At about 11 PM on election night in 2016, I got the first message from a Bernie fan that would stick with me until today:
"Bernie would have won."
It seemed, to say the least, a bit disordered to be sending that message that night. It suggested to me that there were a hard core of Bernie supporters who would rather be RIGHT than care for the world. That's a temptation for all of us at all times, but little in the performance of Sanders or his supporters in the three and a half years since then has changed my impression of them. They always functioned more as a sect, a cell, a revolutionary movement, than as an establishment actor, a partner, a collaborator. Purity rather than complementarity is the name of the game.
Maybe there are some political lessons to be drawn from this.
While there are still some Sanders supporters who are deep in denial about this, there have been some interesting insta-autopsies of the Sanders movement.
In my mind, the most interesting piece for thinking about the future of progressivism in the Democratic party has been by Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times, who I continue to think is offering some of the best analysis out there. (Disclosure: Mr Bouie is a friend of mine, and he took a course with me many moons ago when he was an undergraduate at UVA.) He makes the argument that you need to differentiate the movement from the leader, and that Sanders has done a great deal to encourage a larger leftward shift in the Democratic party. That may be so, though I think it's also the case that the Democrats have been moving left for some time. What's also interesting about Bouie's analysis is the argument that sometimes progressive causes get more oomph from a moderate leader than from a progressive leader. Think about FDR, think about my state's governor Northam right now--some interesting things get done if the top of the ticket is centrist enough to pull in more conservative voters for their coalition, but still have as it were a base that looks more like an "elliptical orbit" with its center further to the left than many of the rightward supporters fully appreciate--so that they get a larger public mandate, but when they get into office, they are able to be bullied by the left to do things. Anyway, the point here is that Biden may be a pretty effective vehicle for progressive change, if he gets elected and helps to increase Dem strength in the House and also return the Senate to Democratic hands.
This morning I came across this piece from Brookings, which also seems to me very interesting. It identifies the problem with Sanders's campaign in a way I hadn't heard before: First, he didn't appreciate that much of the support for the campaign was less pro-Sanders than anybody but Clinton (including a number of white democratic voters who subsequently went for Trump, and are now staying with Trump), and confused fervent support with widespread support. Believing these two things caused problems:
the Sanders campaign believed that cushion of support from 2016 would be sufficient to propel him to the nomination, and mistook a record number of small-dollar donors for broad appeal. These errors closed off the true path to the nomination: broadening the reach of his message, reaching out to anti-Clinton voters who may not have been true supporters, and building a diverse coalition within the Democratic Party. And as a result, Mr. Sanders’s underperformance in 2020 means that he will spend the summer and fall as a surrogate rather than a standard bearer.
The "anybody but Clinton" vote has been there for a long while, and it may be hard for Sanders supporters to believe but I think it's very true. It helped Obama in 2008, by the way--and I say that as an Obamaphile. Sexism and misogyny are real, stop the presses. Even in the most woke soul, they are real.
The other aspect is more interesting. It seems fair to say that Sanders supporters are among the "stickiest" of the primary supporters. They didn't seem fickle. When you went with Sanders, you stayed with him. The tone and the rhetoric of the campaign did that. It valued consistency and purity above "both-sides" views, and saw moderation as dangerous.
I wonder if the core problem is that Sanders's national support was not really from party members, but from ideological purists. I wonder if the intensity of Sanders's support was precisely his problem--that he would lose the enthusiasm, possibly the affection, maybe the support, of his base if he manifested the kinds of strategies that have to happen in a vast and polyphonic political environment. I wonder if a voluble self-righteousness, and an even more voluble contempt for your interlocutors, ended up being counterproductive. After all, those interlocutors may disagree with you on some things (see Elizabeth Warren) but were potentially almost immediate allies, and in the medium term (like, three months from now), they were in fact fellow front-line soldiers against a true enemy--that is, the aggrieved reactionary caucasion legions of Donald J Trump. To act as if they were the worst people in the world, as so often happened (sorry, post-Bernie Bro denialists--it did), is surprisingly infrequently politically effective. So perhaps Bernie's supporters gave him a voice but denied him an effective way to use that voice to mobilize larger change.
(This also leaves behind the question of Sanders's own capacity to effect change. He's been better throughout his career, except for a brief chunk of his mayorality in Burlington, Vermont, as a hectoring voice rather than a power-broker. But his person matters very little in this situation--it's the movement.)
Here's one possibly portable takeaway for me. Arguments that appeal to what is OBVIOUS to you and SHOULD be obvious to everybody almost never work to expand your side of a debate, even as they may reinforce the intensity of your side's collective cohesion. Instead, frame issues as difficult, as possibly having two sides. Or perhaps as not properly apprehensible. In other words, I think it's safer to court the danger of appearing condescending than the danger of appearing arrogant. At least with condescension, it's easier (I think?) to apologize.
This is a lesson for me, as much as anyone else. Anyone who knows me knows how prone I am, especially on social media, to arrogance and vituperative statements. And I'm not saying "you must empathize with the grievances of white nationalists," or al-Quaeda, or what have you. Sure--there are boundaries beyond which one should not go. But undertand the world exists, is separate from you, and that, as Jean Renoir said in his film The Rules of the Game, "in this world, there is one terrible thing, and that is that everyone has his reasons.”
In any event, if Sanders is able to stay in the fight for decency against Trump, and will campaign for Biden, and bring his supporters to work for Biden, it may mean something.