Fredrik deBoer is a writer and academic. He lives in Indiana.

The 2016 Republican presidential field is consumed by debates over which candidates are RINOs—the slur directed by party faithful at those liberal GOP-ers considered Republicans In Name Only. On the other end of the spectrum, though, debate is just as hot about what might just be the first SINO in American politics, the first Socialist In Name Only.

At the center of many conversations at the bustling Socialism 2015 convention in Chicago earlier this month was the presidential campaign of self-avowed socialist Bernie Sanders. National political debates over the senator from Vermont have generally focused on whether he is too far to the left, but the question asked instead by the conference goers—which included thousands of socialists, communists, anarchists, Marxists, Social Democrats and sundry others whose politics place them a country mile to the left of the American middle—was whether Sanders is too conservative to warrant their support.


As a socialist myself, the question of partisan politics has always been a vexing one. The first presidential campaign I voted in, I pulled the lever for Al Gore—not out of a belief that he would be anything resembling a president who would represent my interests, but out of a fairly clueless sense that voting for Democrats was what you did. (Living in Connecticut, my vote meant little, anyway.) Then came 9/11, and the days after it, when Democrats jumped enthusiastically into ultrapatriotism and militarism. When the Barack Obama campaign rose out of the ashes of the George W. Bush presidency, I allowed myself to believe in its transformative potential, writing endlessly in support of his candidacy. That, in turn, led to the days of drones, compromises on austerity and the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

That’s been the cycle, for me: always knowing that Democrats would never really represent my interests, but nevertheless perpetually ready to believe that the next Democrat might make some sort of a difference. I have grown to envy those purer Marxist peers of mine who simply washed their hands of the whole thing long ago. It has left me in a state of permanent agnosticism towards Sanders: I’m pleased that someone who calls himself a socialist is in the race, but I will not invest myself in his campaign, not in terms of energy, effort, time or emotion.

Though Sanders speaks with more candor and vitriol about inequality and corporatism than most Democrats, he is more likely to call for more a more muscular social safety net and higher taxes than for the nationalization of the banks. Sanders is not Zell Miller, but neither is he Eugene V. Debs. This has created a split in socialist circles: some see the Sanders campaign as an opportunity to popularize socialism with the public at large while others fear that it is a trick to bring socialists back into the Democratic fold.

I can’t help but respect those who see support for Sanders as a strategic move for the far left, and who can engage with his campaign without the kind of emotional investment I’ve always fallen prey to. Socialists enthusiastic about Sanders emphasize that he and his campaign are clearly of more relevance to contemporary socialist politics than any major presidential run in recent history. “Sanders is moving the discussion to the left, and mobilizing an absurdly high number of people,” says socialist Bhaskar Sunkara, the editor and publisher of the explicitly Marxist-socialist Jacobin magazine, in an interview. “I want to take the risk of reaching out to all these people comfortable with supporting a self-described socialist candidate.” Sunkara sat on a panel at Socialism 2015 focused on the Sanders campaign and its relationship with the socialist left.

Ashley Smith, a board member of the International Socialist Review who also sat on the Sanders panel, has criticized Sanders not only for his generally conventional policy preferences but also for the likely political outcome of his campaign. “Sanders refused to consider an independent presidential campaign not because he had little chance of winning, but because he didn't want to compete for votes with the Democrats' eventual nominee,” Smith wrote in an article for the Socialist Worker, pointing out that insurgent Democratic campaigns frequently end up merely corralling critics of mainstream Democratic politicians into support for the eventual mainstream candidate. As Smith writes, “by steering liberal and left supporters into a Democratic Party whose policies and politics he claims to disagree with, Sanders—no matter how critical he might be of Hillary Clinton—is acting as the opposite of an ‘alternative.’”

This phenomenon is often referred to as “sheepdogging,” a term suggesting that candidates like Sanders simply function to capture left-wing unhappiness within the party and subdue it. (Indeed, it isn’t difficult to find images depicting Sanders as a literal sheepdog, herding voters toward Clinton, in online left-wing communities.) In a scathing piece for Black Agenda Report, the essential journal of radical black politics, Bruce A. Dixon writes, “Bernie Sanders is this election’s Democratic sheepdog…. Sheepdogs are herders, and the sheepdog candidate is charged with herding activists and voters back into the Democratic fold who might otherwise drift leftward and outside of the Democratic party.” The Sanders candidacy, according to Dixon, will simply redound to the benefit of inevitable nominee Clinton, and in so doing turn activist energy into just more politics as usual.

Both Sunkara and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, a socialist, activist and assistant professor of African-American History at Princeton, reject the sheepdog label. “That implies that people are sheep,” Sunkara says. “I think that’s an overly cynical reading,” says Taylor, though she does not dispute that Sanders supporters will likely end up being Clinton voters in the general election, as indeed Sanders has publicly pledged. “He’s a good soldier who will kick his support in behind Hillary. But I understand the deep desire to rally around the candidate who is speaking out against the kind of gross inequality that pervades this society.”

The question of savviness—of whether socialists who are willing to support Democrats are necessarily naïve—is a persistent part of this debate. It functions as an inversion of typical political debates in which Democrats, even liberal Democrats, dismiss left-wing critics of sitting Democrats as useful idiots for the right.

The question of partisan politics and how to interact with them is one of socialism’s oldest and most difficult. Mistrust of mainstream political organizations, and the Democrats in particular, is baked in to the political beliefs of many on the far left. “You don’t need to get deep into the history of the Democrat Party to understand the problems with trying to use it for a flourishing alternative politics that is serious about attacking inequality,” says Taylor, whose work concerns black America, politics and social policy. “It’s one thing to have a contained insurgent campaign. It’s another thing to try and attack the inequality that’s deeply ingrained in Democratic Party institutions.”

For many socialists, the only thing worse than the Republicans are the Democrats. The former, the argument goes, is an explicitly corporatist, elite-dominated party, while the latter dresses up its corporatism and domination by moneyed interests with progressive rhetoric.

Recent history has solidified the sense of many leftists that the Democratic Party is no home for them. Obamacare, with its goal of expanded health care access but corporation-pleasing systems, made theoretical conflicts about goals and means concrete. Online surveillance and drone strikes play to the narrative that Obama is an American imperialist like any other. And then there was the centrist Bill Clinton administration, which betrayed the left with policies like “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the North American Free Trade Agreement and welfare reform. Though political parties do not map neatly onto different eras, left-wing antipathy toward Democrats can be reasonably said to stretch back as far as the Woodrow Wilson administration, which brought the United States into World War I, harassed and persecuted Communist Party leaders like Debs and often resisted labor reforms preferred by socialists and communists. With this kind of lineage, it isn’t hard to understand socialist antipathy toward Democrats. “Every election year, we hear that it’s time to take the party back, as if we ever owned the party in the first place,” Taylor says. “The notion that the Democratic Party was ever for us is an illusion.”

Still, there are obvious appeals to the Sanders campaign for many within the American left. As Sunkara says, “If we sit it out, we’re guaranteeing that more people go back to mainline Democratic Party politics. If we engage, we can maybe steer debate leftward and work with them in movement work and local electoral races.”

Douglas Williams, a Social Democrat writer, academic and activist who blogs at the Southlawn, echoes this thinking. “The American public has been groomed to mediate their political preferences through the ballot box,” Williams tells me in an interview. “That’s the situation that we have here. It’s not conducive to a general strike or mass mobilizations to shut down the country.” Given the moribund state of the American labor movement and the vagaries of our political system, this perspective seems pragmatic.

For their part, all of the socialists I interviewed for this piece who advocated support for the Sanders candidacy were qualified in that support, arguing for the potential good that the campaign could do while recognizing that Sanders is very unlikely to win the presidency and that Sanders is far from their ideal candidate. Sunkara, for instance, noted the limitations of Sanders’ brand of socialism. “Sanders’ vision of a just society is based on one where certain segments of the economy are taken outside the market, where certain things like health and education become social rights,” said Sunkara. “I aspire for socialism after capitalism, a society where democracy is expanded radically into the economic and social spheres.” At the same time, Williams argues that, if nothing else, the campaign could function as an effective table-setter for the future. “In 2011, 49 percent of young people polled said they approved of socialism. Bernie can be the vehicle through which we spread that idea for 2020.” For many of his more radical supporters, Sanders’ campaign thus functions as a Trojan horse for the larger socialist agenda. But many also support Sanders as the only viable alternative to Clinton.

Clinton, whose status as the presumptive Democratic candidate for 2016 has been widely assumed since at least the night of the 2012 election, is seen as so inevitable that merely overcoming the power of that presumption is a large hurdle for Sanders to clear. But on the left, criticisms of Clinton are so ample, and draw from so much evidence, that the hunger for an alternative candidate is enormous. In a widely-cited cover story in Harper’s Magazine, the influential left-wing economics writer Doug Henwood implored the country to “Stop Hillary!” arguing that her likely candidacy was the result of being anointed by the Democratic party machine rather than merit. “What is the case for Hillary?” asked Henwood. “It boils down to this: She has experience, she’s a woman and it’s her turn. It’s hard to find any substantive political argument in her favor.”

Which raises the question: could the Sanders campaign potentially do more than pull the inevitable nominee to the left, and actually make a run at the nomination? Direct examples are thin on the ground. Since the American left has such little recent history of success within the partisan framework, many search for historical analogs with which to compare Sanders. In an article in Jacobin, the left-wing writer and longtime critic of Democrats Lance Selfa compares Sanders’ candidacy, unflatteringly, to that of George McGovern. McGovern was an anti-Vietnam War liberal who attempted to succeed Lyndon Johnson as the Democratic nominee in 1968, and was summarily dispatched by Democratic Party bosses in favor of pro-war Hubert Humphrey. The resonance here is clear: There are limits to how much any candidate can deviate from the party leadership.

Another historical example frequently compared to Sanders is Jesse Jackson, whose 1984 and 1988 Democratic nomination campaigns were relatively successful, though they are little thought of today. The Jackson campaign “tapped into the cynicism towards mainstream politics and the frustrations of the electorate,” says Taylor. The Sanders campaign has not been shy about playing to that same cynicism and frustration. And in calling for something more than politics as usual, the Sanders campaign reflects a direct, recent analog: the 2008 campaign of Obama, which overcame initial skepticism to capture first the Democratic nomination and then the presidency.

But perhaps the best historical comparison for Sanders is a much more recent vintage: 2015 Chicago mayoral candidate Chuy Garcia. The similarities are multiple and profound. After stepping in for Chicago Teacher’s Union President Karen Lewis, who had taken ill and could not run, Garcia waged an insurgent campaign that existed initially to send a message to the Democratic Party and found itself, unexpectedly, with a chance to win the race. Garcia was able to force a runoff in the Democratic primary when Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel was unable to win more than 50 percent of the vote. Though Emanuel dispatched Garcia fairly comfortably in the runoff, the message of dissatisfaction for Emanuel was clear, especially within the labor organizations that have long been a stronghold of Chicago and national Democratic politics. Emanuel, himself a part of the Clinton machine, is a corporate-friendly Democrat in the mold of the Clintons; Garcia represents the party’s reform-minded activist wing.

Toby Chow, a socialist divinity student and Chicago-based activist, sat on the Socialism 2015 panel about Sanders and participated in the Garcia campaign through the organization Reclaim Chicago. In an interview, he argued that socialists cannot afford to ignore the electoral process and posed Garcia’s campaign as a model for how engagement in elections can broaden left-wing coalitions. “The question is, do you want to build an alternative beyond the neoliberal status quo? Then you should take part in the electoral process where you can. In Seattle, that meant [socialist City Council member Kshama] Sawant running as an independent. In Chicago, we endorsed a socialist who hates the Democrats and ran as an independent. But on the national level, it’s much more difficult to run outside of the two-party system.”

Chow points out that Emanuel’s election was a foregone conclusion in the eyes of most political observers, and yet he was forced into a runoff that sent a clear message about the viability of progressive challengers. “I really didn’t think Chuy had a chance until Rahm failed to get 50 percent +1 in the general election,” said Chow. “When Chuy forced a runoff, it energized local progressive politics in a profound way. Politics are swingy that way.”

The Garcia campaign seems particularly important when considering issues such as education, for which there is frequently little daylight between the Democratic and Republican mainstream. Both parties have adopted very similar reform agendas, with politicians from both sides frequently expressing antipathy toward teacher unions and teacher tenure. Similarly, there often appears to be little distance between national Republicans and national Democrats on issues such as trade globalization and online surveillance. By threatening Democrats from their left, insurgent campaigns like that of Sanders and Garcia can potentially expand the boundaries of the possible. “Chuy was not the perfect progressive candidate; he wouldn’t have been a perfect mayor,” said Chow. “And he didn’t win. But we were able to build out organization through the campaign, so the energy was well spent. And it helps make future, further-left candidates more viable.”

Socialists better hope so, because not one of the people I interviewed believed that Sanders has much chance of securing the Democratic nomination, much less the presidency. The bigger question is whether any of this will matter if and when Sanders is out of the race. There is good reason to be skeptical for few would doubt the potential for all of this leftist energy to evaporate once the cold political calculus of capturing battleground states like Ohio or Florida comes into play. “The Democratic Party pays attention to progressive activists only when it’s forced to,” said Vox’s Dara Lind, who has covered Sanders’ campaign, in an interview.

Yet with such little expectation of success, given its history of marginalization, the socialist left has little to lose. Simply by being in the race and being discussed in the national media, the Sanders campaign has fulfilled a rare and valuable function for a set of political obsessives who are used to getting very little out of conventional politics.

Chow analogizes the Sanders campaign to another electoral phenomenon that stemmed from broad dissatisfaction with politics as usual. “The tea party doesn’t get a lot of people elected, but it’s used the Republican primaries as a field of struggle to drag the party to the far right.” Perhaps a candidacy like that of Sanders, Chow said, could function in the same way for the socialist left.

If nothing else, with so little chance for immediate political success, socialists can afford to plan for victories in the distant future. When asked if he thought Sanders could win, Sunkara took the long view. “Yes, definitely. Just not the primary or the presidency. Barry Goldwater didn't win until a couple decades after he ran.”