by Arun Gupta
Bernie Sanders supporters are
understandably frustrated about the 2016 primary. He essentially tied Hillary
Clinton in Iowa, trounced her in New Hampshire, and gave her a scare in Nevada.
But the narrative is Clinton has “cleared the road,” is “back on track,” and
“inevitable” again to win the Democratic Party presidential nomination.
Sanders diehards might dismiss
this as corporate media bias, but there is little solace elsewhere.
Fivethirtyeight.com, the reigning election prognosticator, finds pluses for
Sanders coming out of Nevada, such as a strong showing with Hispanic voters and
a more than 50-percent jump in self-identified liberals in the turnout from
2008. But the website calls Clinton the favorite in the Super Tuesday primaries
given her win in Nevada and expected dominance in South Carolina, which is what
the polls suggest. It notes Sanders has been unable to make significant inroads
among African-Americans despite how the Clintons brutalized working-class
Blacks with harsh policing, welfare, and trade policies in the 1990s.
More significant, Clinton may
have thwarted Sanders’s surging campaign fatally in Nevada, and her victory was
the fruit of her enduring advantage: the deep state. It also punctuates a
questionable strategy promoted by leftists such as Jacobin publisher Bhaskar
Sunkara: to use the presidential race as a “way for socialists to regroup,
organize together, and articulate the kind of politics that speaks to the needs
and aspirations of the vast majority of people.”
Clinton won with the backing
of unionized Black and Hispanic workers at “six major Las Vegas casinos” —
Caesars Palace, Harrah’s, MGM, Rio, the Wynn and New York-New York. Sanders may
have the passion, he may be firing up young people on the losing end of a
rigged economy, his policies could roll back decades of class warfare on
workers, but his insurgency lacks the array of social institutions
establishment candidates depend on in a crisis.
In Nevada, Clinton’s campaign
colluded with casino owners, the Democratic Party, and the Culinary Workers
Union — which was officially neutral — to deliver the state to her. The
Democratic Party set up caucuses at the six casinos so workers didn’t “have to
travel to their home precincts to participate.” And until Nevada Sen. Harry
Reid reportedly pushed CWU local 226 into action and pressured casino owners to
give workers paid time off to caucus, turnout at casinos was forecast at about
a hundred voters. The Culinary Workers Union provided 100 organizers at sites
including the casinos and coordinated with casino management, which gave
workers up to three paid hours to attend caucuses. The state Democratic Party
extended the noon deadline by an hour or more for the caucus to begin, enabling
large turnouts at the casinos. The Clinton campaign flooded the casinos with
volunteers, delivering resounding two-to-one victories. Unabashed about their partisan
role, the CWU local political director celebrated the Clinton win and Tweeted
that it wouldn’t have happened without Reid.
This is classic corporatism,
in which government mobilizes institutions like corporations, unions, and
political parties for strategic ends. In this case, the guiding hand is the
Clinton camp serving the interests of the capitalist state. It’s powerful,
deploying industrial-scale organizing to overwhelm voluntaristic models like
the Sanders campaign, which relies more on ideas and emotion to motivate
supporters because it does not have access to the institutions the Clintons
have.
Now, Sanders has been trying
to cobble a power base together. The proliferation of social media and digital
media allows him to bypass media that often ridicule Sanders when they notice
him. Liberal clicktivist outfits like MoveOn.org and Democracy for America
support him. He’s capitalized on objective conditions with a left-liberal
response to severe income inequality and benefited from contingent forces like
“Labor for Bernie,” which has been endorsed by more than 10,000 union members
and leaders. His fundraising has defied expectations, and in the run-up to the
Nevada caucus Sanders spent nearly twice as much as Clinton on broadcast
advertising.
But that’s not enough. The
exigencies of the electoral process force Sanders to compete on terrain that
favors Clinton’s pro-corporate substance and methods. His top-down political
revolution has sparked grassroots fervor and cash, but the role of organized
labor points to the possibilities and limits of Sanders’s campaign. Nurses,
postal workers, and communications workers unions have endorsed Sanders, and he
cinched a “coup” when the AFL-CIO said recently it would forgo endorsing a
candidate. About two-thirds of unions, however, have lined up behind Clinton
with millions of members, thousands of staff, and hundreds of millions of
dollars in the bank.
Like the Clintons, some unions
are bare-knuckle brawlers that outmatch the Sanders campaign. At a Seattle
Labor for Bernie rally held on February 21, two sources say the head of the
Washington State Labor Council cancelled his planned appearance there. They
allege that AFSCME, the largest public-sector union in the country, threatened
to cut funding to the council if he spoke.
In Nevada, the pro-Clinton
Service Employees International Union passed out fliers portraying her as a
supporter of a $15-an-hour wage. Only Sanders supports a federal $15 minimum
wage; Clinton calls for a $12-an-hour floor. Her position is so backwards the
New York Times chastised her and told her to get on board with the $15
proposal. SEIU spent more than four years building widespread support for $15
an hour and unionization for low-wage workers, but union leaders seem willing
to jettison these demands to prove their devotion to Clinton.
That many labor leaders do the
dirty work for Wall Street Democrats indicates they have yet to develop a
response to the grievous blow Reagan inflicted 35 years ago in the air-traffic
controllers strike. Unions serve as an ATM for Democrats, earning labor leaders
spots as wallflowers within the chambers of power just to be within earshot of
the CEOs, bankers, and billionaires monopolizing the conversation. Their
thinking seems to be that while Clinton will heap abuse on workers and unions
if she wins, just as Obama and Bill Clinton did, she is not as vicious as
Republicans.
Sanders’s campaign has
benefitted rank-and-file militants opposing labor leaders cozy with corporate Democrats
and Wall Street. But Bill Fletcher says Sanders declined the historic
opportunity to convene “a meeting of left and progressive electoral activists
to discuss strategy” and failed to nurture relationships with movements the way
Jesse Jackson’s radical presidential campaign did in 1984.
Ten months after Sanders
announced his presidential bid, the huge crowds, the enthusiasm, the dreams
that Americans would finally embrace socialism, at least in word if not in
deed, his path to the nomination will narrow if he doesn’t have a strong
showing on Super Tuesday and win some key states. The left, disorganized as
ever, has little to show from it. Even as obituaries are being written for
Sanders, some cling to the airy idea that the Democratic Party can be co-opted
in spite of its glaring corruption and dominance by forces allied with Wall
Street and the Pentagon.
Sanders has proved that
millions of Americans are hungry to reverse neoliberal economic policies. But
the task remains the same: to organize radical mass movements rather than
believing they can magically spring from a Democratic Party inhospitable to
everything the left represents.
This article originally
appeared on TelesurTV.
Arun Gupta is a graduate of
the French Culinary Institute in New York and has written for publications
including the Washington Post, the Nation, Salon, and the Guardian. He is the
author of the upcoming “Bacon as a Weapon of Mass Destruction: A
Junk-Food-Loving Chef’s Inquiry into Taste” (The New Press).
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