Before it was such an upsetting political year, 2016 was glorious. Back in the spring, Bernie Sanders said he was leading a political revolution for greater equality and against war, and I was among many idealists who believed that he might actually win the Democratic nomination.
Before Trump’s Michigan, there was Bernie’s Michigan. He surprised the pundits and the pollsters last March by coming from way down in the polls to beat Hillary Clinton there. Eight months later Trump would shock the pollsters and pundits by doing the very same thing in Michigan. Obviously, team Clinton failed to learn the political lesson. It was too entitled and insular. (Who else needed a committee of eight to sign off on a tweet about Pope Francis’s statement on climate change?).
The Trump revolution is fearful to many people today because he was so openly racist and sexist, but his revolution was built from some of the same political materials and instincts that Bernie tried to build his out of. In fact, the great thing about Bernie’s revolution is that even though he was incapable of the anger that may have been required to topple Clinton, and Wikileaks hadn’t come along yet with its bald evidence that the system really was rigged, he cobbled together the coalition that is the future of the left in America, and it was non-racial. His movement embraced working- and middle-class white people who have now become the bugaboo of the elites, and some on the left too, in the wake of Trump’s victory. He embraced Muslims and African-Americans and of course millennials too. He was 75, but his movement was generational.
Sanders has maintained that populist ethos through Tuesday’s carnage. He’s declared, “I do not believe that most of the people who are thinking about voting for Mr. Trump are racist or sexist.” And he has pushed for Keith Ellison, the great Minnesota congressman who happens to be a Muslim, and who visited Gaza, and boycotted Netanyahu, to be the chair of the Democratic National Committee. It may even happen.
Sanders’s rhetorical brilliance of the spring now comes back to haunt us. Hillary Clinton refused to release her speeches to Goldman, Sachs, and at rally after rally, Bernie said, I’ll release all my speeches to the Wall Street bankers, and he threw his hands in the air — There they are. Well months later Wikileaks released Clinton’s speeches, and they surely helped Trump. So did a comment that is entirely alien to Bernie Sanders’s worldview: Clinton’s sneering claim that Trump was supported by a basket of “deplorables.” No doubt Clinton stood for a lot of good inclusive things in her often inspiring October campaign against Trump. But she also stood for shallow elitist careerism. It was no coincidence that she was supported by billionaires 20-to-1 over Trump. And though Colin Powell branded Trump as a “national disgrace” in a leaked email, he also branded Clinton: “unbridled ambition… not transformational.”
That is the great frustration of this political season: that transformational populist political materials so important to the left were abandoned by the establishment Democratic candidate, and Trump picked them up instead, and won with them. On election night, it was a Republican commentator who said on one network or another that 13 million people lost their homes in the Wall Street credit meltdown and no banker went to jail. An echo of Bernie. And though Chris Matthews talked every night about America’s costly and brutalizing wars in the Middle East, Clinton couldn’t seize that issue either. Nor could the pundit class that supported her so fervently. Because they too supported those wars; and Clinton surrogate Hilary Rosen was pushing regime change in Syria on CNN; and the neoconservatives were looking forward to regrouping in the shadows of the Clinton administration.
One good thing about the Trump victory is that the shakeup of the Democratic Party that we all hoped was going to happen in the next couple few years is happening right now. The party is smashed to bits. And when it is reformed in the months and years to come, this will be a generational revolution. The millennials who came out to those Bernie rallies by the tens of thousands will be taking over the ideological and political reins of the party. It will be an antiwar party and a small-d democratic party, concerned with social justice and equality. Palestinians will be honored at last; BDS will not be spat upon, as it was day after day in the Clinton braintrust. Haim Saban and the rest of the hard-core Israel lobby megadonors will have to go Republican, and good riddance.
There is obviously a Jewish piece to this reformation. Modern Jewish identity is at stake; and here too Bernie Sanders shows the way forward.
In the last days of the campaign the establishment punditocracy was caught up in the question of whether a Trump ad that showed three Jewish faces, among many others, in an attack on the Clinton establishment was anti-Semitic. But all three Jewish faces are powerful people, Janet Yellen, George Soros, and Lloyd Blankfein. And the price of power in our society is scrutiny. The Jewish establishment was an important part of the Clinton campaign– as everyone from Jeffrey Goldberg to J.J. Goldberg to Stephanie Schriock to Steven Cohen stated.
Bernie Sanders offered a different way. His campaign was based on small contributions, and when he dared to criticize Israel’s bombing of Gaza and say that Netanyahu is “not right all the time” in the April debate in New York, it was a liberating moment for the Democratic Party, and for non-Zionist Jews. Jonathan Tasini and Norman Finkelstein were both over the moon. Critics of Israel could open their mouths inside the mainstream discourse and live another day. The Democratic Party will never be the same.
Just as important were Sanders’s expressions of humility and egalitarianism, which he said he had gotten in part from Jewish tradition. In an era of Jewish wealth and nationalism and particularism, this too is a different way. Sanders is a proud universalist. He drew directly on the life of the Jewish Bundists in eastern Europe: they believed that Jews should participate fully, politically and socially, in the societies they belong to, and they should be part of a broad-based movement for democratic socialism (as James North states it).
Sanders’s personal mythology was Jewish but pointedly not sectarian. He honored his paint salesman immigrant father, and Roosevelt and Churchill, too, but when asked if he believed in God he was a modern, and gave one of the best statements of his campaign:
The answer is yes and I think when we talk about God, whether it it is Christianity, or Judaism, or Islam, or Buddhism, what we are talking about is what all religions hold dear, and, that is, to do unto others as you would like them to do unto you.
I am here tonight, and I’m running for president– I’m a United States Senator from my great state of Vermont– because I believe that. Because I believe morally and ethically we do not have the right to turn our backs on children in Flint, Michigan, who are being poisoned or veterans who are sleeping out on the street. What I believe as the father of seven beautiful grandchildren: I want you to worry about my grandchildren and I promise you I will worry about your family. We are in this together.
One of the most obscene DNC emails leaked after the campaign showed that the Democratic leadership wanted to smear him as an atheist.
Does he believe in a God. He had skated on saying he has a Jewish heritage.
While former party chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz said,
The Israel stuff is disturbing.
Sadly, it required Donald Trump to smash that old sclerotic establishment. But now they’re gone, and Sanders’s populist revolution will not end. It is in the best hands, the next generation’s.
H/t Scott Roth, James North, Adam Horowitz.
Sorry, but what was obvious to many of us from the outset became glaringly apparent to even the most naive once Sanders folded before even going to the convention. Bernie was nothing more than a sheep dog hired to bring progressives back in to the fold to vote for Clinton.
Too bad it didn’t work. Now Bernie won’t be getting whatever cabinet post or other peachy appointment he was promised for selling out his followers. He’ll just have to go back to doing what he has done best for decades, making a lot of progressive noise yet accomplishing very little. But he has managed to feed at the public trough regardless.
The only upside to the Trump victory is that now maybe there will be an actual social revolution mobilized from the Left since they don’t have Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama to adulate in order to justify ignoring the horrific war crimes each of them has committed.
A great piece at DV today pointing out the true colors of the so-called Progressives who have supported unbridled war around the globe while ignoring the gutting of our national treasury and the crushing of the middle class by the Democratic Party elite.
You reap what you sow. Welcome to the Trump era. It will be terrible, yet strangely refreshing to see a bunch of sociopaths and crooks at least being honest about what they are doing instead of pretending to be “liberals.”
http://dissidentvoice.org/2016/11/poor-liberals-you-have-nobody-to-blame-but-yourselves/
The American pattern since 1952 is to change parties (president wise) every 8 years (or less). Thus the cards were stacked against hillary, particularly 3rd term of Obama hillary. The one exception to this “tradition” was reagan and bush pere. The arc of Reagan’s votes compared to Obama’s votes demonstrates why that irregularity was not repeated this year. Reagan doubled his margin over his democrat opponent from Carter to mondale. On sheer momentum bush had the wind to his back. Obama’s victory over Romney was weaker than his victory over mccain, it was on a trajectory of descent when hillary stepped into the role. )
PHIL- “Back in the spring, Bernie Sanders said he was leading a political revolution….”
He lied. He was a sheep dog rounding up the disenchanted Democrats for Hillary.
PHIL- “The Trump revolution….”
There was no revolution. Trump is a con man who flim flammed the victims of “liberal” globalization that he was their populist savior who would change the prevailing system. He isn’t and he won’t. And what most “liberals” and “progressives” fail to realize is that Clinton and Obama have been labeled as “liberals” and “progressives” even though neither has a progressive bone in their body. As a consequence, the horrors of neoliberal globalization are identified as the outcome of the policies of “liberals” and “progressives.” And the defense of Obama and Clinton by so called “liberals” and “progressives” indicates that the Democrats and their followers have no principles to speak of, rather, they are more like a tribe showing solidarity with those wearing the same brand.
There will be little difference of substance between Trump and Hillary in regards to the prevailing power relations. Bernie would not have been very different either. To refer to our electoral marketing extravaganzas as potentially “revolutionary” is a debasement of the language. When both candidates are representatives of some grouping of elites, the elites always win and the system prevails with only a minor accommodation to the slight realignment of power. The purpose of the political system is to administer the empire consistent with elite objectives. Little has changed or can change until concentrated money power is broken up. You overestimate the power of the political system and continue to engage in unjustified flights of fancy.
Sorry for bite sized comments rather than a tome at once :
Hillary was a very unusual candidate. The party felt that it owed her the nomination. She had won more votes than Obama in the primaries of 2008, the nomination had been inches away, when the phenom known as barak Obama jumped the line and said, “No, me.” And the party said, ” him first and then you “. First the precedent of race and then the precedent of gender. Hillary served loyally and waited to be anointed.
Sanders was an unusual candidate. He was not a democrat, but an independent, he was not mainstream, but to the party’s furthest left fringes. To expect the party apparatus to reject a loyal super loyal democrat and to prefer an outsider in label and content, is to expect the party apparatus to operate on principles written in the clouds and not in reality.
But still Bernie would have won, except for the black vote. Blacks honor loyalty and they like familiarity and Sanders was never loyal (to the party) and no one ever heard of him before. An old guy, but new to them. To paraphrase Ann coulter, if only whites had voted in the primaries sanders would have won.
This was the first time that someone other than a sitting president was deemed the deserving nominee to the extent that status was granted to hillary. Between the glass ceiling needing to be shattered and winning the most votes in 2008 and being embraced by Obama as Secretary of state, she was practically a shoo-in. (My “What if?” focuses on the death of Biden’s son. Would he have run against hillary if not for that personal trauma interfering with normal life?)
To Phil’s point, a poll says he would have beaten Drumpf easily. I guess we will never know.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/2016-election-poll-bernie-sanders-trump_us_58260f7ee4b0c4b63b0c6928