By Theodore Kupfer
Wednesday, April 8, 2020
‘Few would deny that over the course of the past five
years, our movement has won the ideological struggle.” That’s how Bernie
Sanders ended his presidential campaign, and that’s the line his supporters are
taking in reaction to the news. Sure, Sanders has lost the nomination to a
candidate with obvious and much-discussed debilities for the second time in
four years, the argument goes, but his achievement will endure: He made
democratic socialism (or at least social democracy) palatable in the United
States. He shifted the Overton Window to the left, earned the loyal support of
tens of millions of young Americans who will remain politically engaged, and
helped Jacobin gain thousands of subscriptions. “Years and decades from
now, we will look back on Bernie Sanders’s two presidential campaigns as
massively transformational in American politics,” says Micah Uetricht, that
magazine’s managing editor.
Will we, though? That may have been a reasonable thing to
say after 2016, when Sanders notched a series of stunning wins in midwestern
states while making real inroads among young voters of all races, but it
doesn’t fit the evidence we have now, four years later. The rationale for
Sanders’s 2020 campaign — that he could secure massive turnout among young
people and the pan-ethnic working class by pitching a quasi-revolutionary
message, while also mounting a challenge to Donald Trump’s claim to low-education
white voters — has proven to be delusional. And while he may have gotten his
rivals to embrace versions of some of his signature proposals, the Democratic
Party is undergoing a long-term shift that does not bode well for his brand of
politics.
Both times Sanders ran for president, he lost black
voters in Southern states by huge margins. Sanders did improve among Latinos
from 2016 to 2020, allowing him to win California and put up a stronger fight
in Texas this time around. But he couldn’t repeat his performance among the
non-college-educated whites who’d clearly favored him over Hillary Clinton,
especially in the Midwest. Reporters have noted that the Sanders campaign’s
theory of the electorate was misguided: He avoided retail politics in the hope
that his message would eventually carry the day — that the masses would be
spontaneously drawn into the movement, in Lenin’s formulation. As Joe Simonson
observes in the Washington Examiner, the Vermont senator’s predictions
of massive turnout were proven wrong repeatedly, suggesting he’d built his
battle plan on materialist theory rather than political reality.
In fact, the triumph of theory over reality may have
doomed Sanders’s second run for the White House. The American working class has
plenty of social moderates and conservatives, but his campaign elevated such
figures as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Linda Sarsour, beloved by the
Democratic Party’s activist class and controversial outside of it. He walked
back his 2016-era border hawkishness and replaced it with activist-endorsed
“abolish ICE” messaging. His campaign declined
to forthrightly make its case to black voters out of academic concern that
Sanders “couldn’t speak on behalf of people of color” because he “doesn’t have
those experiences.”
But then, Sanders has never successfully navigated
American political institutions to generate the kind of overwhelming enthusiasm
he’d need to either pass genuinely transformative policies in the Senate or
expand his voter base in elections. That suggests a tension between the
imperatives of democratic politics and the uncompromising nature of his own
brand, which fed the perception that he was “unelectable.” Among his backers,
this perception was often blamed on “subservience to the
economic-powers-that-be” among moderates and political pundits. It’s a
convenient explanation: The candidate wasn’t at fault, his voters were just
being duped by the corporate media and political establishment. But as
political scientists Matthew Grossman and William Isaac have
written, the failure of redistributive economic policies may owe more to
the procedural elements of American political institutions, which require
deliberation and compromise, than to any rigging of the system against
working-class interests.
In any case, Sanders’s failure has a structural
explanation, too. It was identified by University of Texas professor Michael
Lind all the way back in 2016. “At the beginning of his campaign, Mr. Sanders
the democratic socialist focused in the manner of a single issue candidate
almost exclusively on themes of class. . . . But because he is running for the
Democratic presidential nomination, he has had to put greater emphasis on other
issues, including racial disparity in policing and sentencing and the
environment and immigration,” Lind wrote at the time. For Lind, this was
telling: The Democratic coalition increasingly resembled “an alliance of
Northern, Midwestern and West Coast whites from the old Rockefeller Republican
tradition with blacks and Latinos,” the product of a deal in which affluent
whites would embrace high-status positions on identity issues in exchange for
black and Latino support for neoliberal economic policies. On the other side,
Lind wrote, Republicans could make inroads among non-college-educated whites by
tacking away from unpopular libertarian positions on trade and entitlement
reform.
This theory of the partisan realignment has become
conventional wisdom, and is sometimes overstated. But Lind’s view of the
dynamics in the Democratic Party fits observed reality far better than that of
Sanders’s die-hards. And not just in 2020: All the loose talk in 2018 about a
new wave of progressive, multiethnic Democrats who would challenge the party’s
establishment and demonstrate the cross-country appeal of Sanders-style
politics fizzled out after the midterm elections. (A reliable weathervane of
the party’s activist class, Data for Progress founder Sean McElwee, hand-picked
his own weathervanes for a progressive insurgency in the 2018 midterms. They
all lost. Since then, McElwee has grown louder about cultural issues and
quieter about economic ones.) Instead, Democrats won back the House by taking a
lot of affluent suburban districts from Republicans on the strength of
candidates such as Abigail Spanberger and Elissa Slotkin, who attacked Trump’s
personal grotesqueness and his record on health care but otherwise ran as
moderates.
Lind predicted four years ago that a “slightly more
progressive version of neoliberalism freed of the strategic concessions to white
working-class voters associated with Bill Clintonism” was the future of the
Democratic Party. That sounds like a pretty apt description of Joe Biden’s
campaign, which in turn suggests that moderate candidates — Spanberger,
Slotkin, a future iteration of Cory Booker — are where the party is headed
next. Will ambitious Democrats and aspiring socialists learn from Sanders’s
failure? On one hand, there are already signs that would-be inheritors of the
Sanders legacy are abandoning his uncompromising politics. On the other hand,
the next socialist to revise her political views on the basis of evidence would
be the first.
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