The Politics of Anti-Politics
This is a post about Bernie Sanders, and also about his once and (maybe) future supporters. I write this post with full awareness that what I am about to say is likely to piss off people, including people who are friends of mine. My goal is not to troll them or antagonize them, but I expect I will do so, and for that I am sorry.
The bottom line, though, is that I think Bernie Sanders was and is a bad candidate who ran a bad campaign. Moreover, much of the discourse coming out of the Sanders campaign, and especially from Sanders supporters, lacks a recognition, or care about, the basic nature of politics. Which is OK as a philosophical proposition (I mean, you do you), but does not advance the ball of becoming the nominee for a political party and eventually get elected President, which was the ostensible goal of this exercise in the first place. Sanders and his supporters ran an anti-political political campaign, and the fundamental incoherence of that enterprise is what ultimately doomed it, not some nefarious conspiracy of unspecified elites.
I'll begin with a couple of disclosures. First, on a personal level, I do not, and never did, find Bernie Sanders to be particularly appealing as a candidate. In other words, setting aside his policies, I never found Sanders to be dynamic or charismatic or inspiring or exuding competence or leadership or any of those "soft" qualities you look for in a candidate. I get that lots of people view Sanders differently along that axis, and that's OK, but on a personal level he never did anything for me as a candidate outside of his policies.
Second, my preferred candidate in the primary was Elizabeth Warren. We will talk about Warren visa ve Sanders more in a bit, but my support for her was based on two factors. First, I have a tenuous personal connection to her via her husband, who was a professor of mine in law school and a true prince of a person. But, more importantly, I believed (and still believe) that Warren would be not only the most effective President from an operational perspective, but also from the point of view of effectuating progressive policies. Said another way, I believe that Warren would have been more likely to accomplish the goals that the Sanders supporters advocate for than Sanders would have been, and I think it was a serious strategic mistake for the left to throw everything behind Sanders as opposed to backing Warren.
In fact, the Warren/Sanders divide gets to the heart of the conundrum of the Sanders movement. What are the differences between the two candidates? There were attempts at various points in the primary to paint Warren as soft/unserious/unreliable in her support for Medicare for All. What this amounted to, on the level of policy, was an unwillingness on the part of Warren to commit to attempting to implement the complete elimination of private health insurance in one fell swoop. The fact that this staged implementation was likely to occur anyway, even under the most optimistic scenario and regardless of the intentions of the President doing the work, was for the Sanders folks beside the point; what was important is maintaining a certain sort of ideological purity and commitment. An honest acknowledgement of the political realities of implementing a radical realignment of a fifth of the economy was interpreted as, or at least presented as, right-wing backsliding.
But that wasn't the real problem the Sanders folks seemed to have with Warren. The real problem was more fundamental--Warren was and is an institutionalist. "I have a plan for that" reflects a commitment to improving and working through existing political and organizational frameworks. All of the talk in the Sanders-verse about how she described herself as a "capitalist" and how she was a Republican 40 years ago (who cares?) were really about drawing this distinction between the insider technocrat Warren and the rebel outsider Sanders.
Here's the thing, though--being President is an institutional gig. Everyone in that primary, including Sanders, sought to be selected to be first the head of the institution of the Democratic Party, and then to be the head of the institution of the United States government. Framing your message and approach in institutional terms is not selling out--it's being responsive to the "call of the question," as a law professor like Warren would say. At no point did I see Sanders, or especially his supporters, acknowledge this fact, especially as it relates to the Democratic Party.
In fact, let's talk about the Democratic Party for a moment. The post-Civil War Democratic Party was essentially an alliance of urban white ethnics (particularly the Irish) and rural white Southerners. Both groups saw themselves and politically and socially marginalized, and used the institution of the Democratic party to advance their interests, despite the fact they had little to nothing in common with each other culturally or politically. Over time, as white Southerners and to a lesser extent white ethnics exited the party, it came to serve a similar role for African-Americans. But it has always been a coalition party, consisting of groups with diverse interests and perspectives that, while not close to identical, have found a way to work together more or less. At certain points in time, especially in times of national crisis, this inherently unwieldy coalition has achieved remarkable progresssive outcomes--see, e.g., the FDR Presidency. But it is not, and has never been, an ideologically left-wing party in the European sense.
The Sanders campaign, both in its 2016 and 2020 incarnations, (1) sought to be the leader and standard-bearer of this party, while (2) consistently talking about how much the party sucked and how it intended to do away with or bypass its institutions and leadership, while also (3) complaining about unfairly it was being treated by the people and institutions it very vocally and overtly announced its intention to eliminate or bypass. "I hate you and want to burn you to the ground, but it is very unfair that you are trying to stop me from burning you to the ground"--that has been the message of the Sanders campaign to the Democratic Party as an institution, twice. If you are someone for whom the Democratic Party is the primary vehicle through which you have exercised political power in American life (say, for example, many African-Americans, especially older ones), the Sanders campaign by its own self-construction is a threat to you and to your interests. Rallying around another candidate is not a conspiracy; it's an act of rational self-protection. It's taking you at your word that you will disempower them if you are successful.
These sorts of considerations are the very essence of politics, and the failure to consider them in constructing a message is why I think the Sanders campaign and its supporters are engaging in anti-politics. Politics, at least in its electoral form, is about building the largest coalition of people who are willing to vote for you that you possibly can. That's it; that's the game. To the extent the Sanders campaign had a plan for doing this, it relied on a proposed untapped pool of voters combined with some sort of mass movement to force their political opponents or unsure potential allies to acquiesce to the Sanders agenda. The former proved wholly illusory during this primary season; the latter, to actually be effective, would require a concerted campaign of at least intimidation, if not outright violence, directed at the political opponents of the sitting President. That's not cosplaying 20th Century Marxism, in all of its attendant brutality, but actually implementing it.
Every time I hear the discussion of the mass movement to be spawned in the wake of the Bernie campaign, I hear this playing in my head:
The difference between then and now is that I am sure that Lennon and McCartney were in contact with people who truly were willing to do the things mentioned in the song; I am much more skeptical that Brooklyn-based podcasters are sufficiently hard to make the Revolution manifest. This talk of a mass movement was, at the end of the day, basically unserious, an exercise of magical thinking that somehow everyone would just jump on board with, or at least acquiesce to, programs that in some cases sit at least two or three standard deviations outside of the American political distribution curve.
By contrast, the Biden campaign seeks to occupy the middle of the swath of people who don't like Trump. Biden is Median Voter Theory made manifest. Given that Trump has been below the Mendoza Line on approval ratings for the bulk of his Presidency, combined with the fact that sitting Presidents always suffer from a bad economy (and it is likely to be really bad come November '20), this strategy seems pretty sensible. Barring election process shenanigans (which is a real potential problem, but it would have been the same problem for Sanders), I think it is more likely than not that Biden wins in November, and possibly by a substantial margin.
This process described above is not some sort of slack-jawed capitulation, but the very essence of what politics is, at least in its American context. You may not like the vehicle of that politics in the form of Joe Biden--and, to be clear, I'm not super thrilled about it either. You may be bummed your guy lost, as I am bummed that my lady lost. But the objection offered by the Sanders supporters right now seems to be not to any of that, but to politics itself. The politics of coalition-building, the politics of compromise, the politics of figuring out how to move and push and influence things in the direction you want things to go among an array of different people who have differing policy positions and objectives. And, yes, the politics of damage control, triage, and picking the lesser of two evils.
Another part of politics is negotiation. One of the basics of negotiation is that you have to provide space for the negotiation to occur. There is always the initial ask, the dream outcome that you would love to be able to get. And then there is what you will take, which is substantially less than the initial ask. Negotiation happens in the dance between those two points--you try to get the closest outcome to your initial ask while staying above your No Go line. If you begin a negotiation--or worse, before a negotiation--by saying you will take only X and will not countenance anything less or be willing to engage in any meaningful conversation about anything less, you are not engaging in negotiation at all. And, if you so clearly signal that you won't negotiate, then people will take you at your word, and not negotiate with you.
The Sanders campaign, and the Sanders supporters, did everything in their power to make it clear that they would take nothing less than full capitulation of every element of the Democratic Party to every element of the Sanders program. This was their position when the campaign was ascendant, and this position did not change when things started to slip. Having staked out that position, you cannot then complain that the Democratic Party is not addressing your concerns and needs. They are not addressing your concerns and needs because you told them, in no uncertain terms, that they will never be able to. There is no point in trying to negotiate with a group of people who have told you they won't negotiate. And, no, a list of demands is not a willingness to negotiate. It is a call for the other side to unconditionally surrender after they have beat you electorally. It's Monty Python's Black Knight offering a draw after all of his limbs have been hacked off. It's unserious.
In a way, it was probably inevitable that the Sanders movement would turn on Sanders himself, as it has done to some degree with his endorsement of Biden and plea to unite to oppose Trump. Such a move is far too insider-ish, far too transactional, far too political for the anti-political wing of the Sanders coalition. But, I think it is deeply instructive about what is at the heart of the motivation of many in the Sanders movement, especially its online component. Lots of people have tried to make the "horseshoe theory" case for the similarities between Sanders supporters and Trump supporters. That's not really fair--there are real policy commitments at the heart of the Sanders movement, where the MAGA folks are clearly grounded only in blind anti-establishment and anti-elite sentiment. But the anti-establishment and anti-elite program of the Sanders folks is not framed as merely unfortunately necessary steps to accomplishing their policy goals, but a core component of the appeal of their candidate and their movement. Biden (and Mayor Pete, and Kamala Harris, and even Liz Warren) is not just a guy with different policy positions from their preferred candidate, but a representative of a broad and nefarious oppressive force, and the goal of the exercise was to beat them and make them submit to your will. That goal seems to be every bit as important to the Sanders folks I see as beating Trump, and maybe even more important.
Look. If you think that the Democratic Party as represented by Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg and Jim Clyburn and Barack Obama is every bit as bad as Trump and the Republicans (or worse), that's a position you can take. I think it is insane, and contrary to all available evidence (especially as we sit here in the Year of Our Lord 2020, after four years of Trump and four months of Trump as leader in a time of global crisis), but you can take that position. But, if you believe that, why were you supporting a guy who was running to be the leader of the party you think is so evil? By most accounts of the 2016 campaign from the point-of-view of the Sanders partisans, Sanders was abused and mistreated by the Democratic Party at every turn. But, I mean, he came back for a second round; why was he, and by extension you, his supporters, willing to go through that again? And if the answer is "because that's best chance of winning," then, fine, but understand that you are making a completely transactional, political choice. And if you are going to be transactional and political, why not try to build a coalition and work with establish institutional structures? Why not be political? Do, or do not; there is no try.
At the end of the day, I don't get it. I get giving up on electoral politics (except, replacing it with what?). I get giving up on the Democratic Party in favor of creating an ideologically-based left alternative. I really get trying to push the Democratic Party to the left on key issues, as demonstrated by the fact that I was a Warren guy. But I don't understand what Sanders was doing, and I really don't get where his supporters are coming from now. Your guy lost. The alternative to the guy who beat your guy is Donald Trump. This is not a hard choice. Refusing to vote for Biden is nihilism masquerading as principle.
The bottom line, though, is that I think Bernie Sanders was and is a bad candidate who ran a bad campaign. Moreover, much of the discourse coming out of the Sanders campaign, and especially from Sanders supporters, lacks a recognition, or care about, the basic nature of politics. Which is OK as a philosophical proposition (I mean, you do you), but does not advance the ball of becoming the nominee for a political party and eventually get elected President, which was the ostensible goal of this exercise in the first place. Sanders and his supporters ran an anti-political political campaign, and the fundamental incoherence of that enterprise is what ultimately doomed it, not some nefarious conspiracy of unspecified elites.
I'll begin with a couple of disclosures. First, on a personal level, I do not, and never did, find Bernie Sanders to be particularly appealing as a candidate. In other words, setting aside his policies, I never found Sanders to be dynamic or charismatic or inspiring or exuding competence or leadership or any of those "soft" qualities you look for in a candidate. I get that lots of people view Sanders differently along that axis, and that's OK, but on a personal level he never did anything for me as a candidate outside of his policies.
Second, my preferred candidate in the primary was Elizabeth Warren. We will talk about Warren visa ve Sanders more in a bit, but my support for her was based on two factors. First, I have a tenuous personal connection to her via her husband, who was a professor of mine in law school and a true prince of a person. But, more importantly, I believed (and still believe) that Warren would be not only the most effective President from an operational perspective, but also from the point of view of effectuating progressive policies. Said another way, I believe that Warren would have been more likely to accomplish the goals that the Sanders supporters advocate for than Sanders would have been, and I think it was a serious strategic mistake for the left to throw everything behind Sanders as opposed to backing Warren.
In fact, the Warren/Sanders divide gets to the heart of the conundrum of the Sanders movement. What are the differences between the two candidates? There were attempts at various points in the primary to paint Warren as soft/unserious/unreliable in her support for Medicare for All. What this amounted to, on the level of policy, was an unwillingness on the part of Warren to commit to attempting to implement the complete elimination of private health insurance in one fell swoop. The fact that this staged implementation was likely to occur anyway, even under the most optimistic scenario and regardless of the intentions of the President doing the work, was for the Sanders folks beside the point; what was important is maintaining a certain sort of ideological purity and commitment. An honest acknowledgement of the political realities of implementing a radical realignment of a fifth of the economy was interpreted as, or at least presented as, right-wing backsliding.
But that wasn't the real problem the Sanders folks seemed to have with Warren. The real problem was more fundamental--Warren was and is an institutionalist. "I have a plan for that" reflects a commitment to improving and working through existing political and organizational frameworks. All of the talk in the Sanders-verse about how she described herself as a "capitalist" and how she was a Republican 40 years ago (who cares?) were really about drawing this distinction between the insider technocrat Warren and the rebel outsider Sanders.
Here's the thing, though--being President is an institutional gig. Everyone in that primary, including Sanders, sought to be selected to be first the head of the institution of the Democratic Party, and then to be the head of the institution of the United States government. Framing your message and approach in institutional terms is not selling out--it's being responsive to the "call of the question," as a law professor like Warren would say. At no point did I see Sanders, or especially his supporters, acknowledge this fact, especially as it relates to the Democratic Party.
In fact, let's talk about the Democratic Party for a moment. The post-Civil War Democratic Party was essentially an alliance of urban white ethnics (particularly the Irish) and rural white Southerners. Both groups saw themselves and politically and socially marginalized, and used the institution of the Democratic party to advance their interests, despite the fact they had little to nothing in common with each other culturally or politically. Over time, as white Southerners and to a lesser extent white ethnics exited the party, it came to serve a similar role for African-Americans. But it has always been a coalition party, consisting of groups with diverse interests and perspectives that, while not close to identical, have found a way to work together more or less. At certain points in time, especially in times of national crisis, this inherently unwieldy coalition has achieved remarkable progresssive outcomes--see, e.g., the FDR Presidency. But it is not, and has never been, an ideologically left-wing party in the European sense.
The Sanders campaign, both in its 2016 and 2020 incarnations, (1) sought to be the leader and standard-bearer of this party, while (2) consistently talking about how much the party sucked and how it intended to do away with or bypass its institutions and leadership, while also (3) complaining about unfairly it was being treated by the people and institutions it very vocally and overtly announced its intention to eliminate or bypass. "I hate you and want to burn you to the ground, but it is very unfair that you are trying to stop me from burning you to the ground"--that has been the message of the Sanders campaign to the Democratic Party as an institution, twice. If you are someone for whom the Democratic Party is the primary vehicle through which you have exercised political power in American life (say, for example, many African-Americans, especially older ones), the Sanders campaign by its own self-construction is a threat to you and to your interests. Rallying around another candidate is not a conspiracy; it's an act of rational self-protection. It's taking you at your word that you will disempower them if you are successful.
These sorts of considerations are the very essence of politics, and the failure to consider them in constructing a message is why I think the Sanders campaign and its supporters are engaging in anti-politics. Politics, at least in its electoral form, is about building the largest coalition of people who are willing to vote for you that you possibly can. That's it; that's the game. To the extent the Sanders campaign had a plan for doing this, it relied on a proposed untapped pool of voters combined with some sort of mass movement to force their political opponents or unsure potential allies to acquiesce to the Sanders agenda. The former proved wholly illusory during this primary season; the latter, to actually be effective, would require a concerted campaign of at least intimidation, if not outright violence, directed at the political opponents of the sitting President. That's not cosplaying 20th Century Marxism, in all of its attendant brutality, but actually implementing it.
Every time I hear the discussion of the mass movement to be spawned in the wake of the Bernie campaign, I hear this playing in my head:
The difference between then and now is that I am sure that Lennon and McCartney were in contact with people who truly were willing to do the things mentioned in the song; I am much more skeptical that Brooklyn-based podcasters are sufficiently hard to make the Revolution manifest. This talk of a mass movement was, at the end of the day, basically unserious, an exercise of magical thinking that somehow everyone would just jump on board with, or at least acquiesce to, programs that in some cases sit at least two or three standard deviations outside of the American political distribution curve.
By contrast, the Biden campaign seeks to occupy the middle of the swath of people who don't like Trump. Biden is Median Voter Theory made manifest. Given that Trump has been below the Mendoza Line on approval ratings for the bulk of his Presidency, combined with the fact that sitting Presidents always suffer from a bad economy (and it is likely to be really bad come November '20), this strategy seems pretty sensible. Barring election process shenanigans (which is a real potential problem, but it would have been the same problem for Sanders), I think it is more likely than not that Biden wins in November, and possibly by a substantial margin.
This process described above is not some sort of slack-jawed capitulation, but the very essence of what politics is, at least in its American context. You may not like the vehicle of that politics in the form of Joe Biden--and, to be clear, I'm not super thrilled about it either. You may be bummed your guy lost, as I am bummed that my lady lost. But the objection offered by the Sanders supporters right now seems to be not to any of that, but to politics itself. The politics of coalition-building, the politics of compromise, the politics of figuring out how to move and push and influence things in the direction you want things to go among an array of different people who have differing policy positions and objectives. And, yes, the politics of damage control, triage, and picking the lesser of two evils.
Another part of politics is negotiation. One of the basics of negotiation is that you have to provide space for the negotiation to occur. There is always the initial ask, the dream outcome that you would love to be able to get. And then there is what you will take, which is substantially less than the initial ask. Negotiation happens in the dance between those two points--you try to get the closest outcome to your initial ask while staying above your No Go line. If you begin a negotiation--or worse, before a negotiation--by saying you will take only X and will not countenance anything less or be willing to engage in any meaningful conversation about anything less, you are not engaging in negotiation at all. And, if you so clearly signal that you won't negotiate, then people will take you at your word, and not negotiate with you.
The Sanders campaign, and the Sanders supporters, did everything in their power to make it clear that they would take nothing less than full capitulation of every element of the Democratic Party to every element of the Sanders program. This was their position when the campaign was ascendant, and this position did not change when things started to slip. Having staked out that position, you cannot then complain that the Democratic Party is not addressing your concerns and needs. They are not addressing your concerns and needs because you told them, in no uncertain terms, that they will never be able to. There is no point in trying to negotiate with a group of people who have told you they won't negotiate. And, no, a list of demands is not a willingness to negotiate. It is a call for the other side to unconditionally surrender after they have beat you electorally. It's Monty Python's Black Knight offering a draw after all of his limbs have been hacked off. It's unserious.
In a way, it was probably inevitable that the Sanders movement would turn on Sanders himself, as it has done to some degree with his endorsement of Biden and plea to unite to oppose Trump. Such a move is far too insider-ish, far too transactional, far too political for the anti-political wing of the Sanders coalition. But, I think it is deeply instructive about what is at the heart of the motivation of many in the Sanders movement, especially its online component. Lots of people have tried to make the "horseshoe theory" case for the similarities between Sanders supporters and Trump supporters. That's not really fair--there are real policy commitments at the heart of the Sanders movement, where the MAGA folks are clearly grounded only in blind anti-establishment and anti-elite sentiment. But the anti-establishment and anti-elite program of the Sanders folks is not framed as merely unfortunately necessary steps to accomplishing their policy goals, but a core component of the appeal of their candidate and their movement. Biden (and Mayor Pete, and Kamala Harris, and even Liz Warren) is not just a guy with different policy positions from their preferred candidate, but a representative of a broad and nefarious oppressive force, and the goal of the exercise was to beat them and make them submit to your will. That goal seems to be every bit as important to the Sanders folks I see as beating Trump, and maybe even more important.
Look. If you think that the Democratic Party as represented by Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg and Jim Clyburn and Barack Obama is every bit as bad as Trump and the Republicans (or worse), that's a position you can take. I think it is insane, and contrary to all available evidence (especially as we sit here in the Year of Our Lord 2020, after four years of Trump and four months of Trump as leader in a time of global crisis), but you can take that position. But, if you believe that, why were you supporting a guy who was running to be the leader of the party you think is so evil? By most accounts of the 2016 campaign from the point-of-view of the Sanders partisans, Sanders was abused and mistreated by the Democratic Party at every turn. But, I mean, he came back for a second round; why was he, and by extension you, his supporters, willing to go through that again? And if the answer is "because that's best chance of winning," then, fine, but understand that you are making a completely transactional, political choice. And if you are going to be transactional and political, why not try to build a coalition and work with establish institutional structures? Why not be political? Do, or do not; there is no try.
At the end of the day, I don't get it. I get giving up on electoral politics (except, replacing it with what?). I get giving up on the Democratic Party in favor of creating an ideologically-based left alternative. I really get trying to push the Democratic Party to the left on key issues, as demonstrated by the fact that I was a Warren guy. But I don't understand what Sanders was doing, and I really don't get where his supporters are coming from now. Your guy lost. The alternative to the guy who beat your guy is Donald Trump. This is not a hard choice. Refusing to vote for Biden is nihilism masquerading as principle.
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