Bernie Sanders' call for
political revolution has inspired grassroots groups to continue his work even
after the election is over.
FEATURES | MAY 8, 2016
A year ago, when Bernie
Sanders announced his run for president, few thought his bid would amount to
more than a protest campaign. But today, after more than 2 million donors and
400,000 volunteers have helped Sanders build a highly effective political
organization that has earned him victories in 18 states so far, activists are
strategizing about how to turn his campaign into a long-term movement.
In nearly every state in the
nation, autonomous grassroots organizations began campaigning for Sanders
months before his campaign established any official presence on the ground.
Ranging from state-level organizations such as Illinois for Bernie and Team
Bernie NY to city and even neighborhood groups, they brought together thousands
of volunteers—many of whom had never participated in electoral politics—to work
together toward a common goal.
Now, those organizations are
beginning to build coalitions with labor, socialist parties and progressive
groups to set a post-election agenda for the political revolution. To that end,
National Nurses United, which endorsed Sanders, is organizing a People’s Summit on
June 17 in Chicago, while the People’s Revolution, a group founded by former Occupy
organizers, is hosting a People’s Convention in Philadelphia two days before
the Democratic National Convention in July. As with any project to unite the
Left, however, these efforts must first grapple with long-standing divides
around tactics and priorities.
“The advantage of a
presidential campaign is that it unifies competing interests around a common
goal,” says Charles Lenchner, cofounder with Winnie Wong of People for Bernie,
one of the largest pro-Sanders grassroots organizations and a partner in the
People’s Summit. “Without a candidate to rally around, the contradictions
become more visible.”
One of the biggest open
questions is what role Sanders and his campaign infrastructure will play. On a
number of occasions, Sanders has expressed his desire to continue fighting for
political revolution, win or lose. Larry Cohen, former CWA president and senior
adviser to the Sanders campaign, says that Sanders will continue to be a
“transformational force” in American politics well beyond the election. The
Sanders campaign recently began fundraising for three progressive insurgents
who are challenging Democratic incumbents: Zephyr Teachout in New York, Lucy
Flores in Nevada and Pramila Jayapal in Washington. The campaign also plans to
support other down-ballot candidates, according to Cohen.
Cohen thinks that Sanders will
also support grassroots efforts to further his political revolution. “His own
support for it won’t be centralized, but more of a facilitating role within
that network,” says Cohen. “That is a characteristic of how this campaign has
operated from the start, and that’s not an accident.”
“We want Bernie to share what
he built in large part thanks to our help. We want to make sure it goes back to
the people.”
The People’s Revolution
envisions “Bernie without the Bernie,” says Jack “Jackrabbit” Pollack, who in
October cofounded the group with fellow Sanders organizer Shana East. “What
Bernie has shown us is that you can actually rally people around a set of
policies that are really all going in a positive direction.”
The People’s Revolution sees
Sanders as a critical partner in building a broad issues-based progressive
movement to ensure the promise of the campaign—“A Future to Believe In”—becomes
a reality. At the People’s Convention, the group plans to develop and ratify a People’s
Platform to present to the Democratic National Convention and set an agenda for
the broader movement.
The People’s Revolution also
hopes to convince Sanders to turn over the resources his campaign has
amassed—money, voter data and an email database—to the grassroots. “We want
Bernie to share what he built in large part thanks to our help,” Pollack says.
“We want to make sure it goes back to the people.”
To that end, an unrelated
group of more than 1,000 Sanders supporters recently signed an open letter,
drafted by New York teacher and labor activist Erik Forman, calling on Sanders
to devote his resources toward building a permanent organization.
While he declined to go into
specifics, Cohen says these questions are on Sanders’ mind as well. “There’s been
a recognition by Bernie that this is about supporters feeling like they own a
chunk of this campaign. That’s what accounts for the number of donations, and
more importantly the number of volunteer hours.”
But Charles Lenchner cautions
against relying on the Sanders campaign for direction and support. “The lesson
of People for Bernie has been that you don’t need those traditional gatekeepers
to make a difference,” he says. “The early weakness of the Sanders campaign was
its greatest strength. People had to figure out how to build the infrastructure
of a political campaign by themselves. We were able to create a massive
volunteer network with almost no money at all. We want to make it as difficult
as possible for outside groups to co-opt the movement that’s united behind
Bernie.”
Another obstacle, of course,
is that not everyone on the Left is united behind Sanders. Critics from the
movement for Black lives have argued that Sanders’ focus on economic issues
fails to confront the racialized nature of American capitalism.
“For too long, economic
justice movements have asked people from marginalized communities to bracket
their identities for the sake of the cause,” says Jessica Pierce, national
co-chair of the Black Youth Project 100 (BYP100). “It’s one thing to say, ‘This
is the people’s movement,’ but who are those people and how are they coming
together?” Pierce continues. “Inclusion has to be completely integrated into
your organizational structure. If I’m not seeing anything in a platform that
speaks to what I deal with every day as a Black person, then that’s telling me
I don’t matter.”
Pierce says BYP100 has not yet
been contacted by organizers of the Summit or the People’s Convention (both
groups say they plan to reach out). Pierce sees strategic potential in such
large-scale collaborations, but for BYP100, she says, the key question would
be, “How does it help us advance our cause, too?”
Lenchner believes that
addressing concerns like Pierce’s is vital to creating a sustainable long-term
movement. “We need to be intentional about bringing new people into leadership
positions in the movement,” he says. “One of the big challenges is that
movements tend to be led by the first people who showed up. That’s not a good
way to decide who leaders are. It also shouldn’t just be the people who can
work the most, because they’re the ones who have enough privilege to be able to
do so.”
Lenchner hopes to address such
questions head-on at the People’s Summit in Chicago, as well as moving beyond
the “silos” that progressives often work in. Democratic Socialists of America
is joining People for Bernie and NNU in organizing the event, and they’ve
brought in a diverse array of groups such as Progressive Democrats of America,
People’s Action, United Students Against Sweatshops and 350.org.
The goal is to “use the
opportunity of a political campaign to generate broad unity on the Left, while
creating a space for people to act autonomously to pursue their own goals and
interests,” Lenchner says.
“The lesson of People for
Bernie has been that you don’t need those traditional gatekeepers to make a
difference.”
One point of tension is the
age-old question of whether to continue to engage in electoral politics. “For
many of us, participation in electoral politics feels like an abusive
relationship,” reads Erik Forman’s open letter to Sanders. “Many of us poured
our hearts into the presidential bids of the Rainbow Coalition, or the
long-shot campaigns of Ralph Nader and other Green Party candidates. Many of us
turned out to put Obama in the White House. … All of these electoral campaigns
left little behind but broken hearts.”
Pollack, however, argues that
the Sanders campaign has shown that the Left can actually win elections and use
them to build power. “My experience with the Left has been that we reject
electoral politics, and we agitate and we lobby,” he says. “But today Bernie is
illustrating the idea that an electoral insurgency can take place that can
actually push our agenda forward.”
The People’s Revolution hopes
to spark similar insurgencies in future races on every level of the political
system. Toward that end, they are talking with Grassroots Select, a digital
collective founded by Sanders supporters to channel resources and volunteers to
candidates who share Sanders’ agenda. Pollack also points to Berniecrats.net, a
crowdsourced list of more than 250 pro-Bernie candidates running in 2016, as
another example of how Sanders’ grassroots support can buoy other progressive
candidates.
Differences on strategy aside,
however, Pollack thinks the most important goal is ensuring that the political
revolution promised by the Sanders campaign doesn’t fade away. “People who
didn’t believe they had anything to fight for suddenly realized that they weren’t
alone,” he says. “We need to organize, we need to strategize and build power to
make our ideas a reality.”
This is the first in a new
series on the political revolution sparked by the Bernie Sanders campaign, and
the impact it's having beyond the election.
Ethan
Corey is a New York-based reporter writing about politics, social movements and
inequality. Follow him on Twitter at @ethanscorey.
This
is the first in a new series on the political revolution sparked by the Bernie
Sanders campaign, and the impact it's having beyond the election.
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