On a cold Saturday night, more than one thousand people snaked around the block of the City Auditorium in Ames, Iowa. As the sun went down, zero degrees Celsius quickly dropped to negative ten. Ames is a college town of around 65,000 people, home to Iowa State University. While the crowd generally skewed young, plenty of families and retirees mixed with students and the general excitement was more palpable than the bitter cold. Everyone was waiting for the doors to open to see Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and his surrogates — New York Congresswoman, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the award-winning filmmaker, Michael Moore.

A tractor sporting a Trump 2020 flag with two men shouting, “Make American great again!” only inspired chuckles and a few ironic selfies as it drove up and down the street in front of the auditorium’s entrance. An older man toward the front of the line was beside himself with laughter. “Joke’s on them,” he told me. “There’s cops everywhere and it’s illegal to drive that tractor on city streets, they’re about to get a pretty big fine.”

The nine hundred seat auditorium was well over capacity, and an overflow room for an additional five hundred had to be set up. After the band Portugal. The Man warmed up the crowd, three young Native American activists took to the stage to loud applause to acknowledge the more than dozen tribes that originally inhabited the land that is present day Iowa. They were followed by Michael Moore. Toward the end of his speech, Moore recounted the first time he stumped for Sanders. It was three decades previous, and Moore was fresh off his award-winning documentary Roger and Me, in which he repeatedly tried to confront General Motors CEO Roger Smith over the devastation and mass job-loss caused by deindustrialisation in Flint, Michigan. Sanders, then the Mayor of the Vermont city of Burlington, called Moore looking for some celebrities to help him win his first race for Congress. “In 1990 there was a Crocodile Dundee, a Milli Vanilli, there were other, better celebrities,” Moore recalled. The only people who answered the call to help the self-described democratic socialist were “two guys who made ice cream” — namely, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield — “and one guy who ate ice cream” —Moore himself.

The Land Acknowledgement at the beginning of the rally was fitting; it’s a practice Australians are intimately familiar with, but most Americans have never heard of — let alone experienced in presidential politics. So too, at a decidedly less serious level, was the reference to Crocodile Dundee, exhibit A in the old episode of The Simpsons about the United States’ fleeting knowledge of Australia.

Never before, I suspect, have Americans gone into a caucus or a voting booth thinking about Australia. But in dozens of conversations I’ve had with Iowa voters over the last week, the fires that ravaged south-eastern Australia have become an inflection point in this primary season. For they represent a jarring reminder that immediate action on climate change, far and beyond merely re-entering the Paris Climate Accords, is the only hope left to stop the worst of global environmental and social catastrophe. In almost every stump speech, Senator Sanders discusses the bushfires in precisely this way. The fires perform a key rhetorical lead-in to his statement, “I have been criticised for bringing forward the most sweeping climate change proposal that anyone for federal office has ever brought forward.” Perhaps for the first time, Australia is meaningfully on the minds of Americans as they prepare to vote, providing a dramatic example not just of the stakes of the coming election, but also of the very meaning of politics in the twenty-first century.

Just as American voters are thinking about Australia, so too are Australians (along with others across the globe) focused on the caucuses in Iowa and what it would mean for Senator Sanders to win the Democratic primaries — to say nothing of the presidency. Around the world, groups have organically sprung up to telephone and text American voters in early primary states on his behalf: Belgium for Bernie Sanders, South Africans for Bernie, Swedes for Bernie, and on and on. The Berlin chapter of Germany for Bernie got so big that it had to set up multiple locations for its weekly phone and text-banking nights. Australians supporting Bernie Sanders has regular Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Canberra texting and calling events. I met Germans, Taiwanese and Japanese who had made the long journey to Iowa, and heard reports from volunteers that others from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Mexico, Colombia, the UK, Israel and all over Europe were on the ground across the state.

This is all in addition to the thousands of out-of-state volunteers from throughout the United States who have made their way to Iowa and New Hampshire (where the second nominating contest will be held on 11 February) by taking “Bernie’s Journeys,” as the campaign dubbed them. Many slept four to a motel room or bunked with local supporters. Most signed up for three canvassing shifts of three hours each a day to trudge through below-zero weather and frequent snow in order to knock on doors and mobilise Iowa voters to caucus for Sanders on 3 February.

Many of these supporters find Senator Sanders broadly inspiring. Volunteers point to his message of direct political confrontation with moneyed interests and the military industrial complex; his general anti-imperialism — a genuine first in the last four decades of viable American presidential candidates; his advocacy of the expansion of universal social rights around education, health care, housing, child care, retirement and living wages; his broad and vocal disdain for the elite, pay-to-play politics of both American political parties; and his more than five-decade history of being out front on issues of civil rights for African Americans, women and the LGBT community when it was politically unpopular to do so.

How can you get there from here?

But the world’s warming climate and melting ice caps, along with the increased frequency and severity of cataclysmic weather events — exemplified most dramatically in the last few months by Australia’s devastating bushfires — all point to another reason why Sanders has galvanised popular sentiment around the world. If the best, most recent estimates are to be believed, carbon emissions need to decline by 7.6 percent annually in order to curtail the most dire outcomes for the planet and hundreds of millions of people around the world. At this stage, simply re-entering the Paris framework will do little to stem this tide.

Even if the global stage was dominated by well-meaning statespeople and experts, it’s the height of naïveté to think that, given the material and political interests lined up against meaningful climate action, anything more effectual than Paris’ largely unenforceable goals could plausibly be achieved. Everything in the last decades of international politics points to the fact that we can’t get to where we need to go with the boilerplate liberalism of leaders like Emmanuel Macron and the most recent iterations of the Democratic Party — whether its right-wing, defined by figures like Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, or its technocratic centre, epitomised by Elizabeth Warren. For many of the people energised by Senator Sanders, his election represents perhaps the world’s last, best chance — a moonshot, if you will — to mobilise a political force that can viably take on the interests and ideologies that benefit from climate inaction.

This moonshot is both internal to American domestic policy and global in scope and orientation. What is dubbed the “Green New Deal” is both the centrepiece of Senator Sanders’s domestic environmental platform and a key facet of his economic program. Indeed, marrying the two issues is an important tenet of the campaign’s strategy to change the calculus of voters around climate change. Tens of millions of well-meaning people around the world have deep and immediate short- and medium-term material interests in continuing with the climate status quo — something Australians learned all-too-vividly in their last federal election. Their livelihoods and communities depend on mining, fracking, drilling and a variety of agricultural practices doing irrevocable harm to the long-term future of the planet and humanity. Such people’s interests must be taken seriously.

Any climate change politics that imagines actual victory rather than moral purity must start from this fact. As the late Tony Mazzochi, a long-time leader in the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers Union (no crunchy environmental organisation) once put it, “there is a superfund for dirt. There ought to be one for workers.” This can’t just be rhetorical for the communities that have prospered from mining in Western Australia, fracking in Pennsylvania and farming with destructive pesticides and chemicals in Iowa — it has to be “tangible and understandable and coherent,” as Mazzochi said. Shaking his head, a rural Iowa voter deeply worried about climate change told me that his neighbours “are good people, but they just don’t see a future for themselves unless they keep farming this way and no one has given them a practical alternative.”

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Sanders is clear-headed on this point. The Green New Deal starts from the principle of what’s become known as “just transition.” It creates tens of millions of good paying jobs in the construction of an environmentally sustainable economy, renewable energy resources and conservation, while providing large funds for those workers affected by the movement away from fossil fuels to remain in their communities and move to other forms of work in a green economy.

This is neither the standard Democratic Party line of a few million dollars for retraining fossil fuel sector workers as software engineers, nor the elitist disdain shown by the professional-managerial leadership of the Party that Hillary Clinton exemplified in 2016 when she bragged, “we’re going to put a lot of coal companies and coal miners out of business.” Rather, it’s a clear and unequivocal recognition that a key component of shifting the politics of climate change is making sure that those most deeply affected by the movement away from a fossil fuel economy know they will be taken care of in the short term, prosper in the long term and have a real voice in such a transition. This isn’t just the right policy — it’s incredibly good politics to find real ways of severing the interests of voters who depend on the carbon economy for their paycheques and livelihoods from the mine owners, oil companies, pesticide firms and agricultural conglomerates that profit from climate change.

Among large countries, the United States has the highest per capita carbon emissions and is second to China in overall emissions. Making electricity and transportation entirely renewable by 2030 and completely decarbonising the American economy by 2050 — as the Green New Deal proposes — would do wonders in and of itself for global climate change, even if every other country maintained their current emissions trajectories. As a group of leading climate scientists recently put it in an open letter regarding the plan, “it’s not only possible, it must be done if we want to save the planet for ourselves, our children, grandchildren, and future generations.”

This program and its hard realism that a key facet of fighting climate change is to shift the terrain of politics so that it’s in the immediate short-term interests of most everyone who doesn’t own stock in a fossil fuel company, does not stop at the US border. For many of the volunteers and supporters I talked to in Iowa, it was not just the approach of the Green New Deal to climate change and job creation that inspired them — it was the way Senator Sanders discusses engaging with these issues on the world stage.

Despite the cliché, it is nevertheless true that the American presidency is the most powerful job in the world. It’s clear that Senator Sanders does not approach the office as a regular politician, but rather as the leader of a broad and diverse social movement. He frequently talks about being the “organizer in chief,” with a goal of doubling American trade union membership in his first term (another example of something that he unequivocally believes in as a social good and excellent politics as unions tend to bring people into the Democratic Party). Somewhat less noticed, though, is that he takes this same to approach global environmental politics.

Like every Democratic contender, Senator Sanders talks about reengaging with the international community on climate issues. Unlike other Democrats, however, he makes clear that he would also marshal the enormous power and prestige of the American presidency to encourage the growth of social movements demanding environmental action. Sanders’s is the politics not of Paris or Davos, but of climate strikes and the democratic mass-mobilisation of voting blocs around the world to counter those who profit from a carbon economy and the politicians and parties across the spectrum their money buys. A politics built on the sober realism that, given the power of such interests, neither moral suasion nor otherwise well-meaning technocracy stand a chance. And it is this recognition that has brought so many from around the United States and across the world to Iowa and New Hampshire.

Real politics

Of course, to have a hope of applying this politics, Sanders first must win the Democratic nomination and then the presidency itself. Doing so would be a vindication of this political philosophy.

The standard interpretation of American presidential politics is that elections are fought over a small slice of real estate that sits somewhere between the two major parties. The much-discussed notion of “electability” often starts from the premise that candidates win by laying claim to a greater portion of this territory than their opponents, while making sure the regular voters in their party turn out. Of course, given that elections are singular events, never to be repeated in the same context with the same candidates, such notions are speculative and definitionally unfalsifiable — despite the best efforts of an increasingly lucrative and influential polling and predictivity industry to convince the public and media otherwise.

To be sure, the Sanders campaign makes compelling arguments that, in its particular way, it can lay better claim to this electoral territory than any of his primary opponents — not by triangulating like Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and Al Gore but by being unencumbered by any whiff of corruption or insiderism and elitism (regular points of attack from Donald Trump to deflect from his own corruption) and by being uniquely appealing to the small and distinctive cohort of the Obama voters in 2012 and Trump voters in 2016 that swung Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin to Trump four years ago. Furthermore, if this parcel of centrist land was ever particularly big, in the context of 2020 and given the polarising presidency of Donald Trump, it’s likely shrunken to the size of a dying Pacific atoll — there just aren’t that many voters out there who are deciding between Donald Trump and this or that Democratic nominee.

While the Sanders campaign has as good an argument as any — recall again Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and Al Gore — that it can win those voters such as they exist, particularly against a candidate like Trump, its basic theory starts from a different premise. In every single election in modern American history, non-voters decidedly outnumber voters for any given candidate. In 2016, Hilary Clinton received 65,844,610 votes and Donald Trump received 62,979,636 votes. Roughly 85,000,000 eligible Americans did not vote. This is the central, if rarely acknowledged, fact of American democratic life. Sanders’s strategy to both win the election and achieve his goals once in office involves mobilising a relatively small number of these eighty-five million or so Americans. If just five or six percent of them were brought into the political process and the Democratic party fold, the entire horizon of what’s possible in American political life would dramatically shift. By way of recent example, take the recent special senate election between Democrat Mike Espy — an African-American former Secretary of Agriculture — and Republican Cindy Hyde Smith — a white woman who throws around positive references to lynching. If in 2018 Espy been able to bring out just less than six percent or 67,000 out of the more than 1.1 million eligible non-voters to the polls, he would have won. In Mississippi.

The theory of the Sanders campaign is that a good portion of these voters are disengaged because they see politics and elections as meaningless in their daily lives. Whether a Republican or a Democrat is in the White House and whether the stock market is up or down, their wages are still stagnant, their jobs remain insecure and their health care costs are through the roof. Many are swimming in debt and housing and university are increasingly unaffordable across the country. Given the cultural attention it generates and the power of the office, a presidential campaign — unlike other elections — uniquely offers the opportunity to organise and mobilise these citizens.

In 2008, Barack Obama offered a compelling rhetoric of hope and change and won a landslide election by increasing turnout by 3 percent from 2004. This hope and change, however, were embodied in Obama himself rather than his platform and policy goals — goals that, at the domestic level, were even less ambitious than those of his Democratic rivals Hillary Clinton and John Edwards. Four years later, the same trends in inequality and dislocation continued apace and turnout dipped again. Obama could not replicate his 2008 landslide and ended up squeaking by Mitt Romney, a decidedly less popular candidate than John McCain. For Sanders, his bet is that the promise of meaningful change in the form of social goods framed in the deeply American rhetoric of universal rights — the right to healthcare, the right to a living wage, the right to a higher education — cannot only replicate Obama’s singular 2008 expansion of the electorate, but improve upon it permanently and thus radically shift the terrain of what’s possible in American political life.

Iowa is the first test. As Senator Sanders emphasised to the crowd in Ames, if turnout is high, he wins. If it is low, he loses. While he can certainly still win the nomination even if he doesn’t win Iowa, a victory there would likely catapult him to a clean sweep of the first three nominating contests (New Hampshire, followed by Nevada on 22 February). This is the kind of momentum that will make it harder for his opponents to raise the money and pay the staff necessary to compete in the sixteen primaries on 3 March — so-called Super Tuesday — where Sanders is showing impressive strength in polls in states as diverse as California, Texas and Utah.

Blessed are the organised

While waiting for Senator Sanders to take the stage in Ames, I struck up a conversation with Jamet Colton. Born in Chile under the brutal dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, she came to Iowa in 1998. Now in her early 40s and a recently elected member of the Ames School Board, she laughed when I asked her if she planned to caucus for Sanders and if so, why? “Of course!” she said. “For me, it’s everything about him, his policies, his sincerity. No one else is close. It’s inspiring.” She went on: “Plus, it’s the only campaign in Spanish” — a fact she appreciated being from Chile originally and feeling a duty to stand up for Iowa’s rapidly growing, though often forgotten Mexican and Central American immigrant population.

We briefly chatted about Chile and her experiences in Iowa. She told me about how memories of the dictatorship had given her both an appreciation of American democracy and a determination to help make it live up to its social and economic ideals. Bright, energetic, idealistic and clearly willing to do the work, I thought to myself that Jamet is what a realised version of Sanders’s political movement looks like: thousands of everyday people like her across the country entering politics from school boards to Congress for the purpose of guaranteeing and protecting social goods and doing so in concert with one another.

I asked her about her plans for caucus night. She told me that the mother of a friend of her young son — a Pete Buttigieg supporter — was planning on baking cookies to entice adherents of nonviable candidates and undecided voters to caucus for Buttigieg. “I guess I’m going to have to start baking too,” she laughed. “Sweet and savoury.”

I grew up in Minnesota — until recently also a caucus state — and some of my earliest childhood memories are of accompanying my parents to caucus. Caucusing is a decidedly different experience from normal voting. All across Iowa at 7:00 pm on Monday, 3 February, neighbours will come together in school gymnasiums and VFW halls. To outsiders the process often seems opaque, confusing and archaic. Why not just vote? To supporters of the system, however, the caucus is about more than just choosing a candidate — it is about community cohesion, reasoned democratic debate and gauging which candidates can generate the most energy and inspire people to knock on doors for the next ten months. All of which is to say that the baking — or, perhaps more to the point, the willingness to take the time to bake — matters.

In this year’s iteration (for the process changes slightly from cycle to cycle), caucusgoers will join with fellow supporters of each candidate in various corners of the room — unless they are undecided. At that point, any candidate that does not have fifteen percent of the room will be considered nonviable and eliminated. Their supporters, along with the undecideds, are then all up for grabs by the supporters of the viable candidates. People will reason, argue, cajole and even perhaps offer baked goods to gain more supporters for their chosen candidate. Once the next round of sorting is over, the various camps are tallied and candidates are awarded “delegate equivalents” based on the percentage of people in their corner.

Caucuses reward energy, devotion, argument, support from persuasive and respected community members and, above all, organisation.

To create political will

The morning after the Ames rally, I drove to Pete Malmberg’s farm outside the town of Perry — an hour’s drive northwest of Des Moines. I met Pete while he was standing in line the night before when I asked him if he had been following the Australian fires. During a long conversation he half-jokingly, half dead-seriously mentioned that he and a couple friends sometimes talk about how if they had any decency at all, they would quit their jobs and devote themselves full-time to doing anything and everything they could to fight climate change. For Pete, like Jamet, Senator Sanders is the only option.

In his early 50s, Pete is the museum curator and historical and cultural resources coordinator for Dallas County. He also raises goats and chickens and maintains a small orchard. He’ll be his rural precinct’s caucus captain for Sanders. A caucus captain is an integral role for each campaign. There are 1,681 precincts spread across the state. Any campaign worth its salt needs to have a captain lined up at each one. A good captain is integral in convincing caucusgoers to join from the nonviable and undecided groups or be the difference between making the fifteen percent threshold or watching your voters be forced to spread out among other candidates.

Even as Sanders has pushed to the lead in recent polls, the size of the field and the relative strength of Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg and Elizabeth Warren means that a lot comes down to which candidate is able to be viable at each precinct and thus not lose any of their voters.

Pete’s neighbours are mostly farmers, and also mostly Republicans, so his caucus will be small despite the large area his precinct covers. Clinton won that precinct by just two votes out of a little more than a hundred four years ago. But people like Pete are a key advantage for Sanders. Well-known in his community and having caucused for Sanders four years ago, he has a pretty good idea from whom he can expect support, who he needs to call to make sure they show up, who might be convincible and just how to convince them.

As Pete and I tramp around his farm, beautiful in the snow and bright, mid-morning light, he tells me about how changes in the weather have made his orchard harvests both less frequent and less productive. We talk about the shorter growing season that’s wreaking havoc on Iowa farmers and the vicious cycle that leads them to use more polluting pesticides as a result. At some point he brings up the scourge of meth and opioids — plagues of hopelessness born from being forced to work long hours in demeaning jobs, the debilitating aches and pains that result from such work, and the lack of health care to address them; all of this exacerbated and encouraged by a pharmaceutical industry that has profited to the tune of billions off this exploitation and suffering while showering both parties with millions of dollars. I tell Pete that, just a few days before, while shadowing a canvasser in a depressed small town, I was dejected by how many people showed the tell-tale signs of these addictions. I have been aware of the extent of the problem of addiction in theory, of course, but I’ve been away from the parts of the country that are most affected for far too long, and seeing it over and over for just an afternoon was jarring.

Pete tells me about all the chickens he’s had stolen by desperate addicts, and the stricken people who show up at the natural history museum he runs trying to sell monetarily worthless family heirlooms for enough cash for another fix. Despite the darkness of this conversation, I’m struck by Pete’s lack of cynicism. To be sure, he’s clear-eyed — more than most of us, I’d wager — but he has no interest in irony or pretence. The great English historian E.P. Thompson once criticised French philosopher Louis Althusser for imagining that his ever more esoteric theorising was a substitute for a “medium of practical engagement” with the political world. In this historical moment and in this campaign, Pete, like Jamet, seems to have found just such a medium.

A couple nights before I met Pete, I attended a poetry event in Des Moines organised by Sanders volunteers. Dubbed “a movement of movements,” the evening was supposed to feature the acclaimed speaker, educator and Sanders surrogate phillip agnew. But between icy roads, a possible snowstorm and a large rally in Iowa City that ran late and to which he gave a powerful address, agnew wasn’t able to attend. Nevertheless, forty or so people, mostly local Des Moinesians, happily took refuge from the weather in a café while a handful of people read their poetry. The mood was good as the organisers talked about the various platforms of Senator Sanders around economic equality, racial justice and feminism while signing up people to canvas and making sure everyone had a plan for caucus night. When the reading started, one of the first poets to speak was a young man named Cortez Blake:

from cotton fields with no education nor right to vote to winning legislation a back to Africa destination would be epitomizing resignation

He continued on about the duty to fight for a better world, to honour our ancestors who fought to make our lives better by contesting our current inequalities. Delivered with a beautiful cadence, Cortez’s poem arrested me with its profound anti-pessimism. Winning legislation. Epitomizing resignation. He was saying that the point is to fight; the point is real politics — politics in the old-school definition of direct conflict over who gets what, when and how.

Chatting with Cortez during the break, he told me that he couldn’t vote because of a felony conviction. We talked about Senator Sanders’s support for voting rights for all Americans, including those serving time in prison — a position that, once again, is decades ahead of his rivals, and that exhibits uncommon courage by taking an unpopular position on a major civil rights issue. Even though he couldn’t vote, Cortez was determined to do everything he could for the campaign, canvassing his neighbours and organising friends and family to caucus for Sanders. “He the only politician who’s talking about things that effect everybody,” he told me.

For a healthy world

I don’t know if Bernie Sanders will win the Iowa caucuses on Monday. Or if he will go on to win the Democratic nomination. Or if he will defeat Donald Trump in the general election. Or if he and the movement around him are able to do these things, whether they’ll be able to affect the kind of change that the world is running out of time to enact. Anyone who says they do know one way or the other is probably trying to sell you something, be it their services or an ideology even more expensive in the long run.

I am confident, however, that the only plausible way out of the crises of environmental degradation, health and inequality that confront the United States and the world is by substantively changing the calculus and context in which our politics happens. In the United States, this means expanding the electorate and building an actually-existing politics capable of exercising power and plausibly defeating the interests and ideologies that constitute a threat to the health of humanity and the planet. As Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez said in Ames, “the question has always been about political will … how do we create political will?”

In this I can think of worse ways to start than by bringing people like Jamet Colton, Pete Malmberg and Cortez Blake together around a campaign with a plausible theory of meaningful change — maybe the only plausible theory of change in this election year. It’s what Thompson called “a medium of practical engagement”: an effort to attain and exercise real power for the purposes of demanding what Cortez Blake described to me as “a healthy world with healthy people in it.”

As he introduced Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Sanders the other night, Michael Moore told the crowd that “it starts here in Iowa.” Maybe it does. And maybe it’s also our last, best chance before it’s too late.

Thomas Jessen Adams is Senior Lecturer in History and American Studies at the University of Sydney. His most recent book, with Matt Sakakeeny, is Remaking New Orleans Beyond Exceptionalism and Authenticity. You can hear Thomas Adams discuss the Iowa caucus and the ethics of the Democratic primaries with Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens this week on The Minefield.