Never Let Yourself Become Useful, Jamming, 03/04/2017

The title of today’s post refers to a particular kind of idiot. The 2016 election and part of its aftermath created a particular subset of useful idiot that I want to talk about right now. Because that peculiar blend of idiocy grows a black, obsidian rock in the pit of my stomach.

Setting the stage. Sunday morning, I came across an article by Leah McElrath, a journalist I follow on Twitter. She described how she’s processing her own feelings since learning, through the American House and Senate committees on Russian subversion of the 2016 election, that enormous numbers of Twitter accounts were bots controlled by Russia’s intelligence agencies.

Not only that, but many of those bots were designed with personalities as Bernie Bros. Always the most vile, abusive, misogynist Bernie Bros. There were plenty of real incidents of Sanders supporters saying some awful things about Hillary Clinton. Plenty of awful things Bernie Sanders himself said about Hillary Clinton.

It’s not as though she didn’t deserve to have those things said about her. I would never have supported Clinton as the nominee if I was an American Democrat. I disagreed with her about many different policies, and I would have been an advocate in the party to move its ideas beyond the failed new liberalism in which Clinton’s perspective was trapped.

But I remember the horribly hostile tenor of the 1990s, and all the sexist attacks Clinton sustained against her for the entire time her husband was President. I never would have supported Clinton, and I would have fought against the party’s cliquishness and insularity at the level of the DNC.

Yet the bile of the online misogyny against Clinton was horrifying. And too many Sanders supporters played too deeply into that. Sanders himself definitely shares some culpability for Clinton's defeat at the hands of Donald Fucking Trump. It’s not like no one said anything before the election.

Rifts exist within the Democratic Party. Of course they do. In any state political system with only two parties, their coalitions are going to be big and diverse. Socially liberal and feminist neoliberals* are on the same team for control of the state with bourgeois eco-hippies, anti-vaxxer nuts, and radical democrats like me.

* Who still can’t see that there’s a serious problem with new liberal economics. How could you not by now?

Even in Canada, it’s the same. There’s an old joke that the New Democratic Party is where Canada throws all its crazy leftists. But there’s an intense hostility between the trade unionists and environmentalists, anti-colonial pragmatists and borderline anti-Semitic anti-Israel activists. And radical democrats like me.

Canadian progressives have plenty of other conflicts we generally sweep under the rug.

Now to discover that all those volleys of extra-hot boiling hate that hit so many women over the last year are Russian bots? Yes, the big, messy alliance called the progressive left has a lot of divisions.

But progressivism has been most effective when the radical democrat impulse – Get out to the streets! Mobilize the people! Demonstrate with your life that a better way is possible! – finds common ground in a struggle that unites us all.

It’s the struggle that’s always united democrats: the struggle for real, material freedom. Not the abstract and one-dimensional freedom of those sad libertarians. I mean the struggle for a society where more and more people are able to pursue their talents to the fullest.

The victory of Donald Trump was that of a kleptocratic white nationalist regime of oligarchs to the executive branch of the most powerful state machinery in the world. The elected representatives lost so many seats in the national legislatures that they have no real effective opposition.

The social movements against Trump and the radical Republican agendas that dominated pretty much every level of the American state are the only effective opposition.

That’s fantastic. And we shouldn’t let our resentment toward the insular idiots of progressive political parties overpower our need to drive that social movement.

The most depressingly illuminating perspectives I’ve seen on this issue are those on the left who refuse to let go of that rage. The people who say, “I’m glad Trump and the nationalists are fucking up our environment, our economies, and throwing millions of minorities in detention camps. At least it’s sticking one to Clinton and Obama!”

If you give in to hate, you’ve accepted dystopia.

How to Be a Progressive Activist Without Having a Daily Nervous Breakdown, Jamming, 11/03/2017

That’s actually a pretty tough achievement these days. Right now, it’s easier to push for more progressive politics as a Canadian than, really, pretty much anywhere else in the world.

Charlie Angus, the MP for the eastern half of Northern Ontario, is
running. He's long been a strong advocate of a new national 
consensus and institution to restore – at long last – justice for
indigenous people in Canada.

For example, our social democratic party, the NDP, is having its first leadership debate this Sunday for our contest later this year. I’m the Vice-President of my electoral district’s riding association, so I’m helping promote the event on social media, and through personal posts like this.

But I’m in a very privileged position here in Canada. At least relatively speaking. This seems to be one of the few Western countries where the white nationalist alt-right isn’t taking hold of our politics.

Of course, I haven’t adopted some born-again complacency in the three weeks since I posted about my generation’s confrontation with reborn Nazism. Nothing about that has changed.

White nationalism is still a major political problem facing Canada – people wouldn’t be holding demonstrations against the existence of Muslim people in front of our largest city’s house of government if it wasn’t.

Our major conservative party has had its youth wing pretty much entirely compromised by white nationalists. One leading Conservative leadership candidate is openly courting them, declaring that people who don’t share white Christian values shouldn’t be welcome in Canada. Even the more traditional conservatives leading the race throw bones to the alt-right or channel Trumpism in their rhetoric.

Manitoba MP Niki Ashton has made one of her core initiatives the fight
for a more fair economy, often working with groups of young white
collar workers around Canada who are advocating for better working
conditions and more security in their often precarious jobs and careers.

I’m confident that Canadians and the Canadian government can resist and prevent a takeover by white nationalist leaders and activists. They’ll fight hard, and we’ll have to work considerably harder to fight them. But we have better material defences against them.

For one thing, significant portions of Canada already have majority-minority populations, or close enough to it that far fewer people in our cities have stereotypical or racist misconceptions of Asian and Latin American immigrant groups.

Too many white people in Canada’s cities already know Asians, Africans, and Latin Americans to be turned against them with racist fearmongering. These people are our friends.

As well, our political parties have never had to marginalize social democratic multiculturalism to succeed. Here’s what I mean.

Right now in the USA, the Democratic Party and its activists are in a serious rebuilding mode. They’re leaders in the anti-Trump resistance, but the party itself is still figuring out how best to overcome Republicans electorally.

Guy Caron is the MP for Rimouski, so far the only leadership
contender representing the strong Quebecois base of the New Democrats.
He made universal basic income as a central point of his policy platform,
restoring to the front of Canadian politics an important idea that's been
blown away to the wind by the hurricane of Trumpist nationalism.

They have a tough road ahead, especially because they seem to be shooting themselves with infighting – typical of the American left over the years. You could see it in the way progressive activists continued to argue over Tom Perez or Keith Ellison taking over the DNC chair.

The Sanders wing saw Perez as continuing Clinton-style neoliberalism that ignored the real economic suffering of millions. The Clinton wing saw Ellison as continuing the blind populism that made what should have been Democratic votes peeling off for Trump in the name of some amorphous ‘change.’

That division among the American left is a hangover from the three biggest mistakes Sanders and his campaign made.

1) Vilifying Clinton so much that he provided Republicans almost as much ammunition as FOX and no take-backs could ever sound sincere. 2) Pushing a protectionist economic populism whose core principles hewed too close to Trump’s. 3) Completely failing to even bother considering black outreach seriously.

Meanwhile, many conservative Americans think Perez is a radical left-wing loon. And the spectre of Perez’s (or Ellison’s) advancement being purely a matter of identity politics continues to haunt American discourse.

Peter Julian is probably the most senior parliamentarian among the
leadership contenders, and a strong voice for social democratic policy
from the west of the country, thanks to his strong constituency in
Vancouver.

The truth is that American politics have been radicalized already along white anglophone ethnic lines. That was the substance of “Make America Great Again,” taking the country back from minorities, and painting the advancement of non-whites as theft from the rightful lot of white Americans.

The Democratic Party in the United States today has, as its core constituency, women of colour. It’s the party of multiculturalism and the fight against inequality along all vectors. Arguing over which inequality to emphasize – whether to, as Sanders did, divorce racializing inequities from inequities emerging from economic processes – ignores the real integration of all these inequities and oppressions.

Canada, in contrast to the United States, has had a mainstream social democratic party for decades. So these ideas have never truly had to fight against institutional opposition to the same intensity as in America, when the Democrats spent decades embracing Reaganism with hugs.

There again is the ultimately flaw with Hillary Clinton as the 2016 Democratic standard-bearer – the formative decades of her modern political identity was in that era of conservative liberalism.

In Canada, we never had to make that compromise. Those who refused it could always find an institutional home in the New Democratic Party. The core reason why we lost the last federal election to Trudeau was because he doubled down on that language while our strategists got scared and pursued a triangulation campaign straight out of 1994.

That institutional home of the NDP unites all the intersectional politics of liberation – economics, gender, racialization, class – in one coalition. One box on a ballot.

The best defence against Canadian white nationalism is strengthening the voice and growing the platforms of the New Democratic Party. Our next leader has to stand for that total liberation – no one is free if a single person still wears their chains.

So What Is “Pragmatic Radicalism” Anyway? Composing, 03/08/2016

The wonderful photo SERRC published with my last piece.

Last week, I published a new essay at the Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective. I thought of the idea in response to an essay by my colleague and long-standing argument partner Steve Fuller, “Prolegomena to the Deep Sociology of Brexit.”

Now that I’ve returned from the wild woods of central Quebec,* I wanted to start the month with a breakdown of that essay – so you can see what I’m doing with it, and how that work expresses my newly-formulated mission statement as a writer and researcher.

* It was a very pleasant and necessary vacation, thank you, but I really am quite happy to be back in Toronto and returning to my work. More like my many works.

I’d say I learned two things from my time at this May’s Canadian Philosophical Association. 1) Progressive politics among academics lags far behind the actual activists developing new ideas, approaches, and outreach methods. This was more of a re-confirmation than a discovery. 

But most important was 2) There doesn’t really seem to be a place in the academic community for voices that aren’t affiliated with professorial positions in universities. I had a lot of very good conversations, but I was essentially an alien among this crowd. 

Even in seminars where my contributions went over well, some attendees appeared completely unable to process what I was – a researcher unaffiliated with a university who wasn’t at all jockeying for a university position anymore. Just someone here to share their research, able to write, publish, and speak on the same level as the university-based folk.

I had a guiding ideal of what I suppose
became pragmatic radicalism when
writing my last book, but I couldn't
get its publication out of academic
marginalization of high prices and
the catacombs of libraries.

So I’ve begun developing a brand for myself as a public intellectual whose institutional home is in activist communities and political parties. A blue-collar scholar, if you want to put it in a rap.** Part of that brand and identity is developing a philosophical language that addresses immediately relevant public issues while simultaneously crafting complex concepts.

** Please don’t do that. It would be terrible.

That’s what my “Pragmatic Radicalism” essay is. A work of philosophical creativity in response to an occasion. I mean ‘occasion’ in the sense of, “the event that occasioned this response.” An event in our public life of such a significance and complexity that it prompts a public work of philosophical reflection and creativity.

One thing that frustrated me about philosophy as a discipline, from the time I started work on the project that would be Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity, was the disconnect of its creative thinking from the concerns of the world. 

In turbulent times like these, we need contributions to our politics that encourage thought – not thought instead of action, but thought that is one with action. Protest that generates policy. Creativity in harmony with activism.

I’m developing a new brand of blended philosophical research and creativity with worldly activism and social engagement. And my essay at the Reply Collective, “The Pragmatic Radicalism of the Multitude’s Power,” is both a sketch of what that writing style would be, as well as an example. 

How it’s an example I’ve already explained: a work of abstract philosophical creativity, produced on an occasion. But what’s the concept? What is pragmatic radicalism?

When I first floated the title to Fuller, he told me it sounded paradoxical. And that’s definitely part of its spark. A paradox – broadly speaking – is the juxtaposition of several ideas that don’t typically fit together. To me, there are two kinds of paradoxes. 

Vicious paradoxes confuse, frustrate, and arrest thought. But creative paradoxes let you work through a new way of thinking while you figure out the logic by which the juxtaposed ideas make sense together. A new harmony emerges from a dissonant collision.

Pragmatic radicalism is fundamentally about expanding
the realm of the conceivable in your society's public
conversations and thinking.

Pragmatic radicalism sounds paradoxical. Radicalism is a pure idealism, usually thought of as a refusal to compromise, the refusal to give up on anything but your opponents’ total capitulation. A radical’s hopes are usually so distant from the real world that their achievement seems impossible, but they’re committed to them totally anyway.

Pragmatism appears the precise opposite. You have ideals, but you’re prepared to accept compromise with opponents or askew allies – to make allies from opponents – to achieve some progress toward those ideals. Pragmatism is political realism, while radicalism is a refusal of the real’s resistance to your ideals.

Pragmatic radicalism embraces ideals, but also acknowledges and pushes against the resistance of the world as it is to achieve those ideals. It is the admission that practical achievement in politics can take other routes than compromise alone. 

Pragmatic radicalism is philosophical in that it develops new and revolutionarily different frameworks for our political and social institutions and relationships. It’s pragmatic in its resolute focus on material action to achieve those goals. Not compromise, but community organizing to bring these radical ideas to public discourse and make them seem ordinary.

Our current political climate is full of pragmatic radicalism, for both democratic and fascist ideals. One impressive achievement of the Trump campaign has been rapidly bringing ideals of white supremacism and strongman leadership to mainstream political discourse. Though it took much longer, UKIP has been successful in not only making Britain’s exit from the European Union popularly plausible, but apparently a coming reality.

More details at the website.

Thankfully, the Sanders campaign achieved a similar miracle in returning social democratic policy to America’s mainstream discourse – even embedding these ideas in the policy platform of the previously horrifyingly compromised Democratic Party. 

Most importantly, the Black Lives Matter movement has brought its radical critique of America’s police, court, and prison systems to the realm of mainstream plausibility. BLM has launched several concrete policy platforms for institutional reform, first the policing reform packages of Campaign Zero, and recently the larger policy framework of Movement 4 Black Lives.

The Arab Spring – and its ripples throughout the Arab world, as well as the refugee movements from the Syrian Civil War and Iraq’s war against ISIS – was similarly a movement of pragmatic radicalism. An explosive moment of democracy’s becoming conceivable in the Middle East. 

Communication – networked community organizing and cultivating social media communities – is the essential medium of pragmatic radicalism’s transformation of political possibilities. Practicing that communication of simultaneous advocacy and philosophical creativity is the task of the contemporary public intellectual. 

Maybe it won’t be the university or the academy that will product these thought leaders. It seems there’s a wider community of well-educated activists and organizers driving this model of politics and social transformation.

Maybe the occasional blue-collar scholar.

Tainted Left VI: No Necessity But Faith, Research Time, 26/07/2016

Continued from last post . . . I started this series a week ago with some reflections on an essay about the perennial critique and doubt that left-wing politics always faces. The contention that all progressive politics leads to government control over daily life, the most extreme expression of which was Stalinism. 

The essay was by Louis Althusser, writing in the 1960s. He faced a more intense problem than democratic progressives typically have, because he was actually a member of France's Communist Party, and a pretty prominent activist in the Paris branch. 

There are people out there who take this image seriously.

But lately, all progressives in Western democracies face that accusation, that we’re really all wannabe Stalinists. That’s rooted in the radical libertarianism of the alt-right, the most powerful grassroots reactionary movement in decades. 

Althusser’s defence against this accusation rests on an argument about the contingency of history. It's a difficult concept for him to straddle, because he also dismissed the democratic notion that all individuals – no matter how poor or marginal – contribute in some small way to their society’s historical development.

Althusser dismissed that idea as a bourgeois illusion to hide the genuinely abject nature of most human existence. In other essays in For Marx, he argues that civilization’s cause and engine is a product of its superstructure. That civilization is a grand machine that dwarfs the actions of human individuals. 

It's some pretty unforgiving structuralism, at least that's the sense I get so far. But you don’t have to embrace that conception of what drives social change to land at history’s contingency. If anything, Althusser’s extreme structuralism is in a pretty intense tension with his arguments for history’s contingency.

As I said yesterday, history’s contingency is a function of its overdetermination. Every event has a ton of different causes, more causes than would be needed to bring it about in isolation. So you can tell a huge number of stories about how the world got to be the way it is.

If there’s no necessity to the development of history, then we can keep trying different attempts at building a just society where people don’t have to live in poverty. All the hardcore dictatorships of the alleged proletariat fell apart? The soviet councils all fell to pieces and were purged by a totalitarian dictator? The Great Leap Forward caused a massive famine when it turned out farming villages were shit metallurgists?

No situation is ever perfect, but you have to marshal all
your powers to assess what you've done, see what can be
done, and get to work. Sometimes, you just don't win
the vote, but that doesn't mean you can't ever succeed.

Well, it looks like those plans didn’t work. But if history’s development is contingent, there’s no reason for you to presume that every attempt to wrestle the state into becoming an actual servant of the people will fail. One day, we can get it right and make it last. 

That's the engine behind the basic income movement and the revival of social democracy that the Bernie Sanders campaign and the Occupy movement has driven in the United States. It comes down to the faith that we can build a better society together.

That faith rests on the principle that not every attempt to push society toward a more utopian existence will fail, that it is actually possible to figure out how to get it right. 

It’s a faith that refuses cynicism and fatalism. That embraces the potential of humanity, even in the face of our most cruel and violent impulses, from the individual to the civilizational. It looks into humanity’s greatest abyss and demands that we make light shine, no matter how difficult.

I’m not a religious person, but that’s the only faith I have. 

A Historic Meh, Jamming, 09/06/2016

I felt like I should say something about Hillary Clinton. It’s not like I’m the only one. It’s kind of the biggest news in North America. Even bigger than that sinkhole in Ottawa.

She’s a historic candidate. She’s probably going to wipe the floor with Donald Trump, whose swaggering racism and blowhardiness* is alienating millions from the Republican Party across the United States. Hillary Clinton will quite likely be the United States’ 45th President. 

* Is that a word? It should be. It will be. It is.

The first black President will be followed by the first female President. And I dare say she’ll be more epochal than simply her gender can manage, though that’s already pretty epoch-making. 

If Trump continues campaigning as he has – and I doubt that he’ll be civil for more than a few days at a time – he’ll alienate so much of the electorate from his party that Democrats will control more federal and state legislatures more securely than they have in years. 

I have a whole other post drafted about the philosophical
foundations of Trump's politics and movement, which
are both fascinating and horrifying.

So why am I not really all that enthusiastic?

Because Hillary Clinton is a creature of establishment politics. And I don’t just mean that in the crude, pejorative sense. The sense of ‘establishment’ that makes a person see no difference between Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. Although maybe I do mean it a little.

Because I just disagree with so much of Clinton’s traditional policy. I consider it bad for the country, and for the global economy, and for global peace. Here’s one example. 

Her willingness to embroil American military obligations further in the wars of the Middle East can all too easily deepen her country’s and her people’s involvement in that quagmire. And American military might does more harm than good in that region. 

America’s alliances are completely fucked in terms of their potential for genuine good in the region too, featuring a generations-old link with one of the most notorious human rights abusers in the world: Saudi Arabia.

At the end of the day, Clinton’s economic policies are largely just the same old crap that caused the last decade of economic crisis and stagnation in the first place. There’s far too much dependence on a financial industry that doesn’t actually produce wealth that gets to people. 

The first Jewish President is a milestone we'll have to
keep waiting for.

The biggest patrons of Hillary Clinton in the business world are also regular clients of Mossack Fonseca and other firms like them, whose business it is to sequester wealth from people who actually need it.

Yeah, I would have liked Bernie Sanders to become the nominee. Although I used to believe that he had the best chance of stopping Trump from destroying American democracy, I now believe that’s actually Clinton. Trump simply can’t handle tough women refusing to take his shit. When they’re on a debate stage together, she’ll crush him between her fingers and I’ll love watching every minute of it.

And Bernie Sanders did run the best campaign since Obama 2008. He began as a wacky fringe candidate who no one thought would win any primary but a few in New England. 

And Sanders is absolutely right that the American economy needs to change to re-emphasize material manufacturing and the community productivity of the knowledge economy instead of legalized billion-dollar gambling and sharing economy bullshit. And he has a track record of getting that productivity rolling, as you can see in his revitalization of Burlington VT’s downtown.

Voices like Elizabeth Warren's can't let more conventional,
lobbyist-courting Democratic Party officials from
sealing off its channels of progressive activism.

Hillary Clinton and the whole of the Democratic Party needs to pick up the ideas that he lived and advocated throughout his political career. And they need to pick up the ideas of the proliferating Occupy movement that threw its own momentum behind his campaign.

But Clinton and many on her side in her party can also easily be bought. For example, her most high-profile booster – Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz – is pushing legislation to shield the payday loan industry from the consumer protection board her own party’s President Obama created.

I’m going to have a lot of critical things to say about Hillary Clinton when she’s President. As will many people on the progressive side of politics. She is, as this campaign proved, capable of listening to those people, even though she isn’t one of them. 

So congratulations. I hope I can keep saying it.

Politics Without Power I: What’s Your Program? Research Time, 16/05/2016

My friend DJT worked on the Bernie Sanders campaign this winter, as a political organizer in the early months of American Presidential primary season. Knocking on doors in New Hampshire, Michigan, and Pennsylvania was an incredible experience, and he learned a lot that we’re taking to Toronto to progress the causes and issues we care about.

American election processes are convoluted, over-complicated, and utterly weird pastiches of several different systems that never quite fit together in the end. Essentially, each state and territory of the country has its own vote within each major political party for which candidate will run on that party’s ticket in the country-wide election. 70-odd different local party votes on each team before country votes as a whole, technically for the party, not the candidate. 

In terms of marketing, Clinton has already established too
much support – through years of genuinely hard work at
political organizing – from the steadfast coalition of
Democrats who support Barack Obama for Sanders ever
to take down. But his critique was necessary to change
the policy conversations of America's elites.

Every American election, I feel so much happier to live in Canada where our elections are so much simpler. Even if they get a little more complicated, it’s still simple in comparison.

Where the United States stands on its vote right now is that Donald Trump has defeated all his rivals for the Republican nomination for President, and Hillary Clinton has an undefeatable lead, but Bernie Sanders won’t drop out of the race to hand it to her. This even though he can’t win the nomination anymore. 

It’s a campaign without a purpose. Sanders is just traveling to different states now as they hold their primaries, leading rallies and getting his supporters excited about what’s become a literally lost cause that refuses to die. The USA will either get its first female President or its first President-for-Life. The dream of the first Jewish President in 2017 is impossible now.

So the open question is why he continues to run. In the short form, Sanders has always been running an issues-oriented campaign. He ran to see if he could move the policy platform of the Democratic party along the lines of social democracy. He did this from his lifelong opposition to supply-favouring, new liberal ideas on economics that transformed politics in Europe and North America since the 1980s. 

His message resonated with so many people across the United States that he actually did have a good shot at winning the party nomination. And he adapted as best he could. But for a lot of reasons and causes, Sanders came up short. 

Yet he isn’t going away. This would seem silly in conventional ways of thinking about electoral politics. You run in an election to win an election. So once all possible routes to winning the election can no longer work, you drop out. 

But this reasoning completely misses what politics actually is. It’s not a horse race competing for office. That would just make politics an immensely expensive and complicated crowdsourced job application. 

We tend to think of political and social organizing more generally along the lines of election campaigns. As if you could only kick a real movement into gear if you had a clear, definable objective whose achievement would be an obvious sign of victory. You’d achieve your goal, then the movement would disperse and everyone would go home happy.

Reading Commonwealth, I feel like Antonio Negri was very in step with the times writing it. The book was published in 2009, and he identifies this idea of politics – clear goal, concrete steps to achieve it – as a seriously destructive distortion of reality. 

Why not both? Political activism is meant
to be fun. If it wasn't about joy, you may as
well just join the army.

This kind of mission and firm direction in a political movement implies that there has to be an authority underlying any kind of social action. A handbook from the central authority to explain what you’re doing, how what you’re doing relates to what everyone else is doing, and how what you’re doing contributes to achieving the overall goal.

And that’s a generous amount of shared information. Because the central directors of a political campaign don’t even need to tell their members that much if they can expect unquestioning obedience. Ours is not to reason why, etc, etc.

Just a couple of years after Commonwealth dropped, the Occupy movement blew up. And they faced a lot of the same criticisms. What’s the point of having a political movement if your goals – building a more equal, diverse, ecological sustainable society – were so general and vague that you’ll never know if you’re achieved them?

More than that, Occupy was also criticized for its incredible diversity. It often seemed as though every member of Occupy was part of a protest or its support structure for a different reason, a different purpose or goal. Without firm direction to achieve specific policy points, it was often said, the movement was useless at best, mutual masturbation at worst.

But think about it this way. Don’t you find it weird that people in a democratic society would say that you can only achieve your goals through unquestioning obedience to a small clique of campaign leaders? 

That doesn’t sound very democratic to me. Something else is going on here. . . . To be continued.

The Election Takes Care of Itself, Jamming, 17/01/2016

I hope, the forty-fifth and first Jewish President of the
United States of America.

A friend and colleague of mine, T-Boz, recently went to work for the Bernie Sanders campaign in New Hampshire, and I got into a Twitter conversation about it this week with another colleague, Steve Fuller.

Fuller’s tweets are available to anyone who cares to look back at my mentions. But if I can summarize his criticisms, he was concerned that Sanders’ idealism and relative radicalism in America’s political context would make him a reiteration of George McGovern.

I understand his concern, but I do think the situation is very different. Actually, if you consider Steve’s current home of the UK, I find more similarities between McGovern and Jeremy Corbyn.

McGovern, like Corbyn, was an insurgent candidate who achieved the highest position in his party on the strength of a popular movement. McGovern was the spokesperson for the movement against the war in Vietnam, and Corbyn is England’s spokesperson for the anti-austerity movement.

The mass media story is that Corbyn is “unelectable.” The Murdoch-controlled media* of Britain attacks him so frequently that it’s made his fairly tame social democratic policies so unpalatable to the general electorate that he may as well be a Stalinist. But that’s not Corbyn’s biggest problem, as far as I’m concerned.

* As well as the BBC, paralyzed with fear at the prospect of David Cameron’s looming and inevitable catastrophic cuts and radical rewriting of the company charter.

No, Corbyn’s biggest problem is that the British party system invests a huge amount of power over policy in the hands of MPs, and district associations have virtually no power to recall or even critique a sitting MP. And Labour's parliamentary leadership today, like the American Democrats in the 1970s, is schizophrenically split over a catastrophic war: Iraq.

Hilary Benn was the Labour Party's foreign affairs
opposition critic when he stood up and proudly
endorsed Conservative PM David Cameron's bombing
of Daesh in Syria. The Labour Party's leader, Jeremy
Corbyn, laid the party's position clearly: Labour was
against further barely discriminate bombing. Benn won
praise from Britain's conservative media, but a
demotion and probably a broken friendship from
Corbyn himself. Deservedly.

That’s why Hilary Benn openly denounced Corbyn on the floor of parliament last month, enthusiastically supporting the mass bombing of Syria, despite the huge amount of civilian casualties that would result. Most Labour MPs refuse to admit that the invasion of Iraq was wrong, even though their leader has always been against violent military intervention.

So what about Sanders? Well, Sanders’ messages – against Wall Street criminality, the corruption of lobbyist-greased electoral and legislative politics, war, racism, poverty, and economic inequality – genuinely resonate with many Americans.

And although the American mass media have long presumed Hillary Clinton to be the nominee, Sanders’ criticisms of her – that she’s too establishment, too indebted to Wall Street lobbying,** militarily hawkish, and inauthentic – resonate through America’s mainstream media, and have for a long time.

** Much like Barack Obama’s most important Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner, who was an apprentice to the top Wall Street investment firms and hedge fund entrepreneurs, and who designed the financial bailouts of Obama’s first term to protect large banks and bankers, leaving millions of ordinary homeowners underwater.

Sanders’ populism is why soft Donald Trump supporters lean more toward Sanders than Clinton among current swing voters. He, like Trump, is seen as a voice for ordinary people. Sanders has the advantage over Trump of policy proposals that are based in real economic and political solutions, and not scapegoating and racism.

I don’t consider “not being electable” to be a real criticism of a politician’s policies or ideas. It’s a way to dismiss them without engaging the ideas themselves, presuming that they’re too different from the country’s mainstream to attract any support at all.

There is no voice more perfectly suited for channelling
the frustrations of the American people than that of a
cranky, elderly Jewish man.

It presumes that a population is never open to supporting anything but slightly different takes on the status quo. It presumes that genuine political change isn’t possible. If you build a mass political movement first, a movement that reaches beyond its in-group, then the election will follow.

Aiming for electability alone is what doomed Canada’s New Democrats. Messaging that appealed to conservatives only attracted a small number of new supporters while turning away much of the base support to Justin Trudeau, who depicted himself as the candidate of genuine radical change.

But is Sanders a new McGovern? I don’t think so. For one thing, Nixon was no Trump. Nixon may have begun the GOP’s Southern Strategy of implicit race-baiting, but he never descended into demagoguery. Cruz has made a major plank of his platform attacks on the Environmental Protection Agency, a creation of Richard Nixon.

Trump, Cruz, and the Republican Establishment has thrown the racism, elitism, and violence of American conservatism into the light by demurring about nothing. What Nixon hid in euphemism, Trump and and the other Republican candidates now, and Mitt Romney in 2012, all say openly. 

The leaders of the conservative movement really do tell it like it is. And they do so in the context of a financial crisis that has massively hurt nearly everyone in the country.

In 1972, George McGovern was the spokesperson for
America's progressive social movements in the country's
party politics. But the public support of mass police
violence against anti-war protesters at that year's
Democratic National Convention showed that
Americans weren't ready to embrace such a movement.
At least, they weren't back then.

In the early 1970s, there were plenty of Americans distrustful of the period’s rebellious youth culture and in favour of the Vietnam War. And today, there are plenty of Americans who distrust modern youth culture, and who favour massive military intervention throughout the Middle East. 

But damn near every American knows somebody who went underwater on their mortgage a few years ago. Or they did themselves. That’s the message of Bernie Sanders: We can’t trust the people whose economic policies made that disaster happen and then paid off the criminal class of stockbrokers and hedge funds.

That’s also the difference between what made McGovern a failure in 1972 and will make Sanders a success in 2016. The American economy never collapsed in the mid-1960s, but it did in 2008.

All the Republicans think the policies that led to that collapse – low taxes for the wealthy, wages free to spiral down to the lowest common desperation, no real regulations on the banking sector – are actually how you build a successful economy. 

Hillary Clinton is deeply associated with Wall Street as a lobbying group, and is well-known as a politician who repays favours. Barack Obama’s first Treasury Secretary bailed out the economic fraudsters and criminals in the first place.

Bernie Sanders is the only one running for US President with sensible social democratic policies and a simple message to the plunder of the American people by an oligarch class: ENOUGH OF THIS SHIT!!!!

So many people agree with him about this already, across generations, social classes, religions, and cultures that they constitute a true mass movement. Once that’s your voter coalition, the election takes care of itself.