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The unthinkable is happening. A self-proclaimed socialist is not only forging ahead in the Democratic primaries, but could actually win. Yet even as his popularity rises, even as he raises issues no candidate has brought into the public arena in decades, Bernie Sanders faces attacks from all quarters of the Left. He’s accused of not having radical enough economic proposals, of being oblivious to race, of diminishing the chances of electing a woman president, of not being electable and potentially paving the way for Republican victory, and of threatening social movements by herding progressives into the Democratic Party. There is no doubt that aspects of this criticism are deserved. Sanders doesn’t offer anything close to a comprehensive solution for the myriad problems facing the poor and oppressed, and some parts of his political agenda are genuinely backward. But when we place his candidacy in the context of the challenges the Left faces, the orientation of his political rivals, and the incredible enthusiasm he has generated in a climate of general defeat, the attacks on him from the Left become harder to justify. Some of the critiques are unexceptional. Bernie is just a social democrat. He is not advocating socializing the means of production, nor is he seeking to dismantle the American empire; he has at times fallen short of demonstrating an experiential empathy towards racial minorities; and of course, it would have been nice if Sanders was a woman. But politics is always contextual, and this is the United States, not Europe or Latin America. It is a country with a deep history of anticommunism, of little memory of an organized left politics, of a sustained, unremitting, three-decade-long attack on the working class. And the fact is that today, after decades of retreat by the Left, Sanders’s campaign has resonated with working people all over the country — not in spite of his embrace of the word “socialism,” but because of it. Ponder that for a minute. Sure, he isn’t calling for wholesale expropriation. But when was the last time a candidate was winning on a plank that called for breaking up large banks, raising taxes on the wealthy and on corporations, shifting revenues toward huge increases in the social safety net, establishing universal health care and child care, providing tuition-free higher education, spending a trillion dollars on public works, and raising the minimum wage nationwide to $15 an hour? It’s really not much of an insight to point out that this is still short of the kind of revolutionary transformations that we desire. Those are not on the table. What is remarkable, however, is that until recently neither was Sanders’s vision or proposal — and now he has a vast section of the country eating off that table.

Bernie the Man Liberal feminists like Katha Pollitt and Gloria Steinem have put forth the argument that Clinton must be supported because her win would be a victory for feminism. Neither of the two seems to have a substantive objection to Bernie’s policy stances. In her Nation piece “Why I’m Ready and Excited for Hillary,” Pollitt cites three reasons for her support for Clinton: first, her electability, second, it’s time the United States elected a woman as president, and third, Clinton, unlike “the Republican who beats Bernie Sanders” will work toward gender justice, particularly through progressive Supreme Court appointments. Pollitt’s first and third reasons are not that different. They both proceed from the assumption that Sanders can’t win. If he could, then Clinton’s supposed role in appointing judges and otherwise using executive power to liberal ends would not matter because Sanders would do the same or better. What’s more, since Politt wrote the piece last June, the electability argument has come into question. Multiple polls show Bernie coming out some twenty points ahead of the Republican frontrunners. This only leaves the call for electing a female president, a position shared by Steinem, who has proposed the bizarre theory that the reason liberal women oppose Clinton is because of sexual jealousy. While campaigning for Clinton in 2008, Steinem came to the conclusion that white, well-educated women often led “precarious and unequal [married] lives,” so they were jealous of Clinton because “their own husbands hadn’t shared power with them.” Steinem does not entertain the idea that women could be opposing Clinton for her militarism, or immigration policy, or because she has wavered on abortion, or due to the disastrous impact of welfare “reform” on working-class women. Pollitt and Steinem are long-time progressives, and they are fully alive to the political contrast between Clinton and Sanders. For them, the contrast is simply subordinate to the mission of making a woman president. We’re asked to be excited at the prospect of electing a candidate with a corporate agenda. Yes, “symbols matter,” as Pollitt reminds us, but in this instance it is proffered at the expense of substantive issues with direct consequences for working women’s lives. Such positions evince a willful blindness to the class dimension of Clinton’s policies, all in the name of feminism.

Bernie the Class Reductionist The criticisms of Sanders for his supposed blindness to issues of racism have been plentiful, and to his credit, he has responded to them more carefully and fully than any other candidate. The most recent broadside has come from Ta-Nehisi Coates, who upbraids Sanders for his refusal to support reparations, championing instead race-blind structural transformation. Coates bases his argument on a moral appeal for reparation without ever bothering to explain how something like a one-time payment solves the issue of institutional racism or why it’s more effective at improving the condition of black Americans than the reforms Sanders supports. Coates denigrates Sanders’s initiatives like a higher minimum wage and free college because he believes that institutional racism ensures whites will always be the primary beneficiaries of any universal initiative. This is a terribly skewed argument. It ignores the fact that the large majority of workers who would be lifted out of poverty by raising the minimum wage would be people of color. Coates is similarly oblivious to studies showing that the black-white wage gap narrows as the educational level goes up — hence decreasing the benefits of white privilege — but the gap between high school and college-educated blacks grows at an increasing rate compared to the white population. It means the benefits of a free college education would be enormous and weighted overwhelmingly toward working-class blacks. The popularity, however, of Coates’s criticism of Sanders is striking. Coates speaks for a political constellation where class is taken to be a distraction from racial issues, where race politics is set against class politics, instead of being seen as complementary in the struggle for social justice. But make no mistake — what Coates is arguing for is not just a particular vision of race politics, but also a very specific class politics.