In previous posts (here, here, and here) I’ve expressed skepticism about whether Bernie Sanders will really go through to the end with the knockdown fight against the Democratic Party machine that will be required to win the nomination.
My skepticism is based on the contradiction between, on the
one hand, Bernie’s call for a political revolution against the “rigged” social
economy of the 1%, and, on the other, his explicit commitment to running in the
Democratic Party, keeping it united, and supporting whatever candidate the party
chooses, including Hillary Clinton.
The Democratic Party as an institution, and Hillary as a
political persona, are primary obstacles to any such political and social
revolution. It is the programmatic
ideology promoted and practiced by Bill and Hillary Clinton, and honed by the
Obama administration, that has defined the Party as a strategic partner of the ruling class for at least twenty-five
years. It’s hard to make a revolution from within a principal political institution
of the counter-revolution. And I think it’s beyond Bernie’s ability (and perhaps
his intent) to transform that institution into its political opposite.
This contradiction within the Sanders campaign, and within
Bernie’s political persona, is, of course, a reflection of the contradiction
within the Democratic Party between its popular class base and its elite institutional
interests. For leftist Sanders supporters who accept this analysis of the
Democratic Party, the implicit argument must be that he’s indeed mounting a
coup to revolutionize the Party. But there’s a flip side to that argument: If
he’s not mounting a coup, he’s not really running a campaign. For skeptical
leftists, it is obvious that Bernie systematically avoids and elides this
contradiction in order to protect the fictional and precarious unity of the
Democratic Party against what he sees as the greatest evil of the Republicans.
That strategy of protecting, via avoidance and elision, the precarious and pernicious
unity of the party makes Bernie Sanders at one with Hillary Clinton, as a
Democrat.
If FDR’s grand historical project was to save capitalism
from itself, I fear that Bernie’s more modest mission is to save the Democratic
Party from itself.