A Socialist FAQ on Bernie Sanders and the Left
by Alan Maass and Ashley Smith June 6, 2015
The following introduction is by the editors of SocialistWorker.org where this FAQ was originally published.
Bernie Sanders kicked off his campaign for the Democratic Party presidential nomination with a large and enthusiastic rally in Burlington, Vermont, on May 26.
Sanders’ candidacy has prompted discussion and debate among a left shaped by recent struggles such as Occupy Wall Street, the Chicago teachers strike, Fight for 15, Black Lives Matter and the climate justice movement. Many radicals, publications and organizations either support Sanders’ Democratic Party run outright or believe his campaign can be used to build the infrastructure for a stronger left. By contrast, SocialistWorker.org has argued Sanders’ campaign will serve to corral and co-opt the emerging left into supporting the Democratic Party--and make it harder, not easier, to build an independent, left-wing alternative.
Here, Ashley Smith and Alan Maass respond to some of the questions and disagreements posed by SocialistWorker.org readers during the course of the discussion so far.
Q. There may be problems with Bernie Sanders, but he is also putting forward ideas and proposals that socialists agree with. Isn’t it being a “purist” to object to participation in the Sanders campaign?
A. Socialists who criticize the Sanders campaign aren’t just being “purists.”
We do support many of Sanders’ proposals for reform, like free higher education, the breakup of the mega-banks, a green jobs program to promote alternative energy and stop climate change, and measures to challenge corporate domination of the political system. We also disagree with Sanders’ support for apartheid Israel and his failure to consistently challenge U.S. imperialism, his weak position on the issue of racist police violence, and his support for restrictions on immigrant rights.
But the question for us isn’t mostly about the “purity” of Sanders’ political positions. The crux of our objection is Sanders’ decision to run for the Democratic Party presidential nomination, and to promise in advance that he will endorse the mainstream Democrat who will all but certainly defeat him. This decision is the culmination of Sanders’ increasingly close and collaborative relationship with the Democrats, despite the fact that he promotes radical political ideas, labels himself an independent in the U.S. Senate and calls himself a democratic socialist.
Socialist Worker and its publisher, the International Socialist Organization, have supported independent candidates in the past, even when we had political disagreements. We supported Ralph Nader’s independent presidential campaigns, for example, while maintaining our criticisms of some positions he took and calling on him to change them. The most important point was Nader’s determination to run a campaign that was independent of the Democratic Party, with the aim of building an alternative to the two-party system.
This independence is precisely what Sanders is abandoning by running for the Democratic presidential nomination and pledging to support the eventual Democratic nominee.
The biggest problem is Sanders’ relationship to the Democratic Party. It poses as the “party of the people,” but it is, in fact, a capitalist party, funded and controlled by Corporate America and the political elite. The party establishment tolerates liberals and even radicals in their midst, so long as they don’t represent a significant threat. The liberal and progressive faces of the party are, in fact, immensely valuable in winning support from the voting base of the Democrats among the working class and the oppressed.
The real fear of party leaders isn’t that someone like Sanders will raise uncomfortably progressive ideas within the party primaries, but that a threat could arise outside their ranks and build a socialist, labor or Green Party that would challenge the two-party system.
Q. Isn’t running in the Democratic Party the only realistic way for Sanders to win?
A. The opposite is the case. Sanders has no chance of winning the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination.
As he readily admits, the two-party system has been rigged by corporate power to exclude any real challenge to its agenda--and that includes the Democratic Party. Elections are a big business, where corporations sell brands (a.k.a. candidates) to consumers (a.k.a. voters).
This reality led two professors from Princeton and Northwestern Universities to declare in a recent study that the U.S. is not actually a democracy, but an oligarchy: “[E]conomic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.”
Despite the liberal rhetoric we’ll hear even from the most conventional of Democratic candidates, Hillary Clinton, this applies to the Democratic Party primaries, too. Clinton is aiming to raise close to $2.5 billion for her campaign. With that kind of war chest, she can hire an Astroturf army to give the appearance of grassroots support, dominate the media, and keep the political agenda on her terms. Sanders hopes to raise around 2 percent of Clinton’s haul: $50 million. Even with a larger and far more enthusiastic core of volunteers, he is entering the battle with a squirt gun against Clinton’s howitzer.
Even if, by some miracle, Sanders can threaten Clinton’s status as the presumptive nominee--she is, after all, a terrible candidate with a pile of skeletons in her closet--he still has very little chance of being nominated. As a look at the history of the Democrats--especially during the tumultuous period of the 1960s and ‘70s--shows, the party’s corporate backers have plenty of tricks up their sleeve to maintain their power.
Sanders’ run inside the Democratic Party is not only doomed to lose the party’s presidential nomination. It represents a capitulation to the two-party status quo and capitalist domination of elections. Sanders rejected a campaign outside the Democrats because of the very real obstacles to getting on the ballot as an independent, the lack of nationwide left infrastructure to support such a run--but most of all because he didn’t want to be accused of being “spoiler” who might win votes away from the Democratic candidate.
As Ralph Nader said repeatedly during his campaigns, you can’t spoil a spoiled system. It has to be changed instead. And you can’t do that by participating in one of the two capitalist parties that dominates the system. Yes, there are huge obstacles to building a left-wing, independent alternative. But Sanders’ decision to jump into the Democratic Party presidential race is a guarantee of losing.
Q. But can’t Sanders at least articulate our issues and pull the Democrats to the left?
A. Sanders will, indeed, talk about progressive policies and proposals that the Democratic Party’s base overwhelmingly supports, but that get short shrift in the mainstream political discussion. To his credit, Sanders doesn’t back away from his identification as a “socialist.” If the media bother to cover his campaign, that at least will be a breath of fresh air.
But beyond this, there is little reason to hope that Sanders’ campaign can pull either the Democrats or mainstream politics to the left.
It’s worth pointing out that even mainstream Democrats speak out of the liberal side of their mouths during party primaries. In reaction to the Baltimore Rebellion, for example, Hillary Clinton criticized the New Jim Crow and called for an end to mass incarceration--a more radical position than Sanders adopted, in fact. Of course, Clinton will do nothing of the sort if she does become president. She is following the time-honored pattern of Democrats: Talk left during the primary campaign to win votes from the base, before “turning to the center” in the general election.
There is a reason why the Democratic Party establishment isn’t angry, but relieved that Sanders is running for the party’s presidential nomination. For one thing, his campaign has come along with a promise that he won’t be an independent, third party candidate in November. But beyond this, the Democrats face a legitimacy problem with their base--and Sanders could help them rebuild some support.
Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign was built around creating hope and expectations after eight long years of George Bush in the White House. But very quickly,“hope” has turned into “nope.”
In many respects, Obama has continued the policies of Bush’s second term. He bailed out Wall Street and the banks, but not homeowners facing foreclosure; he expanded the war in Afghanistan; he junked his promises to labor; he presided over the largest number of deportations in history; and he did nothing for African Americans even as racist police brutality and mass incarceration intensified.
And Obama’s most significant “reform”--the Affordable Care Act--has been a huge disappointment for millions of people who hoped the government would finally step in and fix the health care crisis. The long-awaited regulations imposed on insurance companies, such as the ban on rejecting patients with “pre-existing conditions,” were far outweighed by the mandate for the uninsured to buy the overpriced, defective products of the insurers, thus pumping up the industry’s bottom line.
As a result of all this, the Democrats went from control of both houses of Congress at the start of Obama’s first term to control of none after two successive big wins for Republicans in midterm elections. Both mainstream parties are suffering a downward spiral in popularity. A new Pew Research Center poll found that the congressional Democratic leadership’s dismal 33 percent approval rating was only outdone by the Republican leadership’s woeful 22 percent