It was a rainy Tuesday, and the revolution didn’t show up … again. Turns out revolutions are hard, even the electoral ones. As I said last week, these primaries are about proof of concept: if there’s a massive constituency for change, as Bernie Sanders has suggested, it should be mobilized enough to carry him into the presidency and to drive his agenda forward in the years that follow. There was no evidence of such a movement this week, and I don’t intend to denigrate the thousands of hard-working people who have powered Bernie’s campaign from the beginning – they have done remarkable work. But they are merely the vanguard – we need to hear from the masses. It is they who have the real power, and thus far they are not showing up.
As someone who has been on the left all of my life, I am no stranger to political losses. Leftists tend not to be easily discouraged, and it’s a good thing. Make no mistake about the Sanders campaign – we are attempting to elevate to the presidency someone who has never taken part in the Nixon/Reagan conservative framing that has dominated our politics for decades. That is unprecedented in the modern era. It’s a heavy lift, and we should have no illusions about that. But as Bernie himself pointed out on Wednesday, his campaign represents majority positions within the Democratic party. It also reflects the priorities of a large majority of our young people – and by “young”, I mean 45 and younger. There is no question that that is where the party is going, not to some chewy center represented by people like Biden.
The fatal question for us as a society, though, is can we afford to wait another decade or more to see this new progressive majority emerge? I would say that the climate crisis has already answered that question. But I want to emphasize that the most important component of our response is in the organizing and the mobilization. Yes, Bernie Sanders is the only remaining candidate who, if elected president, would need little or no convincing to take on the enormous task of turning this fossil-fuel driven society around. But if we don’t achieve that maximal objective (and we should most definitely try to do so), we will still need the organizational institutions to push policy forward on whomever ends up in power next January. Short of Bernie, it would be better to have Biden than Trump; but either way we have to have mobilization. The Sanders campaign is like a progress indicator on the movement – the degree to which it succeeds is some rough indication of how well we’re doing on the ground. Yes, we’ve made progress over the past few years, but we have a long, long way to go.
My recommendation is simply this: don’t lose heart. We can still win this nomination. But even if we don’t, the effort is not wasted so long as we build on the foundation of this campaign.
luv u,
jp
