Bernie Sanders for President in 2020

Sanders is the antidote our ailing nation and planet needs

This is not just another year; there is much more at stake in the US election than just the question of Trump. Trump is not an aberration, he is a product of a deeper crisis. To place my endorsement of Sanders in context, this deeper crisis must first be articulated.

Many are comforted by the notion that a particular kind of fever will break if only Trump loses the election this year — that cooler heads will prevail and we can get on with business as usual. Corporations will continue raking in record profits, swelling in size, swallowing their competitors, producing richer billionaires. The people will muddle through with wise, optimistic confidence in their leaders. They will smile to themselves, knowing all is proceeding as it must: The human population must continue growing; the rainforests must be clearcut; the countryside must burn; multitudes of species must die; the coasts and rivers must flood; surveillance and AI must become ubiquitous; healthcare costs, tuition, and rents must rise while wages stagnate and jobs are automated away. The people must endure all of this because of economic law. The very smart people with the money and the power have patiently explained it to us — there is no other way.

What if the people start getting suspicious of these leaders and what they have told us?

News flash: the people have already gotten suspicious.

Trump is not an aberration. Trumpism is happening all over the world, under different names. Democracy is in peril throughout the globe. Call it neoliberalism, call it technocracy, call it elitism, call it the Illuminati, call it what you will — but the powers that be have engineered a global system of finance, technology, and political rule that has concentrated wealth and power in the hands of the very few. These select people and institutions hold incredible power, including the ability to saturate the media with their ideology and opinions, as well as the ability to overthrow governments and undermine power-sharing and redistributive political movements. As a result, the people have lost faith in democracy.

Enter the right-wing demagogues and neo-fascism. As the people become desperate for an alternative, and since left-wing responses have been effectively crushed by the elite powers who purport to represent democracy, the right-wing message finds its opening. In this growing global ideology, democracy is ridiculed. The dictatorial authoritarian is offered as the people’s savior. He channels their rage, becoming a conduit for it, and directs it against immigrants, queer people, and racial and religious minorities. He stands for the traditional patriarchal rulership of yore. He offers the people an answer; he offers them belonging; he unites them with identity. He consolidates the wealth and power of society to an even greater extreme than the neoliberal technocrats did, but the people allow him to. At least he offers them a raised fist, a middle finger, an enemy to rage against, and an identity to unite under.

Democracy

Bernie Sanders is the best candidate to restore and strengthen American democracy, and the US is the country that can do the most to restore and strengthen democracy around the world. Democracy is to be cherished and valued by humanity as a tangible, moral, and spiritual good. There is not enough room in this endorsement to defend democracy from those who have turned against it. I will say only this: democracy is humanity’s only defense against despotism and oppression. One’s particular choice of despot or class of despots might gain the power of governance, but without democracy, what method will enshrine and maintain that despot’s power? Only naked power and violent force itself. Democracy provides the method of governance by which people can share power, and by which violent means are no longer needed as the arbiter of power.

Sanders provides the antidote to the creeping belief that democracy is rigged and futile. It is not just the Right that has come to abandon democracy; many on the Left have given up as well, not to mention the millions of unaffiliated non-voters. Sanders challenges this democratic despair, and demonstrates the alternative. He leads a campaign completely funded by small-dollar donations; a campaign that escapes the influence and veto power over policy held by the financial interests who fund traditional campaigns. Sanders is beholden only to the people and the power of democracy, not to the moneyed elite. Simultaneously, Sanders has been able to raise more money this way than his competitors, dispelling the lie that electoral politics must answer to upper class interests. Sanders is also conducting a campaign that mobilizes people previously written off as non-voters. His goal is to bring millions of people into the electoral process and revitalize democracy. His goal is to revitalize unions and direct action, to transform what has become a passive consumer model of politics. The people will no longer sit on the sidelines, wait for the political class to offer them alternatives, and tick a box every two years. The people will manifest their own alternatives. In the model of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and many others inspired by Sanders’ 2016 campaign, they will run for office themselves.

Sanders understands that democracy requires more than voting and mobilization. He also understands that democracy requires equality for, protection of, and participation from diverse minority populations. From his early days in the 1960s when he was arrested while protesting for the rights of Black Americans, to his long record of support for women’s equality and queer rights (including advocacy of gay marriage and trans rights while mayor of Burlington in the 1980s, decades before such positions became mainstream), Bernie has the receipts. It’s particularly heartening that the man who may become America’s first Jewish president is also one of the strongest voices against anti-Muslim bigotry in American politics today.

Sanders offers a striking contrast to other candidates on foreign policy. He understands that peace and democracy require commitment to the needs and rights of both Israelis and Palestinians. Not only does he warn against US intervention in Venezuela and other proffered adventures, he recognizes and condemns the various past US interventions that supported dictators and overthrew democracies around the world, including Guatemala, Iran, and Chile, just to name a few. Among world powers, only the US is currently positioned to pick up the mantle of leadership in global democracy. To do so, the US must actually support democracy wherever it exists, and never again undermine or overthrow democracies that are inconvenient to American business interests. The US must also refrain from regime-change wars and black-op coups, even when a foreign nation has leadership that is hostile to democracy. Sanders understands all of this and makes it clear in his foreign policy. The US must act like a democracy, not just talk like one, if we are to nourish and support democracy at home and abroad.

Economy

Another key and necessary component of democracy is that economic power must be shared and broadly distributed. It’s not enough just to focus on political empowerment, voting rights, minority protections, and international relationships to support democracy. If economic power is overly concentrated, no democracy can survive. The concentration of wealth creeps into all other spheres of society. Not only does the concentrated capital corrupt and influence political actors and campaigns, it also creates a two-tiered justice system, whereby the people are subject to the law, but the rich are above the law. It creates an invisible network of power and status by which all things are possible for those invited in, (given that they pledge allegiance to the interests of the rich), and few things are possible for the majority who have not received the invitation. Gradually, it becomes more difficult to achieve economic security by earning a living and saving or investing. Those who already have wealth or inherit wealth gain an enormous relative advantage as their wealth expands through compound interest and financial schemes. Anyone who has ever played the game Monopoly knows how this works. After a player has reached a crucial threshold of wealth, that wealth is used to gobble up existing property, raise the rents to astronomical levels, and bankrupt the other players. It is easy to observe that this is precisely the way concentrated capital works in the actual economy as well.

Sanders understands all of this. He recognizes that extreme wealth inequality undermines and eventually destroys democracy, while demolishing opportunity for regular people. He understands that having health insurance tied to one’s employment keeps workers beholden to the ruling class, often tethered to a job that wears on their souls. He understands that without a strong social security pension, regular people are dependent on stock investments for their retirement (if they’re ever able to save enough to invest in the first place) and are again made beholden to the interests of corporations for their own security. He understands that when the financial burden of higher education has been shifted to individual students rather than carried collectively, those students are crushed beneath massive debt; they are unable to save, invest, provide for a family, or own a home. He understands that as capital works furiously to eliminate jobs through automation and outsourcing, regular people are without recourse — unless a federal jobs guarantee is accessible to provide financial security and meaningful contribution to society. He understands that the minimum wage needs to be a living wage — that no one who works full time should be paid so little they cannot even afford rent or meet basic expenses.

If one reads or listens to the corporate news outlets, one is told that the economy is currently doing great. Inflation is supposedly low, as is unemployment. The economy is growing, and the stock market is booming. But millions of Americans have a different economic experience. Yes, jobs are plentiful, but the jobs don’t pay enough. Adjusted for inflation, wages have been stagnant since the mid-70s, when neoliberal policies were first implemented. All of the economic growth for forty years has been distributed to the ownership class. Inflation reports also disguise the true inflation regular Americans experience. The consumer goods measured by traditional inflation indexes are not where Americans are getting crushed. Three towering expenses have ruined the financial futures of a generation of Americans: housing (whether rentals or the cost of home-ownership), higher education, and healthcare. These expenses have increased at staggering rates since the 1990s, and they are big-ticket items.

Sanders understands that regular Americans need healthcare as a human right, and free higher education at a public college or trade school as a social good, just as K-12 has been regarded for decades. He understands that the wealth which has accumulated in the ownership class for forty years is available to pay for these, and should be used to pay for it — to distribute wealth more broadly in the interests of justice, and to bolster and secure democracy with greater economic equality. Not only that, but regular Americans will be able to start small businesses and become entrepreneurs if they no longer must submit to an employer in order to have and afford healthcare, if they are no longer crushed under the burden of student debt, and if their work pays enough for them to save up for a financial cushion. The absurd increases in rent and property values are partially due to concentrated wealth as well. With so much excess income and wealth flowing to the ownership class, their money keeps pouring into stocks and real estate, thus inflating the price of these types of properties, and making the ownership class richer still. Most of us can sense that this is all a speculative bubble poised to crash sooner or later, as it did in 2008. If Sanders is president when that happens, you can be sure that instead of bailing out the ownership class as Obama did (so they can just scoop their money back up and do the same thing to us all over again), it will be regular people who are bailed out. The future economy will be built on the stable base of working class and middle class prosperity, not tied up in the schemes and hostage-taking of the financial class.

Society

In my lifetime, American society has never been such a toxic place to inhabit as it has since 2016. Part of this is due to Trump’s emboldening of all kinds of bullies, specifically those who target immigrants, queer people, and racial and religious minorities. But the toxicity of society in the current moment is even deeper than this. Technological advances have been weaponized against our social fabric. Active measures by Russian interests targeted social media and information vulnerabilities to sway the US election in 2016, and other actors, such as the right-wing Cambridge Analytica, also engaged in this behavior — not just in the US, but in nations across the world. This model was developed in Russia but has already been learned and adopted by other actors of the Global Right. More to the point, we have since come to understand that the social media platforms used to these ends (Twitter, Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp, and Google/YouTube) have been complicit all along. The leaders of these companies do not necessarily share the same far-right goals as those who exploit their products, but the nature of the technology Big Tech has invented and propogated is inherently authoritarian and divisive in its methods and objectives.

To understand this, it’s important to recognize that the methods used by Russian actors and Cambridge Analytica were not limited to distributing right-wing viewpoints on social media. They also encouraged left-wing viewpoints. They specifically encouraged any viewpoints that were extreme and divisive, rhetoric that was dehumanizing and othering, and above all, content meant to strengthen their targets’ identification with cultural, religious, racial, and other identity groupings and labels. They realized that their efforts to bolster right-wing views would not work unless democracy was corroded and weakened first. In sowing the seeds of hatred, division, castigation, and identity politics (whether in right-wing or left-wing form), the unity and goodwill required for democracy is unraveled, voter turnout is suppressed, and the appeal of the right-wing authoritarian strongman is activated. Facebook, Twitter, and Google have been doing the same thing to us for years, less for political reasons than for the purposes of pure greed and power accumulation. They coerce us (while concealing their actions) into accepting their constant surveillance, then they slice and dice us via identity and psychological profiling to target us with products. Meanwhile, they prioritize content that inflames primal emotions of outrage and fear to keep us clicking, swiping, and scrolling on their platforms.

There’s a lesson here. The goals of right-wing political actors and corporate power accumulators are ultimately identical. The only difference is whether they are active in the arena of voter manipulation or wealth accumulation. The tactics are the same. The resulting concentrations of power and wealth are the same. The resulting destruction of democracy and toxic divisiveness of society are the same. It makes sense that the Global Right would find a ready-made tool in social media to meet their ends. These technologies were already serving right-wing ends before they were weaponized, and they have infected the Left as well. Much has been written about the Woke Wars and Cancel Culture. Debates rage about language, calling out privilege, and guilt by association. There are condemnations, excommunications, banishments and denouncements. Friendships have been destroyed, and families torn apart. There is more to this phenomenon than just social media and technology, but the root cause is one and the same. Identity is centralized and rallied around, and the other is targeted and demonized. Suspicion and hatred of the other is the rule of the day.

Bernie Sanders again serves as an example for the remedy to this societal toxicity. He has remained steadfast in his commitment to justice for vulnerable and oppressed minority groups, in particular with criminal justice reform, legalization of cannabis, an end to private prisons, and other justice and accountability measures to protect black and brown people from a system built to target them. But he has resisted the path of activating his supporters along identity lines. He rarely mentions the ways in which his own identities represent important firsts in a future president, such as becoming America’s first Jewish president or America’s first openly non-religious president. Instead, he consistently returns focus to those concerns that bring Americans together: economic opportunity, access to education and healthcare, and the right to a living wage. He focuses on a democracy that unites us across identity lines rather than dividing us up. As a result, he draws support from independents and even some Republicans. Given his label as a Democratic Socialist and position on the left edge of the political spectrum, some find this surprising. His studied refusal to activate factional identities in the populace reveals the source of his unifying appeal among cross-cultural identity groups.

What the corporate pundits don’t understand is that millions of Americans are thirsty for a candidate that refuses to demonize or praise others based on their cultural background, race, ethnicity, gender, queerness, or use of language. Sanders saves his criticism for those who set themselves apart from others by taking more than their fair share of society’s wealth and power, and for damaging our society and democracy to hold onto what they’ve taken. These Americans are hungry for a candidate who speaks honestly about the great scam of wealth appropriation they have suffered under for forty years. The pundits have a hard time understanding that many Americans turned to Trump for these reasons, believing in his false promises, and falling for the long con job he built his name on. Sanders speaks to the same hunger and thirst, but he speaks to it with honesty and integrity. Most important, Sanders speaks to it in a way that strengthens democracy, that heals separations and divisions. The force in society that has been dividing us up and turning us against each other is the force of capital and wealth accumulation. Divide and conquer is their tried and true method of control. Sanders is the candidate who understands this, and he is the candidate most determined to catalyze the needed change that can restore a society in which we don’t all have to hate each other all the time.

Ecology

It’s important to recognize the role of impending ecological collapse in all of these social changes and anti-democratic threats. Resources are becoming scarcer, the human population continues to grow, the life-support systems of the planet are beginning to fail, and extreme weather catastrophes such as fires, hurricanes, and flooding are becoming increasingly common. Wealth is progressively hoarded in fewer and fewer hands, and new refugees are created through climate and resource war displacement. All of this is contributing to an impulse felt around the globe to shut down the borders and erect the barricades to protect their country’s wealth and national identity.

I don’t believe that most people draw the explicit connection between what is happening ecologically and the newfound appeal of ethno-nationalism. In fact, one who is drawn to ethno-nationalism might simultaneously be drawn to climate-change denial. The denial of the ecological collapse actually serves to highlight how psychologically painful and fear-inducing our predicament is. It may be too painful to face or admit consciously, and denial becomes the method of coping with the fear and anticipatory grief of losing our cherished hopes for the future flourishing of humanity. The rise of AI, nanotechnology, surveillance, and CRSPR gene-editing adds another portent of dread, contributing to the sense that human future is about to be wiped out, replaced by artificially-created machines and life forms, ecological devastation and mass extinction, or both.

Denial about the magnitude of what humanity faces is replete on all sides of various political spectrums. Even on the Left, where environmental action is centralized as an important priority, there is little acknowledgement of how utterly inadequate mainstream environmental policy would be in addressing the challenge at hand, even if it could be enacted. Furthermore, the human population must continue to grow in order to avoid the collapse of the growth-based economic system. The growing population either continues to strain the limits of resources, which exacerbates wealth inequality, or the population finally starts to decline, precipitating a global economic collapse.

Sanders stands behind the Green New Deal, and this must be the way forward for American and the planet at a bare minimum. The Green New Deal is like the original New Deal, in that it is not a policy proposal, but a proposal for a fundamental restructuring of our society and economy. The goals of the original New Deal were to provide public benefits, redistribute wealth, and use the flexibility of government action to remedy the disaster of unfettered capitalism that had produced the Great Depression. Starting in the 1970s, the New Deal was gradually abandoned, and unfettered capitalism is once again threatening the stability of society. The Green New Deal renews the goals of the New Deal while adding the specific ecological focus. We must recognize that free markets and capitalism will never produce the change needed to heal the ecological crisis. They are designed to do just the opposite. In fact, these economic devices destroy the ecosphere staggeringly well. Only an ecological response independent from capitalist economic constraints can achieve the deliberate and targeted actions needed to protect the planet and the human habitat.

The youth of America understand this. It is no accident that Sanders draws his biggest share of support from the youngest voters in the electorate. Not only are young people presented with an economic system rigged against them, they are looking 50 years ahead to where the planet is headed. In Sanders, they see the one candidate who proposes the social, political, and economic change needed to transform society and mobilize the populace to save the planet.

Practical Politics — Understanding the Parties

I can hear some of you already: “This is all very well and good, Raelle, but let’s get practical. Sanders is too extreme. Americans won’t vote for a Democratic Socialist. And even if he wins, he won’t be able to achieve any of this anyway — there’s too much stacked against him. Let’s stop dreaming of pie in the sky and just vote for a corporate, establishment, moderate centrist like Joe Biden. He’ll win over the swing voters and get rid of Trump. And maybe he’ll actually be able to get something done by reaching across the aisle.” I hear your concerns, so let me explain why Sanders is actually the candidate most likely to win, and also most likely to produce needed change despite his lofty targets. First we need to understand the Republican and Democratic parties as they exist today, the history of how they got here, and how political dynamics are currently operating.

The Republican Party has now completed its transformation into a right-wing reactionary party and wholly-owned subsidiary of the ruling oligarchic class of society. This transformation began in response to the civil rights legislation of the 1960s, coupled with a reaction against the youth movement of the era, and the movements for gender and queer equality of the 1970s. Nixon, Reagan, and the other leaders of the party at the time realized that because of these social changes, they could mobilize a conservative backlash that would flip the solid south from Democrat to Republican and secure electoral majorities for decades to come. In doing so, they would be able to gain votes for an otherwise unappealing economic agenda that transferred power and wealth to the rich. They would associate government economic programs with support for racial minorities, advocating for a law and order police state that would target said minorities through the War on Drugs and a vast expansion of the prison system, and they would activate the support of Christian conservatives against abortion, women’s equality, and queer people.

This program was wildly successful, and Republicans were able to consistently mobilize identity and garner votes from the White Christian Conservative backlash demographic. These voters were willing to vote for the transfer of wealth to the rich as long as Republicans continued to target racial minorities, liberated women, queer people, college students, religious minorities, and immigrants. The Democratic Party was blindsided by this strategy in the 1972 blowout of liberal icon George McGovern in the presidential election, which continues to haunt Democratic nightmares to this day. The working class and union voters had left them for Nixon’s Silent Majority, and Democrats began turning rightward. They were desperate to show they were also tough on crime, tough on minorities, God-fearing, free-market true believers, while also throwing occasional bones to their base of liberals and people of color. Despite such efforts, the backlash identity voters usually wanted the real deal instead. Democrats were shut out of the White House and Supreme Court picks for a quarter century (except for Jimmy Carter’s narrow victory in the wake of Watergate). The slow process of Congressional Southern Democrats converting to the Republican party took 20 more years to complete, and was solidified in 1994 when Republicans swept into power in both houses of Congress.

Something else happened at the same time, however; Bill Clinton moved even further to the right than previous Democratic presidential candidates, and won election to the White House in 1992. Demographic changes were shrinking the white backlash voter base, and it was now possible for the Democratic coalition of white liberals and people of color to win the popular vote for president by appeasing just enough of the backlash voters with socially conservative concessions. The trend continued, and starting with Clinton’s victory in ’92, Democratic candidates have won the presidential popular vote six times, losing only once (in 2004). Despite their 1994 congressional success, the Republican Party realized that their demographic base would continue to shrink, and that eventually they would no longer be able to garner enough votes to continue looting the public and lining the pockets of the rich. Their only hope of extending their bonanza for upper class people was to assault democracy itself and inflame its base of backlash voters with ever-increasing levels of paranoia and vitriol.

This strategy has been on display since the 1990s. Bill Clinton was regarded by Republicans as an illegitimate president and was relentlessly investigated for elaborately conceived conspiratorial offenses. With nothing to show for it in 1998 other than his denial under oath about a private sexual relationship utterly unrelated to the subject of their investigations, Republicans impeached the Clinton anyway. In 2000 it became clear that no action would be off-limits in their pursuit of power, not even the outright theft of an election, which was completed that year through a party-line Supreme Court ruling that handed the election to Bush before the votes could be counted. That year, the Republican Party revealed what it had become: a thoroughly corrupted institution with anti-democratic goals, no limits to their lies or hypocrisy in their statements or actions, zero loyalty to the interests of the American people, a complete willingness to tear apart society along identity divisions in order to gain and maintain power, and all of it in service of one goal only — to continue transferring wealth and power to the rich.

Once this is understood, every action of the Republican Party in the past 20 years makes perfect sense and has been thoroughly predictable. The fear- and war-mongering that led to the War on Terror, the lies about weapons of mass destruction, the gerrymandering and decimation of voter rights protections, the voter suppression in minority communities, the opening of floodgates to unlimited campaign contributions, the empire of propaganda led by Fox News and their monopoly of AM talk radio stations, Birtherism, the astro-turfed Tea Party, the sabotage of Obama’s governance, the Benghazi and Clinton emails obsessions, the filibusters of judicial nominees, the refusal to hold a hearing for Merrick Garland, the ultimate acceptance of Trumpism, the Wall, the Muslim Ban, Brett Kavanaugh, slavish obedience and justifications of Trump’s lies and lawlessness, and brazen corruption, and attempts at election-rigging, all the way up to the refusal to hear witnesses at Trump’s impeachment for these offenses. Trump’s eventual acquittal by this lawless, utterly cynical and corrupt party is inevitable (though not yet finalized as of this writing). All of it has been perfectly predictable with the knowledge of what the Republican Party actually is. The party continues to drift rightward into autocracy and ethnonationalism. It may or may not be too early to categorize it as a neo-fascist party, but it is headed that direction.

Given this threat, most Democrats and other denizens of the American Left understand how important it is that Trump be defeated soundly in the upcoming election. Based on Trump’s sociopathic comfort with lying about absolutely anything, and his belief that laws do not apply to him, even electoral victory over Trump is not safe. The closer the margin of victory, the greater the risk of Trump refusing to respect the election. This would throw the nation into a constitutional crisis in which the military will have to decide whether they are ultimately loyal to the Constitution or to Trump, and it’s anybody’s guess who would win that power struggle. Not only does Trumpism threaten to extinguish American Democracy, it threatens to abet the suppression of democracy and rise of fascism throughout the world. It threatens to use that consolidated power to extinguish the ecosphere so the world’s billionaire elite class can die even richer than they are now, and leave a hollowed-out husk of a planet in their wake. We had better pick a good nominee to run in this election.

As mentioned, the Democratic Party has been haunted by the ghost of George McGovern since 1972. His cataclysmic defeat was followed by 20 years of liberalism continually watering itself down until Clinton and the New Democrats thoroughly embraced neoliberalism and transformed the Democratic Party into a kinder, gentler version of the Republicans. At the time, it may have been necessary for the party to start winning elections again. In fact, that has been the conventional wisdom all the way to the present moment. All of the party’s leaders since Bill Clinton, including Gore, Kerry, Obama, Pelosi, and Hillary Clinton, have basically accepted the following premise: Democrats cannot win unless they attract centrist swing voters with neoliberal and conservative economic policies. Joe Biden carries the mantle of this approach in 2020, with Michael Bloomberg waiting in the wings in case Biden falters.

A different lens on the party shines an alternative light on this premise. Economic conservatism and neoliberal policies were never the reason Clinton or other New Democrats won elections. Clinton was able to win in the 1990s because he signaled to the right on socially conservative cues, peeling back some of those backlash voters. Examples include his famous “Sister Souljah” moment, his support for escalating the War on Drugs and support for “Three Strikes You’re Out,” his Defense of Marriage Act, the firing of Jocelyn Elders, and his folksy Southern charm and Baptist affiliation. His gutting of welfare should also be understood as popular at the time because it disproportionally hurt racial minorities, not because voters supported economic conservatism. Clinton’s “it’s the economy, stupid” slogan signaled that despite his concessions to neoliberal economics, his policies were not as damaging as the Republican alternatives.

The Left backed Clinton in the 1990s despite his concessions to social conservatism, bargaining that they had to compromise on that to get the other things they wanted: liberal judges, health care reform, a slight shifting of the tax burden toward the rich, gun control, campaign finance reform, and environmental protection through the Kyoto protocol. The Left also tolerated Clinton’s neoliberalism in the form of NAFTA and financial and media deregulation, with nods and hints from the corporate press that swing voters required these policies from Democrats in addition to the socially conservative concessions.

Year by year, social conservatism and racial/cultural backlash politics became increasingly less dispositive in US general elections. Social attitudes on race, gender, sex, and religion were slowly liberalizing; newer generations had never experienced America before the social changes of the 1960s, and the white portion of the country’s population decreased from 88% in the 1960s to 72% in 2010. A threshold was passed with the election of Obama as the first black president, and Democrats began to realize they had the numbers to openly and uniformly support women’s rights, queer rights, and racial equality. The backlash against Obama in 2010 was partially fueled by the resulting racial and cultural panic on the Right, but it must also be understood as an economic backlash. Obama had chosen to bail out the white-collar criminals that had produced the economic collapse of 2008, and his voters had been expecting him to bail them out instead.

Why did Obama choose to side with the banks and corporations after the financial crisis instead of the people? To understand this, it must be understood that the corporate and financial interests had colonized the Democratic Party leadership under Clinton’s presidency, with tendrils extending back to the advent of neoliberalism in the 1970s. Having fully converted the Republican Party into a vehicle for their aims, they were able to partially convert the Democratic Party, gaining the leadership with the rise of Clinton. Even so, the Left was never fully extinguished, and the embers of their torch were carried by sidelined figures in the party such as Jesse Jackson and Dennis Kucinich after McGovern’s defeat. It was not until Bernie Sanders ran for president in 2016 that the embers burst back into flame, surprising even him. The ground has shifted.

In the ’70s and ’80s, social conservatism carried the day for Republicans and enabled the rise of the neoliberal wealth transfer. In response, New Democrats, led by Bill Clinton, convinced themselves that economic conservatism was necessary to win swing voters. In reality, economic conservatism was necessary to receive funding for their campaigns and to gain favorable media coverage. Clinton witnessed the power of corporate media to distribute propaganda against his presidency in 1993 when he attempted to implement universal health care. The New Democrats internalized the message. Corporate, neoliberal economics was not only necessary to fund and win elections, but actually represented the way the world actually works. New Democrats became captured by the corporate and financial interests. I believe most of these corporate Democrats have truly convinced themselves to this day that neoliberal finance and technocracy is necessary and good for the world.

Bernie Sanders poses a significant threat to them. The media campaign against him is clear to see. They have tried to accuse him of sexism, racism, and even anti-Semitism despite his Jewish identity. They have warned that America will never elect a socialist, that if nominated, he will be the next George McGovern. Behind the concern trolling that says Sanders can’t win, I detect their true fear: that Sanders will actually win. Some members of the neoliberal wing of the Democratic Party would prefer that Trump remain president than Sanders. Trump does not threaten the status quo of entrenched corporate and financial power that so many have come to rely on in their careers and for their status in society.

Practical Politics — The Case for Sanders

A real risk does exist in the potential nomination of Bernie Sanders. The danger is that the corporate wing of the Democratic Party will attempt to sabotage his candidacy if he is nominated. They may be successful if they try, and throw the election to Trump. It’s also possible that this will create a backlash that redounds to Sander benefit in his appeal with independents and he wins anyway. In that case, the same wing of the party might sabotage the Sanders presidency, weakening his administration and paving the way for a Trump comeback victory in 2024. I can only hope that such efforts will either fail to materialize or will backfire if attempted. But it is a risk.

Absent such possible sabotage from the Democratic Party itself, Sanders presents the party’s best chance against Trump. Yesterday, an article in Vox cited a poll that shows Sanders actually performs better in a hypothetical matchup when described by the pollster as a Socialist who opposes billionaires (winning 47%-42%) than when tagged only as a Democrat who opposes the Republican Trump (winning 45%-43%). In general, Sanders performs better against Trump than all potential nominees other than Biden (who consistently beats Trump by about 1% of a greater margin than Sanders in most polls). Out of all the Democratic candidates, only Biden and Sanders consistently beat Trump in the polling.

Despite polling slightly worse than Biden, I believe Sanders is actually a stronger electoral choice for several reasons. Voters already know exactly who Sanders is. He has been thoroughly consistent in his views and positions throughout his career, and is seen as honest and authentic even by voters who oppose his policies. Attacks against him as a socialist in the general will only duplicate what is already known about him, and will furthermore only duplicate the attacks that were used against Obama and failed. Sanders is just as sharp and solid a debater and campaigner as he was in 2016, if not sharper, and he is relentlessly on message. He is transparent as a candidate, and it is clear he has never been bought, and cannot be bought. Even voters with doubts about his policies will be confident where his allegiance lies, and they will be confident he is not aligned with the economic-political establishment that opposes him so strongly. The people long for a champion.

In contrast, Biden’s record is full of hidden landmines. As a New Democrat in the Senate for over 30 years, Biden often embraced socially conservative stances on various issues that undermined racial justice, women’s rights, and queer rights. He also embraced neoliberal economic stances such as support for NAFTA, attempts to cut Social Security and Medicare, and an overhaul of bankruptcy laws that hurt regular borrowers in favor of big corporate lenders. Biden was not well-known in those days, and is currently remembered mostly for his association with Obama as vice president. Biden’s past positions would be used to hurt him in the general election, and he would be painted as a captured insider in the political and financial establishment voters have become so furiously opposed to. Democratic enthusiasm would be depressed as a result, as it was for Clinton in 2016. Biden has been looking weak on the stump and in debates this past year, in contrast to Bernie’s consistent strength. Joe has been getting cranky and defensive when challenged, he veers and meanders off message, and often says things that don’t make any sense. I fear that this image of Biden in 2020 will replace voters’ memory of Biden as Obama’s stalwart VP if he is chosen as the nominee.

Biden’s theory of the case is to pull from the New Democrat playbook: he talks about reaching across the aisle, a return to civility, the practicality of taking moderate piecemeal stances, of not asking or hoping for too much. His association with Obama and his blue-collar cultural style are the image factors meant to activate those vaunted swing voters who have dominated Democratic political theory since 1992. The problem is that those voters have receded to the vanishing point. It’s not 1992 anymore, and it’s not 1972 either. In 2020, Democrats and Republicans have been strictly sorted out and mapped along partisan lines, and they have solidified into their respective camps. The electoral challenge has shifted to one of turnout. The question is, “Who can excite the base and get it to turn out at higher percentages?” Biden is likely to convert about 1% of the electorate through his New Democrat playbook; I believe that’s where his advantage over Sanders in the polls comes from. Those polls are weighted to predict equal levels of turnout from all candidates, though, so they miss the importance of whether a candidate can excite and inspire the base, or whether voters will have to drag themselves to the polls.

Take the example of Wisconsin in 2016. Famously, Clinton didn’t even bother to campaign there (neither Sanders nor Biden will make that mistake in 2020). But take note: Trump actually received 2,000 fewer votes there than Romney did in 2012. He won in that state because Clinton received 238,000 fewer votes than Obama. Clinton had trouble inspiring the electorate; voters had become jaded and suspicious of establishment candidates. Sanders’ theory of the case is not only to inspire and mobilize the Democratic base, but to turn out previous non-voters: potential voters who have previously not gotten involved. These are the eligible voters who are ignored by the polls and ignored by get-out-the vote efforts. Bernie is betting that an anti-establishment candidate who promises to strongly support them and their economic interests can bring them to the polls.

Sanders has activated a new kind of ground game in Iowa and New Hampshire. These states will be the testing ground to see if he outperforms his polls and successfully brings these new voters on board. Sanders has a proven appeal with independents. His campaign hopes to activate voters who may have sat out or voted third party in 2016, as well as some who may have voted for Trump as a middle finger to the establishment, or as a desperate attempt to try someone or something different. Sanders also has massive appeal with young voters. These are also voters who have traditionally been discounted because their turnout rates are historically low; they have not yet developed the habitual voting patterns that older voters activate consistently. This also means there’s the most room for growth among their numbers. Youth need to be inspired, and they need a candidate who cares about their needs and takes them seriously. Their increase in turnout was higher than any other age group in 2018, and they will deliver for Sanders in 2020.

As of this writing, the Iowa caucus is two days away. By the beginning of March, we will have seen results in New Hampshire, Nevada, South Carolina and Super Tuesday. By then, the presumptive nominee may already be clear. It does not seem like it will be Warren or Buttigieg. They have both been sinking in the polls for weeks. Klobuchar has seen some gains, but it appears too little too late. Yang, Gabbard, Steyer, and others still in the race have never been able to consolidate the support they need. At this point, the race is shaping up as a Biden-Sanders contest, so my case for Sanders has been made assuming Biden will be his primary opponent. Bloomberg is surging as the result of his endless billions of advertising dollars, and if Biden falters, he may step in to take up the mantle of the corporate Democrats. Perhaps Bloomberg’s strategy is simply to stay in the race and spend so much money that he diverts votes and delegates away from Sanders, thus manufacturing a brokered convention that can deny Sanders the nomination even if he is the most popular candidate. We shall see.

The mood of the country is populist, as it was in 2016. The economic crash of 2008, coupled with 40 years of the neoliberal squeeze, and approaching ecological catastrophe have changed American politics. This is what we must understand. Sanders is the right nominee to catch the winds of the prevailing populist mood. It swept Trump into power four years ago, but Sanders is the candidate who can make the best case against Trump’s phony populism. Sanders has been consistent, honest, and incorruptible for decades. He is unfazed by the distractions of personal attacks or side issues and is unmatched in his ability to steer the discussion back to policy and stay on message. Sanders can expose Trump’s betrayal of working Americans because he is the real deal — the ideal messenger for a unifying populist economic agenda.

With Sanders as president, the US will have an occupant in the White House who is willing to take on the establishment and prioritize the needs of ordinary Americans for the first time since FDR. Voters know Sanders can’t achieve everything in his platform, but they know he will try. We saw how Obama’s negotiating strategy worked: he gave half the loaf away before beginning the bargaining process, and he ended up with crumbs. Sanders argues for the full loaf, reasoning that he might be able to secure half a loaf in the bargain. He lets voters know that the full loaf is the goal, and that if they want that loaf they can show up in the streets, on picket lines, and at the ballot box to help him deliver it.

Sanders as president is best equipped and has the best vision to root out the corruption and corporate capture that produced the conditions for Trumpism. He is best equipped to guide the US into fulfilling her 21st century destiny: to become the true world leader of a democratic, economic, and ecological revolution that just might save the planet from continued decimation by the forces of unfettered capital.

Vote Sanders in 2020.

- Raelle Kaia — February 1, 2020