Et Tu, Bernie?
There are two versions of
Bernie Sanders. There is the old Bernie Sanders, who mounted a quixotic
campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination as a democratic socialist
who refused corporate cash and excoriated corporate Democrats. And there is the
new Bernie Sanders, who dutifully plays by the party’s rules, courts
billionaires, refused to speak out in support of the lawsuit brought against
the Democratic National Committee (DNC) for rigging the primaries against him
and endorses Democratic candidates who espouse the economic and political
positions he once denounced.
Sanders’ metamorphosis began
in December 2015 when he saw the groundswell of support for his candidacy and
thought he could win the nomination. He dropped the fiery, socialist rhetoric that
first characterized his campaign—he had given whole speeches on democratic
socialism shortly after he announced his candidacy in May 2015. He hired
establishment Democratic Party consultants such as Ted Devine, who, ironically,
played a role in the creation of the superdelegates that helped fix the
nomination victory of Hillary Clinton. He would spend tens of millions of the
some $230 million he raised during the campaign on professional consultants.
When it was clear he would lose, Sanders and his influential campaign manager,
Jeff Weaver, began coordinating closely with the Clinton campaign. By May of
2016, Sanders had muted his criticisms of Clinton and surrendered to the
Democratic Party machine. He has been an obedient servant of the party establishment
ever since.
Sanders was always
problematic. His refusal to condemn imperialism and the war industry—a
condemnation central to the message of the socialist leader Eugene V.
Debs—meant his socialism was stillborn. It is impossible to be a socialist without
being an anti-imperialist. But at least Sanders addressed the reality of social
inequality, which the Republican and Democratic establishment pretended did not
exist. He returned political discourse to reality. And he restored the good
name of socialism.
Weaver and Clinton’s campaign
manager, Robby Mook, built a de facto alliance in the weeks leading up to the
convention. As the convention was about to begin, WikiLeaks
exposed the Clinton campaign’s nonaggression pact with the Sanders
campaign. Many Sanders delegates, by the time they arrived in Philadelphia in
July 2016 for the convention, were enraged at the theft and fraud orchestrated
by the DNC. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the DNC chair and the architect of the
theft, stepped down. Some DNC staff members were fired.
Sanders delegates were deluged
on the eve of the convention with messages from the Sanders campaign to be
respectful, not to disrupt the nominating process and to support Clinton,
messages that often turned out to have been written by Clinton staffers such as
Mook and then sent out under Sanders’ name. Sanders was a dutiful sheepdog,
herding his disgruntled supporters into the embrace of the Democratic Party
machine.
The scope of fraud in the
primaries was breathtaking. Donna Brazile, who took over the DNC after
Wasserman Schultz was removed, later revealed the existence of a joint
fund-raising agreement among the DNC, the Hillary Victory Fund, and Hillary for
America.
“The agreement—signed by Amy
Dacey, the former CEO of the DNC, and Robby Mook with a copy to Marc
Elias—specified that in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC,
Clinton would control the party’s finances, strategy, and all the money
raised,” Brazile wrote. “Her campaign had the right of refusal of who would be
the party communications director, and it would make final decisions on all the
other staff. The DNC also was required to consult with the campaign about all
other staffing, budgeting, data, analytics, and mailings.”
Sanders, although he knew by
September 2016 that the process was rigged, said nothing to his supporters. He
was tacitly complicit in the cover-up. It was left to one of the architects of
the fraud, Brazile, to reveal the scam. But by then it was too late.
Sanders’ capitulation in the
face of the overwhelming evidence of the rigging of the nomination process was
political and moral cowardice. He missed his historical moment, one that should
have seen him denounce a corrupt, corporate-dominated party elite and walk away
to build a third-party candidacy. Sanders will never recover politically. To
see the future, he has only to look at the campaign events he held on behalf of
Clinton after her nomination. His crowds dwindled from thousands to a few
hundred after he endorsed Clinton. Data collected by Harvard Harris Poll
charted the downward spiral of his favorability ratings as he became more and
more obsequious to the Democratic Party establishment. His 2020 campaign for
the presidency will be a pale reflection of 2016. His “political revolution”
slogan has been exposed as another empty public relations gimmick.
If we are to defy corporate
power, which is vicious when it feels threatened, we need leaders with the
fortitude to withstand the onslaught. Debs never sold out. He was sent to
prison in 1919 and ran for president in 1920 from his prison cell. If we are
not willing to pay this price we better not play the game.
“There is but one thing you
have to be concerned about, and that is that you keep foursquare with the
principles of the international Socialist movement,” Debs said in a June 16,
1918, speech in Canton, Ohio, that led to his being sentenced to 10 years in
prison on a charge of violating the Espionage Act. “It is only when you begin
to compromise that trouble begins. So far as I am concerned, it does not matter
what others may say, or think, or do, as long as I am sure that I am right with
myself and the cause. There are so many who seek refuge in the popular side of
a great question. As a Socialist, I have long since learned how to stand
alone.”
Those who support Sanders’
capitulation, including his high-priced establishment consultants, will argue
that politics is about compromise and the practical. This is true. But playing
politics in a system that is not democratic is about becoming part of the
charade. We need to overthrow this system, not placate it. Revolution is almost
always a doomed enterprise, one that succeeds only because its leaders eschew
the practical and are endowed with what the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr calls “sublime
madness.” Sanders lacks this sublime madness. The quality defined Debs. And
for this reason Sanders is morally and temperamentally unfit to lead this
fight.
“I never had much faith in
leaders,” Debs said. “I am willing to be charged with almost anything, rather
than to be charged with being a leader. I am suspicious of leaders, and
especially of the intellectual variety. Give me the rank and file every day in
the week. If you go to the city of Washington, and you examine the pages of the
Congressional Directory, you will find that almost all of those corporation
lawyers and cowardly politicians, members of Congress, and misrepresentatives
of the masses—you will find that almost all of them claim, in glowing terms,
that they have risen from the ranks to places of eminence and distinction. I am
very glad I cannot make that claim for myself. I would be ashamed to admit that
I had risen from the ranks. When I rise it will be with the ranks, and not from
the ranks.”
Heather Gautney, the author of
“Crashing the Party: From the Bernie Sanders Campaign to a Progressive
Movement” and an associate professor of sociology at Fordham University, has
detailed the numerous ploys used by the Democratic Party establishment to deny
Sanders the nomination. These tactics included the party elites’ appointment of
718 superdelegates—Democratic senators, governors and members of Congress,
party officials, dozens of registered lobbyists or “shadow lobbyists” and
wealthy corporate donors. More than 400 were pledged to Clinton before Sanders
announced his campaign. The party also banned those who were registered as independent
voters from voting in many primaries, although the taxpayers pay for the
primaries. It orchestrated the theft of the vote in caucuses such as Nevada’s.
And it limited the number of debates to deny exposure to Sanders. Brazile
passed on the CNN debate questions in advance to the Clinton campaign.
“Over a third of under-30
voters—Sanders’s core constituency—weren’t registered to any political
party,” Gautney
writes in an article in The Guardian. And when they got to the polls
they were turned away. In the New York primary, she notes, “between 3 and 4
million ‘unaffiliated’ voters were disenfranchised due to a statute that
required changing one’s party affiliation 25 days prior to the previous general
election.”
The Democratic Party in New
York in the upcoming primary requires unaffiliated voters to register as
Democrats 11 months before the primary, a condition that will cripple the
progressive candidacy of Cynthia Nixon for governor. Sanders, bowing to the demands
of the party elite, has refused to endorse Nixon’s bid against Gov. Andrew
Cuomo.
Gautney calls the system
broken, but it works exactly as it is designed to work. The Democratic Party
elites have been refining the mechanisms and exclusionary rules since the
presidential election, along with purging the party of progressives, to ensure
that an insurgent candidate like Sanders will never get close to the
nomination. Sanders, no doubt, thinks he can overcome these obstacles by being
obedient to the party hierarchy. This is a terrible miscalculation.
In state after state, as
Gautney details, Sanders was systematically robbed. And he and any other
insurgent can expect the same treatment in 2020. Yes, the party formed a
tripartite Unity Reform Commission with representatives from the Clinton
campaign and the Sanders campaign to review the rules. But the Unity Reform
Commission is cosmetic. It cannot make changes to DNC rules, only
recommendations, which have to be approved by the rules and bylaws committee
and the DNC members. The rules and bylaws committee and the DNC are stacked
with lobbyists, consultants, establishment and Clinton loyalists, and people,
like Brazile, who rigged the election against Sanders. They retain control over
any changes to the rules. The public has no say. There is not one Sanders
supporter on the committee. The final recommendations submitted by the
commission said nothing about the chief source of corruption that grips the
Democratic Party—corporate and billionaire money. It didn’t mention campaign
finance reform. Any attempt at reform is meaningless until corporations and
billionaires stop bankrolling the party.
The Democratic Party is
neither democratic nor in any real sense a political party. It is a corporate
mirage. The members of its base can, at best, select preapproved candidates and
act as props in a choreographed party convention. Voters have zero influence on
party politics.
“I’ll never forget watching
the primary votes being counted for Michigan, one of the key states that decided
the 2016 election,” Gautney wrote in The Guardian. “Sanders’ ‘pledged delegate
count’—which reflected the number of votes he received from rank-and-file
Democrats—exceeded Clinton’s by four. But after the superdelegates cast their
ballots, the roll call registered ‘Clinton 76, Sanders 67.’ ”
“In Indiana, Sanders won the
vote 44 to 39, but, after the super delegates had their say, Clinton was
granted 46 delegates, versus Sanders’ 44,” she wrote. “In New Hampshire, where
Sanders won the vote by a gaping margin (60% to 38%) and set a record for the
largest number of votes ever, the screen read ‘16 Sanders, 16 Clinton.’ ”
Sanders, who calls himself an
independent, caucuses as a Democrat. The Democratic Party determines his
assignments in the Senate. Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, who oversees Wall
Street campaign donations to Democratic candidates, offered to make Sanders the
head of the Senate Budget Committee if the Democrats won control of the Senate,
in exchange for the Vermont senator’s support of Clinton and the hawkish,
corporate neoliberal Democratic candidates running for the House and Senate.
Sanders, swallowing whatever pride he has left, is now a loyal party
apparatchik, squandering his legacy and his integrity. He routinely sends out
appeals to raise money for party-selected candidates, including the 2016
Democratic senatorial candidates Katie McGinty in Pennsylvania, Maggie Hassan
in New Hampshire, Ted Strickland in Ohio and Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada.
Sanders made a blanket endorsement of every Democrat running in the 2017
election, including the worst corporate Democrats.
There was about $6 million
left from the Sanders campaign, and it was used to form an organization called
Our Revolution in August 2016. The organization was set up ostensibly to fund
and support progressive candidates. It was soon taken over by Weaver, who
ensured that it was not registered as a political action committee (PAC), a
group that can give money directly to campaigns. It was set up as a 501(c)(4),
a group prohibited from having direct contact with candidates and giving
donations directly to candidates. The 501(c)(4) status allowed it to take and
mask donations from wealthy donors such as Tom Steyer. Sanders’
decision to quietly solicit contributions from the billionaire oligarchs who
funded the Hillary Clinton campaign and control the Democratic Party betrayed
the core promise of his campaign. Yet, even as he created
a mechanism to take money from wealthy donors he continued to write at
the bottom of his emails “Paid for by Bernie Sanders, not the billionaires.”
Eight of the 13 staffers of
Our Revolution resigned in protest. The organization is now adding a PAC.
Meanwhile, the DNC rules and
bylaws committee has recommended a rule that any candidate in a primary be
required to demonstrate he or she is a “faithful” Democrat. This loyalty test,
intentionally vague, gives the DNC, which will consider the rule change in
August, the power to disqualify candidates and block
them from appearing on the ballot. If the party elites feel threatened,
they can nuke any candidacy, including one mounted by Sanders, before it even
begins.
The Democratic Party elites in
an open process and without corporate backing would not be in power. They are
creations of the corporate state. They are not about to permit reforms that
will see themselves toppled. Yes, this tactic of fixing elections and serving
corporate power may ensure a second term for Donald Trump and election of
fringe candidates who pledge their loyalty to Trump, but the Democratic elites
would rather sink the ship of state than give up their first-class cabins.
The Democratic Party is as
much to blame for Trump as the Republicans. It is a full partner in the
perpetuation of our political system of legalized bribery, along with the deindustrialization of
the country, austerity programs, social inequality, mass incarceration and the
assault on basic civil liberties. It deregulates Wall Street. It prosecutes the
endless and futile wars that are draining the federal budget. We must mount
independent political movements and form our own parties to sweep the
Democratic and Republican elites aside or be complicit in cementing into place
a corporate tyranny. Sanders won’t help us. He has made that clear. We must do
it without him.
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