Why Bernie Can’t Come to the Barbecue: The Black Nation and the Imperial “Left” in the 2016 Presidential Election BRG Follow May 4, 2018 · 8 min read

This is a paper I wrote for a class two years ago exposing the pitfalls and perils of class reductionism when doing political work in the Black nation.

Bernie Sanders was a candidate who aroused and polarized (further) American politics during the 2016 Democratic nomination contest. On one hand, he was seen by many strata of the American population as a sort of savior. The so-called “middle class”, college aged white millennials, and white union card carriers thrown out of their jobs by the long march of neoliberalism turned out for him in droves, seeing him and his old school populist Democratic politics as a welcome rupture from the “establishment” candidate, Hillary Clinton. On the other hand, he was seen as a “godless socialist”, despite seeing individuals like Hugo Chavez as “communist dictators” and pushing a pretty standard plate of old fashioned FDR style reforms that really posed no great threat to the existence of American capitalism and imperialism, and as someone who simply wanted to promote “free stuff without working”. This candidate, essentially, is worthy of being talked about. He lost the nomination, and is currently in a state of rapprochement with the Democratic elite that he spent the entire election spectacle railing against. The question I will work to answer is: Why did he lose? A major part of his failure is his and his supporters’ inability to capture a significant foothold among young, working class, black voters, or black voters and black people in general. Bernie Sanders and his supporters failed with black people because they, more often than not, engaged in a form of blatant, transparent, and gross class reductionism that sought to flatten racial contradictions in favor of class questions, and as a result, alienated what, common sense would dictate, should have been a natural base for the Sanders campaign. Another issue that harmed Sanders vis-a-vis the black nation is the fact that many within this nation have an advanced political consciousness that, simply put, means that they do not have any actual material reason to go to the polls and vote. The historical experience of the Black nation has soured it on electoral politics, by and large.

Who doesn’t vote? A study by the Pew Research Center tells us:

“They are young: 34 percent of nonvoters are younger than 30 years old and the vast majority — 70 percent — are younger than 50 years old. They are racially and ethnically diverse: A full 43 percent of non-voters are Hispanic, African American, or other racial and ethnic minorities. That is roughly double the 22 percent of likely voters comprised by minorities. They are less affluent than likely voters: Almost half — 46 percent — of non-voters have family incomes less than $30,000 per year, while only 19 percent of likely voters are from low-income families. They are less educated than likely voters: While 72 percent of likely voters have completed at least some college, most non-voters — 54 percent — did not attend college.”

Essentially, the poor/working class, black and brown, and non-college population, for a myriad of reasons, does not participate in either midterm or presidential elections. This undoubtedly played a role in the failure of Bernie Sanders to capture the Democratic nomination. Poor black people, those who would seem the most receptive to Sanders’ message and were seen as more likely to give him their vote, simply see solutions as coming outside of the political process. The rationale is that voting has not improved conditions in the Black community since it was able to vote en masse in the 1960s, so it’s not going to improve things now, especially since material conditions have gotten worse since then. Some might start independent, grassroots organizations that refuse to endorse candidates, or community centers that serve the people in their own communities. Some might revolt and rebel in the streets like in Ferguson in 2014 and Baltimore in 2015. Some might simply sit at home or go down to the barber shop and beauty salon and talk with their class and racial siblings about the latest political shakeup and what it means to their community. What they will not do, however, is vote. “Poor and near-poor citizens exert “no discernible impact on the behavior of their elected representatives.” This contradiction means that the voting “game” is seen as a waste of time and people don’t take part. This is why the electoral hype around Sanders fell on deaf ears among the lowest, deepest, most oppressed black masses. The historical experience of the black nation, particularly the working class, is that our kind of change, that which we need, that which benefits our most root interests, does not come at the ballot box. It took years of bloodshed and Civil War to end the chattel slavery system, afterwards, we still weren’t free. It took years and years of bloodshed after the failure of the Reconstruction project to win basic democratic rights that as “citizens”, we supposedly had on paper. Black American history, like that of all other oppressed people, is a long march of struggle, armed and unarmed, with high points and low points. The armed or threat of the armed has won us the most lasting gains, advancing our political consciousness, developing our solidarity as a nation and as a community. On the other hand, the unarmed, the reform, the ballot box, has won us temporary or ineffective salves that are easily taken away by reactionary state legislatures or courts (see the voter ID restrictions and the Voting Rights Act) and the birth of a political comprador class tied to the interests of white supremacy at the root, represented by individuals such as Jesse Jackson and DeRay McKesson. In short, young, poor black people don’t vote because they’ve a keen sense of history and we don’t need a book to tell us what we will need to free ourselves. Sanders didn’t cut it, just like Mondale, Jackson, Clinton and the others that were marched out and paraded before us didn’t.

What of Sanders himself? What of his supporters? Did he provide a workable path, something that would interest black people and other oppressed people? Many of us would say no. His campaign was notoriously tone-deaf towards issues concerning the Black nation, and failed to garner support from this nation as a result. His brand of economic populism, of a square deal for the working people (while keeping the working people out of actual meaningful power), has been paraded before us time and time again, from the New Deal onwards. In relationship to the black people and their leadership during his time as a senator and local politician in the state of Vermont, however, he appeared to have little to no time for Black people or their issues. A Vermont activist recalls an interview with Sanders: “He just always kept coming back to income inequality as a response, as if talking about income inequality would somehow make issues of racism go away.” This type of thinking, reproduced in many of his supporters regarding issues of race, gender, etc., is called “class reductionism”, which is defined as the belief that all national, gender, or racial oppression is reducible to class and thus all contradictions surrounding these issues will disappear through a “more equitable” system. This is important to point out — Sanders has worked for and promoted a more “equal” distribution of resources under capitalism, not the class struggle and not the overthrow of capitalism (which will actually help remove the material basis for national and racial oppression, although it will still exist and need to be struggled against in an actual socialist society). So, his social democratic platform that sought to dance around or flatten these contradictions (which are, of course, class questions in the final analysis) fell flat and subsequently was received lukewarmly or with derision. Hillary Clinton was a rightist and represented the rightist “establishment” wing of the Democratic Party, but also, along with former President Bill Clinton, been working for decades in the black community and had substantially more mass support among black people that actually vote, meaning the middle class and older strata of the working class. Sanders could not make up for his lack of “currency” or “being known” in the Black community, no matter how many appearances he made with Cornel West and endorsements from NAACP figures such as Ben Jealous he received. Instead of rectifying his tonedeafness, he oftentimes chose to double down on it, or when he tried to rectify, he ended up appearing even more tonedeaf. Here’s an example: “When you’re white, you don’t know what it’s like to be living in a ghetto. You don’t know what it’s like to be poor. You don’t know what it’s like to be hassled when you walk down the street or when you get dragged out of a car.” He seemed forced, and didn’t convince many black people that his concern was sincere, or that he had revolutionary or workable solutions to their problems.

The behavior of his supporters further alienated black and brown people from his campaign. Jokes spread throughout the internet during the presidential campaign about young, white men in college who were apparently taken with Sanders’ promises of free tuition and seemed to care about nothing else. Certainly not Palestine, or the BLM movement (unless they could opportunistically pin themselves to it to preach the Sanders movement and how he’d fix all problems under the sun), or the rights of undocumented migrants. This failure to seriously engage with the issues that matter to oppressed communities in this country, once again, did great harm. The low point came at an event in Seattle:

“What ensued was a highly contentious battle for control of the event between Mara and myself, the event organizers, and Bernie’s campaign that resulted in my speaking at the podium for several minutes, and Senator Sanders leaving the event when we did not allow him to speak. The crowd was outraged, chanting Senator Sanders’ name during a moment of silence for Mike Brown and calling for the police to tase us while throwing water bottles at us on stage.”

After this, it was quite easy to paint Sanders and his most fervent supporters as being a bunch of opportunistic racists, correctly or not correctly, perception counts for much in American politics. From misogynistic attacks on Hillary Clinton (an objectively horrible imperialist, neoliberal candidate in her own right) to racist, misogynistic attacks on black women activists, the ball was dropped over and over and over again and the Black community became more and more and more soured on Sanders, his backers, his demographic and his campaign. The fact that he was arrested at a civil rights rally before our parents were born does not count for much when he does not display the same type of politics today, or hasn’t advanced his politics to revolutionary conclusions. We deserve and expect better.

In essence, Sanders lost because he didn’t get enough votes or support to overthrow the Clinton machine. He couldn’t do this because his campaign did not correctly handle extremely sensitive contradictions and had all of the nuance and tactfulness of a buffalo in a porcelain shop. His campaign and its supporters, when not ignoring black issues completely, chose to pander in a transparent and obvious way. Black people weren’t too keen on voting in the first place, Sanders’ behavior and warmed over New Deal politics weren’t winning anyone to the long lines of the polls anytime soon. His class reductionism, his racism, his supporters’ fanaticism and ignorance, his white mediocrity, this is why Bernie can’t come to the barbecue.