June 21 2019, 11:28 a.m.
A FEW DAYS AGO, I shared
what I thought was a fairly innocuous observation about a fundamental
difference between Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. Warren spends most of
her campaign unpacking and explaining detailed policy proposals, many of them
excellent, while Sanders splits his emphasis between his own strong plans and
his calls for the political revolution he has consistently said will be required
for any substantive progressive policy wins.
“Smart policies are very
important,” I tweeted.
“But we don’t lose because we lack smart policies, we lose because we lack
sufficient power to win those policies up against entrenched elite forces that
will do anything to defeat us.”
Within seconds, I was in the
grip of a full-on 2016 primary flashback. I was accused of being a shill
for Bernie and an enemy of Warren (I’m neither). My feed filled up with
partisans of both candidates hurling insults at each other: She gets things
done, he is all talk; she’s a pretender, he’s the real deal; he has a gender
problem, hers is with race; she’s in the pocket of the arms industry, he’s an easy
mark for Donald Trump; he should back her because she’s a woman, she should
back him because he started this wave. And much more too venal to mention.
I immediately regretted saying
anything (as is so often the case on that godforsaken platform). Not because
the point about outside movement power is unimportant, but because I had been
trying to put off getting sucked into the 2020 horserace for as long as
possible.
Liberals in the U.S. often say
the Trump presidency is Not Normal. And yeah, it’s a killer-clown horror show.
But the truth is that from most outsider perspectives, there is nothing about
U.S. politics that is normal — particularly the interminable length of
campaigns. Normal countries have federal elections that consume two, maybe
three months of people’s political lives once every four to
five years; Canada caps federal campaigns at 50 days, Japan at 12.
In the U.S., on the other hand, there’s a total of about nine months in every
four-year cycle when politics is not consumed by either a presidential or
midterm horserace.
It’s a spectacle that comes at
a steep price. The relentless process of picking electoral winners sucks up
intellectual energy, media airtime, movement muscle, and boatloads of money that are
badly needed elsewhere. Like organizing to stop war with Iran, for instance. Or
supporting movements trying to free migrants from Trump’s concentration camps.
Or figuring out what a transformative Green New Deal should look like on the
ground. Or building international alliances with people in countries facing
their own hate-filled authoritarian strongmen.
There’s another reason to
resist attempts to turn Sanders vs. Warren into a redux of the 2016
primaries eight months before the first vote is cast. Today’s electoral
dynamics are absolutely nothing like 2016. That was a two-way race between two
candidates with radically different records and ideas, in which one candidate’s
gain really was the other’s loss. A winner-takes-all race like that pretty much
always turns into some kind of death match.
These primaries are another
species entirely. There is a small army of candidates, with two of the leaders
running on platforms so far to the left, they would have been unimaginable for
anyone but a protest candidate as recently as 2014. The frontrunner, meanwhile,
is eminently beatable (especially if Joe Biden keeps showing us exactly who he
is, as he did about six times this week).
All this means that for
leftists and progressives, the name of the game is not canceling out each
other’s candidates. It’s doing everything possible not to end up with a Wall
Street-funded centrist running against a president with the power of
incumbency. That means making the case against the idea that candidates
positioning themselves as the “safe choice” are in any way safe, whether at the
polls or once in office. And it means helping to bring more and more people to
one of the genuinely progressive frontrunners. There’s plenty of time to worry
about vote-spitting down the road — the task now is to enlarge the number of
votes available to be split (or combined).
Because Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez was absolutely right when she said on
ABC’s “This Week,” “We have a very real risk of losing the presidency to Donald
Trump if we don’t have a presidential candidate that’s fighting for true
transformational change in lives of working people in the United States.”
That was clear on the morning
of November 9, 2016. In case more proof is required, see the recent devastating
elections in India and Australia, where right-wing incumbents won despite
predictions to the contrary, as well as the results of the European parliament
vote, most notably in France and Italy, where the far right has surged. Again
and again, we learn the same lesson: Tepid centrists carrying the baggage of
decades of neoliberal suffering are no match for machineries of scapegoating
willing to stop at nothing to win. Luca Casarini, a longtime Italian activist
who now works on an Italian ship that has rescued dozens
of migrants in the Mediterranean, recently put it to me in these harrowing
terms: “There is pleasure being taken in the suffering of others. That is what
these politicians are selling.”
Even on the off chance that
Biden did manage to pull off a Macron and win (which he’s about 35 years too
old for), there is the problem of what he would (and wouldn’t) do once in
power. “No one’s standard of living will change. Nothing would fundamentally
change,” he told a swanky fundraiser at
the Carlyle Hotel — a philosophy he helpfully reiterated,
for those at the back: “You beat them. Without changing the system.”
AS I’VE SAID before a
time or two, in the
age of climate breakdown, if nothing fundamentally changes in the political and
economic spheres, then absolutely everything is going to change in the physical
sphere. Indeed these changes are already well underway.
So we either change those human-created systems or the natural systems on which
all life depends will ruthlessly force change upon us. Given this and so many
other life-and-death crises, would it still be worth substituting Trump for
Biden or some similarly compromised runner-up? Without question or hesitation.
Getting rid of Trump in 2020 is a civilizational imperative, if only to slow
this slide into barbarism.
But what the progressive surge
in these primaries is telling us is that we can, and must, do so much better.
For that to happen, the very
last thing we need is for the two strongest left/progressive candidates and
their supporters to tear each other apart for the next eight or so months, in a
desperate bid to discredit a perceived rival. What should be happening instead
is exactly what Sanders and Warren have been doing (with only a couple minor
lapses): steadily building their bases by talking about ideas and strategies,
thereby sharpening the contrast — in policies, track record, and electability —
with Biden.
Because despite the various
transparent attempts by Democratic power brokers to boost the narrative of a
pitched Sanders vs. Warren battle over a finite pot of progressive voters,
there is less overlap between the two candidates’ bases of support than is
commonly assumed.
“Sanders and Warren have
competed for months over the party’s left flank,” Politico recently claimed.
In fact, both have dramatically expanded that flank, drawing on different parts
of the U.S. electorate. Sanders’s base is younger and more multiracial;
Warren’s is older, whiter, and wealthier, according to a CBS News poll and
one from Fox
News. Sanders galvanizes traditional nonvoters and is more likely to peel
off some Trump voters down the road; Warren is more able to shift former
Hillary Clinton supporters to the left.
What is really happening in
this race, and this is why the rivalry is being so relentlessly stoked, is that
centrist candidates presumed to be frontrunners or at least serious contenders
are flailing, and the progressive flank is expanding — to the extent that
Sanders and Warren’s combined bases exceed Biden’s. This is an extraordinary
turn of events representing an unprecedented revival of unabashedly left ideas
in U.S. politics. In short, it’s not 2016, when broad support for Sanders’s
bold progressive policies took nearly everyone by surprise — it’s something
entirely new.
None of this is to say that
Bernie and Warren are interchangeable. There are big differences between their
policies, styles, and world views: on the role of markets and the military; on
the depths of our structural crises; on the urgency of standing up to the
Democratic Party machine; on the role of outside movement power; and more.
These differences are important and should be explored and clarified during
this interminable campaign. Like everyone else, I have my own preference
(hardly a well-kept secret), and I’ll be writing more on that later. We should
all also pay close attention to how messages resonate beyond our particular
tribes and ideological circles — because beating Trump is paramount.
But as we make these
assessments, let’s not lose sight of the depths of the shift we are witnessing.
Whether it’s Sanders’s stalwart support for Medicare for All or Warren’s plans
to break up big tech, neither politician is primarily trafficking in the kind
of win-win market based “solutions” that never ask the wealthy to give up much
of anything at all. Both are saying to the multimillionaire and billionaire
class: You have won enough, now you have to share so other people can thrive.
IT’S ALSO TREMENDOUSLY significant
that these sorts of policies are catching fire not during an economic crisis
like in 2008, but in an economy that is considered booming by conventional
measures. In 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt introduced the New Deal to solve the most
profound crisis in the history of capitalism, one for which markets had no
semblance of a solution of their own. Warren is calling for New Deal levels of
market intervention, and Sanders is leading a revival of democratic socialism
at a time when the economic fundamentals are strong — and that has
significantly further-reaching implications. Because it means that when
capitalism is doing precisely what it was built to do — produce unprecedented
wealth — it is a crisis for both the majority of people and the planetary
systems on which we depend.
The threat that this
realization represents to establishment players like the Wall-Street-funded
Third Way think tank and Center for American Progress is the real reason that
both have begun to hold
up Warren as a more palatable version of Sanders. It’s not because
Warren actually has their backing; it’s because this revved-up rivalry is
viewed as the most effective way to undercut Sanders and, with it, the left’s
growing base in the party.
There is no question that the
elite antipathy for Bernie runs deeper than for Warren, for obvious
reasons. Writing on his landmark speech on democratic socialism at George Washington
University earlier this month, Keeanga Yamahtta-Taylor marveled that
“he named capitalism as the culprit and democratic socialism as a solution.
What a breathtaking turn of events.” And as the very real prospect of an attack
on Iran heats up, it’s equally clear that Bernie represents the far
greater threat to the bipartisan consensus for endless war.
But Warren, because of her
track record and her competence, is a threat in her own right. To Wall Street,
for whom she has been a nemesis since 2008; to big tech, whose obscene
profits and monopoly power would take a hit under her plans to break them
apart; to the ultrarich as a class, because of her proposed wealth tax. So make
no mistake: For corporate Democrats, the endgame is still to defeat both Warren
and Sanders. And in this never-ending and crowded campaign, that effort will
shape-shift many times over.
It is true that Biden has had
a bad week. But if Biden implodes, there’s a phalanx of other candidates,
recently seen hopping from one $2,800-a-head Wall
Street fundraiser to the next, all with variations on the same reassuring
message: I’ll change things just enough to fend off the pitchforks and to save
you from the social embarrassment of Trump, but not so much that you will
notice a thing.
“It is important to rotate the
crops,” David Adelman, a financial industry lawyer, told the
New York Times. He was ostensibly explaining why he had co-hosted a fundraiser
for Beto O’Rourke, but in doing so, he also summed up precisely how Wall Street
sees Washington: as its plantation. It engineers the seeds, plants them, then
reaps what it sowed.
These forces, and the think
tanks they finance, want the Warren and Sanders camps at each other’s throats,
demoralizing and weakening each other. Because that’s exactly how the
progressive bloc stalls or shrinks enough for Biden (or some newer political
GMO crop) to walk away with it.
The current political map is
confusing, there is no doubt. Progressive vote-splitting is a real possibility
down the road — but so is vote-combining, and the more progressive voters there
are, the more viable that prospect will become. There are multiple routes by
which a progressive majority spread over several candidates can be translated
into a Democratic ticket that is more progressive than any we’ve seen in nearly
a century, maybe even ever.
There are also multiple ways
that the historic opportunity of this progressive surge can be lost. And that
loss begins with scarcity thinking, trying to tear each other down, and fooling
ourselves into believing that it’s 2016 all over again. When in fact, we are
somewhere we have never been before.
