The Sanders campaign has been
driven by class politics, not white male angst.
The battle for the Democratic
nomination is almost over, but the battle to define the meaning of the Bernie
Sanders campaign has just begun.
Does the Vermont socialist’s
improbable success — fueled by historic
levels of support from younger voters — herald the rise of a new left-wing
bloc in American politics? Or is the Sanders phenomenon closer to a passing
fad, little more than a protest vote against Hillary Clinton?
Writing in the New York Times, political scientists Christopher Achen and
Larry Bartels recently joined the debate.
Based on an analysis of exit
polls and survey data — and drawing from their new book, Democracy
for Realists — they argue that the difference between Sanders and Clinton
voters lies not in ideology or policy views, but “social identities, symbolic
commitments, and partisan loyalties.”
Sanders voters, in short, are
not “the vanguard of a new, social democratic–trending Democratic Party,” but
chiefly a group of “disaffected white men” and young people drawn to “campaign
labels, not policy preferences.”
Of course, this is music to
many ears. Nothing would please corporate Democrats and establishment pundits
more than if the largest left-wing insurgency in American primary history could
be exposed, once and for all, as an accidental combination of confused children
and angry white dudes.
An ecstatic Paul Krugman,
crowing that Achen and Bartels had laid bare the true essence of the movement,
was even inspired to formulate a set of Myers Briggs–style personality types for Sanders voters, in
which every shade of fool, narcissist, lunatic, and failure was duly
represented.
A closer look at the survey
evidence, however, casts some doubt on Achen and Bartels’s conclusions.
The first prong of their
argument is a familiar one: according to exit polls, self-described “liberals”
have not come out overwhelmingly for Sanders. For Achen and Bartels, this
counts as evidence that Sanders voters do not truly lean to the left.
Yet this election season has
not been kind to the predictive power of the liberal-moderate-conservative
typology beloved by pollsters.
Last summer, Nate Silver
developed a model of the Democratic primary based on the (supposedly stable)
number of liberals in each state’s electorate. His formula spat out a grand total of two victories for Sanders.
Of course, as it happened, the
share of “liberal” voters skyrocketed everywhere — in Indiana, for instance, it
leapt from 39 percent in 2008 to 68 percent — and Sanders has already won over
twenty contests.
Does this mean Indiana’s
Democratic electorate surged to the left over the last eight years? Probably
not. A better explanation is that voters’ ideological identities — at least as
expressed through simplistic survey labels — are not fixed, but heavily
dependent on context.
The context in this year’s
Democratic primary is a race between one of America’s most famous liberals,
Hillary Clinton, and a rival significantly to her left.
For the most part, that
leftward dynamic has encouraged Democrats to adopt the “liberal” label in
record numbers: among the limited choices offered to voters, it is
theoretically the most left-wing.
But in other ways, the
Clinton-Sanders clash has muddied the ideological waters in ways the
traditional categories do not reflect.
Bernie Sanders, an independent
and an avowed socialist throughout his adult life, is not one to adopt the
“liberal” designation — and the same goes for many
of his supporters.
After the West Virginia
primary, pundits gleefully noted that Sanders ran far ahead of Clinton among
Democrats who favored policies “less liberal” than Barack Obama’s.
But what do Obama-style
“liberal policies” actually mean to West Virginia voters — free college tuition
and a $15 minimum wage? Or bank bailouts, soda taxes, and global free-trade agreements?
Sanders, after all, won “less
liberal” voters not only in conservative West Virginia, but in Wisconsin and
Massachusetts, too.
Over the last thirty years, as
the Democratic Party has increasingly aligned
itself with the professional class, it’s not hard to imagine that for many
struggling workers, “liberal” has come to mean little more than a synonym for “Harvard Law School graduate.”
If Sanders voters proudly back
a program that involves taking on the “billionaire class,” enacting universal health
care and child care, and launching an ambitious jobs program, we need not
be concerned about whether they call themselves “liberals”: they are already
social democrats.
Here, however, Achen and
Bartels interject a second and more troubling finding. Sanders supporters, they
report, are actually less enthusiastic than Clinton voters about left-leaning
economic policies: a higher minimum wage, for instance, and increased spending
on health care.
According to the two political
scientists, even the young Democrats so central to Sanders’s rise are less
likely to support these redistributive measures.
This finding contradicts many
other studies. Pew’s survey of primary voters earlier this year placed Sanders
supporters further to the left than Clinton supporters on some economic
questions, including whether corporations make too much in profits, and found that they held
comparable positions on other issues, including health care and Social
Security.
When Harvard’s Institute of
Politics conducted an extensive poll of young people this spring, they found
overwhelming evidence that voters under thirty are much more progressive than
their elders.
So what accounts for the
discrepancy? Achen and Bartels’s numbers come from a January 2016 survey conducted for the American National
Elections Studies. It contains some of the most detailed information we have on
the political views of different primary candidates’ supporters.
But as the political
scientists Christopher
Hare and Robert Lupton have pointed out, there’s one major problem with the
ANES survey: it asked respondents to choose a Democratic candidate “regardless
of whether you will vote in the Democratic primary this year.”
As a result of the open-ended wording, a large proportion of Republicans and
Republican-leaning independents appear to weigh in: about 40 percent of them
selected a favorite Democratic candidate.
Many of these Republicans and
Republican leaners (very
similar groups of people) chose Bernie Sanders. Some of them, no doubt,
were sincere. After all, Sanders has consistently eclipsed Hillary Clinton in
general election polls.
But it’s doubtful that more
than a handful of these Republican respondents — like the 50 percent of
Democrats who picked a favorite GOP candidate — expressed anything like a
meaningful political commitment.
If we want to truly understand
where Sanders voters stand within the broader Democratic electorate, it makes
little sense to use a survey sample that is fully one quarter Republican.
Interestingly, when we remove
these GOP respondents from the pool, the sharpest differences between Sanders
and Clinton supporters occur not on economic policy but on questions involving
gender and race.
And for all the online chatter
about sexist “Bernie Bros,” the ANES data offer little evidence that Sanders
voters embrace him out of a desire to buttress their male identity.
Sanders backers, for instance,
were more likely to strongly endorse requiring employers to pay men and women
equally for the same work. They were also much more assertive in their support
for mandatory paid parental leave:
Nor do the ANES data furnish
much evidence that Sanders voters have been motivated by white racial
resentment. Among Democrats and non-Republican-leaning independents, in fact,
white Clinton supporters were more inclined than white Sanders supporters to
say that blacks are “lazy” or “violent,” and that black people should work
their way up “without special favors.”
Based on the ANES results,
Achen and Bartels describe Sanders backers as less hardy in their support for
“concrete” progressive economic policies than Clinton backers. But omitting
Republicans from the sample neutralizes that judgment, as Hare and Lupton
demonstrate.
Achen and Bartels may be right
to suggest that there are no major ideological gaps between Clinton and Sanders
voters. It is Clinton, after all, who has won the lion’s share of support from
black voters (especially older black voters), who are generally
more left-wing than their white counterparts on economic issues.
The critical fact in politics,
however, is not how voters organically position themselves on a static spectrum
of ideology or policy: it is where they line up in the context of a dynamic
political contest.
And this is where Achen and
Bartels’s argument really falls short.
After attaching Sanders
supporters to the “folk theory” of democracy — the civics 101 idea that
“citizens can control their government from the voting booth” — the pair goes
about demolishing its precepts. By the end of the essay, the reader is
left wondering whether it isn’t just the promise of Sanders’s political
revolution that’s empty but popular democracy as such.
The mistake, however, is to
believe that the folk theory represents a realistic (or even desirable) ideal
against which we should judge American democracy.
Voters’ political preferences
and identities aren’t molded willy-nilly by political elites. But neither are
they immutable doctrines that spring solely from the minds of voters. They’re
the result of a complex mix of influences and experiences — personal,
political, material, cultural, and so on. The folk theory washes all this away,
reducing democracy to a simple transmission belt where voters funnel
preferences to elites, who smoothly convert them into policy.
A grade school conception of
popular government, it doesn’t recognize the interplay between institutions and
the rank-and-file, between leaders and ordinary citizens.
Sanders is fond of saying that
his campaign “isn’t about me.” That isn’t quite true: while leaders don’t
singlehandedly create social conditions, they can mobilize people to help steer
the course of history.
But acknowledging that “the
people” aren’t the only ones with their hands on the wheel doesn’t spell the
death of democracy — or necessitate a retreat to a place where, as Achen and
Bartels end up in their book, democracy is only preferable because competitive
elections minimize corruption and allow for an easy transfer of power.
What’s especially curious is
the pair’s almost obsessive focus on the foibles of voters, rather than the
myriad institutions and forces that frustrate popular democracy in the United
States.
In Democracy for Realists,
Achen and Bartels devote at most a few sentences to the political power of the
well-heeled (this despite the work of
Bartels himself on the political implications of inequality). There’s little
mention of the ways in which the American system, with its innumerable checks
and balances and veto points, blurs the lines of decision-making and makes
holding politicians accountable a tall task. There’s no appreciation of
the fact that powerful market actors set
the contours of economic policy-making.
Popular sovereignty, the two
seem to say, faces its gravest threat from inept citizens — not from Sheldon
Adelson’s wallet or Madisonian institutions or the cold judgment of the bond
market.
Sanders has advanced a
different understanding. In his packed stadium rallies, democracy is not the
atomized affair of the folk theory, in which the ideal citizen impartially
weighs the positions of the various candidates and then somberly enters the
polling station to cast his ballot. It is instead an activity of passion and
agitation and, yes, even struggle against a “billionaire class.”
The last point has been
crucial, in two respects. First, even with the reduced pitch of an electoral
campaign, Sanders has reminded observers that collective action and organized
people remain the driving force behind social progress. The rough and tumble
quality of strikes and protests and mass rallies don’t debase democracy — they
are among its highest expressions.
Second, through constant
excoriation, Sanders has formulated what Achen and Bartels would call an
identity around which his supporters cohere: they are not the billionaire
class. They stand against it.
Of course, when coupled with
the social-democratic remedies Sanders pushes, this is just old-fashioned class
politics — the idiom of any viable left project.
But that’s the point.
As Jerome Karabel has recently argued, the most important question that the
2016 Democratic primary asked is whether a candidate running on a bold
left-wing platform could win mass support. The answer to that question has been
an emphatic “yes.”
43 percent of voters — and 70
percent of young voters — opted for the social-democratic candidate, even
though he was facing an opponent with greater
institutional backing than any non-incumbent in history. (If more
independents were allowed to vote, the result would have been even closer.)
Achen and Bartels are surely
right that social identities and symbolic allegiances animate voter behavior
more than pure ideology. But although a large portion of Sanders’s electoral
backing has come from white men, the ANES data do not suggest they are
particularly attached to their racial identities.
Only 22 percent of white
Sanders supporters indicated that “being white” was “extremely” or “very
important” to them (compared to 43 percent of white Clinton supporters).
By contrast, 74 percent of
Sanders supporters (compared to 56 percent of Clinton supporters) reported that
“the difference in incomes between rich people and poor people” has grown “much
larger” in the last twenty years. Sanders supporters placed income inequality
among their most important political issues twice as often as Clinton supporters.
Achen and Bartels file these
results under the heading of economic pessimism and dismiss their significance
because Sanders supporters did not respond with sufficient gusto to a bland
ANES question about “government services.”
But if abstract policy
preferences aren’t so important after all, perhaps we should take another look
at those inequality numbers. What if they actually show the growth of a deeper
allegiance — a compound of social identity and symbolic attachment that we
might even dare call “class consciousness”?
From the New Deal to the New
Democrats, the symbolic allegiances that have most damaged American
social-democratic politics have been whiteness and maleness. For better or
worse, they are with us still.
But by bringing so many white
men into the social-democratic tent — not through sexist innuendo or racist dog whistles, but by appealing to a profound sense
of class grievance — the Sanders campaign has pointed a way forward.
The promise of class politics,
after all, is not only that it can threaten the interests of the few, but that
it can unite the struggles of the many. After the final primary elections this
month, the Sanders campaign may come to an end. But class politics isn’t going
anywhere.
Shawn Gude is the associate
editor at Jacobin. Matt Karp is an assistant professor of history at Princeton
University and a Jacobin contributing editor.
