Did The 26th Amendment Fail, Part 5
How Bernie Sanders’ 2016 Campaign Galvanized ‘The Movement’ — And The Truths About His Politics And Campaign That Are Rarely Talked About
Much of the criticism of ‘neoliberalism’ has been led by economic geographer David Harvey, himself a Marxist. Much of the criticism against it involves politicians of the 1980s including Bruce Babbitt, Gary Hart, Paul Tsongas, Bill Bradley and it is considered a critical factor in Bill Clinton’s becoming elected President in 1992. Because the policy was at the center of so much of the formulation of the conservative movement, the argument goes that during the end of the 20th century both parties moved fundamentally to the right. The Democrats have taken far more criticism than the GOP on the part of the left because it is seen as a betrayal of the liberal cause.
There is a truth to this when one considers the policies unfolded. But left out of the discussion are the outside factors when one considers the results of two very different GOP landslides: Nixon’s in 1972 and Reagan’s in 1984. In both cases they managed to win 49 out of fifty states against an old style liberal Democrat. Walter Mondale may have been less to the left of McGovern but it couldn’t have been a clearer message for the Democratic Party. In the case of Reagan’s massive electoral victories the Democrats could not have gotten a clearer message from the electorate: embracing the liberal order would be a death sentence for the party.
Political theorists and activists have a difference obligation then elected officials and it is something that both progressives and conservatives have been fundamentally unable to grasp. A political party is supposed to listen to the message of the electorate and govern based on the message they got. Every four years both parties have to reshape their message based on previous elections.
In the case of the ‘Atari Democrats’ — the so-called neoliberals I mentioned above — they had gotten the message of political winds of the 1980s and shaped their message accordingly. When Bill Clinton ran for office in 1992 he was the first Democrat since Carter to try and run from the center more than the left. After twelve years of Republican leadership and having lost four of the five previous Presidential elections the Democratic Party was facing the possibility of never winning the White House again with a traditional liberal message.
Activists like Ralph Nader and his ilk never accepted that fact and still can’t. During Clinton’s Presidency (and later on, Obama’s) activists continued to argue that there was no real difference between the two parties because the Democratic party had abandoned what they considered its traditional leftist values. The fact that those values might not be shared by the electorate at large didn’t matter; the fact that both men managed to win reelection on those messages and were immensely popular was, to many, proof of their distrust of the electorate at large.
There has always been two types of progressive politicians. One type — Lincoln, both Roosevelts, Hubert Humphrey as a senator and in his domestic policy Lyndon Johnson understand that rhetoric alone doesn’t lead to sweeping change. One must have the will of the people, be willing to make compromises and build coalitions to achieve your goals. The other types — Thaddeus Stevens and the Radical Republicans, Robert LaFollette, Henry Wallace, Eugene McCarthy through much of his active political life — care little for public opinion and believe that it is their job to get their vision through regardless whether their colleagues in the Senate or the White House or even the electorate itself want it done. They generally never move beyond their seat in Congress and most of their visions end up never being achieved. Like Mondale’s description of McCarthy, they are big on rhetoric but reluctantly to do the ‘heavy lifting’ which is how policy gets made in a democracy.
And it is for that very reason, I believe, that so many of today’s scholars then and now admire them so much. In a movement that has increasingly become more based in ‘performative activism’ rather than achieving policy and where principles and purity have always held the left back more in winning elected office than the right, these elected officials are held by some as heroes because they had a vision and did not compromise in it. That they failed spectacularly and the nation is worse because they didn’t agree to compromise is also why they are valued: increasingly over the 21st century the left admires candidates who lose by huge margins rather than compromise rather than win and have to govern.
For that reason I suspect many young voters in particular were drawn to Bernie Sanders when he ran for the Democratic nomination, a decision that I increasingly believe has done as much damage to the Democratic Party as the rise of Donald Trump.
It’s worth remembering something that academics almost always refuse to mention when they talk about Sanders: he’s not a Democrat, he merely caucuses with them. Sanders is everything the activist left wants him to be because he was primarily an activist. And he has been a proud socialist since his 20s and was part of the anti-war movement as well as part of SNCC and CORE. He actually tried to run as a member of a social party multiple times during the 1970s. He actively ran for the as a Socialist when he was Mayor of Burlington, praised Noam Chomsky. He was the first socialist elected to Congress since Vito Marcantonio who’d run for office in 1946 (under the mantle of Henry Wallace)
Sanders’s presence in Congress for the first eighteen years of his life was one of someone who alienated allies and colleagues. It is unlikely he would have been tolerated as much as he was had he not spent the majority of his tenure in Congress (1991–2006) when Congress was under Republican control. The fact that he has been a constant critic of so many conservative causes (including the Patriot Act and the War in Iraq) no doubt helped him.
When Sanders ran for the Senate in 2005, the only way he managed to win was to align with the Democratic Party. In large part he was endorsed by the establishment and it helped that the Democrats needed him in 2007 to win back control of the Senate.
Throughout his career however, in the Senate, he was just as much pissing inside the tent as he was when he was on the outside. When he gave ‘The Speech’ against TARP in 2010 the bill still passed the Senate by a huge margin. But it did what leftists have always wanted: it made him a name. In 2007 he helped kill a bill for comprehensive immigration reform, arguing its guest worker program would depress wages for American workers. He has spent his career advocating for progressive causes but rarely forging actual legislation. According to the Times: “Big legislation largely eludes Mr. Sanders because his ideas are usually to the left of the majority of the Senate.” He has a far lower legislative effectiveness then the average Senator and is also one of the most popular politicians in America.
Sanders is, in other words, everything the left could ever hope for in a candidate. He shouts at the top of his lungs about the causes they care about, they fail because they go against what Congress believes in, and then he can campaign about how corrupt ‘the establishment’ is even though he himself is part of it. He was in fact considering challenging Obama in a primary campaign in 2012 because of Obama’s betrayal of the cause. Obama had been one of the first Senators to campaign for Sanders when he was running for office the first time and Sanders was going to need his help to win reelection that year. Harry Reid had to intervene to stop him.
When he chose to run for President in April of 2015, he was essentially the opposition to Hilary Clinton who everyone was sure was going to be President in 2016 and whom nobody really seemed happy about. Clinton had never been popular among the left even though she should have been. The author is far from Hilary’s biggest fan but one can’t help but think this has much to do with the fact that Hilary was connected to reality in a way that the left never liked.
When she had first run for President in 2008 she had been harshly criticized about a statement she had made about the Voting Rights Act: “John Lewis marched for the Voting Rights Act but it took a President to sign it.”
Clinton was accused by many — including the Obama campaign — of diminishing Lewis’s work as an activist. Clinton’s larger point was true — all the marching in the world does no good if you don’t have the political headwinds at your side and Lewis, himself a Congressman, knew this very well. But in the binary world of activism and the media Hilary was seen as shitting on the accomplishments of a black activist to bolster a white President.
I feel to this day that much of Sanders’s success in the Democratic Primary of 2016 was based on the lack of opposition in that primary. Clinton was never a skilled campaigner, could not win over crowds and was never an inspiring speaker. Considering the bias against her compounded by sexism and the right-wing media throughout her political life, I believe sincerely that had she been challenged seriously by Joe Biden, she would have lost. But the field for Democratic candidates for the Presidency was essentially dry by that point and the disastrous 2014 midterms had essentially stripped the cupboard bare of opposition. Even by the time Sanders announced there was no one of consequence running against her.
Clinton could no doubt have made political hay had she chosen to point out that Sanders had no real business running for the Democratic nomination for President as he was no more a Democrat than George W. Bush. She could have pointed out that Sanders had been a gadfly to the Obama administration while she was Secretary of State and for all his claims of being an outsider had been in Congress for three times as long as Hilary. She did point out, multiple times, about the increasingly Populist tone of Sanders’s campaign and how his bringing down the institutions were not conducive of a man running for the Presidency.
But that never came out at Sanders’s speeches — or should I say, his speech. At the end of every primary or caucus during the spring and summer of 2016 Sanders would regardless of the results make the same speech. It would advocate for taxing the top one percent, raising the minimum wage, fighting climate change, gun control, realizing citizenship, campaign finance reform and ‘billionaires owning the political process’.
He made his campaign, it should be noted, with no real endorsement from the establishment. Many had wanted Elizabeth Warren to run for the Presidency but she decided not to. She welcomed him into the race but in the most neutral terms possible: “I’m glad to see him get out there and give his version of what leadership in this country should be.” She never endorsed him, with good reason. Warren was part of the Democratic Party and Sanders was not part of it.
Sanders no doubt drew huge crowds because of his use of social media and much his coverage was the most favorable. Because of this he was immensely popular on college campuses, who no doubt were inclined to vastly admire his politics. Because the majority of them knew nothing about his standing in the Senate and assumed, because he was campaigning in a Democratic primary he was de facto a Democrat and because he didn’t sound like the typical politician because he wasn’t one, he had the same kind of appeal on campuses that had been unheard of among primary voters since the era of McCarthy and McGovern. That in itself should have been a sign to anyone how limited his appeal would be nationwide but no one ever accused cable news of having common sense either.
Much of this must be blamed on the media’s desperate need to turn what was looking to be a coronation of Hilary Clinton, someone that was already an old face on cable news and had never been popular with them before. The media must be considered an unindicted co-conspirator in everything that happened in the leadup to 2016 and that includes the Democrats as well as the Republicans. There has always been a tendency on the media to try and make excitement where there isn’t one and the Democratic primary was shaping up to be dullsville. Cable news hadn’t liked Hilary Clinton when she’d run in 2008 and no one was any happier about her running now. So they seized on the early excitement over Sanders as something genuine.
And because of that, everybody ignored the very real fact that Sanders’s polling was never high nationally from the start of the race to the end of it. The reason it seemed like Sanders had momentum was because of the narrowness of Clinton’s victory in Iowa and Sanders’ overwhelming victory in New Hampshire (which was of course, right next to Vermont. In February Hilary won Nevada by a small margin and trounced Sanders by nearly three to one in South Carolina.
On Super Tuesday Clinton swamped Sanders winning eight primaries and caucuses to his four. She was dominant in the South while Sanders could only win in Colorado, Minnesota, Vermont and Oklahoma. Her narrow victory over Sanders in Massachusetts showed the weakness of the Sanders campaign but he decided to stay in the race in anticipation of more favorable territory in New England, the Great Plains, the mountain states and the Pacific Northwest. There was the troubling sign that the only primary he’d won was in Oklahoma and Vermont — Minnesota and Colorado were caucuses
Sanders won Kansas, Maine and Nebraska — all caucus states. He would also narrowly win the Michigan caucus. However Hilary managed to win the majority of the primary states especially in the South — Florida, Louisiana, North Carolina and Mississippi went to here by overwhelming margins. This pattern continued throughout the rest of the primary season: with Hilary maintaining a nearly insurmountable lead as early as the end of March.
Sanders’s campaign, in summation, very much resembles McGovern’s primary campaign in 1972. Sanders did very well in the caucus states, all of which were smaller and involved less organizing and did horribly in the primaries. His performance in the Southern states can’t be measured the same way because the McGovern campaign more or less yielded them to Wallace but compared to the larger states the comparison is undeniable: he lost Texas by a huge margin (Wallace won that state) Florida (McGovern finished dead last in a field of six) narrowly lost Illinois (McGovern didn’t contest the state) lost Ohio (McGovern narrowly lost to Humphrey) lost Pennsylvania (he finished third there). Indeed in many ways he did worse then McGovern, losing California and New York and being swamped in New Jersey, all states McGovern carried. Only in Michigan did he do better than McGovern, winning a state where McGovern finished a distant second to Wallace in.
So many of the victories that Sanders had in the caucuses gave his supporters the illusion that he had the will of the electorate. But most of them were small states that gave him very few delegates and in most of them Clinton was always able to negate his gains by finish just as strongly. In terms of delegate count the Democratic primary was over by mid-March but the media promoted the narrative. The contest was heating up rather than cooling down. And as a result to this day millions believe that Sanders had the will of the people on his side but the ‘establishment’ stole the election for Hilary. In fact all he did was overperform expectations.
Sanders’s campaign shifted the Democratic Party to the left and by and large much of the platform acknowledged it: calling for a $15 minimum wage, a carbon tax, wall street reform and pathway to legalization for marijuana. But either many Sanders voters never read the platform or they were so furious about ‘Bernie’ being defeated’ that they basically refused to go along with Sanders call for party unity. It is calculated that somewhere between 9 to 11 percent of all Sanders’ primary voters chose to vote for Donald Trump. Combined with the 2 percent that Jill Stein received as a Green Party candidate — much of it in states like Michigan and Wisconsin — there is an argument that the left played a small but measurable role in the shocking election of Donald Trump in 2016.
And perhaps it is not a shock. Both the campaigns of Sanders and Trump were described by scholars as ‘Populist’ and using the definition of the term, there is truth in that. Sanders chose the path of the economic populism that was the foundation of the Populist Party in the West by farmers in the Plains states, while Trump’s took on the mantle of the racist demagoguery held in the South by such men as Thomas Watson and ‘Pitchfork’ Ben Tillman. Sanders’s campaign as well as Trump’s was powered as much by rage and economic anger, in this case following the Crash of 2008. Sanders railing against the corporate interests; Trump’s was founded on illegal immigration and was just as racist and sexist as those of the far southern politicians of another era. And for all of his measured tones Sanders’s did use the measure of demagoguery in his speeches when he was railing against the corporate interests and greed that has been part of the campaigns of those such as the Dixiecrat campaigns of Strom Thurmond. Sanders blamed the status quo as much as Trump does. He just has a different set of scapegoats.
Bernie Sanders has been a huge influence on the Democratic Party ever since and there’s an argument it has not always been positive. There remains no evidence — certainly not based in the elections in the eight years since Sanders’s arrived on the national stage — that the rest of the nation wants any of the policies that Sanders and so many of his followers advocate for. His policies as well as those of so many of the so-called Justice Democrats that have come to the part since then are non-starters in Congress even when both it and the White House were under Democratic control during the first two years of Biden’s administration. Justice Democrats, like the Peace Democrats half a century earlier, have a limited electoral appeal nationwide that has shrunk ever since their major campaign in 2018 managed to land them eleven members in Congress. As of the last election only ten remain in Congress and they did not gain a single newcomer for the first time since their founding. They have no presence in the South, as is the tendency for most far left parties. Yet they have a disproportionate voice in Congress compared to most Democrats. And there’s an argument that by staying loyal to them, the Party at large has suffered nationwide.
Of course fans of AOC and Ilhan Ohmar would argue that they are the future of the nation. I’d argue that they and the Squad are little more than the other side of the coin that Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert represent. The Squad, for all its youth, diversity and photogenic nature has done nothing substantial in terms of legislation or advance the party nationwide. What they are good at is advocating for their issues on camera on social media and in the halls of Congress. Whether or not they know that this was the strategy of Newt Gingrich — to bloviate in empty halls for the cameras while making it seem it was speaking truth to power — is unclear. That it has done as much to make them popular in certain circles as it has done with the Freedom Caucus in theirs is unmistakable.
And for all the supposed inspiration they have among the youth of America, they also demonstrate the technological savvy as opposed to common sense. As representatives of Congress they have responsibilities to the party, the voters and the country but by and large they behave very much like they only owe a responsibility to their causes and their own self-promotion. They are more interesting in advocating for change than actually compromising and making sure it happens. The fact that many Justice Democrats chose to vote against Biden’s infrastructure bill in large part because he had to ‘compromise’ with Joe Manchin in order to get it to pass in the Senate shows that they cared more about making a point then helping the public. That they were defended in progressive outlets such as Daily Kos — who spent the last decade vilifying Manchin as a Democrat in Name Only — shows how little their common sense is.
And many of them chose to turn on their idol later on. After Biden’s election in 2020 Sanders was given major committee assignments and enormous influence well outside his standing or the fact he was a Democrat. Sanders seems to have understood that the only way to get his agenda passed was to work with the administration. Yet he received large sums of hate mail arguing that he had ‘completed betrayed the supporters of his 2016 and 2020 run for the Presidency by working with the administration. Sanders was actually trying to bring about the causes he had thought for into some form of reality, however watered down. In the minds of many of his most ardent followers, that was the worst kind of betrayal possible. In their minds marching for a cause was important. They still fail to understand that it takes a President to sign it.
In the next article this series I will discuss so much of the left’s activities and policies today and how technological savvy has prevailed among the young even more than intelligence then how they should be achieved.