The Bernie Sanders' Legacy Has Been Bastardized By Those Who've Co-opted It
As someone who closely follows politics, I've long been fascinated by Bernie Sanders, the Independent Socialist from Vermont who cut his teeth in the U.S. House for a decade and a half before running for the Senate, where he's been since 2006. Particularly during the "triangulation" years of the 90s, Sanders was often a very lonely voice pitching an old-school platform of economic liberalism, advocating for workers' rights and consumer rights, along with an expansion of the federal government to resemble some of the democratic socialist nations of Scandinavia. Bernie's been plugging the same message for his entire professional career and while he can tend to sound like a broken record at times and undersells the magnitude of taxation that would be required to pay for his program, he's correctly diagnosed a lot of problems that took the Democratic Party a long time to catch up with. But when Bernie ran for President as a Democrat in 2016, he found his platform to take his message to the people, and I think even he was surprised by how much it caught on. With that said, looking at the leftward drift of the Democratic Party that Bernie is credited more than anybody else for bringing about in the last three years, I'm seeing a movement that is in too many ways drifting away from Bernie's branding and toward a social justice groupthink that will almost certainly be electoral kryptonite in the states that decide the 2020 election.
There were early signs that the core demographic of Bernie supporters (or at least the noisiest demographic) was largely divorced from Bernie's decadeslong discipline, and was in fact taking the reins of an ensuing movement that would spiral out of Bernie's control to the point that even Bernie himself can sometimes sound like he's mouthing a hostage video version on his own message. The old version of Bernie seemed more accommodating toward letting the rednecks have their guns than the guy we've seen in the last couple of years. The old version of Bernie was much more skeptical about immigration than the guy we've seen in the last couple of years. It was the old version of Bernie who won the hearts and minds of an impressive number of voters in the Rust Belt and Midwestern states that decided the 2016 election, and particularly in the rural areas in those states that swung hardest from Obama to Trump once Bernie lost the Democratic nomination fight to Hillary Clinton. And I suspect it was the quirkiness of his occasional deviations from current left-wing orthodoxy--quirks that came from representing a rural state in Congress for a quarter century--that helped win over those voters who ultimately chose to vote for Donald Trump if their other choice was Hillary Clinton.
Unfortunately for the Democrats, I suspect the discarding of that policy quirkiness by Bernie's successors, several of whom are running for President in 2020, will scare off a good share of those Rust Belt and Midwestern voters that Bernie won over in 2016. Ironically, the social justice politics that Bernie largely tried to stray from now seems to be what animates his imitators more than anything else. For example, Bernie often tried to frame contentious identity politics debates within the rubric of the overall class struggle in the increasingly unequal America.....but his imitators plunge head-first into identity politics debates as the first order of business. I won't say they do so to the exclusion of a left-populist economic message, but the extent to which they saturate their message with racial and gender-based language necessarily fractures the size of the audience who will positively receive the message. When Bernie delivered his message, a white working-class wage earner from a burned-out Midwestern factory town felt like Bernie was talking to him. When Alexandria Ocazio-Cortez makes a generally similar pitch but also discusses abolishing immigration enforcement and providing universal basic income to people "unwilling to work", Joe Sixpack from Youngstown, Ohio, is very unlikely to take the same message away.
So ironically, the Democrats have moved left since Hillary Clinton, largely embracing Bernie as an inspiration, but are taking with them the most electorally fragmentational messaging of Hillary's campaign that proved so out of touch with Middle America. Not only have they run with social justice and identity politics, they kicked it up a few notches, often seeming to take their inspiration primarily by being as against Trump as they possibly can--stylistically and rhetorically--even on matters when there was far less of a lefty consensus just a few years ago.
For example, Trump has gotten away with an endless litany of racist invective and, by his own admission, has engaged in multiple acts of sexual assault, but by elevating Trump's misdeeds, the left has chained itself to a standard for themselves that ultimately requires unilateral disarmament. That very thing happened when Senator Al Franken was pushed into resignation by his colleagues, some of whom are now running for President, over dubious sexual harassment/assault charges, never allowing him the due process to defend himself. More recently, almost every elected Democrat in the country turned on Virginia Governor Ralph Northam because of a racist photo from 35 years ago in his medical school yearbook. There were a ton of plot twists that complicated the Northam incident and it looks as though he may now survive what seemed like certain political death a week ago, but it was striking the extent to which Northam's 20-year record as an elected official counted for absolutely nothing to just about anybody with a (D) next to his or her name, all of whom spent the better part of a week validating the premise that Northam's entire life was defined by a photo he may or may not have taken in 1984....or that he may have worn a tone-deaf Halloween costume that same year.
All of this is consequential because the struggling Midwestern communities that took to Bernie Sanders' message three years ago, before swinging the 2016 general election to Trump a few months later, will absolutely not share today's Democrats' obsession with whether a Halloween costume some college student wore in 1984 is racist. Nor will they have any use for the college campus worldview of "white privilege", "toxic masculinity", and "abolishing ICE" that's gone mainstream among the Democrats' Presidential campaign trail guiding lights. If those who claim to be inspired by Bernie-- voters and Presidential candidates alike--actually started messaging more like Bernie they might be positioned to beat Trump next year. But with each passing week, Bernie's meat-and-potatoes message of yore seems more and more distant from where his successors are, and it's not likely to end well by the general election.
There were early signs that the core demographic of Bernie supporters (or at least the noisiest demographic) was largely divorced from Bernie's decadeslong discipline, and was in fact taking the reins of an ensuing movement that would spiral out of Bernie's control to the point that even Bernie himself can sometimes sound like he's mouthing a hostage video version on his own message. The old version of Bernie seemed more accommodating toward letting the rednecks have their guns than the guy we've seen in the last couple of years. The old version of Bernie was much more skeptical about immigration than the guy we've seen in the last couple of years. It was the old version of Bernie who won the hearts and minds of an impressive number of voters in the Rust Belt and Midwestern states that decided the 2016 election, and particularly in the rural areas in those states that swung hardest from Obama to Trump once Bernie lost the Democratic nomination fight to Hillary Clinton. And I suspect it was the quirkiness of his occasional deviations from current left-wing orthodoxy--quirks that came from representing a rural state in Congress for a quarter century--that helped win over those voters who ultimately chose to vote for Donald Trump if their other choice was Hillary Clinton.
Unfortunately for the Democrats, I suspect the discarding of that policy quirkiness by Bernie's successors, several of whom are running for President in 2020, will scare off a good share of those Rust Belt and Midwestern voters that Bernie won over in 2016. Ironically, the social justice politics that Bernie largely tried to stray from now seems to be what animates his imitators more than anything else. For example, Bernie often tried to frame contentious identity politics debates within the rubric of the overall class struggle in the increasingly unequal America.....but his imitators plunge head-first into identity politics debates as the first order of business. I won't say they do so to the exclusion of a left-populist economic message, but the extent to which they saturate their message with racial and gender-based language necessarily fractures the size of the audience who will positively receive the message. When Bernie delivered his message, a white working-class wage earner from a burned-out Midwestern factory town felt like Bernie was talking to him. When Alexandria Ocazio-Cortez makes a generally similar pitch but also discusses abolishing immigration enforcement and providing universal basic income to people "unwilling to work", Joe Sixpack from Youngstown, Ohio, is very unlikely to take the same message away.
So ironically, the Democrats have moved left since Hillary Clinton, largely embracing Bernie as an inspiration, but are taking with them the most electorally fragmentational messaging of Hillary's campaign that proved so out of touch with Middle America. Not only have they run with social justice and identity politics, they kicked it up a few notches, often seeming to take their inspiration primarily by being as against Trump as they possibly can--stylistically and rhetorically--even on matters when there was far less of a lefty consensus just a few years ago.
For example, Trump has gotten away with an endless litany of racist invective and, by his own admission, has engaged in multiple acts of sexual assault, but by elevating Trump's misdeeds, the left has chained itself to a standard for themselves that ultimately requires unilateral disarmament. That very thing happened when Senator Al Franken was pushed into resignation by his colleagues, some of whom are now running for President, over dubious sexual harassment/assault charges, never allowing him the due process to defend himself. More recently, almost every elected Democrat in the country turned on Virginia Governor Ralph Northam because of a racist photo from 35 years ago in his medical school yearbook. There were a ton of plot twists that complicated the Northam incident and it looks as though he may now survive what seemed like certain political death a week ago, but it was striking the extent to which Northam's 20-year record as an elected official counted for absolutely nothing to just about anybody with a (D) next to his or her name, all of whom spent the better part of a week validating the premise that Northam's entire life was defined by a photo he may or may not have taken in 1984....or that he may have worn a tone-deaf Halloween costume that same year.
All of this is consequential because the struggling Midwestern communities that took to Bernie Sanders' message three years ago, before swinging the 2016 general election to Trump a few months later, will absolutely not share today's Democrats' obsession with whether a Halloween costume some college student wore in 1984 is racist. Nor will they have any use for the college campus worldview of "white privilege", "toxic masculinity", and "abolishing ICE" that's gone mainstream among the Democrats' Presidential campaign trail guiding lights. If those who claim to be inspired by Bernie-- voters and Presidential candidates alike--actually started messaging more like Bernie they might be positioned to beat Trump next year. But with each passing week, Bernie's meat-and-potatoes message of yore seems more and more distant from where his successors are, and it's not likely to end well by the general election.
posted by Mark at 5:40 PM
0 comments
