov poll last night

And whether or not JC goes, lots of the membership will buy that argument

Jo Greening excellent analysis me too I hope I see not a single one of them today

09:11

The YouGov poll put Labour at 38 percent — the party’s best polling score by that stage of the campaign — with the Tories at 43 percent. 09:12 Jo Greening no its [sic] great 09:12 Francis Grove-White Not that I think we will end up there or probably anywhere near 09:12 Jo Greening and I shall tell you why it is a peak 48

Francis Grove-White

№ 38  /  SUMMER 2020

Like after the referendum when they distorted the polling and claimed wee [sic] had overtaken the Tories before the “coup” happpened

A poll conducted by YouGov after the Manchester speech showed that a plurality of voters believed the UK was wrong to participate in military action against Iraq in 1991, Afghanistan in 2001, Iraq in 2003, and Libya in 2011. And 55 percent believed that Tony Blair’s invasion of Iraq was wrong: just 18 percent now supported the war.

Leaked Labour Report

09:17 Jo Greening if this speech gets cut through — as I think it may — it will harden normal people against us definitely in the face of a terror attack normal people do not blame foreign intervention they blame immigration

YouGov asked voters if they agreed with Corbyn’s argument that “wars the UK has supported or fought ARE responsible, at least in part, for terror attacks against the UK”: 53 percent endorsed the statement, while 24 percent disagreed. whats [sic] more — all they will hear is we dont [sic] want to respond strongly

drink it we’d all be doing very well. We were hearing people who hadn’t voted for a long while voting Labour yesterday evening, who were inspired by the policies — and, it has to be said, by Jeremy — to vote Labour last night.” but that this speech particulalry [sic] was toxic and Manchester had happened when that poll was in the field on the supporters I personally think we are going to do very badly in deed [sic] and I think it will shock a lot of them how badly we do including JC so everyone has to be ready when he is in shock

we want peace with ISIS

it has to be clean and brutal

it all plays into a bigger picture of how they see corbyn so I have a feeling this will cut through you are right on the second point it has to be up to the MPs though to demonstrate how toxic he is on the doorstep throughout

When the election results came in, Corbyn’s 2016 leadership challenger Owen Smith praised his performance effusively: “He’s proved me wrong and lots of people wrong and I take my hat off to him ... I don’t know what Jeremy’s got but if we could bottle it and AFTER BERNIE

When John McDonnell went to Labour’s Southside HQ with some of Corbyn’s aides on the night of the election results, they found that their electronic passes no longer granted them entry to the building. Iain McNicol adamantly denied that this was in preparation for an attempted leadership heave if the Tory landslide that his officials were anticipating had materialized. and not involve the party at all in my opinion

49

FIELD NOTES

those crazy people who now make up our membership never want us to win in anycase [sic] they are communists and green supporters even if Manchester hadnt [sic] happened and we got smashed they would have never changed their minds 09:23 Francis Grove-White Yeah that’s true I agree with all of that. And I think you’re right — most people will see this speech for the nonsencial [sic] and ill-judged turd that it really is

Andrew Grice of the liberal Independent confidently predicted that Corbyn’s speech would backfire: “This is a debate the Tories are delighted to have; it will help them a lot more than it does Labour.” YouGov, on the other hand, found that “voters from across all parties were more likely to side with the Corbyn stance than not . . . in most instances Corbyn appears to be on the right side of public opinion.”

I CANNOT WAIT to see Andrew Neil rip him to pieces over it tonight

The campaign ended two weeks after Corbyn’s Manchester speech, with Labour winning 40 percent of the vote — the party’s best result since 2001, and the biggest increase in vote share for either of the two main parties since 1945. While Labour supporters were jubilant, the mood in Southside was more subdued: party officials described themselves as being “in need of counseling,” “stunned and reeling,” silent and grey faced.” According to one official, Tracey Allen, the result was “opposite to what i had been working towards for the last couple of years.” June 8, 2017 22:24

Patrick if anyone in war room needs some safe space time they can come to gso

GSO: General Secretary’s Office 22:25 Tracey Allen

09:25 Jo Greening

More like in need of counseling!

the crazies wont [sic] — they will love it 22:41

09:25 Francis Grove-White Yeah of course — but the wider electorate and floating voters

50

Julie Lawrence

№ 38  /  SUMMER 2020

Emilie Oldknow What’s the atmosphere like there?

Leaked Labour Report

22:41 Simon Mills

22:47

Depends which side of the building!

Not if we go into coalition and lose short money “Steve” walking the floor

22:41 Patrick Heneghan Awful

22:48

Help 22:42

Simon Mills

22:48

I’m going into room of death

Julie Lawrence 22:48

They are cheering and we are silent and grey faced. Opposite to what I had been working towards for the last couple of years!! :’(

22:48

Emilie Oldknow

22:52

22:47

Emilie Oldknow And at least we have loads of money now ...

Iain McNicol I’m not in smiling and mixing and doing the 2nd floor.

22:53

And not show it

Emilie Oldknow was Keir Starmer’s first choice to take over as Labour’s general secretary this year, but she dropped out of the running after the report was leaked.

Julie Lawrence Its [sic] hard but yes

We have to be upbeat 22:47

Emilie Oldknow Everyone needs to be very up beat

22:45 Tracey Allen

Emilie Oldknow

Patrick Heneghan Everyone needs to smile

We are stunned and reeling.

22:45

Emilie Oldknow Oh no

Split between euphoria and shock 22:42

Julie Lawrence

Iain McNicol Everyone else needs to do the same. It is going to be a long night.

News of one Labour gain in London’s Kensington & Chelsea constituency came as an unwelcome shock. June 9, 2017 13:30

Sarah Mulholland Kensington and Chelsea? I’ve just woken up and confused by Twitter. Did we gain it???

AFTER BERNIE

51

FIELD NOTES

Days after the election, the Grenfell Tower fire killed seventy-two people in Emma Dent Coad’s new constituency. Dent Coad was widely praised for her work representing the families of the victims. 13:30

Patrick Heneghan Count again at 6pm

13:31

Sarah Mulholland Omg. That Emma Coad is a grade 1 tool.

Dent Coad narrowly lost her seat to the Conservatives in the

2019 general election after the anti-Brexit “Best for Britain” campaign and the liberal Observer urged pro-Remain voters in the constituency to support the Liberal Democrats. Dent Coad was an opponent of Brexit who supported a second referendum; the Lib Dem candidate was a Tory defector who lied about Grenfell during the election campaign.

READING MATERIEL CANON FODDER

BY HANNAH PROCTOR

Reading Victor Serge from the Depths of Defeat Despite isolation, political defeat, and incalculable grief, the Russian revolutionary Victor Serge persisted in writing in collective rather than personal terms.

In Christian Petzgold’s 2018 film Transit, a man assumes the identity of a dead anti-Nazi writer. He circles, alongside other refugees, among bureaucrats in Marseille in an attempt to secure the requisite paperwork to leave Europe. Although it is based on a 1944 novel of the same name by the German Jewish Communist Anna Seghers, the film is set in something resembling the present, shot through with anachronisms — though the streets, cafés, and 54

police cars are contemporary, most details are not updated. The parallels are oblique rather than direct, as Petzgold shows how the violent regimes, persecutions, and displacements of the present resemble, without being identical to, those of the past. Seghers herself left Marseille for Mexico in 1941. On the same boat was the writer and agitator Victor Serge (1890–1947). He describes the “castoffs of Europe № 38  /  SUMMER 2020

on a drifting wreck,” gambling for matchsticks and drinking on deck, remarking on the incongruous persistence of apparent frivolities in dark times: the “true end of the world will be the day there are no more cocktails.” Notebooks: 1936–1947 documents his final years. Following international protests, Serge was permitted to leave the Soviet Union in 1936, just before Stalin’s purges, living in exile in Belgium and France and then escaping to

Mexico. The last entry was written in November 1947, the month of his death from heart failure. Unlike his epic novels and memoirs written during the same period, the notebooks intersperse chronicles of world historical events with what Serge describes as an attentiveness to life “in its details, its dailiness, a ceaseless curiosity about the earth and ideas.” The notebooks encompass discussions of Surrealist art;

summaries of Hollywood films; caustic thumbnail sketches of other exiles; descriptions of cacti, butterflies, sunsets, oceans, lakes, and at least one volcano; predictions for the future, responses to current events, and reflections on past failures; speculations on psychology; observations of Mexican archaeological sites and city streets; and documentation of Serge’s shifting moods and increasingly poor health. AFTER BERNIE

Memoirs of a Revolutionary, translated by Peter Sedgwick and first published in 1963, then released in an unabridged format by nyrb Classics in 2012, covers Serge’s experiences as a young anarchist, Bolshevik, and Left Oppositionist. It is less an autobiography of an individual than a biography of a political generation of which Serge was a rare survivor. His writing often serves as a book of the dead. Serge records the deaths and recalls 55

CANON FODDER

Serge’s rejection of historical fatalism is tied to his conviction that “we have an unforeseeable future in our hands.”

the lives of people he knew who were executed in Stalinist and Francoist prisons or killed in Nazi concentration camps, battles, and sieges, as well as those who died from disease, old age, or suicide. He expresses occasional guilt at sitting in calm gardens listening to birdsong in the midst of war but acknowledges that “it’s mad to wish, even subconsciously, unconsciously, for everyone’s participation in the catastrophe.” Though long accustomed to exile, Serge complains in his notebooks of the absence of the “environment” previously provided by his comrades: “Terribly difficult to create in a void, without the least support, without any atmosphere.” Yet despite struggling to find publishers, he wrote prolifically in this period — novels, memoirs, essays, articles, letters, poems — and described his capacity to continue working as a capacity for hope. “Perhaps a secret joy is needed to write a poem, even in the depths of suffering,” he wrote. Serge does not doubt that the “tyrannies will last longer than I have left to live,” yet he never stops imagining that things might one day improve through renewed collective efforts. Though he expresses no optimism for the immediate future, his rejection of historical fatalism is tied to his conviction that “we have an unforeseeable future in our hands.” In Mexico City, he pays visits to Leon Trotsky’s widow, Natalia Sedova. Alienated from the Fourth International (he supported the

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anti-Stalinist but non-Trotskyist poum in the Spanish Civil War), Serge expresses exasperation that the “gossip of narrow-minded malevolent sectarians” continued. But despite tensions, he is determined to maintain a relationship with Sedova, whom he sees as the only other survivor of “twenty years of struggles.” He describes her as a “living shadow,” mourning not only her partner but “an era and an uncountable crowd.” They share an “immense bereavement” — for individuals, for a collective, for an unrealized ideal. But Serge makes clear that mourning should be combined with a continued commitment to life: “All our ideas about death are ideas of the living. To think of death is an act of life, an act of faith in life.” Despite isolation, political defeat, and incalculable grief, Serge persisted in writing in collective rather than personal terms. Petzgold’s adaptation of Seghers’s novel demonstrates that historical analogies are never precise, but as another global catastrophe was unfolding, I found myself writing lines from Serge’s notebooks in mine: “In the depths of defeat what is left to us is nonconsent to the inhuman; the refusal to close our eyes; the refusal to lose hope in ourselves and so in everything.” Image Credits: Victor Serge. Death mask, from front, left and right. Serge, V. “Una página del diario de Victor Serge. Los Alemanes” typescript, corrected. Serge, V. (1940). “L'assassinat de Trotsky (d'après les journaux américains du moment)” typescript, corrected.

A

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Bernie Sanders’s Five-Year War

MATT KARP

1 2 3 4

How he lost and where we go from here.

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

One mild April afternoon in 2015, deep within the ideological dead zone of the second Obama administration, Bernie Sanders took a break from his Senate workday and stalked out to the lawn in front of the Capitol building. Unfolding a crinkled sheet of notes, the Vermont senator took less than ten minutes to tell reporters why he was running for president: Americans were working longer hours for lower wages, while the rich feasted on profits and billionaires ruled the political system. The country faced its greatest crisis since the Great Depression, he said. Five years later, on an April morning in 2020, Sanders stood inside his home in Burlington, Vermont, and announced that he was suspending his second campaign for president. This race, like the contest four years earlier, had ended in defeat, and though Bernie gave an inspirational fifteen-minute speech — quoting Nelson Mandela and thanking supporters for their blood, sweat, tears, and social media posts — even a sympathetic viewer might wonder what, exactly, all this passionate effort had yielded. Income and wealth inequality have soared to new heights; a billionaire sits in the White House, while the opposition party turns to its own billionaires for leadership; and the covid-19 pandemic has left the United States not merely approaching its greatest crisis since the Great Depression but thoroughly immersed in it.

Sanders lost. He waged a five-year war against the billionaire class and the Democratic Party’s leadership — a war across six Aprils — and in the end, he was beaten on both fronts. Those of us who soldiered in Bernie’s beaten army must reckon hard with the nature and significance of this defeat. The Sanders project was among the most significant left political events of the twentyfirst century, linking for the first time minimal but foundational socialist demands to a base of millions in the nerve center of global capitalism. Its conclusive defeat this spring, amid an apocalyptic atmosphere of disease, depression, and unrest, offers enormous temptation for the Left to fall into despair. Already, we have seen a range of broadsides against Sanders and the legacy of his campaigns, whether inflected by the far left, pleased to move on from a long detour into electoral politics; the liberal center, eager to submerge all possibility outside the present field of vision; or the traditionalist right, only too happy to proclaim a left-wing retreat from class to culture war. The corporate press, meanwhile, has jumped at the chance to throw Bernie — and his insistent call for massive material redistribution, funded by corporate profits — straight into the dustbin of history. Even the mass protests over the police murder of George Floyd somehow became an occasion for the New York Times to announce the end of

26

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the Sanders era. “Bernie Sanders Predicted Revolution, Just Not This One,” blared the headline, building off intersectionality theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw’s analysis that “every corporation worth its salt” has now surpassed Sanders in the battle against “structural racism and anti-blackness.” Goodbye Medicare for All, hello Jeff Bezos clapping back against “All Lives Matter.” These are all artifacts of defeat. Sanders lost, and both his fair-weather friends and his permanent enemies are now eager to consign him to the grave. But neither a defeat at the polls nor a shift in the discourse is reason to abandon the essence of Bernie’s struggle. Mass protests against police violence and racism can only begin to realize their aims if joined to a broader, Sanders-style democratic movement — large enough to shape national politics and determined enough to challenge capital — capable of winning the material concessions necessary for a truly free and equal society. An accurate balance sheet for the Sanders campaigns must have at least two columns: first, an accounting of achievement, substantial on its own terms and unprecedented in more than fifty years of US political history; and second, a reckoning with limits, which now, in the aftermath of 2020, appear both larger and more intractable than at almost any point since 2016. To this accounting we can add a third column, on the prospects for future struggle — foreshortened in the present, blurry in the near future, but possibly brighter in the decades ahead.

testing scandal in Atlanta schools, and Martin O’Malley’s record as Baltimore mayor. This was no more than what was due for a candidate polling at 3 percent, in a newspaper that had not actually printed the words “Medicare for All” in the calendar year before Sanders entered the race. From the perspective of 2020, it is difficult to remember the narrowness of the policy girdle that fitted American left liberalism in the years just before Bernie’s first campaign. As progressives like Keith Ellison, Michael Moore, and Susan Sarandon urged Elizabeth Warren to run for president, the Massachusetts senator appeared alongside Tom Perez at an afl-cio summit in January 2015. There, Warren won headlines for a “fiery” speech in which she denounced “trickle-down economics” and called for new financial regulations, the enforcement of existing labor laws, protections for Medicare and Social Security, and an unspecified increase in the minimum wage. “The striking thing about this progressive factional agenda,” noted Vox’s Matthew Yglesias at the time, “is there’s really nothing on it that Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton would disagree with.” Today, that 2015 reform package sounds a lot like the Joe Biden 2020 platform, and no one, outside of a tiny caste of professional propagandists, affects to call it “left-wing.” Bernie’s five-year war, even in defeat, taught the American left two fundamental lessons. First, it demonstrated that bold socialdemocratic ideas, well beyond the regulatory ambitions of Obama-era progressives, can win a mass base in today’s United States. An uncompromising demand for the federal government to provide essential social goods for all Americans — from health care and college tuition to childcare and family leave — stood at the heart of the Sanders project from beginning to end. Starting at 3 percent in the polls and conducting two presidential campaigns almost

I. Bernie’s Achievement: Two Lessons When Bernie Sanders announced his candidacy in 2015, his press conference appeared on page a21 of the New York Times, far behind articles about the Obama presidential library, a

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MATT KARP

C

D

entirely on the strength of this platform, Sanders built the most influential left-wing challenge in modern history. Yes, candidates from Jesse Jackson to Dennis Kucinich also supported single-payer health insurance, but their campaigns did not end with polls showing a newfound majority of Americans backing Medicare for All, let alone massive supermajorities among Democrats and voters under sixty-five. Yes, leftists from Michael Harrington to Ralph Nader had long declared that a bipartisan corporate class rules America, but they did not turn that insight into a political movement capable of winning primaries in New Hampshire, Michigan, or California. Nor is the partial success of the Sanders campaigns merely a hollow “discourse victory.” It has presented concrete evidence for a proposition that mainstream political observers scoffed at five years ago, and that the American left itself had grandly announced rather than demonstrated: that “democratic socialism,” driven by opposition to billionaire-class rule and dedicated to universal public goods, can win the support of millions, not just thousands. Across the last half century, any activist with a bullhorn could proclaim this to be true, but Bernie Sanders actually fucking proved it. Of course, as Bernie’s defeat makes clear, there is a vast gulf between winning exit polls and winning power. If the Sanders campaigns illuminated American social democracy’s unknown political resources, they also revealed, in a dramatic fashion, the determination of their opponents. This is the second practical lesson of Bernie’s five-year war: the unanimity and ferocity of elite Democratic resistance, not only to Sanders himself, but to the essence of his platform. In its general outlines, this has been visible since early in the 2016 campaign, when Democratic Party officials, TV pundits, and prestige print writers — across an ideological

AFTER BERNIE

spectrum, from centrists like Claire McCaskill and Chris Matthews to liberals like Barney Frank and Paul Krugman — universally scorned the Sanders campaign and its agenda. Yet in other ways, the depth of Democratic opposition to Sanders was not obvious until this year, either to Bernie’s friends or to his enemies. Throughout February, as Sanders won New Hampshire and lapped the field in Nevada, panicked centrist commentators called on the remaining Democrats in the race to unite behind a single anti-Bernie candidate. But their palpable angst betrayed a near-universal belief that this would not actually happen. For “a critical mass” of Bernie’s rivals to withdraw at the last minute, reported the New York Times on February 27, “seems like the least likely outcome.” We all know what happened next. Just three days later, on the evening before Super Tuesday, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar suddenly withdrew from the race and endorsed Joe Biden, joined by Beto O’Rourke, Harry Reid, and dozens more prominent Democrats and former Obama officials. This great consolidation around Biden, following his victory in South Carolina, produced perhaps $100 million in “free” laudatory media coverage — more than Sanders spent on advertising all campaign long — compressed into a single weekend before the most critical election of the primary. The result was a Super Tuesday stampede for Biden, even in states where Sanders had led the pack only a week before, from Maine to Texas. It gave Biden a commanding lead that he never relinquished. In retrospect, it may seem hopelessly naive for Sanders and his allies to have counted on an indefinite division of the Democratic field. Yet there is a reason that even Bernie’s most bitter enemies shared the same calculus, with dozens of party operatives telling the Times in late February that it might take a brokered convention to stop him.

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A

After all, Buttigieg was proclaimed the winner in Iowa and finished a close second in New Hampshire; never since the birth of the modern primary system has a candidate with that profile quit the race nearly so early. Even as an ideological move to throttle the Left, the Biden coalescence had no precedent in its swiftness and near-perfect coordination. When Jesse Jackson briefly threatened to take the Democratic Party by storm in 1988, establishment rivals Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, Dick Gephardt, and Paul Simon all remained in the running until the end of March, when more than thirty-five primary contests were complete. This time, the core establishment forces managed to clear the field after just four primaries, leaving just a single centrist alternative to Biden, the vain billionaire Michael Bloomberg. (Elizabeth Warren’s persistence in the race only helped the anti-Sanders effort, since she was somewhat more likely to siphon votes from the left than the center.) And after Super Tuesday, of course, Bloomberg promptly quit and endorsed Biden. Warren, when she left the race, would do Sanders no such favor. Though, in many ways, the Democratic Party of 2020 is much weaker than it was thirty years ago — it controls eleven fewer state legislatures, for instance — the current Democratic leadership, in its influence over party politicians, is stronger than ever. Buttigieg, who had campaigned hard in Super Tuesday states — on February 29, he held the primary’s single largest rally in Tennessee — did not drop out because of a predictably poor showing in South Carolina. (Even there, he still finished ahead of Warren for the fourth consecutive race.) Buttigieg abruptly abandoned millions of dollars of advertising and perhaps thirty thousand Super Tuesday volunteers because Barack Obama told him to — and because he knew that his own career prospects, in today’s Democratic Party, depend less on winning

60

B

popular support in his own name than on gamely joining the team effort to halt Sanders and “save the party.” The speed and thoroughness of this elite consolidation — which also made Biden an instant donor-class favorite — makes a mockery of the implausible idea, floated by some reporters and pundits, that Sanders blew a golden opportunity to win over the Democratic establishment through better manners. Obama, Hillary Clinton, and their corporate allies — never mind the consultants, hedge fund managers, and tech ceos who built “Mayor Pete” — did not capriciously decide to close ranks against Bernie because he did not make enough polite, endorsement-seeking phone calls after Nevada. Their profound ideological opposition to the Sanders project has been plain for a long time; what we didn’t know is just how rapidly and effectively that private opposition could be translated into public fact. This hard lesson is not only enough to prevent anyone in the Sanders camp from looking for meaningful concessions from the Biden campaign; it underlines the sharp limits of any institutional politics within the existing Democratic Party. Whatever Democratic voters think — and most of them like Bernie Sanders and his platform — the dominant bulk of Democratic officials oppose them both with an organized vigor they seldom bring to combat with Republicans. In 2016, Sanders won more than 40 percent of the primary popular vote but earned endorsements from just 3.7 percent of congressional Democrats (seven of 187 representatives). Against a far more crowded field in 2020, Sanders won the first three contests and around 35 percent of the vote, but got the support of just 3.8 percent of congressional Democrats (nine of 232). That is not a marker of institutional progress.

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MATT KARP

Primary Popular Vote vs. D Congressional Endorsements

C

2016

Even the Congressional Progressive Caucus (cpc), whose cochairs gave Sanders a splashy endorsement, furnished more support for Biden (twelve members) than for Sanders (eight) before Super Tuesday. In the brief two-way contest between March 3 and March 17, Biden racked up twenty further cpc endorsements, compared to just one for Sanders. In this critical respect, the institutional Democratic Party did not really “move left” at all between 2015 and 2020. Yes, various elements of the Sanders agenda have migrated onto party platforms and campaign websites, and some left-leaning policies, like the $15 minimum wage, have even been introduced at the state level. But in national politics, the line guarding the party’s left flank — a steel barricade that separates Obama-style kludge politics from Sanders-style demands for universal public health care, education, and family support — is now more heavily policed than ever. This hard-won knowledge itself is a weapon against liberal elites who usually prefer to obfuscate differences rather than fight over them. “Bernie Sanders’s ideas are so popular that Hillary Clinton is running on them,” gushed Vox in April 2015. Of course, Democrats will peddle this message again in 2020, but for the millions of Sanders voters who have just watched the party establishment spend five years suffocating a platform of Medicare for All and free public college, it’s a much tougher sell. The major achievement of Bernie’s five-year war, then, is an invigorated and a clarified movement for American democratic socialism — newly optimistic about the appeal of its platform, yet intimately aware of the power of its enemies. Sanders has left the Left in a stronger position than he found it, both larger and more selfaware, and far less tempted by either the

AFTER BERNIE

43.3%

3.7%

Primary Votes

Endorsements From Congressional Democrats

31.2%

3.8% 3.8%

2020 (Before March 17)

sour futility of third-party campaigns or the saccharine cheerleading of party-approved “progressives.” Yet this is where the real trouble begins. The Left, after Bernie, has finally grown just strong enough to know how weak it really is. The essential problem, after all, is not that the corporate establishment commands Democratic politicians — it’s that it still commands most Democratic primary voters. Given a clear choice between Bernie’s demand for another New Deal and Biden’s call for a “return to normalcy,” about 60 percent of the Democrats who went to the polls

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A

The Left, after Bernie, has finally grown just strong enough to know how weak it really is.

apparently picked Warren G. Harding over Franklin D. Roosevelt. The harsh truth, proved harshly across these six Aprils, is that a social-democratic majority does not yet exist within the Democratic electorate, never mind the United States as a whole. Sanders has given the Left new relevance in national politics, but to make the leap from relevance to power, we need to build that majority — and this is not the work of one or two election cycles, but at least another decade, and maybe more.

II. A Closer Look at Defeat In 2016, Bernie Sanders led the largest leftwing primary campaign in Democratic Party history, winning far more votes and delegates than Jesse Jackson, Ted Kennedy, or even the victorious George McGovern. He entered the 2020 race as a serious contender, not a longshot underdog. In the end, however, Joe Biden beat Sanders with a voting coalition that both resembled and subtly differed from the coalition that propelled Hillary Clinton to the nomination in 2016.

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A look at local results from the two elections suggests that Sanders was defeated by three key factors in 2020: First, despite a substantial effort, the Bernie campaign struggled to make inroads with black voters, which turned out to be a far more intractable problem than it seemed four years ago. Second, and relatedly, despite considerable success in winning working-class support compared to 2016 — mostly with Latino voters — the campaign failed to generate higher participation among working-class voters of all races. Finally, above all, Bernie was swamped by a massive turnout surge from the Democratic Party ’s fastest-growing demographic: former Republican voters in overwhelmingly white, wealthy, and well-educated suburban neighborhoods. Let’s take each of these in turn. Struggling to Win Black Voters After the 2016 campaign, in which Sanders’s struggles with black voters cost him dearly, the 2020 campaign made a range of well-documented efforts to court African Americans, in both substance and style. The goal, as Adolph Reed Jr and Willie Legette have argued, was never to win a singular, homogenous, and mythical “black vote” — but in order to compete in a Democratic primary, Sanders did need to convince a lot more black voters. In 2019, the campaign released an ambitious plan to fund historically black colleges and universities; supported by scholars like Darrick Hamilton and leaders like Jackson, Mississippi, mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba, Sanders railed against the racial wealth gap and delivered substantive plans to close it. His campaign poured resources into South Carolina, which Sanders visited more times than Joe Biden or Elizabeth Warren; Bernie himself went on The Breakfast Club and said his 2016 campaign had been “too white.”

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MATT KARP

C

D

None of it seemed to make an appreciable difference. In South Carolina, where Sanders won 14 percent of black voters in 2016, exit polls showed him winning 17 percent in 2020. In the state’s five counties with a black population over 60 percent, Sanders increased his vote share from 11 percent to 12 percent. It was no better for him on Super Tuesday and beyond. In the rural South, from eastern North Carolina to western Mississippi, Sanders struggled to break the 15 percent threshold in majority-black counties. In some black urban neighborhoods, like Northside Richmond and Houston’s Third Ward, he made small gains on his 2016 baseline, occasionally winning as much as a third of the vote; but in others, like Southeast Durham and North St. Louis, Sanders fared even worse. On the whole, Biden clobbered him just as comprehensively as Clinton had four years earlier. After 2016, it was still possible to argue, optimistically, that black voter preferences reflected Clinton’s advantage in name recognition and resources, along with Sanders’s need to focus on the early contests in Iowa and New Hampshire. All the best survey data showed reliable and enthusiastic black support for the core items on Bernie’s social-democratic agenda. With improved messaging and a more serious investment in voter outreach, surely an insurgent left-wing candidate could breach the Democratic establishment’s “firewall” and win a large chunk of black voters. Bernie Sanders was not that candidate, either in 2016 or in 2020. But after years of struggle, it is time to revisit the assumption that superior policy, messaging, and tactics are enough for any insurgent to overcome black voter support for establishment Democrats. After all, Sanders is far from the only left-wing candidate who has struggled on this front. In the 2015 Chicago mayoral election, Rahm Emanuel beat Chuy García with huge

margins among black voters; the same pattern was visible in gubernatorial races in Virginia, New Jersey, Michigan, and New York, where black voters overwhelmingly backed Ralph Northam, Phil Murphy, Gretchen Whitmer, and Andrew Cuomo against progressive outsiders. In last year’s race for Queens district attorney, Melinda Katz barely edged past Tiffany Cabán with the strong support of black voters in Southeast Queens. Nor have anti-establishment black candidates necessarily fared much better with black primary voters. Jamaal Bowman’s recent victory over Eliot Engel is a meaningful and inspiring win for the Left, but not many leftwing candidates have had the advantage of facing a severely out-of-touch white opponent in a plurality-black district. Far more often, under different circumstances, the result has gone the other way. In the 2017 Atlanta mayoral race, the business-friendly party favorite Keisha Lance Bottoms creamed Vincent Fort, who had been endorsed by both Bernie Sanders and Killer Mike. And in congressional contests from St. Louis and Chicago to Columbus, Ohio and Prince George’s County, Maryland, black progressive insurgent campaigns have failed to catch fire, with black voters ultimately helping establishment-backed incumbents coast to victory at the polls. Black voter support for mainline Democrats is a broader trend in American politics — a trend approaching the status of a

AFTER BERNIE

Sanders’ Performance in South Carolina Among Black Voters 2016

14%

2020

17%

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BERNIE SANDERS’S FIVE-YEAR WAR

A

B

fundamental fact — and it cannot be explained with reference to Bernie Sanders alone. After 2016, some argued that a clearer focus on racial justice and a concerted effort to woo activists might boost a left-wing campaign with black voters. But the 2020 race offered slim evidence for that proposition, either in Sanders’s performance or in the frustrations of the Elizabeth Warren campaign, whose platform included a prominent focus on black maternal mortality, grants for blackowned businesses, and targeted reforms to help “farmers of color.” This rhetoric won black organizers in droves but hardly any black votes: among African Americans, exit polls showed Warren trailing not only Biden and Sanders but Bloomberg, too, in every single state, including her own. In North Carolina’s rural black-majority counties, farmers of color did not turn out for Warren, who actually received fewer votes than “no preference.” Another popular view is that black voters have the most to fear from Donald Trump and the Republicans, and thus tend to favor moderate, conventionally “electable” candidates. But while concerns about electability surely played a key part in Bernie’s 2020 defeat, there is little evidence to suggest that it mattered more to black Democrats than white Democrats (if anything, polling suggests the opposite). Fear of general election defeat also cannot explain why black voters favored Joe Crowley over Alexandria OcasioCortez, Andrew Cuomo over Cynthia Nixon, or establishment leaders in other deep-blue areas where Republicans are banished from politics altogether. Nor can the phenomenon be explained by actual ideological conservatism, or any real hesitance to get behind a politics of material redistribution. In fact, black voters support Medicare for All at higher rates than almost any other demographic in the country.

The institutional conservatism of most black elected leaders, on the other hand, continues to stack the deck against left-wing politics. Powerful black politicians like Jim Clyburn and Hakeem Jeffries, as Perry Bacon Jr has argued, support the establishment because “they are part of the establishment.” The Congressional Black Caucus has not tried to disguise its fierce hostility to left-wing primary challenges, even when the progressive challengers are black, like Bowman and Mckayla Wilkes, and the centrist incumbents are white, like Engel and Steny Hoyer. Overcoming the near-unanimous opposition of black elected leaders is difficult enough, but the problem for left-wing insurgents is even greater: it’s hard to win black voters by running against a party establishment whose preeminent figure is still, after all, America’s first black president. In the age of Obama, as Joe Biden’s primary campaign showed, black primary voters may well be moved more by appeals to institutional continuity than either personal identity (as Kamala Harris learned) or political ideology. After fifty years of living in a system where profound material change seems almost impossible — and black politics, like many other zones of politics, has become largely affective and transactional as a result — that feeling is understandable. Black voters, of course, must be a critical part of any working-class majority. But as long as every black political figure with significant institutional standing remains tied to Obama’s party leadership, and remains invested in using that tie to beat back left-wing challenges, anti-establishment candidates will face tough odds. If there is hope for the Left here, it is that black support for establishment Democrats remains tenacious rather than enthusiastic — strong support from a relatively small group of primary voters. Campaign boasts and press puffery aside, there was no black turnout surge

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C

D

for Joe Biden. Across the March primaries, even as overall Democratic turnout soared in comparison to 2016, it dropped absolutely in black neighborhoods across the country. In Michigan, Democratic participation bloomed by more than 350,000 votes but wilted in Flint’s first and second wards, where turnout declined from over 25 percent of registered voters to under 21 percent. Similar declines from 2016 were recorded in Ferguson, Missouri, in North St. Louis, in Houston’s Kashmere Gardens, Sunnyside, and Crestmont Park, and in Southeast Durham — even as statewide Democratic turnout soared in Missouri, Texas, and North Carolina. This follows a pattern already evident in the 2016 general election, in which poor and working-class black voters — like working-class voters generally — appear to comprise a smaller and smaller share of the active Democratic voting coalition. That is no consolation for Bernie Sanders, whose campaign was premised on its ability to help generate working-class participation in politics. But it does suggest that in some ways, the Left’s struggles with black voters are a specific symptom of a more general disease. The Sanders campaign, in both its remarkable strengths and its ultimately fatal weaknesses, illuminated the larger problem that has plagued left politics across much of the developed world: a failure to mobilize, much less organize, the majority of workers.

parties, though winning more working-class votes, largely remain under the thrall of a business-dominated “merchant right.”) The causes behind this shift on the Left are disputed: Piketty, along with Jacobin and other socialist critics, blames globalized capitalism, the decline of organized labor, and the centrist policy turn of major party leaderships; many liberals, meanwhile — ironically joined by the “populist” right — tend to emphasize the sharpening cultural conservatism of ethnic majorities within the working class. To the extent that Bernie Sanders aimed to reverse this global trend in the space of two presidential primary races, he failed. Yet the dynamics of that failure are more complex than most analysis so far has acknowledged. Compared to 2016, the Sanders campaign in 2020 struggled with what pundits call “the white working class”: white voters without college degrees. Against Hillary Clinton, Bernie’s strength with this share of the primary electorate propelled him to victory in states like Indiana and West Virginia. But this spring, as many analysts have highlighted, Joe Biden turned the tables on Sanders and beat him outright in predominantly white working-class counties across the South and Midwest. In retrospect, it seems clear that some of Sanders’s former strength in these areas owed to the particular conjuncture of the 2016 campaign. Low-turnout caucuses overstated Bernie’s actual rural support in states like Maine, Minnesota, and Washington; a deep hostility to Clinton, as some suspected at the time, seems to have boosted his vote total everywhere, and particularly in conservative regions like Appalachia, the Ozarks, and the Great Plains. Bernie’s leading opponent in 2020 was much stronger on this terrain. Though Biden’s actual record in the Senate is that of an exemplary corporate neoliberal — apathetic if not hostile to working-class interests — some

Working-Class Complexities This is perhaps the central fact of transatlantic politics in the last fifty years. In his recent book, Capital and Ideology, Thomas Piketty offers an efficient summary of the basic problem: since the 1960s, left-of-center parties in Europe and North America have lost support from the traditional working class, remaking themselves into a “Brahmin left,” crucially dependent on the votes of professionals. (Conservative

AFTER BERNIE

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combination of age, guile, and good-natured imbecility have allowed him, even and perhaps especially in his declining years, to produce an effective impression of a vanished breed of New Deal Democrat, experienced enough to know his way around Washington but always willing to throw a punch for “the little guy.” In this respect, the Sanders campaign knew from the start that Biden would be a formidable rival for working-class votes, white and black alike. But by far the most significant difference between 2016 and 2020 is the incumbent presidency of Donald J. Trump. Since the creation of the modern primary system, the presence of a rival in the White House has nearly always led opposition parties to pick nominees perceived as moderate and safely electable: Mitt Romney in 2012, John Kerry in 2004, Bob Dole in 1996, Bill Clinton in 1992, and Walter Mondale in 1984 all fit that mold. (The only partial exception is Ronald Reagan in 1980, and the incumbent president he faced, Jimmy Carter, was so weak that he could not even avoid a serious primary challenge of his own.) Apparently riskier candidates like Trump and Barack Obama, with more ambivalent relations

to their party’s establishment, have flourished only in open-year elections. The incumbent effect has hampered primary challengers for forty years, but never has it been stronger than in 2020, when a dominant majority of Democrats believed that beating Donald Trump was more important than all other issues put together. Even in 2004, much less than half of that memorably nervous Democratic electorate said that beating George W. Bush was so important. Any attempt to explain Bernie’s defeat chiefly through the desertion of white workers must founder on the larger fact that Sanders lost ground to Biden with every group of white voters. (The richer the group, the more ground he lost — but more on this to come.) A general incumbent effect, as Dustin Guastella has argued in Jacobin, was far more significant than any specific question of campaign tactics or cultural signaling. In fact, it is easy to overstate the scale of Bernie’s defeat among the so-called “white working class.” In virtually every state, Sanders did better with white voters without a college degree than with their better-educated counterparts. In Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Carolina, California, Texas, Colorado, and Vermont, Sanders actually led or tied Biden among white voters without a degree. Everywhere, too, Sanders fared even better with white, working-class men, winning them outright in all of the above states, plus North Carolina, Tennessee, Maine, and Washington. In both Michigan and Missouri, Sanders trailed Biden among white men without degrees by less than 5 points — but Biden won women in this group by 17 and 30 points, respectively. Bernie’s particular struggles with women — much more concerned with beating Trump than men, according to polls — further suggest that the decline in his white

White Voters Without a Degree Biden

Sanders

Nevada

14

35

South Carolina

25

30

California

34

34

Texas

31

33

Colorado

21

26

Vermont

21

53

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MATT KARP

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D

working-class support had less to do with culture or ideology than with a perception of electability. A serious class analysis of the evolving Sanders coalition must also take note of the massive group Bernie brought into the fold this year — Latino voters, the fastest-growing portion of America’s working-class electorate. All over the greater Southwest, from the Rio Grande in Texas to California’s Central Valley, Sanders dominated the Latino districts that he had mostly lost to Hillary Clinton in 2016. In heavily Latino neighborhoods from East Los Angeles to Northside Houston, “Tío Bernie” often won more votes than Biden, Bloomberg, and Warren combined. This was not a regional phenomenon, nor was it limited to Mexican-American areas. Sanders also won big with working-class Puerto Rican and Dominican-American voters in Holyoke and Lawrence, Massachusetts, as well as in Central American immigrant neighborhoods in central LA and Southwest Houston. In nearly all these places, Sanders had to overcome the opposition of the Latino political class, which was scarcely more favorable to him than the black political establishment. By early March, Sanders had received just two endorsements from the Congressional Hispanic Caucus; Biden had fourteen. Yet there is no such thing as a Latino Obama, and the institutional ties linking Latino voters to the Democratic establishment, we learned this year, may be relatively weak. In the end, few elected Latino leaders delivered their constituents to Biden. Across four Southern California congressional districts represented by Lucille Roybal-Allard, Lou Correa, Tony Cárdenas, and Juan Vargas — Biden endorsers all — Sanders beat his multiple rivals with an outright majority of votes.

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Sanders’ Performance Among White Voters With and Without Degrees

White Voters With Degrees

Nevada South Carolina California Texas Colorado

White Voters Without Degrees

+11 +12 +3 +8 +4 +4

Vermont North Carolina Tennessee Maine

+12 +6 +2

Washington

+10

Michigan

+2

Missouri

+5

In numerical terms, Bernie’s huge gains with Latinos may well have offset the decline in his white working-class support. And given that Sanders won over these voters, in large part, by doubling down on the redistributive bread-and-butter issues that Latino voters prize most, it may well be that the 2020 Sanders coalition, though smaller than the 2016 version, was in fact even more fully grounded in the US working class. Certainly, given this significant shift, it is too soon to pen epitaphs to the possibility of class-driven politics within the Democratic Party.

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Michigan Primary Voters Income Under $50,000 31% OF VOTERS

other possibility, no more inspiring, is that the new Latino voters Sanders gained were offset by an equally large number of voters who dropped out of the primary electorate in 2020. It is just one more enumeration of the elemental problem that confronts any effort to run left-wing candidates in the Democratic Party: the relative decline of working-class political participation — black, brown, and white alike. From Patagonia to Halliburton

Sanders

49%

Biden

42%

Yet even this silver lining carries with it an inevitable touch of gray. Sanders won Latinomajority areas overwhelmingly, but mostly without increasing voter turnout. In RoybalAllard’s working-class South LA district, which Bernie won with almost 57 percent of the vote — his single best congressional district in the country — almost ten thousand fewer voters came to the polls than in 2016. The same pattern held in many of Bernie’s strongest areas in Southern California. And across Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, and in Houston’s Latino-majority neighborhoods, Sanders won decisively, but overall Democratic turnout (as a share of registered voters) was either flat or declined from 2016. This suggests that his campaign’s Latino outreach efforts were enormously successful in convincing 2016 Clinton voters to jump on the Bernie bus — an impressive feat on its own terms — but less successful in bringing new working-class Latino voters into politics. The

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In the mainstream press, Sanders’s defeat in Michigan, the Waterloo of his 2020 campaign, was largely attributed to the desertion of the working-class voters who had propelled him to victory four years ago. Yet among Michigan voters making under $50,000 a year, he beat Joe Biden by 7 points — a larger margin than in 2016, when he beat Hillary Clinton by just 3 points with that same group. Sanders was not defeated by lower-income voters at all, who gave him solid support in Michigan and elsewhere. Nor did the real hammer blow come from working-class or lower-middle-class voters of any kind. It came, with devastating force, from the rich suburbs. In Detroit’s Wayne County, Sanders lost by almost the exact same margin as he had in 2016. In middle-class Macomb County, ancestral headquarters of the Reagan Democrat and the Obama-Trump voter, Sanders took a serious hit, losing by twenty thousand more votes than in 2016. But in the wealthy, welleducated suburbs of Oakland County — the richest county in Michigan — Bernie’s deficit swelled by fifty thousand votes. A closer look at precinct results from three smaller Michigan communities illuminates this even more vividly. The two working-class wards of northwestern Flint, including some of the neighborhoods where children were notoriously exposed to lead in city water, are about 90 percent black. The northern seven

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wards of Bay City, near Saginaw, are about 85 percent white, but like Flint, the city has been punished by deindustrialization, and particularly by the decline of General Motors. Meanwhile, the prosperous Oakland County town of Birmingham — original habitat of ur-suburban homeowner Tim Allen — boasts median property values ($488,000) and income levels ($117,000) three to five times greater than Bay City or Flint. All three districts are largely Democratic; all contain between 16,900 and 18,100 registered voters. In Flint’s northwestern wards, where turnout sagged, Biden actually won 600 fewer votes than Clinton received in 2016. In the northern bulk of Bay City — including the working-class neighborhood where Madonna Louise Ciccone was born to a gm employee — Biden picked up 300 more votes than Clinton, just enough to beat Sanders citywide. But among the tall backyard fences and expensive mega-garages of Birmingham, Biden picked up nearly 2,300 votes — more than enough to bury Bernie Sanders under a heap of luxury home improvement products. This same pattern played out in every state and metropolitan area where a primary vote was held. From the beachfront retirement communities of coastal South Carolina to the colonnaded ranch manors of Contra Costa, California, wherever Democratic turnout climbed from 2016, it climbed highest in the wealthiest and whitest suburbs, which threw their collective weight against Bernie Sanders. In North Carolina, where the total Democratic vote dipped from the eastern swamps to the western mountains, the rich suburbs of Raleigh and Charlotte saw 40 to 50 percent bumps from 2016. In Missouri, where the vote declined in Ferguson and the Ozarks alike, it climbed by 50 percent in the country club precincts of St. Louis County. And in wealthy Fairfax County, Virginia, the archetype of the Democrats’ twenty-first-century

suburban strategy, the primary vote soared by 70 percent, with nearly a hundred thousand new voters joining the party of Biden. In many areas, the power of the suburban surge was so great that even very small wealthy communities had a larger impact on the election than much larger working-class areas. In Massachusetts, compared to 2016, Sanders lost more votes to Biden and Bloomberg in just three fancy South Shore towns — Hingham, Duxbury, and Norwell (total population: 51,753) — than in all of Hampden County, home to the city of Springfield and its working-class suburbs (population: 466,372). Last fall, with Elizabeth Warren leading Democratic polls, debate swirled over the role of so-called Patagonia Democrats: affluent liberals in deep-blue districts who had flocked to Warren’s planful policy agenda. Like many Sanders supporters, I was skeptical of the claim that such professional-class voters — whatever they told pollsters — could really serve as the electoral base for a redistributive agenda. But in retrospect, neither Jacobin nor Vox anticipated the real story of the 2020 primary, which did not involve Warren-style liberals, but a much more conservative tribe of wealthy

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In heavily Latino neighborhoods from East Los Angeles to Northside Houston, “Tío Bernie” often won more votes than Biden, Bloomberg, and Warren combined. 69

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suburbanites — disaffected Republicans who, since the 2016 election, have thrown themselves whole into Democratic Party politics. All across the Sun Belt, from the defense contractors of Northern Virginia to the energy corporations of Texas and California, Joe Biden was boosted not just by Patagonia Democrats but by newfound Chevron, Raytheon, and Halliburton Democrats. After 2016, the “Never Trump Republican” became a punch line on the Left — in a party where Trump enjoyed 90 percent approval, self-important critics like Jennifer Rubin and David Frum appeared to form an editorial page whose staff was larger than its readership. But in 2020, these neoconservative Never Trumpers had the last laugh. Craftily rebranded as “moderate” pundits, forgiven their cheerleading for the Iraq War, and handed outsize platforms in the liberal corporate media, it turned out that their true audience was not Republican at all, but affluent purple-state suburbanites, who shared both their cultural distaste for Trump and their material opposition to Sanders.

Though Democratic turnout rose everywhere in the wealthy suburbs, from Silicon Valley to metro Boston, a clear pattern was visible: the richer and more conservative the suburb, the more dramatic the increases. In Virginia, Fairfax County’s stunning 70 percent increase was surpassed by neighboring Loudon County — the richest county in the United States — where Democratic turnout nearly doubled from 2016. Once again, the picture is most vivid at the neighborhood level. In greater Houston, Biden scored some of his most impressive gains in wealthy, traditionally Republican suburbs like Bellaire and West University Place, which flipped from Mitt Romney to Hillary Clinton in 2016 and helped elect Lizzie Pannill Fletcher to Congress in 2018. Primary turnout in these areas doubled from four years ago, reflecting the success of Democrats’ concerted effort to retain Romney-Clinton voters. And in relative terms, the most staggering turnout gains did not come in the Houston precincts Democrats won in 2016 or 2018, but in those that they lost. In the extremely rich and conservative oil-money districts of River Oaks, Afton Oaks, and Tanglewood — the neighborhood where Jeb and George W. Bush grew up — Democratic turnout often tripled, with nearly all of it going to Biden or Bloomberg. Some of these voters, to be sure, only cast their ballots in an open Democratic primary because there was no competitive Republican contest on offer. (In that sense, the incumbent effect took another massive toll on the 2020 Sanders campaign.) And if Trump is convincingly repudiated in November, a fraction of these wealthy suburbanites may attempt to return to a chastened Republican Party. More of them, though, seem likely to stick around as Halliburton Democrats. The suburban surge of 2020 fits into a larger pattern: in the Bush family’s historic Tanglewood precinct, Democrats won under 18 percent of the

All across the Sun Belt, Joe Biden was boosted not just by Patagonia Democrats but by newfound Chevron, Raytheon, and Halliburton Democrats.

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general election vote in 2012, but nearly 30 percent in 2016 and over 34 percent in 2018, with a higher share likely to follow in 2020. In recent weeks, even as Democrats have sought to present themselves as the party of George Floyd, it is worth knowing that Houston’s River Oaks — home to Joel Osteen and former Enron ceo Jeffrey Skilling — now boasts higher Democratic primary participation than the Third Ward, where Floyd was born and raised. In the United States, at least, the margin between Piketty’s “Brahmin left” and “merchant right” is rather blurry at the top of the wealth pyramid, and it’s getting blurrier. Not only do many merchant princes of the billionaire class — perhaps a majority, outside a handful of extractive industries — already lean Democratic; their corporate vassals, in prosperous metropolitan areas from Houston to Charlotte to Grand Rapids, are now trending Democratic, too. This year, Halliburton Democrats may well have swung the election against Bernie Sanders. With their voices amplified by prestige media, and their votes eagerly courted by leading candidates, they helped make sure Democrats would emerge from the primary season as something closer to the party of Bill Kristol than the party of Krystal Ball. It is not likely that they will be going anywhere soon.

III. A Majority in Embryo No doubt, there are tactical lessons to be drawn from the Bernie 2020 campaign, both in its achievements and in its possible missteps. Yet the major electoral forces that defeated Sanders at the polls — the establishment preference of black primary voters, the declining participation of working-class Democrats, and the mass arrival of rich suburbanites into the party — all predate Sanders and will likely live on beyond him, too.

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Harris County Precinct 0269 (DEMOCRATIC VOTE SHARE IN TANGLEWOOD, HOUSTON)

40% 30% 20% 10% 2012

2014

2016

2018

2012

17.7%

2014

18.8%

2106

29.4%

2018

34.2%

What we learned over the course of Bernie’s five-year struggle is that a national presidential campaign, however successful in other ways, could not reverse or even arrest these trends on its own. Sanders-style democratic socialism has not yet won a majority in the United States, either inside the Democratic Party or outside it. But not having a majority is no excuse for not building one. And while the Sanders coalition was not ready for victory in 2020, there are reasons to believe that his five-year war has put social-democratic reform on the path to a national majority in the next decade.

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In both of his campaigns, Sanders won younger voters by historic margins, and he won them not with style or charisma but with perhaps the most brusquely ideological platform in Democratic primary history. His five-year struggle simultaneously reflected, galvanized, and shaped the worldview of an entire generation of voters — forging a new and serious bond between the material conditions of Americans under forty-five and the Sanders brand of “class-struggle social democracy.” As Jacobin’s Connor Kilpatrick has argued, Bernie’s dominance with young voters is significant for at least two reasons that should shape left strategy in the 2020s. First, despite the understandable skepticism about “generational politics,” there is simply no precedent in US history for an ideological candidate winning younger voters on a scale like Sanders did — not George McGovern and certainly not Barack Obama, whose youthful support was much thinner and less evenly distributed. In the 2008 race against Hillary Clinton, Obama won voters under thirty in California by 5 points, and in Texas by 20 points. This year, against a larger primary field, Bernie won that group in both those states by at least 50 points. In both his campaigns, Sanders won young white voters, he won young black voters, and he won young Latino voters — the latter group by outrageous margins (84 percent!) in states like California. Very probably, he won young Asian voters, young Muslim voters, and young Native voters with similar levels of enthusiasm. Second, Sanders did not just win big with kids fresh out of school: across five years of campaigning, he showed persistent strength with middle-aged voters in their forties. Of the twenty states that conducted exit polls, more voters under forty-five chose Sanders than all the “moderate” Democrats combined (Biden, Bloomberg, Buttigieg, and Klobuchar) in sixteen of them.

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In Missouri and in Michigan, he won voters between forty and forty-five outright. And in key states like Texas, Massachusetts, and Minnesota, where Bernie lost overall, he still managed to win voters under fifty by double digits. Notoriously, these younger voters did not turn out in large enough numbers to help Sanders on Super Tuesday and beyond. But the media’s glib conclusion on this subject — that youth voting actually declined in 2020 — was based on flawed 2016 exit polls, whose methodology changed significantly this year, rendering crude comparisons about the shape of the electorate practically worthless. In the context of rising overall turnout, it is almost certain that the absolute number of younger primary voters actually rose in 2020. (In South Carolina, where official state numbers have been released, more than forty thousand new voters under forty-five cast a Democratic ballot, and their turnout rate increased, too.) Though outnumbered by the surge of older, richer Halliburton Democrats, these new, younger voters flocked to Bernie’s standard to an extent that helped change the geography of his coalition. Though Sanders struggled to win many of the rural areas he had carried four years ago, his strength in cities — and especially in younger, racially diverse, lower-income urban neighborhoods — actually grew from 2016 to 2020. With younger Latino voters now firmly in his coalition, Bernie not only swept the barrios of East LA, he won overwhelming victories in the mixed, immigrant-heavy precincts of San Diego, Denver, Seattle, and Las Vegas. Sanders showed similar strength in younger, lower-income urban areas all over the country. In the majority-nonwhite ninth ward of Minneapolis, where George Floyd was killed, Bernie won an absolute majority. In smaller cities across the Northeast and the Midwest, his support was undiminished, if not

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enhanced from 2016 — with younger urban voters helping Sanders in the early states and beyond, from Portland, Maine, to Duluth, Minnesota. Although easily dismissed by critics as a phenomenon of the “gentrifier left,” latteswilling graduate students did not power Sanders to victory in working-class cities like Manchester, New Hampshire, or Brownsville, Texas. A much broader group of younger and disproportionately urban voters, who make far less money and own far less property than the Democratic electorate as a whole, formed the core of the Sanders coalition.

for All, wealth taxes, and other significant reforms — they have shown, in two different primary campaigns, that those fundamental redistributive commitments are strong enough to guide their voting choices. This is not yet a socialist majority, but it is, perhaps, a socialist majority in embryo. And even as the US population ages, this embryonic majority grows every year, and within every demographic. Despite the folklore about voters growing more conservative as they age, the academic consensus is that ideological preferences are, in fact, quite stable over time. Older millennials, locked out of an increasingly unequal economy, do not appear to be moving to the right. The supermajority that demands national health insurance today, we can bet, will demand national health insurance tomorrow, too. If Bernie Sanders was not fated to be the Abraham Lincoln of the twenty-first-century left, winning a political revolution under his own banner, he may well be something like our John Quincy Adams — the “Old Man Eloquent” whose passionate broadsides against the Slave Power in the 1830s and 1840s

Working-Class Politics Can Still Be the Future Across the world, from Norway to New Zealand, as working-class parties of the Left have given way to their Brahminized descendants, the scope and the horizon of left-wing politics have changed. Less interested in transformative economic redistribution — and far less capable of delivering it, anyway — contemporary progressives have put their faith and their energy in a range of other projects, from environmentalism to questions of cultural representation. Yet socialists like Bernie Sanders understand that few of these struggles for justice can be won, in any meaningful or lasting way, if they are not accompanied by a large-scale transfer of power and resources, won by a determined working class. All by itself, Bernie’s five-year war did not succeed in reanimating twentieth-century class politics. But if there is any hope for a return to the electoral alignment that produced every major social-democratic reform in history — uniting a diverse working class around pressing demands for redistribution — it lies with the cohort of Sanders voters under age forty-five. Not only do two-thirds or more of these younger, poorer Americans support Medicare

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By 2032, today’s Bernie voters under fifty will likely represent a majority within the party electorate. What sort of left will be there to greet them?

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inspired the radicals who toppled it a generation later. Over the next decade, this embryonic majority faces at least two considerable challenges. First and most pressing, it must face off against its principal antagonist within the primary electorate: the older, wealthy, and ever-growing coalition of Fairfax and Halliburton Democrats, whose votes party leaders continue to court with gauzy patriotic rhetoric and concrete promises of tax relief. In the short term, the most promising avenue for attack is in the scores of mostly urban legislative districts, from Los Angeles to Denver to San Antonio, where younger voters predominate, and where Sanders outpolled all of his centrist rivals combined. Recent left-wing insurgent victories in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Washington, DC, and New York suggest that there is more room for democraticsocialist politics to grow in cities across the Northeast, too. Even in the short term, though, younger urban districts alone will not be sufficient for Sanders-style left-wingers to outvote Fairfax Democrats within the party caucus — much less to wield meaningful fiscal power in larger state governments or in Congress. And in the longer run, a laser-like focus on extremely liberal urban districts on the coasts — an electoral map that follows Brahminized progressives wherever they go — risks accelerating the Left’s drift away from the fundamental questions of class power and material redistribution. For some Brahmin activists, this is precisely the point: a retrograde focus on class has prevented progressives from understanding that their natural base lies with white-collar suburbanites, who already share liberal cultural politics. “I can take someone who is

deeply concerned about patriarchy and I can make them understand how patriarchy intersects with capitalism,” argues Sean McElwee, “much more than I can take someone who’s mad because gm took their job away and make them understand socialism.” The broader decline of working-class participation in politics may even be something to celebrate, from this angle, if it turns more congressional districts from red to blue. Sanders had a different theory, and his campaigns assembled a different coalition, centered on younger, lower-income voters from Brownsville to Duluth. In 2020, that working-class coalition was not enough to win the Democratic nomination. And no, Sanders did not manage to turn history on its head and bring the vast reservoir of alienated, apolitical workers back to primary politics. But by 2032, today’s Bernie voters under fifty will likely represent a majority, and certainly a plurality, within the party electorate. What sort of left will be there to greet them? Will it be a thoroughly post-Sanders progressive movement, whose priorities are defined by social media discourse, billionaire-funded activist ngos, and a friendly working relationship with the corporate Democratic Party? Imagine Sean McElwee giving a keynote address at the Walmart Center for Racial Equity — forever. Or will it be a political left that continues the work, to borrow from Lincoln at Gettysburg, that Sanders has thus far so nobly advanced? A left grounded in class politics, and aimed fundamentally at majority-building demands for material redistribution — health care, education, jobs, and family support for all, paid for by the rich? The future is still unwritten.

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THE TWO PATHS OF DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM: COALITION & CONFRONTATION in the United States face a crucial test, one more significant than any since the mass 1930s incorporation of the industrial working class into the Democratic Party coalition. The Bernie Sanders campaign has politicized thousands of new democratic socialists; the covid-19 crisis may create political space for social-democratic policies unlike anything we have seen since the Great Depression; and a tidal wave of mass protests for racial justice has upended conventional politics throughout the spring, with far-ranging political consequences we are only beginning to understand. The situation is fraught with extraordinary uncertainty — simultaneously creating the conditions for a resurgent left, as well as an even stronger and more emboldened right-wing nationalism. Quite simply, we are living through an epoch-defining moment for the Left. Depending on how we respond, the coming years may offer unprecedented opportunities for the growth of democratic-socialist politics, or else lead to the socialist left’s increasing isolation and irrelevance. In this piece, I lay out two basic paths socialists might take on the electoral front, each of which can operate on different scales (local, state, regional, and national). The first broad approach has been advocated in some form by left-liberals as well as pragmatic-minded socialists, ranging from Data for Progress to the Working Families Party and Justice Democrats. This orientation exhorts progressives and leftists to build common cause with as broad a coalition of Democrats as possible, within legislatures as well as among the electorate. That means seeing most elected Democrats as potential allies — while also working to primary conservative Democrats in liberal districts — and widening our support among both working- and middle-class voters. The second option, proposed by socialists in the Sanders universe such as Jacobin’s Seth Ackerman, Meagan Day, and Micah Uetricht, is to bring together different forces within and beyond the Sanders coalition around a combative, class-centered, left-wing organization that takes elections seriously. This organization would run its own candidates, usually on the Democratic DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISTS

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After Bernie Sanders, democratic socialists in America face a vital strategic dilemma. Do we go the Justice Democrats route of winning gains as the junior partner in a progressive coalition, or do we take a gamble on more independent class organization and struggle? Party ballot line, and would view class — rather than partisan identification — as the primary criterion for building an electoral base. Of course, these are stylized renderings of strategic hypotheses that rarely appear in such pure form on the ground, but hopefully they can help to clarify some of the key discussions around democratic-socialist strategy. I have previously advocated for my own version of the latter orientation in the pages of Jacobin, and, as I discuss below, I continue to believe it offers a number of strategic advantages. That said, serious challenges to this approach — underscored by the lack of empirical support we’ve seen for key assumptions underlying Sanders’s 2020 electoral strategy — remain unresolved, and to date there has not been a particularly fruitful dialogue between proponents of the two strategies. In this piece, then, my goal is not to take sides, but rather to lay out the terms of debate. Each approach has important strengths and weaknesses, and we must grapple with them seriously if we hope to emerge from the coming period in a United States where democratic socialism can reach new heights.

Electoral Politics Matter Now More Than Ever Before diving into the contrasting electoral strategies socialists might pursue, it is worth first explaining why a focus on electoral politics makes sense at all. Given socialists’ weak ties to working-class communities and organizations in the United States, perhaps we would be better served concentrating on social-movement and trade-union activities. Indeed, a number of commentators have reasonably concluded that, in the absence of a stronger organic base — within, for instance, the organized labor movement — socialist electoral projects will be, at worst, totally irrelevant, and, at best, entirely dependent on continued support from elected officials over whom we have little political leverage. These concerns are valid. To the extent that socialists can broaden our base through different forms of AFTER BERNIE

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organizing — in communities, among tenants, on the shop floor — while strengthening our ties with labor, we will be in a stronger position both to wage electoral campaigns and to exert broader political influence. At the same time, however, the non-electoral strategies proposed by skeptics are pitched at a scale that is nowhere near adequate to build serious political strength in the foreseeable future. Crafting effective community organizations and progressive union locals takes years, even decades, and generally does not allow leftists to reach a mass audience. Under ordinary circumstances, such a focus would be understandable. When general political headwinds are against us, there is very little that the organized left can do beyond engaging in various forms of political education to keep the home fires of socialism burning, and carrying out local experiments in community and electoral organizing that might serve as models for future struggles. Furthermore, under these conditions, most progressive electoral struggles will be defensive, aimed more at stopping the rollback of previous gains than pressing forward an assertive agenda. For around three decades between the late 1970s and the late 2000s, there was little that electoral politics could do to advance a democratic-socialist agenda at state or national levels. Today, however, things are different. Our ideas are very popular, and it is now conceivable that we could win majority legislative support for some of them at the state and even national level. Under these circumstances, electoral organizing has the capacity to significantly alter the playing field on which future socialist struggles will take place. Election campaigns can popularize our ideas among the public on a mass scale — just look at Bernie Sanders’s 2016 and 2020 efforts. They can also be used to push through structural reforms that will make future organizing easier (such as labor, voting rights, and campaign-finance reforms), and to open the door to major victories around racial justice, health care expansion, green infrastructure investment, or public jobs programs.

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These measures can show skeptical Americans that real alternatives to the status quo do exist, and can generate massive new constituencies committed to defending and deepening gains. Many reforms along these lines would also have the benefit of putting working people in a stronger position to demand more by insulating them from the vagaries of the labor market. In other words, these reforms represent potentially epoch-defining changes in the terrain of US politics. The electoral paths that I explore in this essay would face several barriers: a lack of institutional support from the labor movement, the Left’s relatively weak connections with working-class communities, and an overdependence on charismatic political leaders. And, of course, a strategic focus on electoral politics by no means implies eschewing other forms of organizing at the same time. On the contrary, these should be mutually reinforcing activities. Yet sitting out the electoral fight, or putting it on the back burner, would be a serious mistake in this period of extraordinary opportunity. Barring legal changes that might tilt the playing field of industrial struggle in favor of workers, a major upsurge in union strength is not going to materialize, even under the most optimistic assumptions. Increased strike activity may well result from the economic downturn to come, but this is by no means inevitable, as strikes are historically more common in tight rather than slack labor markets. To be sure, widespread strikes by workers in strategic industries — particularly logistics — could help to force significant concessions from major corporations, and could produce broader political ripple effects. Beyond that, mass protests may intensify in response to corporate greed, police brutality, and the government’s poor response to the coronavirus crisis. As the dramatic upsurge of protest around the country after the killing of George Floyd has shown, these protests can play an important role in shifting public opinion and ensuring progressive and democratic-socialist policies make it onto the legislative agenda.

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Sitting out the electoral fight would be a serious mistake.

As important as these developments could be, however, their impact would be severely limited in the absence of significant electoral advances. Our unfortunate reality is that the historic weakness of the US left and labor movement means that turning democratic socialism into mass politics will depend heavily on a relatively narrow window of opportunity to make advances in the electoral realm. The legislative and broader political effects of these advances can alter the structural limitations we face and create more favorable conditions for future working-class struggles.

alienating them. Justice Democrats communications director Waleed Shahid puts it this way:

The Path of Coalition

This approach has been championed recently not only by Justice Democrats but also by liberal strategists such as Sean McElwee, as well as by leaders of other progressive electoral organizations such as the Working Families Party and Our Revolution. The experience of organized labor from the 1930s to the 1950s is perhaps the most important example of the coalition strategy. During this period, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (cio) made common cause with the Democratic Party to ensure the gains of the New Deal were preserved and to push for further laborfriendly legislation. This involved trying to push the party in a leftward direction by channeling money to progressive candidates, working to shape the party platform in a pro-labor mold, and proposing mechanisms to ensure that congressional Democrats would be more accountable to the party’s working-class elements. However, cio leaders knew, even at the height of their power, that they could not exert enough influence in Democratic Party politics to secure outright congressional majorities. Furthermore, since coalitions with progressive Republicans were not viable, the Democrats were labor’s only plausible allies. In turn, because cio leaders considered the idea of starting a third party to be far too great of a political risk, labor’s leverage with Democrats had to come through persuasion and delivering votes, rather than the threat of exit. While the gains labor achieved through its alliance with the

The first option for socialists is to create a new electoral project or to join an existing one, focused on building constructive relationships with as many Democrats as possible. The goal would be to forge broad coalitions to support key progressive reforms. In the legislature (whether local, state, or national), this would mean working to persuade Democrats that such reforms are in their own political interest. In terms of the electorate, it means targeting working-class voters, but also middle-class professionals — including more centrist suburban Democrats. This strategy could be implemented at whatever levels are possible, based on the success that progressives and socialists have in forging relationships with new coalition partners. Building such coalitions by no means rules out the idea of waging primary campaigns against conservative Democrats. Indeed, electing more progressive candidates in Democratic primary contests is an important aspect of the coalition strategy, since the larger the progressive legislative bloc, the more influence it can exert. At the same time, the plan does assume that the most likely political allies for progressives will be other Democrats. From this perspective, unnecessarily attacking fellow Democrats makes little sense and would be counterproductive. The idea is to push and persuade mainstream Democrats as much as possible, but also to avoid

A good way of thinking about the situation in American politics today is that the left wing of the party — whatever label you want to use for it — is a junior partner to a senior partner in a coalition government. The senior partner is the party of Pelosi and Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries and Dianne Feinstein. They have more power. But we are in a coalition together to get over 50 percent and keep the Republicans out of power.

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Democrats were disappointing when compared with the advances made by social democrats in Europe around the same time, proponents of this strategy argue that the key question is what would have happened if labor had pursued another strategy. Political scientist Daniel Schlozman, for instance, argues that cio leaders simply understood the limits of their influence and crafted the best strategy possible given the constraints they faced. Consequently, he contends, “the most plausible alternative to laborDemocratic alliance was not industrial democracy, but a far less consequential partnership that simply entrenched the prerogatives of white unionists — or no alliance at all.” From this perspective, the laborDemocratic alliance facilitated the rise of civil rights as a core issue on the Democratic agenda, giving rise to the defection of Southern Dixiecrats from the party and paving the way for the Great Society reforms of the 1960s. In sum, while leftists might have hoped for more, the coalition strategy ultimately maximized progressive gains under less than ideal circumstances.

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Proponents of the coalition strategy can also argue that conditions today may be even more propitious for sweeping progressive legislation than they were during the New Deal era. While they will not rack up the overwhelming congressional majorities enjoyed by fdr, if Democrats can win majority control of both houses of Congress this time, they will not depend — as the party did in the ’30s and ’40s — on a powerful bloc of reactionary Southerners to pass legislation. On the contrary, Democratic lawmakers today have constituencies that support key planks of the progressive policy by often overwhelming margins, and the Democratic establishment has shifted further to the left in recent years than we have seen in decades. When you combine this with the possibility that aspects of the progressive agenda might face less intransigent opposition from sectors of capital than we would expect under normal circumstances, when the economy is not teetering on the brink of collapse, the coalition strategy appears plausible. Beyond its prospects for exerting legislative influence, there are also reasons to believe that the strategy can deliver more progressive electoral victories, in working-class as well as middle-class districts. For instance, let’s take membership of the Congressional Progressive Caucus (cpc) as a rough proxy for progressive legislators in the US House of Representatives who more or less

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The threat of exit from the Democratic coalition in our winner-takes-all electoral system would simply not be taken seriously. follow the coalition strategy. The figure below shows that progressive candidates perform significantly better than other Democrats in working-class districts that have relatively low proportions of non-college-educated white voters. What’s more, there are 162 congressional districts that fit these criteria, so progressives have ample opportunity to augment their ranks through an electoral strategy focused on those districts. And while cpc members are less competitive than other congressional Democrats in more affluent areas, they nevertheless won in nearly thirty such districts in 2018 (representing just under 30 percent of all cpc members), suggesting that they can simultaneously compete well in predominantly working-class districts as well as ones with more middle-class liberal voters. The coalition strategy, then, has much to recommend it. It offers a plausible theory for how progressives can exert influence over legislators from a position of relative weakness, while also demonstrating a capacity for electoral success in a large number of congressional districts. But the strategy also has important limitations. First, it does not explain how the movements that get progressive and democratic-socialist legislators into office can hold them accountable once they are there. What kind of leverage do we have over officeholders, in the absence of a clear political platform they must adhere to or risk losing our financial and organizational support? How can we pose a credible threat to elected officials if we see them primarily as coalition partners we depend on to advance our political agenda, rather than as strategic allies who must deliver for us to ensure our continued backing? The coalition strategy’s theory of progressive political influence is based primarily on the idea that voters in Democratic districts support a progressive agenda and arewilling to punish legislators and candidates who don’t support that agenda. The successes of insurgent progressives in recent years at all levels of government lend some credence to this theory, but the extent of such

successes remains limited, and it’s not clear how much further they can be pushed. In turn, the coalition strategy assumes that a relatively small but committed group of progressives can have an outsize influence on policy-making. The capacity of politicians like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria OcasioCortez, and Rashida Tlaib to affect nationwide political discourse suggests this theory is valid, at least when it comes to agenda-setting, if not actually passing legislation. There are also historical examples to suggest that having strong, influential progressives in strategic positions during key moments can be critical. The work of New York senator Robert F. Wagner and his staff in drafting and skillfully building a coalition to support labor reforms in 1935 comes to mind. Nonetheless, a modest increase in the number of insurgent candidates, and the hope that a small but well-organized bloc of electeds can work legislative magic during a time of crisis, falls short of explaining how leftists can hold legislators accountable to our agenda. The recent failure of Congressional Progressive Caucus members to ensure the inclusion of a paycheck protection element in the heroes Act points to the limits of the coalition approach. Another limitation is its electoral weakness in areas with large concentrations of non-college-educated white voters. As we can see below, while around 40 percent of all congressional districts fit this profile, they only account for 13 percent of the cpc membership (twelve representatives). Democrats can clearly win a majority in the House without relying on districts with large concentrations of these voters; however,

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Share of CPC and Non-CPC Democratic Districts with Primarily Low-Income or Low-Education Voters (Excluding Majority White Non-College-Educated Districts) All Congressional Districts Poor or Low-Educated Districts

Non-CPC Democrat Districts

LowEducated Districts

CPC Districts

Poor Districts 0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

Share of CPC vs. Non-CPC Democratic Districts: Majority White Non-College Districts All Congressional Districts

Non-CPC Democratic Districts

CPC Districts

0

5

10

15

20

25

such voters currently make up most of the electorate in twenty-seven US states. This means that the coalition strategy is less suitable for winning the presidency or securing a majority in the Senate, not to mention in state houses across the country. 82

30

35

40

If establishment Democrats can argue convincingly that an overly progressive message amounts to electoral suicide in national politics, they will continue to wield an effective veto over any progressive legislation, even if Democrats control the presidency and both houses of Congress. And we will have no credible leverage

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How can we pose a credible threat to elected officials if we see them primarily as coalition partners we depend on? with which to stop them. The threat of exit from the Democratic coalition in our winner-take-all electoral system, where the opposing Republican Party is openly hostile to every aspect of the progressive agenda, would simply not be taken seriously. Finally, since the coalition strategy depends to a considerable extent on middle- and upper-middle-class liberal voters, it may be less effective in promoting a radical, redistributive program than a strategy that is focused primarily on support from working-class voters. Indeed, the notion that middle-class Democratic voters are afraid of redistribution has been a driving force in pushing Democratic politicians to the right on economic issues for decades. What’s more, careful empirical studies have shown that the economic preferences of middle-class voters diverge substantially from those of working-class and poor voters, and that politicians are consistently more responsive to the former. This is not to deny that middle-class Democratic voters often have favorable views of virtually all planks of the progressive agenda, including those with major redistributive implications. Indeed, analysts have shown that college-educated voters (across all ethnicities) hold just as progressive, if not more progressive, views on economic redistribution compared to non-college-educated whites. They might become even more egalitarian in the future, as well. To the extent that relative prosperity for middle-class voters over the past few decades has made them resistant to a redistributive agenda, the historic economic fallout from the coronavirus crisis may well shift middle-class voters to the left, at least for a while, as it did in the 1930s. However, the bulk of the evidence suggests that expressed preferences in opinion surveys of middle-class voters don’t necessarily conform with their behavior at the ballot box. As we saw above, for instance, members of the Progressive Congressional Caucus were notably less successful in predominantly middle-class districts compared to other Democrats in 2018. Democratic elected officials who are chiefly accountable to middle-class voters will likely remain a serious political liability for economically progressive policy-making.

The question, then, is whether any realistic alternative exists to mitigate the anti-redistributive, middleclass bias of many Democratic politicians by building broad, multiracial, working-class electoral coalitions that can hold elected officials accountable to a Sanders-style political program. This is the wager made by proponents of confrontation.

The Path of Confrontation The second electoral strategy socialists might choose is to build new organizations or coalitions based explicitly on a zero-sum, class-based political logic. Rather than trying to work with existing bases of power in the Democratic coalition, this strategy seeks to create new legislative blocs and electoral constituencies based on a message of confrontation with the Democratic leadership and their principal donors. In the legislature, this will mean doggedly advocating for a clear, working-class-oriented platform, and threatening Democrats with primary challenges whenever they fail to support that platform. In electoral terms, it entails building a primarily working-class support base, focused on nonvoters and independents with weak partisan attachments to the Democratic Party, as well as working-class Democratic partisans who feel sufficiently disillusioned with the party leadership to take a chance on insurgent primary candidates. The confrontation strategy could also be carried out at any level of government, depending on what resources are available. This approach by no means rules out the possibility of making strategic alliances with existing blocs in the Democratic Party coalition: the decision of Bernie Sanders to caucus with congressional Democrats, despite his strong, public denunciations of the Democratic Party over several decades, is a good example. In general, however, the confrontation strategy privileges electoral threat over persuasion and mutual accommodation. Confrontation will almost certainly alienate potential allies, both in the legislature (Democrats) and

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among the electorate (middle-class liberals and strong Democratic partisans, across class lines), but if successful, it could generate a larger number of new allies. While it’s been a common strategy employed by populist politicians around the world during periods of time when traditional parties have experienced sharp declines in electoral support, confrontation has rarely been employed effectively at the national level in the United States. This is because of the relative stability of the two major parties over time, and the failure of third-party electoral projects that have attempted to supplant one or both of them. That said, there have been attempts to execute a strategy along these lines at the national level through Democratic (and Republican) primaries. Generally, however, these battles have been waged between powerful blocs within the party establishment — the 1912 Republican contest between Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, for example, or Franklin Roosevelt’s effort to purge the Democratic Party of anti–New Deal Southern Democrats in 1938 — rather

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than by an outsider bloc against party insiders writ large. These efforts were also not particularly successful. Bernie Sanders’s two presidential campaigns represent something closer to the confrontation approach applied to groups outside the party establishment. Sanders openly challenged Democratic Party leaders, sought to build an electoral apparatus without depending on any traditional sources of funding from within the Democratic coalition, and enjoyed the support of only a handful of elected Democrats. He explicitly sought to bring nonvoters and low-propensity voters into his coalition, in order to compensate for the low levels of support he received among strong Democratic partisans (particularly those over thirty-five). Yet this strategy faced limitations that ultimately proved insurmountable, and it underperformed expectations in key respects, particularly in terms of mobilizing working-class voters to take part in the Democratic primary. The most successful examples of the confrontation strategy have come at the state level, most notably in North Dakota and Minnesota in the 1910s and 1920s. In North Dakota, the Nonpartisan League (npl) successfully took over the Republican Party between 1916 and 1918 by creating an electoral organization distinct from that party. The organization used the primary system to wage an open electoral war against the Republican establishment in the state. By 1918, as Richard Valelly describes, the npl had “seized control of North Dakota government to an extent simply unknown in American state politics before or since then.” Based on this extraordinary electoral success, the n p l in 1919 was able to push through wide-ranging reforms in education, health care, and other

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public services, even in the face of extreme opposition from elites in the state. In Minnesota, the npl created an electoral organization to compete in the Republican primaries. It was so successful that it prompted Republicans to ban npl candidates from running independent campaigns in the general election after first losing in the Republican primaries. Since Minnesota was effectively a one-party (Republican) state at the time, and since the npl was already a powerful electoral force, in 1922 it chose to abandon its Republican primary strategy and instead create the independent Farmer-Labor Party (flp). During its heyday in the 1920s and ’30s, the Minnesota flp was able to elect three governors, four US senators, and eight US House representatives, in addition to securing majorities in the Minnesota state legislature. A similar strategy today, carried out at either the state or national level, would offer several important advantages. First, as I mentioned above, winning legislative majorities requires a strategy with wide appeal across the working class. As we saw above, the coalition strategy has not been electorally successful in areas with large concentrations of white workers. By contrast, while Sanders’s support declined in white working-class areas in 2020, there is some evidence that his confrontational class rhetoric, combined with a platform based on policies that are popular across the broad working class, could be more effective than the coalition strategy in securing red-state victories. For instance, Sanders has a long track record of electoral success in heavily working-class areas in Vermont, and he consistently outperformed his coalition-oriented progressive rival Elizabeth Warren in head-to-head contests against Donald Trump throughout battleground states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. This is consistent with evidence suggesting that Sanders was viewed less unfavorably by rural Americans than all the other 2020 Democratic primary contestants. Furthermore, polling has found that key planks of Sanders’s economic program, particularly Medicare for All, are more popular in rural areas than they are

in both suburban and urban communities. Finally, the strong negative correlation between income level and support for Sanders in the 2020 primaries indicates that his populist economic message can resonate with working-class voters. A second potential benefit of the confrontation strategy is that it could be more effective in holding elected officials accountable. Historically, progressives in the Democratic Party have been keenly aware of the inherent difficulties in enforcing discipline around progressive planks of the party program when relying on a political strategy that seeks the broadest possible support among legislative and electoral blocs within the ideologically diffuse Democratic coalition. There were important movements in the 1950s and ’70s that aimed to address this problem by overhauling the party’s internal structure (such as by implementing biannual national conventions, adopting a party platform, and abolishing seniority rules). Though these efforts did produce some gains, they were largely unsuccessful. This failure can be explained, at least in part, by the fact that the progressives pushing for reform could not credibly threaten to exit the party if their demands were not met, and they were unwilling or unable to use primary challenges on a large scale. However, if a similar approach were to be taken today, by an organization that was independent of the Democratic Party’s formal structures — one that focused on Democratic primary challenges — it could conceivably enjoy greater success. Instead of directly contesting for power within the key institutions of the party apparatus (like the Democratic National Committee, or state and local

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committees), this organization would create a parallel structure with its own internal decision-making procedures, fundraising mechanisms, and political identity. We would be hearkening back to the npl strategy discussed above. Our formation would require all candidates it supported to commit to a clear platform, and would itself commit to withdrawing organizational and financial support from elected officials who reneged on that commitment. If we were successful in winning a significant bloc of seats in a state legislature (or in the US House), our threat to primary recalcitrant Democrats might be taken seriously enough to push some of them leftward on key policies. Finally, the confrontation strategy could help to build an organized long-term base for left politics in the United States. The exigencies of the electoral cycle mean that progressive moments come and go, and it is very difficult to convert the energy of an insurgent electoral campaign into a durable political organization capable of patient movement-building. Indeed, virtually every important national-level left-wing insurgency in the last century — from Robert La Follette and the Conference for Progressive Political Action in 1924, to Jesse Jackson and the Rainbow Coalition in 1988 — squandered any chance of building durable progressive organizations through an excessive reliance on the insurgent presidential candidate. Employing a confrontational strategy in the wake of Sanders’s 2020 presidential bid and

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the economic downturn caused by covid-19 could be an effective way of creating a political home for people who have lost faith in the Democratic Party establishment and its capacity to meet the needs of working people. Even if its short-term electoral prospects were relatively limited, an organization formed along these lines could be effective in long-term constituency and movement-building, while also playing a role in popularizing leftist ideas among an increasingly sympathetic working class. Such an organization would run primary challenges against incumbent Democrats at all levels of government (depending on its organizational and financial resources), and would also carry out sustained voter outreach campaigns in working-class communities between electoral cycles. If the group maintained a clear and consistent program that distinguished it from the Democratic establishment, while offering its membership a more significant role in organizational decision-making, it could conceivably maintain a loyal base of support even in the face of slow advances on the electoral front.

Why Confrontation Could Fail All that said, the confrontation strategy also has serious weaknesses. First, and perhaps most obvious, the electoral viability of this approach is far from clear. Despite the promising figures discussed above, the Sanders 2020 campaign fell far short of its own promise to dramatically expand the electorate through bold redistributionist demands. To the extent that Sanders did well in white working-class districts in 2016, a prime cause was opposition to Hillary Clinton rather than the outright appeal of democratic socialism. Hence in 2020, when more moderate but also more popular figures — relative to Clinton — like Joe Biden were on the menu, many white working-class voters jumped from the Sanders ship. Others simply didn’t participate in the Democratic primary. Additionally, the evidence from recent electoral cycles that economic

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populists outperform centrists in congressional races is mixed at best. Second, since the confrontational approach requires open conflict with the very legislators and constituencies that currently offer the most plausible route to winning key pieces of progressive legislation — which is to say, the rest of the Democratic Party — it runs the risk of producing outcomes that could ultimately put left political movements on a weaker footing. For example, cio president John L. Lewis attempted to chart an independent path from the Democratic Party in the early 1940s by supporting Republican presidential nominee Wendell Willkie in 1940. This proved disastrous, as

the vast majority of the labor movement — judging the political risks to be far too great — was unwilling to follow him.

This set back labor’s electoral efforts for years, and it left John Lewis in the political wilderness. In turn, the Lewis-led Un i t e d M i n e

Workers of America’s 1943 decision to launch a nationwide coal strike — in defiance of both the cio and the Democratic Party — backfired fantastically, supplying a pretext for the viciously anti-union SmithConnally Act later that year. Lewis’s efforts faced objective limits that no confrontational strategy, however bold or innovative, could have overcome. Other attempts have been made to forge a middleground strategy between open conflict and quiescence to Democratic Party leaders. At least one important figure in the cio’s political leadership, for instance, called for progressive labor to seriously consider the threat of withdrawing its campaign resources from Democrats in 1956. The goal, as explained by the cio pac’s assistant director, Tilford Dudley, would have been to force the party leadership to drop the seniority rules in Congress that gave Southern Democrats outsize influence. According to Dudley: “If we really did this, and meant it, it would be a thrilling revolution in American politics. But we won’t do it.” It is impossible to know how successful the cio would have been had they taken Dudley’s suggestion seriously. Evidently, however, virtually the entire cio leadership believed his strategy was not a risk worth taking, since it could further empower the Republicans in Congress. Today, the labor movement has much less leverage over Democratic leaders when compared to the 1940s and ’50s, and the only labor organizations that would

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Virtually every important insurgency in the building durable progressive organizations insurgent presidential candidate. even consider the confrontational strategy lie at the margins of Democratic politics. Even if these groups were willing to withhold support for mainstream Democrats, their resources are so limited that losing them would not prove fatal to many Democratic candidates. Most Democrats would be perfectly happy to forgo the headache of appeasing marginally useful, and potentially antagonistic, progressive forces in their coalition. Another alternative would be defection to a third party, but unless that party’s constituency were large enough to convince Democrats they could not win without it, the most likely result would be marginalization and a politically debilitated left. And given that partisan polarization is, by many measures, higher today than at any other time in modern US history, it is unlikely that a significant percentage of the electorate will be convinced any time soon that there is no meaningful difference between the Democratic and Republican parties. This problem is compounded by the fact that the most likely supporters of a Sanders-style third party based on economic populism are the least likely to defect from the Democratic Party. As the figure below shows, it is neither disillusioned former Democrats, nor independents who may not feel the party represents their interests but who vote for it on strategic grounds, who are most eager for more left-wing economic policy. To the contrary, voters who identify strongly with, and feel most adequately represented by, the Democratic Party are the staunchest democratic socialists in the electorate. Hence, a “successful” third-party challenge that garnered enough votes to hurt Democrats and reward Republicans, but not enough to position itself as a viable electoral alternative, would make that party extremely unpopular among the voters most receptive to its political message. If anything, a third-party approach would be likely to push progressive voters even closer to the Democrats, as they sought to prevent further losses to the Republicans. The spoiler problem is precisely why even the most vocal proponents of a third-party alternative from within the Democratic coalition have ultimately decided against 88

taking the plunge. An important example here is former United Auto Workers (uaw) president Walter Reuther. In response to growing disillusionment with the Truman administration’s failure to press forward with the New Deal agenda, Reuther in 1946 called on the uaw and its allies “to work toward the eventual formation of a broad new progressive party which will truly represent the needs of our nation and its people.” In the end, however, understanding the extraordinary political risk associated with splitting the Democratic coalition during a period of Republican resurgence, Reuther never took any concrete steps toward the formation of a labor party. It is conceivable that things might have looked different if Truman had been routed in 1948 (indeed, third-party proponents in the uaw even planned an educational conference to prepare for the formation of a labor party, to be held on the date of Thomas Dewey’s 1949 inauguration), but as it happened, no mass defection from the Democrats materialized. The only real potential leverage that an organization pursuing the confrontation strategy would have over Democratic candidates and lawmakers is the threat of waging as many primary challenges as its organizational resources allowed (assuming, of course, that successful insurgents could win in general elections). This approach could certainly prove effective in increasing the number of disciplined progressives and leftists in Congress and state houses. Beyond the risk of alienating critical allies, however, it would also run up against serious limitations when it came to legislative influence. Insurgent candidates could conceivably scare a fair number of legislators to the left; if elected in sufficient numbers, they could serve as a consistent voting bloc to obstruct anti-progressive legislation. That said, leftists’ ability to force Democratic leaders in Congress and state legislatures to actually pass progressive legislation is limited, among other things, by the fact that those leaders don’t believe they can win majorities if their candidates in relatively moderate or conservative areas are associated with overly progressive legislation. This is the same problem already discussed above in connection with the coalition strategy.

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last century squandered any chance of through an excessive reliance on the

Even if left-wing candidates and lawmakers were totally willing to burn their political bridges with the rest of the Democratic Party, then, they would still have little capacity to ensure the passage of progressive legislation. The only context in which the confrontation strategy could succeed in guaranteeing such legislation would be if insurgent lawmakers held a majority of seats, so that they wouldn’t have to depend on alliances with any other Democrats (as the nplers were able to do in North Dakota in 1919, for example). This is unlikely to happen in the foreseeable future, either at state or national level. Short of that, it is possible that progressives could exert more legislative influence if the Democratic electorate shifted decisively to the left. This is arguably why the Tea Party and its subsequent iterations have been so successful in shaping the Republican agenda. Republican leaders understand that their base is very conservative — more than three-quarters of Republicans identify as conservative — so they can afford to pass elements of the extreme-right agenda without generating serious divisions among the party base. By contrast, Democratic leaders face a more diverse and less ideological base: only around half of Democrats identify as liberals today, which is still a historic high (up from 40 percent in 2010). As a result, in order to maintain support among the broad set of interests and ideologies that characterize the Democratic coalition, candidates often have to distance themselves from elements of the progressive agenda. Yet even if the current leftward shift of Democratic voters continues — assuaging the party’s fear of alienating segments of its base by enacting progressive legislation — Democratic leaders will still face a major additional hurdle to progressive reforms: in order to win the Senate or the presidency, Democrats have to prevail in states with electorates that are majority conservative, and increasingly so. This means that they have to appeal not only to centrist Democrats, but also to right-of-center voters. Democratic leaders worry, not illogically, that they cannot win if they make too many policy concessions to the Left.

However, if Democrats could find a progressive message that was as effective in highly liberal urban and suburban districts as it was in rural districts, this could change. The Sanders movement has suggested such a message, and it may prove to be especially compelling in the coming years if the Democratic Party is unable to put forward economic solutions for working-class people on the vast scale required by the coronavirus crisis. Even so, it remains to be seen how realistic such a strategy could be. Its proponents must continue experimenting with models based on the most successful cases that we’ve seen to date.

What’s Next? In practice, the extent to which one approach is pursued over the other in the short to medium term will depend on the outcome of this year’s presidential and congressional elections, as well as on the political learning that occurs as we take stock of the last four years and update our strategies based on dramatically evolving conditions, both political and economic. At the national level, if Donald Trump is reelected, the prospects of either strategy will be limited in the medium term. We will be forced to focus our energies on defensive battles against an almost certainly emboldened and more dangerous second-term Trump, and increasingly desperate Democratic voters will become even more risk-averse than they were during the 2020 primaries. It is important to remember that, however much establishment Democrats are loath to pass bold reforms, even Obama-era Democrats took important steps to stem the tide of rising inequality — though they were unwilling or unable to pass sweeping legislation to actually reverse the decline in working-class living standards. For almost all progressive voters, then, maximizing Democratic electoral victories during a second Trump administration will be much more important than attacking establishment Democrats Democrats for not doing more.

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4.0 3.5 3.0 2.5 2.0

Dem. to Ind. Dem. Leaner Weak Dem.

1.5

Democratic Party Does Not Represent My Interests (higher = stronger agreement)

Strong Dem.

1

2

3

4

5

If I Were to Vote for a Third Party, On Economic Issues I’d Want It To Be (1 = More Liberal, 5 = More Conservative)

If Trump loses, by contrast, the medium-term prospects of the coalition strategy will be enhanced. Under these conditions — particularly if Democrats win the Senate — there is a chance of passing popular, progressive policies to avert economic depression. Yet we should not be overly optimistic. Even with Democratic control of the White House and both chambers of Congress, the possibility of sweeping progressive reforms would be limited by — to name just a few factors — a president with little political vision who is reliant on a neoliberal brain trust, a non-filibuster-proof Democratic majority in the Senate, and opposition from conservative Democratic senators like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. Nonetheless, the opportunities are real, and it is difficult to imagine advocates of the confrontation strategy finding too many progressives sympathetic to their arguments under such conditions. If Democrats win control of the presidency and both houses of Congress, but they fail to deliver at least some of the progressive agenda, however, the viability of the confrontation approach might increase significantly. More Democrats may become disillusioned with their party, and more working-class Americans may be open to a combative, populist message. Unfortunately, many Americans may also become more receptive to an even more insidious brand of Trumpism.

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 Source: Democracy Fund Voter Study Group data set. “Dem. to Ind.” indicates voters who identified as Democrats in 2011, but who no longer did so and did not lean Republican in 2018.

The same logic might be applied to the confrontation strategy’s prospects in the event of a defeat of Joe Biden in 2020: in other words, mass disillusionment with the party establishment’s capacity to beat Trump (again) paves the way for an even stronger Sanders-style insurgency within the party in 2024. But this scenario is less plausible. It is more likely that a Biden defeat would rally progressives further round the flag of electoral pragmatism to stop additional Republican advances. This possibility is all the more likely since we know parties out of government are much more willing to make rhetorical concessions to their activist base than parties in power — after all, they have little to lose politically from doing so. In other words, a Biden defeat would give establishment Democrats more political space to appease progressive demands than a Biden presidency, and this would be likely to further constrain insurgent challengers. At the state level, the coalition strategy has a much greater chance of success in strongly Democratic states,

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where a focused coalition of left and progressive electoral groups could conceivably win enough seats in the next couple of electoral cycles to constitute an influential minority in the Democratic caucus, if not a majority. In turn, if a wide range of progressive and left national organizations concentrated their efforts on a confrontation strategy in one state or a small number of states, they could conceivably make real headway (especially if the coalition included significant elements of the progressive labor movement). That said, the negative consequences of paying less attention to other states or to federal races could be considerable. If advocates of the confrontation approach hope to demonstrate the viability of their strategy, however, focusing on state-level races in one or a small handful of states that are not Democratic strongholds might be the most effective way to do so. Finally, either approach might be successful in specific municipalities, especially those with nonpartisan elections or with single-party Democratic rule. Indeed, we have seen isolated successes of the confrontation strategy in the not-too-distant past in places like Burlington, Vermont; Jackson, Mississippi; and Richmond, California — not to mention historical examples in places like Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Reading, Pennsylvania; and Schenectady, New York, to name but a few — and we have seen many more successful examples of the coalition strategy. Progressives and socialists should certainly take advantage of local-level electoral opportunities, particularly in larger cities, to experiment with progressive policies, expand their electoral base (especially among working-class communities and communities of color), and deepen their bench of effective candidates. As important as these efforts are, however, the fiscal constraints facing municipal governments limit the broader impact of electoral gains at the local level. Where possible, then, regardless of whether they focus on the confrontation or coalition strategy, progressives and socialists should set their sights on the state and federal levels.

There is no simple means of adjudicating the relative merits of coalition and confrontation: inevitably, both will continue to be tested to one degree or another — often in combination. The coalition strategy offers a realistic theory for how progressives might expand their ranks substantially in state and federal legislatures and exert greater influence over lawmaking. Yet it does not explain how progressives and democratic socialists can hold elected officials accountable in the absence of a serious electoral threat, nor does it offer a strategy for progressive success in the many red and purple states where a traditional liberal message tends to fail. For its part, the confrontation strategy offers a way to hold officials accountable and build electoral coalitions across the broad working class, but it bases its claims on limited evidence. If unsuccessful, the strategy could generate serious negative political consequences for progressives and leftists. In other words, the coalition strategy offers less uncertainty but potentially fewer benefits, while the confrontation strategy points to much broader political horizons but is based on a number of critical and largely untested assumptions. Ultimately, progressives and socialists have to seriously assess whether the coalition strategy rests on a realistic assessment of the Left’s level of political influence — or, alternatively, if it is based on a selfdefeating aversion to disrupting existing political alliances within the Democratic Party that hinders a bolder, and potentially more effective, confrontational alternative. Conversely, is the confrontation approach grounded in a hard-nosed appraisal of the objective limits of reform and the nature of political leverage in a capitalist democracy? Or is it based on a set of idealistic, if not naive, assumptions about the prospects of class politics in the United States that could undermine less flashy but ultimately historic advances? These are the questions we should be debating, as the answers will have major implications for democraticsocialist strategy during a period when the stakes could not be higher.

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How the Labour Party Lost the Chance of a Lifetime BY RONAN BURTENSHAW

Corbynism had a popular program — but not the popular insurgency it needed to fight for it. when we look back at this era of British politics, it will be defined by the battle between two projects for radical change: Brexit and Corbynism. Both claimed the mantle of deep public frustration with not just a single policy or government but decades of developments. Both promised fundamental transformation in the nature of democracy. Both mounted insurgencies against the gatekeepers of Westminster politics. In December, one vanquished the other. This trajectory was not set in stone. The 2017 general election came just one year after the Brexit referendum. Then, Labour recorded its largest increase in vote share since 1945. Brexit influenced the campaign but didn’t dominate it. Instead, Labour’s left-wing policy platform proved hugely popular. The British Election Study estimated that between 26 and 34 percent of Labour’s supporters voted Leave just one year earlier. It seemed plausible that economic inequality would be the issue that defined politics for years to come. Three years later, Corbynism is over. Labour is recovering from an election defeat in which it lost seats it had held for decades, in some cases for a hundred years. The political terrain is shaped by Brexit — young versus old, cities versus towns, cosmopolitans versus patriots — and the prospects for class politics appear bleak. But it didn’t have to be this way. ILLUSTRATION BY HARRY HAYSOM

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HOW THE LABOUR PARTY LOST THE CHANCE OF A LIFETIME

In 1959, Nye Bevan said of the Left that “we have never suffered from too much audacity; we have suffered from too little.” Sixty years later, the same was true of Corbynism.

Changing the Common Sense in the weeks since December’s defeat, the 2017 election has scarcely been mentioned in the media. But the fact remains that Labour under Jeremy Corbyn secured nearly 13 million votes, far surpassing not only the Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband election defeats, but even the last two Tony Blair victories. It was a remarkable comeback performance from a party that had been more than 20 points behind at the beginning of the campaign. Euphoria ensued: Labour rose to a clear lead in national polls, and mps who had savaged their leader only months earlier now proclaimed themselves Corbynites. However, the results of 2017 disguised serious problems. The Left had not won the battle for the party, which remained largely unreformed and, especially in parliament, opposed to its agenda. It faced a ferociously hostile media — not only in the right-wing press but in nominally left-leaning outlets such as the Guardian and the Mirror. And in many heartland seats, from Bassetlaw and Bolsover to Great Grimsby and Don Valley, victory in 2017 came alongside major increases for the Tories, who had captured votes cultivated by the UK Independence Party in the decade prior. Fundamental and irreversible shifts in wealth and power are not achieved without stubborn resistance. This should have been expected. But Corbynism had another problem: in two years, it hadn’t managed to change the broader political landscape outside Westminster. There was no sign of an uptick in class conflict; trade union membership was continuing its slow decline. Days lost to strike action were minimal; even social movements, which had murmured with life in the years prior to 2015, had fallen back into hibernation. Corbynism had a popular program — but not the popular insurgency it needed to fight for it. The socialist premise has always been that entrenched opposition can be overcome by uniting the working-class majority of the country. This means building a coalition based on majoritarian material interests that can challenge the power of concentrated 94

wealth. But the entire apparatus of British politics — its parties, its papers, its patrons — acts to ensure that this is not the basis on which national debates take place. Instead of conflict between classes, their hope is that the conflict is limited to the one within the ruling class, between those with liberal and conservative worldviews. It is not possible to overcome this dynamic inside Westminster alone. For Corbynism to be successful, it had to change how politics was done, sustaining a vibrant grassroots movement that could fight for its policies outside of parliament as well. This meant fundamentally transforming the Labour Party and breaking with its tendency to see politics entirely through an electoral lens. And it meant rebuilding social institutions — the basis of working-class community across Britain — to stem the tide of atomization that threatened the basis of collective action. Without such a strategy, class politics would always be impossible to maintain. Corbynism had tapped into widespread anger — but this anger could be released through other forms of politics as well. The most potent was one centered on globalization, which relied on culture wars and divided people based on their social views rather than their interests. Corbynism had one chance to prevent its rise: it had to seize on the 2017 general election result to remake politics in its image.

The Months We Wasted in many ways, it is understandable that the movement around Corbyn was disoriented by 2017. It had spent the previous two years under siege. Corbyn was elected Labour leader in September 2015 — by November, the right-wing press had whipped up a frenzy over whether he bowed deeply enough to the Queen, and half of his shadow cabinet was in revolt over his refusal to bomb Syria. The next year saw the Brexit referendum and then an attempted coup against his leadership. The attacks were relentless. June 2017 brought a very different experience: popularity. Corbyn himself had endured a remarkable rise in his approval ratings during the campaign and was now feted by many commentators who had previously labeled him an extremist. The path forward for any ambitious Labour mp was clear: they had to make their peace with Corbynism and its burgeoning support base if they were to stand any chance at career progression.

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For a brief moment, it seemed as though those obstacles — the opposition within the party, the hostility of the press — were not so great, and that a left-led Labour government was just around the corner. But, of course, this was not the case. The establishment had not dropped its opposition to socialist policies just because they proved popular. Corbynism, meanwhile, put itself in “permanent campaign mode.” There was talk about using this strategy to keep the grassroots mobilized, but its chief function was to prolong the high of the campaign for as long as possible — and to avoid returning to the harder and more conflictual realities that had preceded it. Instead of using the political capital earned by 2017’s remarkable performance to tackle the deeply entrenched

obstacles inside and outside the party, the movement seemed intent on basking in the glory. The months after the summer of 2017 were the moment when a second wave of Corbynism had to be built. Questions should have been asked about why the level of struggle outside parliament — in workplaces and movements — was so low. After surging in the cities and among younger people, determined efforts needed to be made to reach out to voters in heartland areas where the Tories were making gains. Instead of mock-Glastonbury festivals like Labour Live, which spoke only to the converted, resources needed to be directed to building lasting social institutions that could give the project a meaningful presence in communities. There was a time when

Labour under Jeremy Corbyn secured nearly 13 million votes, far surpassing not only the Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband election defeats, but even the last two Tony Blair victories.

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trade union branches, Labour associations, and party street captains served this function. The last century was full of ambitious attempts to go beyond them, too — from socialist Sunday schools to Clarion cycling clubs. No serious attempt was made under Corbynism to reverse the decline of these institutions. We were not present in working-class people’s dayto-day lives. Right-wing tabloids like the Sun and the Daily Mail were. As 2017 drew to a close, it was clear that the muchprophesied collapse of the Tory government was not on the horizon. Instead, Corbynism was gradually sucked back into the old Westminster politics where its energies had been stunted in years prior. The battle was soon underway again in the party, too. As Corbynmania faded, elite liberal interests set about shifting the debate away from class questions, where they had found themselves increasingly squeezed. Instead of challenging the Brexit culture war, their intention was to force the Labour Party into it on the side of Remain. In April 2018, the People’s Vote movement was launched.

The Brexit Culture War labour’s brexit policy in the 2017 general election was highly effective. At that time, the party promised to respect the referendum result and to focus the debate on “what sort of country we want to be after Brexit.” The reason why Corbynism, which had supported Remain in the referendum, chose this path was clear: no classbased coalition for socialist politics could be built while promising to overturn the referendum. Whichever way you assessed class — by income, skill level, education, abcde social grades, or self-identification — most working-class people had supported Brexit. For millions of workers, that vote was not just like any other. It was an expression of dissatisfaction with decades of political and economic action, as well as an attempt to force those in power to listen to people and places that had been neglected. This was not the only — or even the dominant — part of the Brexit coalition. But it was a substantial part that could not be ignored by the Labour Party. It also happened that 148 of Labour’s own seats voted Leave, compared to just 84 that voted Remain. For class politics to have any chance of dominating the national debate in the years that followed, the potency 96

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Instead of remaking politics in its image, Corbynism was remade by Brexit.

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had to be taken out of the Brexit divide. Labour had to be the party that argued it was time for Britain to move on from the referendum. This didn’t mean avoiding the issue or trying to triangulate between its two sides, but instead putting forward a comprehensive policy backing either a customs union or a Norway-style deal. That kind of approach would have made life much harder for Theresa May and Boris Johnson. They wanted the culture war battles, which could give the Conservative Party the appearance of speaking on behalf of the people against a Westminster establishment. These battles would also distract from the fact that, while in Westminster, successive Tory governments had overseen policies that savaged the living standards of millions in favor of the interests of millionaires. If Labour had put forward a viable alternative to Tory Brexit during the years of parliamentary wrangling that followed 2017, it could have avoided being painted as merely an obstructionist force. And if this alternative had been complemented with a genuine commitment to renewed democracy and regional rebalancing of the economy, the party’s prospects of being seen as a vehicle for real change by many in its heartland areas would surely have been significant. But Labour failed to take a decisive position. Week by week, the project was drawn further into a Westminster battle it could not win. Corbyn’s opponents in the Parliamentary Labour Party grew stronger, using the wedge of a second referendum to undermine his leadership and speak to party members who had all but written them off only months earlier. They were supported by a lavishly funded liberal campaigning effort — whose leading figures, including Alastair Campbell and Peter Mandelson, knew only too well that defeating Corbyn was as important as defeating Brexit. Their focus was almost exclusively on the Labour Party, which they attacked on a daily basis while providing a stream of positive coverage for the Liberal Democrats. Instead of remaking politics in its image, Corbynism was remade by Brexit. It was forced to adapt to its divides and respond to its developments. By the time the 2018 Labour conference arrived, many party members saw Brexit and not the prospect of a Corbyn government as the key political issue of the day. They duly voted through a motion — with the strong support of Keir Starmer — that opened the door to a second referendum.

The prospect of Corbynism being an insurgency in its own right was over.

Taking the Easy Road the failure to be decisive on Brexit was immensely costly. Over the months that followed, Corbyn, who had grown in popularity during the election as a campaigner that exuded authenticity, was reduced to a figure of calculation and parliamentary intrigue. In truth, the failures over Brexit summed up Corbyn’s limitations — he excelled as a moral leader but failed as a political one. His greatest moments came when defending principle under pressure, but he rarely demonstrated the comfort with strategy necessary to lead a project as ambitious as his own to power. This strength as a moral leader also came under attack throughout 2018. Labour’s antisemitism controversy, which had developed prior to the 2017 election, returned with a vengeance. It is easy to point to errors — from Corbyn’s endorsement of a clearly conspiratorial mural to the party’s failure to put in place effective procedures soon enough. But the recently leaked report (excerpted in this issue of Jacobin) has made clear that many of Corbynism’s early failings on the issue were the result of deliberate sabotage on the part of the Labour right. The truth is that only a tiny fraction of Labour’s members held antisemitic views — far less, in fact, than those of other parties. That this issue became headline national news owed far more to a campaign against the Corbyn project than to the specifics of the cases. This broader effort had a clear aim: to paint the entire movement as racist and thereby dent the moral appeal it possessed when challenging the genuine racism and class spite of the Tory government. Once again, a lack of decisive leadership had contributed to significant damage. The same couldn’t be said of the Brexiteers. At each moment when they possessed political capital, they used it. They pushed Theresa May into a hard-line position she didn’t believe in, then sabotaged her deal when she showed signs of compromise. They ensured her departure when she refused to renegotiate, then backed the Brexit Party in European elections to remind the Tories of the likely outcome if they did not replace her with someone committed to Brexit.

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Later, upon Boris Johnson’s ascendancy, they wasted no time in disposing of those Tories who objected to the trajectory — kicking Father of the House of Commons Kenneth Clarke and Churchill’s grandson Nicholas Soames out of the parliamentary party. This is the kind of ruthlessness that tends to characterize successful insurgencies. But, as time wore on, Corbynism increasingly took the easy road. Not only did it refuse to mount a fight within the parliamentary party, it leaned into those parts of its base — the young, the urban, the well educated — that were already onside and that best suited the terms of the Brexit culture war. The project narrowed at precisely the moment it needed to broaden, and and by 2019 it was tangibly speaking more to its own supporters and less to the class as a whole. In 2015, Labour had promised to reverse the long decline the party was suffering in its heartlands, a process that dated back to losing 5 million votes during the Blair government. But by 2019, it had become clear that this erosion was, in fact, continuing. Rather than being seen as a break with so much of what postindustrial communities hated about New Labour, Corbynism came to be seen as similarly distant and associated with the same aloof attitudes. The Left has tended to blame this on objective factors, such as the malign influence of the right-wing press — and their impact shouldn’t be underestimated. But even here, the question has to be asked: What was the strategy to defeat them? More than 60 percent of the newspapers people read each day in Britain are owned by Rupert Murdoch and the Daily Mail. This isn’t a new phenomenon. Corbynism wasn’t present in the vast majority of postindustrial communities in a way that might have circumvented their influence. Was the plan to win over the existing left-leaning press? Little effort seemed to be exerted here, which is understandable, given the hostility. But social media alone could never be sufficient. In this context, the failure to seriously explore media alternatives seems even more shortsighted. After all, even the timid Labour leadership of the 1980s had lent its support to the abortive News on Sunday effort. Why was the project so reluctant to explore building our own institutions? The tragedy of all this was that, unlike in previous years, Labour had a message worth communicating. Its proposed policies — a national investment bank, 98

a real overhaul of transportation networks, proper funding and powers for local councils, and thousands of green industrial jobs — would have substantially undone the damage inflicted by Margaret Thatcher on working-class areas. Sadly, in a political landscape dominated by Brexit, they didn’t resonate — or at least not sufficiently to drown out the Tory narrative: Labour no longer respects the result of the referendum because, fundamentally, it doesn’t respect you.

The Red Wall Crumbles corbynism’s accumulated failures were laid bare on December 12, 2019. An opposition party with a popular policy program had been thumped by a ten-year party of government that oversaw an economy most people felt was moving in the wrong direction. That simply does not happen without Brexit — which came to dominate British politics and, in the process, rescued the Conservatives from their own record. A lot of criticisms have been made of Labour’s election campaign. It lacked the dynamism of 2017, with fewer and more sparsely attended rallies, a video campaign that only found inspiration in the dying days, and a slogan — “It’s Time for Real Change” — that felt every bit the focus-grouped fudge it was. The manifesto had excellent policies, but it lacked a coherent vision of what a Labour society might be about — allowing it to be caricatured as a laundry list of fantastical promises. But, in truth, the die had been cast long before December. By 2019, Corbynism was not a project that working-class communities felt any ownership over. Its insurgent appeal had faded. Trapped in a Westminster game it couldn’t win, Labour felt like just another political party. Meanwhile, the debate over the future of the country revolved around Brexit. The class coalition that socialist politics relies upon was torn apart by its competing camps. Remain advocates would point to the fact that Labour lost more than a million voters to anti-Brexit parties. This is true, although many of those votes were in Scotland, where the dynamic was quite different. The People’s Vote campaign’s relentless focus on Jeremy Corbyn and Labour had taken a toll. In the end, however, its strategy came up disastrously short. Not only did the Liberal Democrats have a dismal night, Tory Remainers largely stuck with their party.

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For all the multiple millions of pounds poured into their efforts, the Remain campaign’s only meaningful contribution was to damage the Labour Party and defeat Jeremy Corbyn.

The Liberal Democrats’ post-election report was scathing in its account of their “high-speed car crash” of a campaign. In fact, it went so far as to admit that the party’s policy of revoking Brexit “alienated large chunks of the population” — including those who had voted Remain. For all the multiple millions of pounds poured into their efforts — and, at one stage, People’s Vote alone had a comparable number of staff in its headquarters to the Liberal Democrats — the Remain campaign’s only meaningful contribution was to damage the Labour Party and defeat Jeremy Corbyn. We should be under no illusions that this will be a worthy consolation for many of those involved. But it was Leave voting areas that defined the election. Fifty-two of the sixty seats Labour lost had voted Leave in 2016. A YouGov poll shortly after the election showed that Labour lost 40 percent of its 2017 Leave vote to the Tories and the Brexit Party. Only the Brexit Party’s decision not to stand down in contests for Labour seats prevented another dozen or more being lost where their vote was higher than the margin of victory. Another YouGov poll demonstrated the reason for the switch: 49 percent changed their votes because of Brexit, and only 27 percent because of Corbyn. The Labour Party’s internal report into the election failing — which was clearly written to justify Keir Starmer’s moderate political line — nonetheless noted that the Tories had managed to turn out almost 2 million previous nonvoters, largely older white men, over the question of Brexit. Many of the seats that Labour lost were party strongholds across generations. It had held Leigh since 1922, Newcastle-under-Lyme since 1919, and Rother Valley since 1918. In many seats, Labour didn’t just lose — it was decimated. In Ashfield, the party lost 18 points and finished third. In Great Grimsby, its vote share fell by 17 points, and there is now a Tory majority of more than 7,000 in a seat Labour had held since the Second World War. In all of these places, Labour’s downward trend began more than a decade ago, with 2017 merely a blip on the road. But even then, there were clear warning signs. In Leave-voting seats that the party lost during the Corbyn surge, 2019’s picture is truly disastrous. The Tory majority in Stoke-on-Trent South is now AFTER BERNIE

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11,000; in Walsall North, it is almost 12,000; in North East Derbyshire, it is nearly 13,000; and in Mansfield, it is 16,000. These are seats that had Labour mps less than five years ago.

Winning the Battle, Losing the War the party’s right has used December’s election defeat to argue that the Corbyn project in its entirety failed and should be consigned to history. Whatever Keir Starmer might have protested during his campaign, this is the logic he is following, too — summed up by his recent sacking of the most prominent Corbynite in his shadow cabinet, Rebecca Long-Bailey. Starmer’s politics are an attempt to turn back the Labour clock to the “soft-left” positions of Ed Miliband — ones that were soft enough to include attacks on benefit scroungers and trade unions, it should be added. Starmer hopes to carry this off more competently, by appealing to Britain’s right-wing press with “sensible opposition” that, in reality, offers little resistance to the Boris Johnson government. This program has produced a poll boost for the party, but it still languishes well below where it was at the height of Corbynism in late 2017 and 2018. And even if Starmer were to restore the party’s polling fortunes with this approach, an election is probably five years away. His politics will guarantee that those five years are spent with a prolonged shift to the right on everything from the economy to civil liberties to foreign policy. It is worth remembering that, even in defeat, Jeremy Corbyn received more than 10 million votes — substantially more than the party had received under soft-left Ed Miliband. In fact, the 2017 result of almost 13 million votes under Corbyn’s left-wing leadership is the only election since 1997 when Labour could claim widespread support in the country. The reason for this is clear: Labour’s policy program under Corbyn was enormously popular. Polling from bmg Research after the election demonstrated its enduring appeal. There were thumping majorities for policies like free personal care (83 percent in favor, just 3 percent against), net-zero carbon emissions by 2030 (70 to 7), a £10 minimum wage (67 to 12) and tax increases for those earning over £80,000 (60 to 16). Labour’s nationalization plans also drew significant support — with clear support on rail (57 to 100

16), water (53 to 18), energy (52 to 20), and mail (48 to 21). Renationalization of the nhs (48 to 19) gained similar approval. Even nationalized broadband — widely cited by critics as a policy that contributed to Labour’s downfall — was approved by a margin of 47 points to 21. In the past four years, Labour under Jeremy Corbyn has profoundly transformed the debate over the economy. As recently as the 2015 general election, the party had accepted that austerity was a necessary evil. It promised to match the Tories cut for cut outside of a small number of protected areas. Its headline manifesto commitment was to “cut the deficit every year.” Today, the tide has turned against austerity. But more fundamentally, it has turned against the market. In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher sold the market as a panacea for Britain’s economic problems — dynamic, efficient, and delivering benefits for consumers. That common sense endured for decades, but Corbynism brought it crashing down. The pandemic has made clear the degree to which there is now a consensus that the state and the public should play a larger role in the economy. Even the Conservative government has had to abandon its Thatcherite roots and flirt with a more interventionist approach. It has pledged increased spending on the nhs and infrastructure, and it has supported an unprecedented underwriting of wages in the form of the pandemic-induced furlough.Already, this is placing its own coalition under pressure. Changing the economic debate wasn’t Corbyn’s only legacy. After so many years in which party memberships declined and politics appeared to be hollowing out, Corbynism produced a remarkable growth in Labour Party membership — taking it to more than 500,000 at its height. It won a generation of younger people to socialist politics and forced anti-war positions onto the political agenda. It made millions of people believe that real change could be achieved through collective action, and that politics could be about more than choosing between the lesser of two whatevers. These legacies must be built upon, not cast aside. The battles Corbynism waged were ones that will confront any Labour Party that aspires to shift the balance of power in favor of workers. Now is not the time to shy away from these fights — it is the time to prepare the ground to win them next time.

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Cultural Capital CAPITALIST REALISM

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CULTURAL CAPITAL BASS AND SUPERSTRUCTURE

ALEX NIVEN

Don’t Look Back in Anger One advantage of being a millennial is that we have no real equivalent to the New Left apogee of 1968. As a result, freed from wistful thoughts of political and cultural might-have-been, we tend to look forward rather than back when we dream of a revolutionary moment. Having said that, for many of us — especially (but not only) those of us who grew up in Great Britain— there is one period in recent history that does tend to induce an ambivalent, slightly sheepish reverie. For those who lived through it, the so-called summer of Britpop, which began in 1994, following the death of Kurt Cobain, and ended with the election of Tony Blair as prime minister in May 1997, will always seem like a cultural high-water mark of some kind. But though most of us would agree that there was something pivotal about the mid-’90s, there is wild disagreement about the historical significance of Britpop. Was it

Britpop is often dismissed as an embarrassing, retrograde moment in British culture. But at its best, it hinted at what might have happened if the working class had managed to regain its sense of power and pride after the defeats of the 1980s. a failed breakthrough for an authentic modern populism, or just another tacky and reactionary example of postmodern “retromania”?

Britpop Sociology The tackiness was always there in abundance, of course, even when Britpop was at its most exhilarating. This was, at its roots, a musical movement that rejected the pretension and political earnestness of ’80s indie rock in favor of an aesthetic that was AFTER BERNIE

gaudy, louche, and — above all — popular. In the view of alpha Britpop bands like Suede, who emerged in 1993 with an eponymous debut album inspired by glam rock and the “bedsit pop” of the Smiths and Pet Shop Boys, the puritan post-punk tradition had fizzled out with the high seriousness and dead-end nihilism of grunge. In response, Suede offered an exaggeratedly British tableau of “crimplene, glamour, wit and irony” — a counterblast to

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grunge’s supposedly American emphasis on hard-rock authenticity. But over time, these shallow national caricatures, worked up by a British music press desperate for a new domestic scene to promote, would give way to something more inclusive of the whole atmosphere of the

High Nineties (if you’ll pardon the phrase). Boiled down to its sociological essence, Britpop was a sort of mad, mass-cultural symposium about class. Underneath the Union Jack imagery and the cartoon nationalism, Britpop unfolded as a dramatic battle between different ideas about the fate of the British proletariat. After a long decade in which the Conservative government had done a pretty good job of destroying the material basis of working-class identity in organized labor, Britpop celebrated a residual aesthetic tradition: the British mass culture of the postwar period, from David Bowie and the Beatles through punk and rave.

A Shallow Piece of Dignity

empowerment it had achieved in the twentieth century. As the Welsh band Manic Street Preachers put it in one of the most timely lyrics of the period: “Libraries gave us power / Then work came and made us free / What price now / for a shallow piece of dignity?” On the one hand, Britpop was a dubious parody of British working-class experience. In a summary that has never been bettered, the critic Jon Savage called it an “outer-suburban, middle-class fantasy of central London street life, with exclusively metropolitan models.” At the forefront of this tendency was Blur, whose lead singer, Damon Albarn, had grown up on the fault line between urban East London and nouveau riche Essex. Although Blur was a complex proposition overall, the band’s 1994 album, Parklife, was at least partly guilty of co-opting the mores of the British proletariat in the way Savage describes. Parklife featured artwork depicting greyhound racing, “mockney” vocals that flattened vowels and exaggerated glottal stops, and a series of songs smirking at subjects like Mediterranean package holidays, drinking lager down the pub, and unemployed teenage layabouts. Its tonguein-cheek, carnivalesque portrait of working-class culture

The big question was whether this would turn out to be a wake or a renaissance for working-class Britain and the moderate forms of 104

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captured — and helped to shape — the atmosphere of Britain between 1994 and 1997. Football, regional accents, crates of beer, and vintage sportswear — regardless of where you sat on the class spectrum, this was the unavoidable cultural mainstream in these years. But while Blur’s ambiguous art-school send-up of

LIBRARIES GAVE US POWER THEN WORK CAME AND MADE US FREE WHAT PRICE NOW FOR A SHALLOW PIECE OF DIGNITY?

proletarian leisure activities was Britpop’s early public face, its heart and soul would arrive in the form of an unequivocally workingclass band.

Looking for Some Action The five original members of Oasis grew up in the council estates and Irish immigrant enclaves of South Manchester. As such, whatever else can be said about it, there is no question that the Oasis phenomenon that eventually swallowed Britpop whole was rooted in the lived experience of working-class community in

Don’t Look Back in Anger

the 1980s and ’90s — its resentments, disappointments, bursts of optimism, and spasms of political rage. Anyone looking for answers to the big questions Britpop posed about class must examine the Oasis narrative in all its seedy, intoxicating glory.

I was looking for some action but all I found was cigarettes and alcohol.

Oasis had very little to do with Britishness per se. Their debut album, Definitely Maybe, appeared in the same year as Parklife. But in place of that album’s knowing cameos of life in suburban London, Definitely Maybe offered a more universal vision, which spoke of a Western postindustrial proletariat undergoing its own “end of history” moment. Oasis songs were, on the surface, full of classic rock traits and simple lyrics about seizing the day. But even in this superficial sense, they were a product of their social context. For example, songwriter Noel Gallagher partly derived his willingness to “steal” from the rock canon, all in the service of a good time, from his experience of the “dole culture” of the ’80s and ’90s. One consequence of neoliberal mass unemployment was the rise of a subversive, hedonistic lifestyle fueled by cheap intoxicants and enlivened by the nearest pop-cultural artifacts at hand.

This was the wellspring of the Oasis sound and worldview. As one of Definitely Maybe’s most anthemic lyrics opined, over a riff stolen from T. Rex: “I was looking for some action / But all I found was cigarettes and alcohol.” Oasis emerged from the scorched earth of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, offering a dream of escape into a sun-filled landscape of communal release. The quintessence of Gallagher’s idealistic side can be heard on the chorus of 1995’s “Acquiesce”: “We need each other/ We believe in one another / And I know we’re going to uncover / What’s sleepin’ in our soul.”

The Interregnum However, Oasis’s mix of simulated euphoria and underlying melancholy also expressed a deeper truth about ’90s Britain. As Britpop escalated, there was a growing sense in the country that better times were coming. The political reasons for this were

quite specific. Thatcher’s successor, John Major, presided over a deeply unpopular Conservative government. Meanwhile, his opposition counterpart, Tony Blair, enjoyed sky-high approval ratings after he became Labour

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we need each other we believe in one another and I know we’re going to uncover what’s sleepin’ in our soul.

leader in July 1994, and he was clearly the coming man. Major was not duty-bound to call an election until 1997. This was, if you like, a classic Gramscian moment — the old was dying, but the new could not be born. Yet, crucially, the long Britpop summer that Oasis came to dominate was decidedly not a time of morbid symptoms. As it turned out, Blair’s New Labour government mostly ended up continuing Thatcher’s political legacy after it came to power in 1997. But before this disillusionment kicked in, for a couple of years, the people of Britain were able to dream of an enlightened sequel to Thatcherism, founded in the purely imaginative, utopic world of popular culture. Perhaps Britpop was nothing more than a fleeting, culturalist daydream. But there is surely something worth remembering about this strange glitch in the neoliberal timeline, which hinted at what might have happened if the British working class really had managed to regain its sense of power and pride after the defeats of the 1980s. If you listen hard to the best Britpop music, you can hear the tragedy and the heroism of this failed dream echoing through the decades.

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DANIEL FINN ILLUSTRATION BY CHARLIE LE MAIGNAN

Where Have All the Political Footballers Gone? “Football gives meaning to life, yes. But life also gives meaning to football.”

Asif Kapadia’s film Diego Maradona is a superb documentary, but it’s also a time capsule from another age. Watching it, you can’t help comparing Maradona to his fellow Argentine Lionel Messi. If Kapadia wanted to make a study of Messi’s life twenty years from now, he would have little to work with: a highlights package of wonderful goals, interspersed with talking heads paying tribute to Messi’s footballing genius. The extracurricular drama of Maradona’s life would be entirely absent. 106

As far as Messi himself is concerned, this is probably no bad thing: he’s better off without Maradona’s cocaine habit, alleged domestic violence, or compromising ties with the Neapolitan Camorra. But something important has been lost along the way, too. Maradona’s career sheds light on some of the great political dramas of his time. In part, this was a matter of what he symbolized rather than the opinions he expressed: an Argentinian footballer scoring twice against England in the 1986 World Cup, four years after the № 38  /  SUMMER 2020

Falklands War; the world’s greatest player coming to Naples, at a time of mounting regional tensions, and lifting its team from mediocrity to claim the Italian championship at the expense of richer clubs from Turin and Milan. However, Maradona also took political stances of his own, associating with Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez, and joining protests against George W. Bush in 2005. Messi, who’s been carefully chaperoned by his club, Barcelona, since he was a teenager, keeps a much lower profile.

Where Have All the Political Footballers Gone?

Corporate Men The gulf between the two men reflects the changing nature of the game. In his book The Football Men, Simon Kuper describes how the growing professionalization and commercialization of European football has effectively killed off two archetypes: the hedonistic, rock-star player (Maradona, George Best) and the charismatic leader (Franz Beckenbauer, Johan Cruyff ). As Kuper explains, modern footballers are “actively discouraged from developing interests outside the game” and cut off from their peer group at a very early stage. They receive media training to learn the art of speaking at length without saying anything controversial. The clubs that invest so heavily in a player’s career want him to be “a slightly monomaniac corporate man and yes-man.”

no need to worry, as long as they manage their money well. At the highest level of the game, players circulate freely between cities and countries, going from Madrid to Manchester, Munich, and Milan without having to change their habits or lifestyle. This is not an environment that encourages people to develop strong political views, let alone express them in public.

“The Socialism I Believe In” This is not to say that football was a hotbed of politics before the age of Sky Sports and the Champions League. The degree of politicization varied: football in Italy had a strong connection with the country’s political struggles, as

John Foot shows in his great history Calcio. Roma and Lazio, the two teams from the Italian capital, had the image of being leftwing and right-wing clubs, respectively. No English team enjoyed the same reputation. Marcello Lippi, who coached Italy to World Cup triumph in 2006, is the son of a trade-union militant at the Fiat auto plant in Turin. According to Lippi, when he took a job in the ’90s as manager of Juventus — owned, like Fiat, by the Agnelli family — he went to his father’s grave to apologize: Lippi Sr had despised the Turin club and “all it stood for.” In English football, it was often managers rather than players who were politically outspoken. Bill Shankly, who first established Liverpool as one of England’s top

In Britain, home of the world’s most lucrative football league, soccer players are almost unique among high-profile professions because they are drawn overwhelmingly from the working class. In contrast with fields like politics, media, business, and law, privately educated footballers are vanishingly rare figures. Yet the wages they receive lift them out of the working-class experience altogether. In the recent past, players could make a decent living but would still have to find a new source of employment when they retired, often as managers or pundits. Their latter-day counterparts have AFTER BERNIE

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clubs, was an avowed socialist, whose concise definition of his political outlook still features on T-shirts and banners in the city: “The socialism I believe in is everybody working for the same goal and everybody having a share in the rewards. That’s how I see football, that’s how I see life.” Brian Clough and Jack Charlton were vocal in their support for the miners’ union during the great strikes of the 1970s and ’80s. The miners’ leader Arthur Scargill liked to tell a story about Charlton lending his car to the local union office during the 1984–85 strike. He borrowed it for the day to drive to Nottingham for a professional meeting with Clough, only to find himself stopped on the way to the city by a police blockade. The officers had orders to prevent any flying pickets from entering Nottinghamshire, so when they saw Charlton’s coal not dole sticker, they hauled him aside. Charlton asked the police to imagine what the famously irascible Clough would do to them all if he was late for his meeting, and they immediately waved him through.

I grew up in a very working-class area of Glasgow ... believing Labour was the party of the working man, and I still believe that . . . All my life I’ve seen Labour as the party working to get better health care for ordinary people, and the Tories really only caring about the people at the top. In 2012, Ferguson sent a message of support to Irish factory workers who were occupying their plant in Cork, recalling his own career as a union activist half a century earlier.

Two Exceptions Shankly, Clough, Charlton, and Ferguson all grew up in workingclass communities in Scotland or Northern England, at a time when the Labour Party and the trade unions were part of the social

The last representative of this tradition was the Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson, who led a strike by engineering apprentices in the Glasgow shipyards before he made a career in football. Ferguson was one of the celebrity backers that New Labour liked to parade in Tony Blair’s pomp. But the way he justified his support for the party had a distinctly “Old Labour” thrust: 108

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fabric. Modern-day footballers usually don’t have that experience. At the game’s summit, superrich clubs produce a standardized product for the world market, mimicking the development of global capitalism. Most of them are no longer socially embedded in any meaningful sense. The company that owns Manchester City has turned “City” into a transnational brand, with franchise clubs in Melbourne, Mumbai, and New York. Owners don’t even use their team as a vehicle for success in national politics, in the way Silvio Berlusconi once used ac Milan as a launchpad for his career as Italy’s prime minister. The Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich and the Emirati royal Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan bought Chelsea

Where Have All the Political Footballers Gone?

and Manchester City in the hope of laundering their reputations (“sportswashing”). They seem to have no interest in the British political scene, however, as long as it doesn’t interfere with their business. There are two main exceptions to this rule among the European superclubs: Barcelona and Liverpool. The Catalan team has such a strong connection with national identity that it couldn’t help being caught up in the agitation for statehood of recent years. The former Barcelona manager Pep Guardiola, a product of the club’s youth academy, is a vocal supporter of the Catalan independence movement who has used his media platform to denounce the repression of its leaders. Liverpool, meanwhile, has earned its reputation as the most leftwing, anti-Tory city in England. The Hillsborough disaster of 1989 established an inextricable link between football and politics in the city. Ninety-six fans died because of gross negligence by the same police force that had stitched up the miners at Orgreave a few years earlier. Senior police officers lied about what had happened to cover their tracks, with the enthusiastic support of Rupert Murdoch’s Sun, which published revolting, defamatory lies about the club’s supporters on its front page. Three decades later, a boycott of the Sun by Merseyside remains firmly in place. Liverpool fans have never forgiven their former manager Graeme Souness for granting the paper an interview in

LlIbErtAT FC BARCELONA

the early ’90s, when the wounds from Hillsborough were still raw. The long campaign of the Hillsborough families for justice has done as much as anything to expose the dark heart of the British state: not only have the families established the culpability of the police for “gross negligence manslaughter,” their efforts have also shed fresh light on the policing tactics used during the miners’ strike.

Gary Neville Is a Red It’s not surprising that the former Liverpool captain Jamie Carragher should have been a Labour supporter in last year’s general election. Carragher, who grew up in Liverpool and spent his whole career in the city, takes a few pages in his autobiography to explain AFTER BERNIE

why he cared far more about the club than the English national team: [W]henever I returned home from disappointing England experiences one unshakeable overriding thought pushed itself to the forefront of my mind, no matter how much the rest of the nation mourned. “At least it wasn’t Liverpool,” I’d repeat to myself, over and over ... If people want to condemn me and say I’m unpatriotic, so be it ... We all hear about the importance of 1966 to the country. For my family, the most important event at Wembley that year was Everton winning the fa Cup. Carragher explicitly links this disdain for England’s fortunes with a “them and us” mentality that took root on Merseyside during the Thatcher years: “I’ve heard the 109

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“The socialism I believe in is everybody working for the same goal and everybody having a share in the rewards. That’s how I see football, that’s how I see life.”

Kop sing ‘We’re not English, we are Scouse’. There’s no affinity with the national team.” There was a touching moment on election day last year when Carragher’s great rival, Gary Neville, joined him in urging a vote for Labour. The Manchester United player was notoriously hostile to Liverpool as a club — “Gary Neville is a red, he hates Scousers” was a familiar chant at Old Trafford — but his evident loathing for Boris Johnson put him on the same page as the vast majority of Liverpool fans.

James McClean Hates the Queen Of course, Barcelona and Liverpool still function in the same way as the other megaclubs, in a multibilliondollar sport that is full of ethically dubious commercial entanglements. There’s no such thing as a socialist football club at this level of the sport, nor could there be. However, a strong social context 110

is sometimes enough to lift players out of the conformist, depoliticizing marsh of the modern game.

understand the reasoning behind his decision, no matter how many times he respectfully explains it.

The Manchester United striker Marcus Rashford recently spearheaded a successful campaign pressuring the British government to extend the provision of free school meals for poor families into the summer holidays. Rashford recalled his own experience of childhood poverty in a letter to mps:

Like the Liverpool fans who have done more to challenge Rupert Murdoch than any center-left politician in Britain, Australia, or the United States, McClean and Rashford have shown that sport can still be a tool for political mobilization as well as a profitable enterprise.

As a family, we relied on breakfast clubs, free school meals, and the kind actions of neighbours and coaches. Food banks and soup kitchens were not alien to us; I recall very clearly our visits to Northern Moor to collect our Christmas dinners every year. Another striking example in the Premier League is the Irish footballer James McClean. McClean comes from Derry, a city that witnessed the Bloody Sunday massacre in 1972. For the last decade, he has been virtually the only highprofile figure to resist the mawkish, stultifying culture of jingoism built up around Remembrance Sunday (described by one broadcaster as “poppy fascism”). The poppy celebrates all the wars that the British Army has fought, including those in Ireland. Unsurprisingly, McClean had no interest in joining in, and he declined to wear a jersey with the poppy symbol attached. Since making that fateful choice, McClean has been the target of an orchestrated hate campaign, whipped up every year by the rightwing press, who pretend not to № 38  /  SUMMER 2020

Football for the People Bill Shankly once playfully remarked that football wasn’t a matter of life and death to him: “It’s more important than that.” The passage of time has turned that wry, self-deprecating comment into a rather stale cliché. A couple of years ago, the Manchester United legend Eric Cantona published a fine article calling for the sport to be transformed: Football is one of life’s great teachers. It is one of life’s great inspirations. But the current business model of football ignores so much of the world ... Football should be for the people. This does not have to be a utopian idea. Cantona described the influence on his life and career of his grandfather, a Spanish Republican refugee who came to France in 1939. It’s a fair bet that Shankly would have endorsed his view of the game’s social importance: “Football gives meaning to life, yes. But life also gives meaning to football.”

CULTURAL CAPITAL WAYS OF SEEING

BY PHOEBE BRAITHWAITE

Mark Fisher’s Popular Modernism At the heart of the work of Mark Fisher is something he called “popular modernism.” By this, he meant a kind of culture — most often found in music — that straddled the experimental and the mainstream. While popular, it required work to be fully understood, doing away with past forms, following a modernist “make it new” imperative. As an idea, it was based on the claim that the most interesting postwar culture had developed out of a flourishing welfare state, made by the students of municipal art schools and the recipients of higher education grants. Pop modernism, Fisher argued, embodied a sense of possibility that never fully recovered from the thoroughgoing attack it underwent in the 1980s. However, he was by no means ignorant of contemporary pop music: he went from praising the “sadness” and “ambivalence” of early Rihanna to applauding the “existentialism”

It’s been three years since we lost Mark Fisher, but his vision of a socialist future endures.

of Dido. While he found a natural habitat in polemic, Fisher’s primary work was a matter of fleshing out alternative realities, breathing form into the lost futures that haunt our present. An 800-page volume, k-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher, was released in 2018 by Repeater Books, the publishing house Fisher set up with Tariq Goddard after leaving Zero Books. It collects writings, interviews, and blogs from 2004 to 2016 and attempts to set in order the thinking of a figure whose 2017

AFTER BERNIE

death was a great loss to socialist intellectual life. Fisher’s philosophy of “going beyond the pleasure principle” underpins this writing. As he argued in Capitalist Realism, we are trapped in a state of “depressive hedonia”: not “an inability to get pleasure” but “an inability to do anything else except pursue pleasure.” The work in the anthology explores this state through a wealth of genres, art forms, and ways of life — hip-hop, indie, neo-noir — in a style that mashes together a lay criticality with an eclectic array of philosophical

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reference points. Fisher insisted that theory should be used to intensify the examination of everyday life, and his work is underwritten by a moving sense of the freedom gained through mastering these methods of analysis. He was exposed to this culture by the music journalism of the 1980s: “No sob stories,” he wrote, “but for someone of my background, it’s difficult to see where else that interest would have come from.” His writing has the feeling of a system — an entire architecture — coming into being, each blog post an opportunity to fine-tune its pillars and boundaries. Fisher’s emphasis on the everyday places him in the vein of the Birmingham School and the tradition of cultural studies, of Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall, who were, in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, navigating a path between the machine of high theory and the feelings and events it claimed to discuss. Like them, Fisher understood that it wasn’t just protest songs that contained political content. But Fisher, for his part, railed against academia and the stolid manner of interrogation to which it too often gave rise, and he expressed his frustration with academic leftism and its dogmatic adherence to a quasiMarxist “theology.” 112

Blogging became a kind of respite from this fustiness. In 1999, Fisher had completed a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Warwick. Starting his blog five years later and announcing himself as “k-punk,” he described his relationship to the academy as “uh difficult.” “PhD work bullies one into the idea that you can’t say anything about any subject until you’ve read every possible authority on it ... Blogging was a way of tricking myself back into doing serious writing,” he said in a 2010 interview. K-punk also, of course, nurtured its own community, becoming a hub of online interconnection in a spirit of techno-idealism still viable in the early 2000s. The new volume contains a previously unpublished introduction to a book Fisher had been working on called Acid Communism. Disturbed by the

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cruelties of the unfolding conjuncture — Brexit, Donald Trump, the bitter nature of online interaction — Fisher was looking for new ways to connect, and he unexpectedly chose the averted utopianism of the psychedelic counterculture of the 1960s as a locus for revival. He hoped we could find in this a kind of consciousness capable of overcoming the legacies not only of neoliberalism but of an “authoritarian leftism” that had neutered these experiments in the ’70s. Fisher looks to Stuart Hall and the New Left as forerunners in this project: “The socialism that Hall wanted — a socialism that could engage with the yearnings and dreamings that he heard in Miles Davis’ music — was yet to be created, and its arrival was obstructed as much by figures from the left as from the right,” Fisher writes. The aim was to imagine new ways of getting through to one another. “We on the left have had it wrong for a while,” he writes — it is not that we are anti-capitalist, but that capitalism is anti-us. It is only by “unforgetting” our collective capacity to produce, care, and enjoy that we will overcome it.

The Tumbrel STILL ROASTING LIBERALS

THE TUMBREL GIRONDINS

At this point, the autopsy process has almost run its course — most of the postmortems about the 2020 Democratic primary have been written, and the sniping, mocking, and football-spiking is dying down on social media. If there is any lasting political lesson from the yearlong race, it is probably a simple and boring one: former vice presidents are tough candidates to defeat in nominating contests. Still, the primary does leave open a question — one that has nothing to do with ideology and everything to do with honesty. Can elections be won by telling Americans the truth about what we must do to survive the crises threatening our survival? The contrast between Senator Bernie Sanders, for whom I was a senior adviser and speechwriter, and former vice president Joe Biden was muted by the two candidates’ personal affinity for each other. While their disputes on specific issues occasionally took center stage, they were most often in the background (and they were further muddled by Biden lying about the basic facts of his own conservative record). And yet there was a huge difference in visions that did define the race. Sanders told America that if he won the White House, it would not be the end of the battle — it would be the beginning of a protracted war to defeat the elite and transform US society. He leveled with the country by acknowledging that taxes would

BY DAVID SIROTA

Did Americans Want a Political Revolution? Joe Biden told us there was an easy path. Reality will soon catch up to that fantasy.

have to go up and systems would have to be rebuilt or built from scratch. But he went further than merely challenging our conception of policy — he asked America to think beyond its psychological affinity for the path of least resistance. He told us that there is no easy path to attaining the kinds of policies that are necessary to save millions of lives as well as our democracy. “This struggle is not just about defeating Donald Trump — this struggle is about taking on the incredibly powerful institutions that control the economic and political life of this country,” he said in the speech launching his campaign. I’m talking about Wall Street, the insurance companies, the drug companies, the AFTER BERNIE

military-industrial complex, the prison-industrial complex, the fossil fuel industry, and a corrupt campaign finance system that enables billionaires to buy elections. Brothers and sisters: we have an enormous amount of work in front of us. Biden told America the opposite story. Evoking Warren G. Harding’s famed “return to normalcy” theme, he insisted that there is an easy path. The former vice president essentially argued that Donald Trump is the singular problem in the United States, and that once Trump is defeated, the battle is over — we can restore stability and go back to the kind of incrementalism that has defined Democratic presidencies for more than forty years. 115

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“I believe history will look back on four years of this president and all he embraces as an aberrant moment in time,” Biden said at the beginning of his primary campaign, and a year later, he capped off that primary run by telling nbc News that “Americans aren’t looking for revolution.” In the interim, Biden’s campaign spent months telling voters that we can solve climate change with a “middle ground” policy, we can solve the health-care crisis with an incremental public option, and we can solve economic inequality even if we make sure that “nothing would fundamentally change” for billionaires. If the Sanders-Biden battle was perceived as a choice between Sanders’s daunting promise of an exhausting revolutionary struggle and Biden’s promise of a glide path back to normal, then it’s no mystery why Biden ultimately prevailed. Easy street was an understandably alluring vision for an electorate already tired out by Trump’s never-ending conflicts and controversies. In reality, though, this was not a choice between two possibilities — it was a choice between honesty and fantasy, and Democratic voters picked the latter. That’s a problem, because Sanders was giving voice to truths that we cannot keep avoiding, omitting, or rejecting at the ballot box if we hope to survive the disasters engulfing our society. The fossil fuel industry isn’t going to voluntarily stop exacerbating the climate crisis. The health care industry isn’t going to voluntarily 116

stop profiting off sickness. The private prison industry and the police are not going to voluntarily stop fortifying an inhumane and racist criminal justice system. Billionaires and corporations are not going to voluntarily stop using an army of lobbyists to rig the tax system for the wealthy, and they are not going to voluntarily stop exploiting a system of legalized bribery to buy our elections. Fixing our country and our world will require transformational policies — or, as Sanders calls it, a “political revolution.” And yes — enacting those policies will require exactly the kind of struggle that Sanders envisioned and earnestly acknowledged during the Democratic primary. Those crises will not just go away or get better by replacing Trump with a Democratic president who prioritizes comity, decorum, and incrementalism over struggle, conflict, and radical change. But can candidates win office while admitting that? In every contested primary, progressives will inevitably face Joe Bidens — corporate-backed moderates who reassure us that there is no need for a slog, who tell us a fantastical and inspiring tale about how we can fix the country through half measures, bipartisanship, and polite requests for national unity. In the face of that appealing sales pitch, can progressive candidates up and down the ballot win power while leveling with voters about how hard it will be to actually save our country and the planet?

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On that score, the results of the 2020 Democratic primary were not a hopeful sign. However, reality may finally be overwhelming the power of fantasy. Since Biden became the presumptive nominee, more than 120,000 Americans have died in a lethal pandemic, and millions have lost their existing health care coverage — all as the economy has continued to enrich billionaires. At the same time, an explosion of police violence and mass protest has spotlighted the bigotry and inequality tearing apart the social fabric of communities across the country. Meanwhile, the climate crisis helped create a 100ºf day in the Arctic Circle. In light of these emergencies, politicians face an altered political topography. They risk looking tone-deaf if they try to pretend that the panacea is some easy half measure or singular electoral victory. The converse is also true — candidates may end up seeming more authentic and electable by fessing up to impending cataclysms and echoing the call for the kind of struggle that will be necessary to rescue ourselves. In short, events occurring outside of the political arena in the terrestrial world — in the streets, hospitals, schools, and communities we live in — are intervening to change elections in a way that could make honesty a winning strategy. If that shift continues, it will be unfolding at too late a moment to put Sanders in the White House — but if we are lucky, it will happen in time to save the world.

Did Americans Want a Political Revolution?

WHO SHOULD I VOTE FOR?

MEDICARE? Medicare For All!

Malarkey! For....All?

WELLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL....

POLITICAL REVOLUTION?

Now!

Listen here, Jack, how do I open PDF?

FOREIGN POLICY?

I looked straight in Saddam’s eyes and said “Listen here, Fat!”

No wars. Cut the Pentagon budget.

Evo Morales told me a woman couldn’t be president.

RACIAL JUSTICE? Address massive disparities.

Let me tell you about a fella named Corn Pop.

I will consult a national intersectional directorate of bipoc nine-year-olds.

BERNIE

WARREN AFTER BERNIE

BIDEN 117

THE TUMBREL WORST ESTATE

BY DAVID BRODER

We Don’t Live in Weimar Germany Liberals say that socialists who don’t support Joe Biden are “like the German Communists who refused to fight Hitler.” The analogy doesn’t hold up — and it’s also historically illiterate.

Labeling social democrats as “social fascists” doesn’t sound like mature political analysis. And the Nazi triumph in 1933 was a damning retrospective judgment on those who couldn’t tell the center left apart from the far right. As an oft-repeated legend has it, the German Communist Party (kpd) was too sectarian, too purist to ally with the Social Democrats (spd) to defend democracy. With the Left failing to identify who its real enemy was, Adolf Hitler could destroy the labor movement almost without a fight. For liberals, this divided resistance to Nazism serves as an enduring 118

indictment of left-wing sectarianism. They plastered this parable across centrist outlets during Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016, arguing that Bernie Sanders was dividing the united front against Trumpian “fascism” simply by contesting the Democratic nomination. Their British counterparts also deployed this “lesson from history” against Jeremy Corbyn, accusing him of not fighting Brexit with sufficient vigor. In the weeks after Joe Biden’s rise to become Democratic Party nominee this March, many pundits hastened to roll out the № 38  /  SUMMER 2020

same narrative. For some, the disappointment of those who supported Bernie Sanders in the primary offered a perfect target for such criticism. We should not bang on about the “sins of the center left,” a piece in Prospect averred, but instead direct our fire against the real enemy. Any failure to cheer on the anti-fascist standard-bearer Biden would mean repeating the kpd’s “superhuman myopia” in the fight against Hitler. The most obvious response is that left-wing activists in the United States are fighting Donald Trump and his far-right agenda — and not only at election time. Yet the fable of the kpd isn’t really about strengthening the fight against fascism, or even about learning the lessons of the past. Rather, it’s a bid to demonize today’s left — and conceal the dismal record of liberals themselves in combating the far right.

Liberal Fascism One problem with the story that leftwing sectarians hobbled the resistance to fascism arises from a primary historical test case — the rise of Benito Mussolini in Italy. Here, the Fascist movement emerged in 1919, greatly strengthened by the masses of soldiers who had been thrown onto the streets in the wake of World War I. Italy’s liberal postwar governments did not attempt to suppress the movement, seeking instead to integrate and contain it within established institutions. When the liberal defense minister Ivanoe Bonomi decided that Mussolini’s

We Don’t Live in Weimar Germany

Blackshirts could remain in the army, but communists and anarchists couldn’t, Antonio Gramsci dubbed him “fascism’s main organizer.” Bonomi was a renegade ex-socialist, and the approach adopted by the most conservative forces in the labor movement was also profoundly harmful. Already during the biennio rosso of worker militancy in 1919–20, the Blackshirts had started to win the backing of industrialists and landlords by violently repressing labor and peasant unions in “red” regions like Emilia-Romagna. Yet Italy’s social democrats eschewed confrontation and sought a “pacification pact” with the Fascists — one that excluded the fledgling Communist Party — in the hope that it would reduce violence. Local Fascist squads paid no attention to the truce and continued to slaughter their leftwing opponents. As the Blackshirts extended their street presence across Italy, by fall 1922, the main liberal and conservative forces had united behind Mussolini’s candidacy for prime minister, claiming that it would “moderate” him. He was appointed to the office by constitutional and parliamentary means, even though his party only accounted for thirty-five of the 535 mps in the chamber of deputies. Indeed, when it received its initial confidence vote, Mussolini’s government enjoyed the support of the previous five liberal prime ministers — including Bonomi and the elder statesman Giovanni Giolitti — alongside the

philosopher Benedetto Croce, later a prominent opponent of fascism. Only the Socialists and Communists voted against him.

Who Let Hitler Come to Power? In a repeat of the Italian pattern, World War I and the intense social struggles that followed it radicalized and militarized the German right. Yet the rising Nazi movement also had to contend with the Social Democrats (spd), a workers’ party with a much stronger mass base than anything that confronted Mussolini. Its eventual success was thus owed greatly to the fragmentation of centrist and right-wing middleclass parties, which had survived the hyperinflation crisis of 1923 only to collapse under the impact of the Great Depression. In the face of escalating social tensions, these parties were consistently anti-communist, but only fleetingly anti-Nazi. One major test came in December 1929, with the elections in the state of Thuringia. While the spd came first, with 32 percent, the smaller right-wing (thlb, dnvp) and national-liberal (dvp) parties formed a bloc with the Nazis in order to keep out the Left. Hitler’s ally Wilhelm Frick became minister of the interior. After passing an Enabling Act in March 1930 that allowed it to rule by decree, this liberal-conservativeNazi alliance went on to purge the state administration of spd supporters. It sacked Communist teachers en masse and promoted

AFTER BERNIE

Left-wing activists in the United States are fighting Donald Trump and his far-right agenda — and not only at election time.

race theory in public schools. Events followed a similar trajectory in Braunschweig beginning in September 1930. The situation in the Weimar Republic’s largest state, Prussia, was different. The spd led a coalition with the Catholic Center Party and their smaller liberal allies. Yet this bloc against the so-called twin extremes of Nazism and Communism had an equally unimpressive record of defending democracy. After banning a Hitler rally in December 1928, the state government generalized the ban on demonstrations across Prussia. When the kpd went ahead with its march on May Day 1929, the Prussian police, presided over by the Social Democrat Karl Friedrich Zörgiebel, opened fire on the crowd, killing thirty-three people. Instead of protecting democratic rights, the spd was curtailing

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those rights in the name of the fight against “extremism.” In 1925, Paul von Hindenburg had been the victorious right-wing candidate for president against opposition from the working-class parties. However, by the time Hindenburg stood for reelection in March 1932, the spd had decided that the veteran militarist was the “lesser of two evils” in comparison to his chief rival, Hitler, and the party threw its weight behind his candidacy. With the backing of most German industrialists and the country’s centrist forces, Hindenburg took 53 percent of the vote. Yet the anti-communist offensive of the German right immediately turned on the spd itself. The government of the right-wing chancellor Franz von Papen fabricated evidence of an spd-kpd plot to stage a “Marxist putsch,” prompting Hindenburg to dismiss Prussia’s spd government in July 1932. Just six months later, the man that the spd had seen as the “lesser evil” appointed Hitler as Germany’s chancellor. In March 1933, Hitler passed an Enabling Act allowing him to rule by decree — the instrument by which he ruled as a dictator until 1945. The spd voted against it — the kpd would have, if not for the fact that Hitler banned the party and jailed its parliamentarians after the Reichstag fire. Hindenburg, who was still president, however, gave the Enabling Act his wholehearted approval. Indeed, liberal, centrist, and

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The burned-down plenary sessions hall of the Reichstag, 1933.

SPD logo isolated from a poster.

3

Addressing crowds at Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park, Communist MP calls for the release of the Reichstag Fire suspects in Germany, 1933.

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A group of Fascist Blackshirts is about to set fire to portraits of Marx and Lenin during the elections of May 1921.

5

A communist speaker addresses a large crowd in Berlin to protest about the unemployment situation in Germany, circa 1920.

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We Don’t Live in Weimar Germany

11

Letter to organize a nationwide general strike against the Nazi government, 1933.

10

KPD members in Berlin during a protest against Nazi and right-wing groups.

conservative MPs failed to cast a single vote against the abolition of Weimar democracy.

9 Anti-Hitler demonstrators lead a procession representing

the Reichsbanner Organisation, the Trade Unions and the Workers’ Sports Clubs at Wilmersdorf, Berlin.

7

Isolated text from a KPD poster.

8

6

Adolf Hitler reads the Enabling Law in the Garrison Church at Potsdam, 1933.

The tomb of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, designed by Mies van der Rohe in Berlin-Friedrichsfelde, 1927.

AFTER BERNIE

Even the left-liberal German State Party (dstp), heir to the Democratic Party cofounded by Max Weber in 1919, voted to grant full powers to Hitler. Still, just as the spd’s supposed proximity to the kpd had been used to condemn it as a “revolutionary Marxist” threat to the state, the dstp was, in turn, labeled a mere appendage of the spd. By June 1933, the Nazis had banned it, too.

KPD Sectarianism The Weimar Republic had emerged from the chaos that followed World War I: throughout its lifespan, political violence was a familiar sight, especially in the years immediately after the war and again during the Great Depression. The mass parties had their own armed militias, which could recruit their members from trained war veterans who often still had their weapons, as well as from the growing ranks of the unemployed. This backdrop of violence was closely linked to the sharp hostilities between Communists and Social Democrats — hardly a matter of “purist” sectarians at loggerheads. In 1914, the spd’s members of parliament had voted to send German workers to war, and even after the naval mutinies of fall 1918 sparked a far-reaching social revolution, the Social Democrats were never on the side of the insurgents. Even as it

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Image Credits: 1. Imagno / Contributor 3. Keystone/Getty Images 4. Mondadori via Getty Images 5. FPG / Staff 6. Heritage Images / Contributor 8. ullstein bild/ullstein bild via Getty Images 9. Keystone / Staff 10. ullstein bild Dtl. / Contributor 11. ullstein bild Dtl. / Contributor

declared a republic, the spd sought allies in the old military leadership to reimpose order; in January 1919, its leaders made a pact with the far-right paramilitaries of the Freikorps in order to crush the Spartacist uprising, itself led by communists who had opposed the war. These bitter clashes — including the murder, still fresh in the memory, of communists Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht — created lasting hostilities between the kpd and the spd. But this was fed by a sociological divide. The Communists were rooted in sections of the population whom the spd most failed in government — by 1932, the unemployed made up a massive 85 percent of the kpd’s membership. As Eve Rosenhaft’s study Beating the Fascists? documents, the Communists built up their base through direct action, whether that meant defending tenants against evictions, mounting rowdy demonstrations at unemployment offices, or resisting Nazi gangs. Hence, while the kpd theorization of impending revolution pointed to the industrial might of factory workers, its revolutionary promise and confrontational organizing methods — so adept in mobilizing the unemployed — set it at odds with the defensive attitudes that prevailed among employed workers during the Depression. If Communists were hardened in a militant but sectarian niche — in essence, preparing a militarized organization for an ultimate clash with the combined forces of reaction — they were only further 122

entrenched in this stance by the repressive actions of spd-led governments, combined with their own gloomy economic situation. Damning Weimar’s failures, the kpd consistently denied support for any regional or national government from 1923 onward. Such was its en-masse rejection of — and by — all other parties. kpd propaganda tended to present Hitler’s rise as another passing phase in the hardening of bourgeois reaction, prepared by countless other instances of repression, rather than the affirmation of the single figure who would stabilize a dictatorship far more total than what had come before. The writer c. l. r. James would lampoon this approach with a widely cited but inaccurate claim that the kpd had raised the slogan “After Hitler, Our Turn,” creating the legend that it had willed him to power in order to destroy the spd and allow its own ultimate victory. Telling, however, is the fact that this specific slogan was first used not by kpders but by spd supporters — indeed, after Hitler had already become chancellor in January 1933. This was an expression of defiance, not of complicity. For its part, the kpd’s claims that Nazism would prove ephemeral directly followed from its effort to recruit “honest workers” from Nazi ranks — a botched tactical ruse rather than a show of complacency, per se. The fact that most kpders went along with this line suggests that, rather than it being merely “crazy,” this was a galvanizing № 38  /  SUMMER 2020

sentiment in a small party faced with the murder of hundreds of its militants, the trade unions’ retreat into passivity, and the outright hostility of its “bigger brother” in the spd.

Why Weimar? Yet the interesting thing about this history is not so much the factors behind the kpd policy — aptly addressed in Rosenhaft’s study — as the political reasons for its frequent invocation today. The claim that every fresh opponent of liberalism — from Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi to Donald Trump — is really a “new Hitler” evidently seeks to dramatize the moral binary and serve as a call to action. But what use is it comparing our own situation with that of Weimar Germany, even in countries that bear almost none of its defining traits? One insight comes from Jacobin contributing editor Daniel Bessner, who has compared the use of the Weimar analogy in different eras. In his telling, in the period around 1968, older intellectuals who had emigrated from Germany to the United States often brandished the Weimar analogy in order to damn the excesses of the US extraparamilitary left. Such claims were repudiated not only by those who defended anti–Vietnam War protests outright, but also by others who considered the Weimar comparison hysterical. However, according to Bessner, when this same historical analogy was deployed in the 2016 election cycle — now taking Trump for a

We Don’t Live in Weimar Germany

new Hitler — even those historians who rejected the comparison tended to invoke definitional distinctions rather than profess any deeper faith in the longevity of US democracy. We would be wise not to jump to comparisons with post–World War I Germany. In the absence of mass violence claiming hundreds of thousands of lives, a recent military defeat, or — for now, at least — large-scale paramilitary mobilization, even our coronavirusaddled time is a pale shadow of the chaotic Weimar era. Yet, as Bessner argues, the claim that German democracy was destroyed

by the new mass politics has often been used as an argument for technocratic alternatives, narrowing the range of political choice in order to protect it from the masses’ irresponsibility. When Joe Biden has so little else with which to win our support, what better way to glorify his campaign — and smear its leftwing critics — than to wrap it in the colors of anti-fascism? The history we’re told of the kpd’s errors neglects to mention why the Weimar Republic’s own social base fell apart. No wonder the main use of that historical fable today is as a diversion:

its purpose is to wish away the reasons why many are so unenthusiastic about Biden’s candidacy. It should be enough, we’re told, that Biden is not a wannabe Hitler, and asking for anything more than that is putting our selfish whims before the victims of fascism. It’s likely that Biden will be able to mobilize enough people worried about stopping Trump to win this November. But if we really are threatened with another Weimar, we’ll need to do a lot more than just get the “good guys” to vote against the Nazis.

Leftovers THE STRUGGLE CONTINUES

LEFTOVERS POPULAR FRONT

“They might have the money, but we have the people,” is something I’d often tell Bernie Sanders volunteers in Iowa before sending them out to knock on doors. Canvassing is the most important thing you can do as a volunteer on an electoral campaign, but you still need some inspiration to get out there in the thick of Iowa’s caucus season, when temperatures are often in the single digits. After all was said and done, our supporters knocked on almost a million doors in Iowa — a state with a total population of 3 million and a Democratic caucus turnout of about 180,000 — and the campaign managed to eke out a popular-vote victory. Sanders mobilized something like ten thousand volunteers across the country to hit the pavement in early states, a feat that none of his rivals came close to matching. We had a tremendous manpower advantage — yet Joe Biden ultimately prevailed in many states where he lacked any real field presence. Rhetorically, the Sanders campaign set itself the goal of mobilizing a new electorate that would first win the primary and eventually go on to beat Donald Trump. Bernie’s advantage was supposed to be the dedication of his volunteers and the enthusiasm of his supporters. The campaign’s slogan, “Not Me, Us,” alludes to

MARILYN ARWOOD

We Knocked on a Million Doors for 45,000 Votes I helped organize Bernie Sanders’s canvassing efforts in Iowa, and I learned that we can knock on as many doors as we want, but to make lasting change, we need to think beyond election day.

one of our perceived strengths — a vast base capable of making more voter-contact attempts than our rivals. Although we did see some evidence of that materializing — a plurality of new caucusgoers went for Sanders in Iowa, and Bernie won the youth vote — there was no significant boost in turnout, and the campaign was unable to get traditional nonvoters to participate in the primary.

At the Margins The bad news here is essentially the same as the good news: for a AFTER BERNIE

presidential primary, work in the field is not decisive. Even the biggest advocates of canvassing admit that its impact comes into play at the margins. The profile of campaign workers and volunteers tends to be, on average, very different in demographic and cultural terms when compared to the swing or lowturnout voters that campaigns seek to win over. If this observation holds for the average Democratic Party candidate, the contrast is likely to be even more pronounced for Sanders, whose base of support is much younger — 125

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A canvasser prepares to knock on doors in Davenport, Iowa, February 1, 2020.

and more ideological — than the overall composition of the Democratic Party.

the average Democratic primary voter was focused on the imperative of “beating Trump.”

This mismatch between canvassers and voters doesn’t mean that volunteers are totally ineffective; it just means that they’d probably have more impact on their home turf, and volunteers would do well to remember that the people they are trying to win over are likely to be less ideological than they are. We saw this divide playing out in the primary this year: while Bernie supporters were motivated by a wide array of issues and causes,

Though thousands of left-wing volunteers from coastal cities may not have been the ideal messengers to win over new voters, I don’t believe that our field campaign was the decisive factor in the primary. Nor do I think it could have been. However, if we’re going to continue knocking on doors, it’s worth spending some time critically evaluating how well the tactic works.

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Bernie’s 2020 campaign proved that there’s a massive reservoir of № 38  /  SUMMER 2020

time and energy from volunteers that is ready to be put to use. Nothing else is quite like the presidential race, and down-ballot races in which direct voter contact makes more of a difference will account for most left-wing electoral activity in years to come. In the future, we can learn to focus our messaging on core demands that have broad appeal. One thing we learned from the primary is that although Bernie didn’t have enough support to win the nomination, his agenda is very popular with voters. Never forget that in 2020, a majority wanted

We Knocked on a Million Doors for 45,000 Votes

to replace private insurance with Medicare for All in twenty consecutive states — and that was before the coronavirus pandemic.

Strategic Organizing We were also successful when we organized strategic constituencies: for example, Bernie won nearly all of the Iowa satellite caucuses by proactively registering workers who were getting off the third shift at Tyson’s meatpacking plant, at mosques, and in Spanish-speaking communities. Sanders dominated the caucuses on the Las Vegas Strip because his campaign had prioritized organizing taxi drivers and culinary union workers — in spite of opposition from union leaders. Campus organizing led to increased turnout from students, whom Bernie won over in droves. Obviously, we didn’t get the result we wanted, and any number of postmortems can reflect on perceived strategic missteps. Ultimately, though, it’s unlikely that the presidential primary was — or could have been — decided by ground game. Yes, we have to keep knocking on doors, but it won’t be enough to foster the kind of political engagement that can seriously wrest power away from the neoliberal consensus. Direct voter contact through canvassing and phone banking only has a marginal impact, because it works through extrinsic motivation to vote: the commitment of signing a pledge, coupled with the thought that someone will follow up on whether you actually go to the polls, is supposed

to bring you out for the candidate. While this is effective for gotv (“get out the vote”) efforts, it’s a fairly shallow type of engagement, not to be confused with the project of building a coalition that lasts beyond election day. A presidential campaign, even when it’s well resourced, is a machine that is obliged to constantly adapt and reconstitute itself. Only in early primary states is there the time and the budget to build a long-lasting and effective field campaign. And “long-lasting,” in this case, is a strictly relative term — something like eight months. In states that voted later, the Bernie campaign increasingly relied on a combination of featherweight state staff teams, nationally distributed digital organizing, and — to a huge degree — volunteers to take on the work of planning and executing canvasses and phone banks.

Digging Deeper Conjuring a national coalition every four years is resourceintensive and unlikely to succeed, as we’ve now seen from the two Bernie campaigns. Socialists need to build permanent organizations that actually bring in more of the disaffected, nonvoting working class, developing the kind of class consciousness and political agency that runs deeper than the biennial reminder to turn out to the polls. Without any durable left political institutions that can compete and wield power at a national level, a winning Bernie 2020 campaign would have been like an AFTER BERNIE

Conjuring a national coalition every four years is resourceintensive and unlikely to succeed, as we’ve now seen from the two Bernie campaigns.

incredible shortcut. While the zeal of supporters and the stalwart door-knocking effort we all put in wasn’t enough to win this time, the campaign showed us the opportunity we might have if we were organized to compete in races on an ongoing basis, not just once every four years. It’s a huge testament to the organizing strength and dedication of everyone who worked with the Sanders campaign that we were able to conjure up such a formidable national voter-contacting network, and there’s no doubt it was a huge asset. But the less exciting races, the ones where the gap in volunteer power can’t be canceled out by $70 million in earned media in three days, are the ones where we might expect to see these efforts pay off in the future. 127

LEFTOVERS POPULAR FRONT

CEDRIC JOHNSON

Let’s Talk About South Carolina Bernie Sanders didn’t lose because of the “black vote,” but winning places like South Carolina is crucial to building a left majority.

Joe Biden made history twice when he was interviewed by Breakfast Club cohost Charlamagne tha God in late May. He likely became the first white man since the end of Jim Crow to challenge a black man’s blackness without losing his teeth. He also set the record for the most uses of “man” in one conversation, with the previous record being set in 1977 by a leisure-suited pimp on the corner of 42nd and Broadway. Biden would have been real cool on that corner in the ’70s, but this performance reeked of pandering.

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Sadly, in the national electoral politics of 2020, pandering has become “the new black.” With Vermont senator Bernie Sanders exiting the race weeks before that interview, Biden was the assured Democratic Party nominee. Charlamagne was not in the mood for celebration, however, and he pressed the former vice president about what he would do specifically to address black voters’ concerns. Biden, for his part, wasn’t in the mood for defending his commitments to blacks. “You’ve got more

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questions?” Biden quipped. “Well, I’ll tell you what, if you have a problem figuring out if you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black ... take a look at my record, man!” The problem with Charlamagne’s line of questioning, just like Biden’s response, is that he operates on the falsehood that the black population is a singular constituency, unified around common interests. Charlamagne is not alone in this thinking, and his interview channeled recent comments by music mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs, who called on blacks to withhold their votes from the Democrats if their demands were not met. Charlamagne’s and Combs’s concerns about not being taken for granted by the Democratic establishment are real, but the idea that the black vote is united and can be withheld because a few entertainers or black political leaders say so is foolish.

Let’s Talk About South Carolina

The roots of this debacle, with its interplay of race whispering and pandering, lay in Charlamagne’s home state, and the supersize role South Carolina has come to play in Democratic presidential nomination contests. During the 2016 and 2020 Democratic primary elections, Sanders offered an alternative to the New Democratic triangulation of Hillary Clinton and Biden, but in both contests, the Sanders campaign lost in South Carolina. And in both campaigns, the narrative of Democratic Party insiders, Twitter activists, and the corporate chattering classes alike was that Sanders lost because he wasn’t strong enough “on race,” which was a vessel that could accommodate whoever was speaking on behalf of blacks at that moment. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t attempt our own accounting of Bernie’s struggles, despite the popularity of his message. There are important lessons to be gleaned from the South Carolina primaries in 2016 and 2020, but I’ll focus on three core points for now. First, Sanders didn’t lose because of the “black vote,” and black voters are not simply motivated by racial appeals, as so many pundits and party insiders assert. Second, Sanders won the ideological fight across the country, which is a different plane of struggle than an electoral campaign. Third, the South Carolina defeats represent the next battlefront for forces who want to advance the egalitarian politics of the Sanders campaigns.

What Happened in South Carolina? The South Carolina black vote has taken on mythical proportions. In 2016, it was Hillary Clinton’s firewall. In 2020, it was Biden’s. For the liberal punditry, it was their proof that Sanders’s democratic socialism was not viable. And for the Democratic elites over the last few election cycles, the South Carolina black vote was their saving grace in times when neoliberalism has been facing a crisis of legitimacy. In South Carolina, blacks make up 56 percent of the Democratic base, and in the 2020 primary, a majority of those voters supported Biden — some 64 percent, compared to only 17 percent for Sanders. Extrapolating from those numbers, pundits not only argued that Sanders failed to win most black voters, which is empirically true, but many took the line further, beyond the immediate results and exit polls, and beyond the state limits, to speculation about black voters nationally. In the run-up to the South Carolina primary, Eugene Daniels drew on the voting intentions of his grandmother Ruby Brown as a portent of Biden’s good fortunes among “one of the Democratic Party’s most dependable constituencies: older black women.” “After fighting so hard for the right to vote — Nana included,” Daniels continued in an article for Politico, “older black voters have a pragmatic streak that Biden represents.” AFTER BERNIE

Of course, there is some truth to the account — older voters tend to be more pragmatic, and unlike the younger voters of all races who have been drawn to Sanders, older voters can recall the limited political horizons imposed by Cold War anti-communism and Jim Crow segregation. They’re less likely to believe that a viable candidacy by a socialist, even a democratic socialist, is possible. However, most of these popular explanations, especially as they were repeated incessantly by superdelegates and party insiders, assume that race was the primary theme motivating black voters in South Carolina, a claim that reduces the different interests and motivations of black publics to the discrete concerns advanced by party insiders and self-ordained spokespersons for the “black community.” The “black vote” is a powerful myth, one with roots in the world of Jim Crow, where African Americans were restricted from full participation in public life. Within that segregated context, educated blacks, ministers, ward bosses, and precinct captains were called on to voice the concerns of the black body politic. That segregated world, where all blacks were subjected to secondclass status in the South, regardless of education and wealth, has vanished, but the representational practices and leadership claims set in motion during Jim Crow persist. Some of this is kept alive by self-appointed brokers, but these practices also have an institutional basis. 129

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What remains in parts of the country like South Carolina, however, are majority-black legislative districts and blackgoverned cities with patron-client relations that give material weight to more abstract claims of racial representation. In Sanders’s two South Carolina defeats, his campaign ran up against those relations in the form of the local machinery of James Clyburn, and the party establishment amplified the defeat as a general failure of Sanders in appealing to black voters. The Palmetto State is one of a handful of Southern states where black registered Democrats outnumber those who are white, and it is the first of those states to vote in the Democratic presidential primaries. This has given South Carolina an important but contradictory role in recent election cycles. The South Carolina primary has become the place where Democratic candidates are expected to demonstrate their capacity to attract black voters, but South Carolina is not typically in play as a possible Democratic win in general elections. Hence, the state is more important in terms of agenda setting than for the party’s national electoral calculus. Since the beginnings of the Democratic Leadership Council (dlc) in the late ’80s, which pledged to put the party back on a center-right path, the South Carolina primary has played a critical role in shaping the party’s racial overtures. Recall 130

At one point, Clyburn even offered that old chestnut of conservatives, “Nothing in life is free.”

that Jesse Jackson won the South Carolina primary in 1984 and 1988, and that the threat of his campaign helped precipitate the dlc’s neoliberal project. During the waning years of the Obama administration, South Carolina became a powerful symbol of a gathering anti-racist politics reflected in the Black Lives Matter slogan. On June 17, 2015, Dylann Roof, a twenty-oneyear-old white supremacist, walked into a bible study session at Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston and shot and killed nine people, including state senator and pastor Clementa Pinckney. Ten days later, filmmaker and activist Bree Newsome scaled the flagpole atop the South Carolina statehouse and removed the Confederate battle flag in an act of civil disobedience. It should be noted, as well, that South Carolina is the ancestral home of many blacks who reside in the Northeast. It is essentially a synonym for “the South” and a repository of all manner of № 38  /  SUMMER 2020

real and imagined habits, customs, norms, and modes of thinking associated with antebellum slavery and Jim Crow apartheid. If the notions of the black community and the black vote serve as powerful myths at the national level that reduce complex interests animating millions of people to the favored vanity issues embraced by the professional class, in local contexts like South Carolina, these notions take on a more concrete meaning within the realm of social relations and Democratic Party patronage bonds. Contrary to the prevailing line of Democratic centrists, black voters did not choose to support Clinton in 2016 and Biden in 2020 because Sanders was weak on race. Black voters, like all other voters, harbor many different motivations, and many voted defensively and pragmatically. The 2020 South Carolina primary was, in many ways, a replay of the 2016 contest, but with some important differences. Sanders didn’t face the same hurdle of

Let’s Talk About South Carolina

name recognition as he did in the previous race, but the large field in 2020 likely posed new challenges for his campaign in the state. Moreover, the successful election of Donald Trump, which seemed highly unlikely to many Americans in the spring of 2016, now intensified existing concerns and anxieties for many black South Carolinians. As others have noted, the longtime South Carolina congressman and House majority whip James Clyburn played a critical role as kingmaker in both of these contests, and he emerged as a vocal foe of Sanders’s social-democratic agenda. Clyburn’s stature in the Democratic nomination process has been years in the making. In 2008, he may well have tipped the balance in favor of then-presidential-hopeful Barack Obama, after Clyburn deemed some of former president Bill Clinton’s comments about Obama disrespectful. The optics of that exchange ultimately backfired on the former president and his wife’s campaign. In 2016, however, Clyburn made amends, throwing his support behind Hillary Clinton and against the democratic socialism of Sanders. In both 2016 and 2020, Clyburn engaged in a folksy form of red-baiting. In 2016, Clyburn was joined by congressman John Lewis in his attack on Sanders, claiming that the Vermont senator’s proposal of free higher education was not feasible. At one point, Clyburn even offered that old chestnut of conservatives, “Nothing in life is free.” Clyburn’s assertion that Sanders’s proposal

to make tuition free at public universities would hurt black institutions was false, however, since many black universities are public, and thousands of black students nationwide would stand to benefit immensely from such a program. The 2020 primary saw more of the same, with Clyburn saying at one point, “I do not believe there are any free lunches. And certainly there’s not going to be any free education,” again sounding more like a budget hawk than a liberal Democrat. This time, Louisiana congressman Cedric Richmond took over as Clyburn’s sideman on the trail. Picking up his mentor’s script, Richmond charged that Bernie’s free higher education proposal would disadvantage black private colleges like Richmond’s alma mater, Morehouse College. As before, such claims were disingenuous and deceptive, appealing to constituent needs through conservative common sense rather than visionary public policy, but this is precisely the kind of rhetoric that plays well in a state where blacks are far outnumbered by white Republicans.

some have claimed, or even of committing more time on the ground there. Clyburn’s influence is maintained through his constant presence; the dense social relationships that he, his staffers, and his surrogates maintain with local constituents and organizations; the real, material benefits like jobs, economic investment, scholarships, and infrastructure improvements that his office delivers to black South Carolinians; and the reputation those deliverables have created over a long career of public service. That kind of clout can’t be achieved or dethroned in an election cycle, certainly not through stop-anddrop voter canvassing runs and political rallies, but is rather earned by much more involved and intensive political organizing.

How Sanders Won the Ideological Battle

Clyburn was not a fan of Medicare for All, either. How could he be, when he is a darling of the pharmaceutical industry, having received more than $1 million in campaign donations from the sector over the last decade — more than any other sitting member of Congress?

In the weeks after the South Carolina primary in 2020, Sanders took to saying that the campaign was winning the battle over ideology but not the battle of electability. As the South Carolina results came in, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar stepped aside and endorsed Biden, and the party rapidly united around the former vice president, with endorsements coming from retired Senate majority leader Harry Reid and Illinois senator Tammy Duckworth. After Super Tuesday, Sanders’s path to the presidential nomination narrowed further still.

Sanders’s troubles in the state were not merely a problem of picking better surrogates, as

Even in defeat at the ballot box, Sanders succeeded, however, in building a popular base for

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131 7

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Medicare for All, the signature legislation touted by his campaign. As he exited the race, the policy achieved majority support nationally. Contrary to those who argue that blacks in general were cold toward Sanders’s social democratic program, African Americans are the most likely group of voters to support single-payer health care nationally, with some 74 percent saying they are in favor in some polls. In their postmortem on the South Carolina primary, Adolph Reed Jr and Willie Legette, political scientists and organizers of South Carolina’s “I’m a Medicare for All Voter” campaign, reported that half of Democratic primary voters in the state supported single-payer health care. Another measure of the campaign’s progress was in garnering more than eighteen thousand pledge cards from South Carolina voters, most of them African Americans, who said they would only vote for candidates supportive of Medicare for All. Over the course of the campaign, black South Carolinians’ support for government health insurance grew despite the efforts of the Partnership for America’s Health Care Future, an anti-singlepayer lobby that ran nonstop ads against the policy. Reed and Legette’s explanation of the apparent disjuncture between strong support for Medicare for All and inadequate support for its foremost champion in the democratic primary is insightful. “People take different criteria to

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candidate selection than to their estimations of the issues that most concern them,” they write. “In part that is the result of decades of bipartisan neoliberal hegemony in which electoral politics has been drained of serious policy differences.” Moreover, Reed and Legette contend that in South Carolina, “Democratic party politics is fundamentally transactional, where people are habituated to making electoral choices based on considerations like personal relationships or more local concerns that do not center so much on national policy issues.” The result of these local and personal voter determinations within the context of neoliberalism is a citizenry that does not view electoral politics as the “appropriate domain for trying to pursue policies that address people’s actual material concerns like health care, education, jobs and wages, or housing.” The low expectations of the political process Reed and Legette describe here are the consequence of decades of neoliberal retrenchment, and digging out from under this will take more than a few election cycles. The experience of neoliberalization, which has left joblessness, a crisis of affordable housing, economic insecurity, and social precarity in its wake, has also softened the ground for the Sanders campaign, as millions of Americans have warmed up to socialist ideas, although most polls do not specify what that might entail. And even when they are not committed to socialism per se,

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many more Americans now support the expansion of public goods. The Sanders campaigns provided a model for a different kind of left electoral politics going forward, but in places like South Carolina, much more work remains to be done.

Why South Carolina Still Matters Over the last few years, I’ve listened to some on the Left rail against any focus on the expansion of public goods as “mere social democracy,” with the implication being that a $15 minimum wage, single-payer health care, free higher education, and the like are not radical enough, but are rather simply modifications of capitalism. I have also been labeled — wrongly, I should say, by some friends, comrades, and foes alike — a “social democrat,” often for daring to suggest that there were meaningful gains made by blacks and other working people through the New Deal, or worse, that the path to socialism might actually begin with policy fights we have a chance of winning. Two immediate problems are always evident whenever the “social democrat” epithet is leveled. Usually, the person who’s yakking is not particularly worried about where their next meal is coming from, how they’ll pay off their student loans, or whether they’ll have to choose between paying the electricity bill or their ailing mother’s medical co-pays and prescriptions this month. The other problem is that most of these critics of social democracy

Let’s Talk About South Carolina

South Carolina represents the next frontier of left politics, beyond the coastal population centers, metropolitan regions, college towns, and union-dense locales.

hail from the most culturally liberal and urbane corners of the country. South Carolina is not that place, and neither is my home state of Louisiana. In places like South Carolina, Louisiana, and other states where left bookstores (or any bookstores, for that matter), socialist study groups, liberal universities, reproductive justice campaigns, lgbt progressivism, and militant trade unionism are not the norm, a Sanders campaign seems less viable, especially in the face of a powerful Republican Party. The electoral landscape and prevailing conservatism necessitate tough choices among voters with too few good options. South Carolina matters because it represents the next frontier of left politics, beyond the coastal population centers, metropolitan regions, college towns, and union-dense locales where the Sanders campaign had the most traction.

The Palmetto State is tied for last place in union density among the fifty states. In both South Carolina and North Carolina, only 2.7 percent of the workforce are unionized, compared to 10.4 percent of American workers nationally. Not surprisingly, the state has also ranked consistently near the bottom in terms of poverty (thirty-ninth in 2018) and the number of citizens relying on federal food assistance (thirty-eighth). South Carolina ranked forty-seventh in terms of property crimes per capita and forty-first for violent crimes. The Sanders campaign looked different in places like South Carolina. However, more work needs to be done to build a left political majority around the kinds of policies Sanders popularized. We should put the primary behind us, but South Carolina remains a critical battleground.

AFTER BERNIE

LEFTOVERS MEANS AND ENDS

SETH ACKERMAN

appointed its chairman, and immediately he and his comrades looked with bullish optimism to the next general election: the first great electoral test of the “socialist revival,” then a decade old. (That phrase, already in use at the time, evoked the near disappearance of English socialism after its tumultuous climax in the 1840s.)

The Victory to Come Bernie critics seem to think they dodged a bullet. They haven’t — the bullet is still on its way.

Imagine a time and place where, to everyone’s astonishment, a “socialist revival” sprouts up, seemingly out of nowhere. At first, it’s not much more than a literary trend, involving writers and intellectuals reading and talking in big cities. But soon, the idea penetrates the official world of politics, where a lone independent socialist — a gruffly earnest politician-activist of working-class stock, who keeps a defiant distance from both major parties — launches an improbable campaign to push socialism into mainstream political life.

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This was Britain in the early 1890s. And the gruff politician was Keir Hardie, the secular saint of British socialism and the central figure in the founding of the Labour Party. In 1892, Hardie left his life as a union agitator in the Scottish coalfields to run for parliament as an independent. In the ebullient atmosphere that surrounded his victory, a meeting of socialist activists convened in Bradford to create an organizational vehicle for their political hopes, which they christened the Independent Labour Party (ilp). Hardie was

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After two years of feverish activity, and with voting just a few months away, a confident Hardie published an essay in a high-toned London monthly to explain the party’s aims and prospects. “Owing to the rapid development of the Independent Labour Party during the past few months, it is no exaggeration to say that it now controls at least 25 per cent of the total voting power in the centres of industry,” he assured his readers. Twenty-eight parliamentary candidates were being run in districts across Britain, and while it was impossible to say in advance just how many would win their races, “at any rate, there will be a sufficient number in the next House of Commons to define the attitude of the Independent Labour Party towards both parties.” In fact, the 1895 election was a disaster for the ilp. Every one of its twenty-eight candidates went down to defeat — including Hardie — with several splitting the Liberal vote and throwing their races to Conservatives. A Westminster journalist who had covered the party’s campaign compared its pre-election hubris, and subsequent calamity, to the frog in the Aesopian fable who

The Victory to Come

kept puffing himself up until he burst. “The general opinion,” he reported in the Fortnightly Review, was that the ILP was now “extinct and will never be revived.” Beatrice Webb, the Fabian socialist leader, called the election “the most expensive funeral since Napoleon’s.” As ilp militants plunged into despair and mutual recrimination, a gleeful bourgeois press leapt at the chance to declare the fledgling movement defunct. A crowing editorial in the Economist — headlined “The Rebuff to Socialism” — judged the ILP’s result “a most astonishingly

complete answer to the claim of the Socialists to speak for the working man and to represent the people.” In line after line, the editorialists unspooled their contempt: “The voters will not have Socialism at any price.” “The mass of the electorate are AntiSocialist through and through.” “Thousands of votes are in reality turned purely by the dread of Socialism.” The contempt was bipartisan. “There can be no doubt,” jeered the Tory Spectator as it zeroed in on Hardie’s demoralizing defeat in his very left-wing London district, “that Mr. Keir Hardie,

AFTER BERNIE

and the views and methods of which he is one of the most prominent exponents, have lost hold on popular support where there has been the fullest opportunity of observing them.” And yet, the 1895 election did not mark the end of British socialism. Within five years, the ilp had joined with the trade unions to launch the Labour Representation Committee (lrc), an ad hoc vehicle that ran union-sponsored candidates in selected races. When the lrc captured twenty-nine parliamentary seats in 1906, it restyled itself the Labour Party and appointed Keir Hardie its first

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parliamentary leader. In its new constitution of 1918, the party formally embraced socialism, pledging itself to the “common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange.” And in 1922, it finally surpassed the Liberals to become the largest parliamentary opposition to the Tories. Almost fifty years to the day after the Economist’s gloating eulogy for British socialism, its editors grimly relayed the news that Labour, campaigning as “a Socialist Party, and proud of it,” had won a crushing victory over Winston Churchill’s Conservatives in the 1945 general election — ushering in a government that would, in short order, nationalize one-fifth of the UK economy, create the National Health Service (nhs), and lay the foundations of the postwar welfare state. There was just “one superlatively good thing about the result of the General Election,” the stunned editorialists wrote: It leaves no room for doubt about the will of the people. The Labour landslide is complete and surpasses the wildest dreams of [party headquarters] ... Beyond any possibility of mistake, the country wants a Labour Government and a Socialist programme. “Labour Landslide” was the headline they chose for this two-page swallowing of fiftyyear-old crow. But “Political Revolution” would have been just as fitting. 136

Unsettled Matters This story, and countless others like it that litter the early history of socialism, holds a lesson for those who despaired — and those who exulted — at the failure of Bernie Sanders’s presidential bid. It reminds us that political revolutions are won or lost over generations, not individual campaigns; that their progress can be gauged only loosely by any given vote; that they succeed through defeat as much as through victory. Unlike the general run of ambitious office seekers whose political horizons extend no further than the next election cycle, Sanders pursued a project that would have remained unfinished even had he spent eight years in the White House. His aim, like Hardie’s, was a permanent realignment of politics around the axis of working-class power. In the consensus view of commentators, Sanders’s defeat proved the futility of class politics. It was “a hammer blow to the left’s class-based theory of winning political power,” as Vox’s Zack Beauchamp put it. The Sanders camp, entranced by the senator’s “Marxist political strategy,” had wagered that “an unapologetically socialist politics centering Medicare-for-all and welfare state expansions would unite the working class and turn out young people at unprecedented rates.” When months of campaigning failed to unite the working class, and youth turnout failed to set new records, Sanders’s strategy, in Beauchamp’s account, stood discredited. № 38  /  SUMMER 2020

This notion — that the “theory” of an insurgent campaign is disproved if the candidate loses — is the primordial delusion of political punditry, an eternally recurring canard that appears at regular intervals only to be exploded by the evidence of history. When Barry Goldwater lost to Lyndon B. Johnson in a historic landslide, it did not disprove his “theory” that an unapologetically conservative gop could win majorities by courting Southern whites. When William Jennings Bryan attempted to remake the Democratic Party into a liberal reform coalition by uniting rural populists and Northern workers, even his two consecutive election debacles, in 1896 and 1900, could not, in the long run, deal the concept a “hammer blow.” Yet that was not the impression you would get from reading the tide of triumphant commentary that followed both men’s respective defeats. “Bryan and Bryanism have passed into history,” declared a jubilant New York Times in November 1900, rejoicing that all the issues Bryan had raised in his two campaigns “have been settled forever.” “The election has finished the Goldwater school of political reaction,” the New Yorker’s Richard Rovere assured his readers early in 1965 — though if they “keep at it,” he joked, “Goldwaterism may triumph in 1996 or thereabouts.” Today, Bryan is remembered by historians as, in his biographer Michael Kazin’s words, “the key figure in transforming his party

The Victory to Come

The Roveres of the world are immortalized for their purblindness: their bad takes literally enter the history books.

from a bulwark of conservative thinking and policy into the standard-bearer of modern liberalism.” The Goldwater campaign is recalled by Sean Wilentz as an effort that, “despite [its] enormous defeat … marked a breakthrough for the conservative movement that never entirely abated.” (The Roveres of the world are immortalized for their purblindness: their bad takes literally enter the history books.)

Why We Lost As for Sanders, any serious account of his defeat must start with the underemphasized fact that the contest he lost was a primary, not a general election. Party primaries are a distinct kind of election: not only are voters deprived of the partisan cues that normally guide their voting decisions (since, in primaries, all candidates run under the same party label), but as everybody knows, strategic voting is the rule. As political scientist Elizabeth Simas has put it:

Primary elections are unique in that electability — defined as a candidate’s prospects for winning the general election — is also included in the decision calculus. The addition of the electability factor creates the potential for voters to be faced with a tradeoff between a sincerely preferred candidate and a candidate who is less favorable but more likely to win. In such scenarios, it becomes important to understand just how much weight voters place on a candidate’s electability. The evidence is overwhelming that electability was the paramount issue in the minds of most Democratic primary voters. In November, Gallup found that 60 percent of Democrats preferred to see a nominee who had the “best chance of beating Donald Trump,” even if he or she didn’t agree with them on all the issues they cared about; only 36 percent preferred the opposite. YouGov found electability looming even larger in this election than in past years.

AFTER BERNIE

And in the typical state exit poll, electability voters ultimately outnumbered issue voters by a 25 to 35 percentage-point margin. That’s why, despite entering the field with a larger pool of committed supporters than any other candidate, Sanders knew he would lose if he didn’t swiftly establish an image as a vote-getter — which meant winning early primaries. His initial success on that front brought instant results: after Sanders’s New Hampshire victory, the share of Democrats who named him as the candidate most likely to beat Trump jumped from 23 percent to 29 percent, and then jumped again, after his massive victory in Nevada, to 34 percent — twice the level for Joe Biden, according to the Morning Consult poll. By the end of February, Sanders wasn’t just leading in horse-race polls; he was beating Biden in head-to-head matchups, in which voters were asked whom they would choose if the field were narrowed down to those two. In a March 2 Reuters/Ipsos matchup poll, Sanders led Biden 54 percent to 46 percent — which means that, contrary to a number of analyses, his polling lead had never been that of a mere “factional candidate” benefiting artificially from a split in the moderate vote. It was Sanders’s defeat in South Carolina, and the coordinated wave of Biden endorsements by prominent Democrats, that threw the trend into reverse. Within days, the share of voters who viewed Biden as the most electable

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candidate doubled from 17 percent to 33 percent, then surged to 51 percent after Super Tuesday. Suddenly, 54 percent of Democrats planned to vote for Biden. Sanders never recovered his momentum. In short, Sanders was defeated because a sizable segment of rank-and-file Democrats, anxious to defeat Trump, opted for the candidate who party leaders had assured them would stand the best chance in November. It’s a simple, obvious explanation, and if any more evidence is needed, consider this fact: Sanders, who lost sixteen of the twenty-one primaries for which there were exit polls, would have won seventeen of those contests had self-declared “electability” voters stayed home and left the field to the “issue” voters. Sanders’ “Marxist” electoral strategy had nothing to do with this sequence of events. The Democratic establishment marshaled its advantages against Sanders — rank-and-file Democrats’ hunger to defeat Trump, the existence of a bloc of party loyalists ready to be swayed by endorsements, the self-propelling dynamics of “momentum” in primaries — but it could have done that against any other candidate, with any other “theory.”

A Possible Future That’s not to say that the manner of Sanders’s defeat holds no lessons for socialist electoral politics. Among other things, it

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raises the intriguing question of whether he would have been less vulnerable to the party’s machinations had 2020 — like 2008 and 2016 — been an “open” race with no Republican incumbent running; such contests seem to mellow the primary electorate’s obsession with electability. But what is most striking about the Sanders campaign in retrospect is how consistently it drew the support of the expanding, as opposed to the declining, elements of American society. At a time when the fastest growing religious group in the United States is the “nones” (the religiously unaffiliated), Sanders was by far the leading candidate within that group, and he received the least support from white evangelicals, the religious segment now experiencing the fastest decline. At a time when Latinos are projected to reach nearly 20 percent of the electorate in less than two decades, Sanders

attracted a tidal wave of Latino support: no less than 42 percent in national polls post-New Hampshire, and a staggering 50 percent of the Latino vote in the Nevada caucus, according to entrance polls. Finally, there is the generational phenomenon. Within almost every conceivable demographic — from blacks, to rural whites, to second-generation immigrants — Sanders led the field among the young, winning majorities and often supermajorities. Even his dismal showing with older voters points to the same conclusion: that the force of generational replacement is working silently in the background, shifting the electoral rolls in Sanders’s direction. If a Martian were to land on Earth and watch the 2020 primaries unfold, I suspect they’d be puzzled by the bluster of Sanders’s critics, who seem convinced that they dodged a bullet. They haven’t — the bullet is still on its way.

The Democratic establishment marshaled its advantages against Sanders but it could have done that against any other candidate, with any other “theory.”

№ 38  /  SUMMER 2020

In memory of our friend and comrade Michael Brooks (1983–2020)