What Does Bernie Want? - Part 2

I’m prompted by some of the reactions to my Bernie Sanders piece the other day, to make some further comments. Many people seem to think I was being unkind and unfair to a man who has had a long and honorable career “wisely and effectively” promoting progressive causes. It was not only unkind of me to suggest that Bernie had “entered this race planning to lose,” it was horribly “cynical” (a word that appeared in a number of comments).

First of all, I want to say that this is not about personally dissing Bernie Sanders. I agree that Bernie Sanders has often been a wise progressive on many issues, consistently head and shoulders above almost all of his colleagues. It is also true that Bernie Sanders is not all that radical. It's not a very progressive cohort, after all. His limitations from a left, socialist, or anti-imperialist perspective are well-known. (You can find them analyzed in the sources in note 1 of yesterday’s post.)

Bernie is an FDR-New Deal-type American liberal, with all the limitations that entails. He's a moderate welfare-state social democrat, who calls himself a socialist in a way that can resonate within the strange paradigm of American politics. It’s another peculiar effect of the American political paradigm that Bernie Sanders ever appeared to be super radical. It’s particularly disturbing, as we should all notice, that his brand of FDR social politics is now seen as marginal, exceptional, and out of touch with reality within the Democratic Party.

It’s also the case that, though Sanders has been an effective, if limited, progressive on a local and congressional level, he’s never been, or tried to be, a nationally transformative figure, and never evinced serious Presidential aspirations.

Bernie has also had a particular, cozy, relation to the Democratic Party. Though he's always identified himself and run as an independent socialist, he has maintained close, reciprocally-supportive relationships with the Democratic Party. He participates in the Democratic Senatorial caucus, and the party defers to him in Vermont, never fully supporting a Democratic opponent for his Senate seat. Bernie may not formally be a Democrat, but he's an Adjunct Democrat as least as much as he's an Independent Socialist.

What Does Bernie Want?

The assumption was that Bernie Sanders would have no chance of becoming the Democratic Party's presidential nominee. It was understood that he would get a few months to highlight the issues of austerity and inequality before quickly succumbing to Hillary Clinton's highly experienced and well-financed political machine in the early primaries—probably right after the votes were counted in New Hampshire, if not Iowa.  He would then exit gracefully, assuring his supporters, with Hillary at his side nodding in agreement, that the important problems facing the “middle class” had been forcefully and irreversibly placed on the Democratic Party's presidential agenda, that it was going to be wonderful for America to have its first woman president, and that the most important thing to do now was to make sure the goddamn Republicans don't win.

I'm still betting we are going to hear that speech. But the path to it is becoming considerably more complicated, and the stage may not look the same. It’s interesting to consider how the dynamic of the Sanders campaign within the Democratic Party is unfolding.

Preliminary note: I am not going to focus on the deep problems with Bernie’s politics, which are important, but not crucial for this essay. For the purposes or this discussion, I’m going to treat the Sanders campaign as a vehicle that has attracted and mobilized many good progressives for substantively good reasons. My point here is to think about where this campaign is likely going. To clarify where I stand, I’ll put some remarks on two of the substantive political issues that should not be ignored into the first endnote.¹

Let’s first consider Hillary’s assets and advantages.

We must begin with the superdelegates. The superdelegate system, through which 20% of the convention delegates are appointed essentially ex officio, with no vote of the party’s constituency, was created after the McGovern defeat precisely to prevent anyone remotely leftist from winning the Democratic nomination. This system gives the un-Democratic Party’s establishment great confidence that it can squelch the kind of uprising of its popular base that is now roiling the more democratic Republican Party. Those superdelegates, and the Party establishment to which they belong, are, of course, overwhelmingly Hillary supporters. That means she starts out with a 20% lead.

Lawyers, Guns, and Twitter: Gun Battles and Class Struggle after San Bernardino

Kent State, 1970 
14-year-old Mary Ann Vecchio, crying over the body of 20-year-old Jeffery Glenn Miller. Photo: John Filo

As can be expected, in the aftermath of the horrific San Bernardino mass murder committed by Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik in December, the issue of “gun control” and “gun violence” comes to the fore again, highlighted by a teary appeal from President Obama for new “gun safety” measures. I’ve dealt with the issue of gun rights in a comprehensive essay after a previous mass shooting (Sandy Hook), and I stand by the position laid out therein.¹

There are two considerations that, I think, count for something:

1)   The right to own firearms is an important political right. That is not a right-wing position. In fact, I consider the defense of that right part of the populist tradition in left revolutionary politics. Therefore, any necessary regulations on that right – and there will be some – must be as carefully considered as the limitations on any other important right.

2)   The American capitalist state is an apparatus whose main purpose is to protect class rule and its accompanying injustices, and to project compliance-inducing aggression on behalf of the American elite and its favored allies — locally, nationally, and internationally. Any mitigations of these injustices and aggressions are not the products of the liberal state’s inherent neutrality and altruism. They are the hard-won, always-precarious, fruits of social movements that scare the liberal capitalist state into forgoing particular wars, advancing particular minority and civil rights, establishing remunerative social welfare policies. etc.

In most “gun control” discourse, the first point — that gun ownership is a fundamental political right — counts for less than nothing. Most such discourse, in fact, considers it important that gun ownership not be considered a right, but some kind of frivolous luxury. Those who think that should acknowledge it, and advocate openly for the rescission and denial of that right, as do now the major organs of mainstream liberal opinion in the United States, the Washington Post (“The problem with Obama’s promise not to take away your guns”) and the New York Times (“it would require Americans who own those kinds of weapons to give them up”). The strongest, most forthright, statement of this position is given by Israeli-American sociologist Amitai Etzioni in his Huffington Post column, “Needed: Domestic Disarmament, Not 'Gun Control'”.²