Cheer Up, Progressives: You’re Winning, Even if Bernie Lost

I don’t know if my progressive friends fully understand what just happened in Philadelphia. The left won. To argue otherwise misunderstands how politics works, and confuses a stubbed toe for a tragic journey. Imagine you make the wonderful discovery that you’re strong enough to climb Everest in a day, and mourning you’re not at the peak by lunchtime. If Bernie and friends got this far, they can go much farther.

Blasphemy, you say. There’s no truth to it, you say. Hillary is in the saddle, and neoliberalism rides. This is the common appraisal of defensive pessimism, and it is understandable: It is disheartening that Bernie didn’t win. But in the longer view and in the short view, this was a victory. Not in the anemic “A symbolic and moral victory,” or the pathetic “You should see the other guy,” or in the pitiful “Dad totally sent me to bed but I feel like I made my point.” God, no. None of those. That’s not what I’m talking about.

What happened in Philadelphia was not a consolation prize. When I say win, I mean win. I mean in the actual smoky-backroom system of power, the Earth has shifted. The power to sell and barter, to threaten and reward. Real power.

Writing about the Democratic National Convention wasn’t nearly as fun as the RNC, for obvious reasons. But what I saw was more telling. In an article titled “Roll call of states at Democrats’ convention takes on new meaning,” we read the following:

Rival factions within delegations peacefully shared the microphone; in a typical interchange, a Sanders delegate from Hawaii cast 19 votes for “the leader of our revolution, which shall continue.” And U.S. Sen. Brian Schatz cast 15 votes for Clinton, “the next president of the United States.”

Think of that. Some people see politics as zero sum game. “Hillary wins, I lose. Bernie wins, I win.” But it’s so much more complicated than that.

I grew up in the second most-conservative city in America: Lubbock, Texas. I’ve been a liberal Democrat since I could remember knowing what politics was. In West Texas, I learned two facts early on:

1) You keep the faith. You always keep the faith.
2) Purity is for angels and Dems who live in blue states. Not here.

These are not mutually exclusive beliefs. Being outnumbered shreds political illusions. I’ve never had a pure election in my life. Not on any level, not even with Obama in ‘08. Those of you who grew up red in red, or blue in blue, or just discovered the game, have the luxury of spotlessness. I don’t, and neither does the country. As Bernie told his delegates, “This is the real world that we live in.”

“Politics ain’t beanbag,” Mr. Dooley said, and it isn’t church either. I lost a little and won a lot in Philadelphia. Let me explain why.

FIRST, HILLARY

What makes neoliberalism so popular among the elite and so frustrating to everyone else is its strange lack of nutritional content: it’s an ideology of exhaustion. There have been other belief systems which claimed to be the endpoint of history: Communism, fascism, divine right, Pokemonism, etc. Neoliberalism also claimed to be the last ideology, but in a curious way—it was the ideology everyone turned to after every other position had been “proven” wrong.

That’s what is so deceptive about it: it’s a theory of government that pretends not to be a theory: “Welp, everything else doesn’t work, this is what’s left over. Cut social programs and let the market figure it all out for the next century.” Neoliberalism is a credo built for complacency. But the same blindness which make it obnoxious also guarantees its adherents aren’t really that faithful. You can’t trust a belief which spends its time telling you trust is dangerous. By nature, neoliberals are an amphibious crew, mutable. They tend to go where the wind blows. And what I saw on the campaign trail and in Philly tells me a new front is moving in.

In her piece about What Hillary Really Meant, Alexandra Petri has Clinton say these lines:

I am (twitch) glad we have moved the party left. So glad. Do you need me to become a socialist? I can oppose the TPP. I can oppose whatever you would like. I’ll evolve like I’m a Galapagos finch being observed by Charles Darwin. I’ve evolved before, on gay marriage, on that crime bill. What can I say? I believe in science.

I’ve been watching Hillary since I was twelve. My guess is, Petri is right. If it couldn’t be Bernie, if it couldn’t be an actual progressive, then let it be someone whose ideology is fungible, who will be susceptible to influence from the party. Centrism can be turned to bright advantage by a movement with enough gravitational force and dank memes. Look at what Bernie has done with his campaign. His mass of supporters warped the space-time continuum of Democratic politics.

The moment is critical, because Bernie knows what I know: The pieces of power are there, waiting to be picked up. If progressives can get Obama’s coalition, and the white working class comes on board, that’s it, show’s over, that’s all the marbles. With the exception of the South, that’s the New Deal Coalition put back together. If that happens, progressivism can cripple the far right for a generation, but more importantly — much more importantly – they can send neoliberalism back to hell, where it belongs. Rahm Emanuel, Paul Ryan, Larry Summers, the Koch Brothers, all of them go down the flaming way of Icarus. This time, they’re the ones who get outsourced.

The Secretary and I are both fans of Hamilton. She quoted it in her acceptance speech. It was a nice touch. I can do that too:

Our poorest citizens, our farmers, live ration to ration
As Wall Street robs ‘em blind in search of chips to cash in …
We won’t be invisible.
We won’t be denied.
Still
It must be nice, it must be nice to have
Washington on your side

Left to her own devices, Clinton will govern from the center, or wherever the hell Twitter thinks the center is. And that won’t do, for a very simple reason, and that reason isn’t Trump. Trump is not the issue. Ask his supporters why they support the Donald, and you’ll hear words like immigrants, Muslims, greatness, but what this comes down to is, “He says what everyone else is thinking.” And what does that mean?

Trump, the tangerine purse full of Internet rumors. Trump, the embodiment of everything inside the soul of Florida Man. Trump, Trump, Trump. Trump is loud and Trump makes good TV but Trump isn’t the issue. Trump isn’t the one to worry about. It’s the one that comes after Trump, the candidate who uses Donald’s message but has discipline, self-awareness, and the backing of what’s left of the machine, all the stuff the Master Builder lacks. That’s the one to watch. Maybe in four years, maybe in eight. But they will come. Maybe it’ll be a competent, scary nationalist. Maybe it’ll be an emissary from Koch Industries. Maybe it’ll be someone who is actually clever in his loathing for Muslims and Mexicans, someone who can hide their plans better.

That’s what happens if the forces Bernie picked up on aren’t brought inside the tent, if Goldman Sachs goes right back to work at the Treasury in January 2017. Nothing changes, nothing is resolved, the pressure builds for the next four years, and surprise, somebody else gets to own the future. My friend X, who supports Trump, put it this way: “I know all of the bad stuff about him. But when you get down to it, Jason, Trump is the one who will turn the page.” So “He says” turns out to really mean the opposite: “He listens.”

The Orangeman has been trying his damnedest, in his blind, hungover drug-dog way, to find the roots of a new worker’s party. It doesn’t take a lot of theory to figure out people are mad. You don’t even have to believe in anything. You just need to be a barker who can read a crowd, and that’s Trump’s greatest skill, not the real estate stuff. The man has apocalypse fatigue down cold. As Matt Taibbi writes, “large numbers of working-class voters, particularly white working-class voters, long ago abandoned the Democratic Party in favor of the Republicans.”

The GOP leaned on white working-class support, even though its policies were the opposite of blue collar concerns. Hard-hat voters bought the trickle-down shill for years, says Taibbi, “But Trump was their way of telling their leaders they’re done waiting. They want their piece of the pie now, even if it means unleashing the Trumpinator to get it.” They went to the GOP and then Trump because the Dems sold them for a mess of pottage, out of the memory of McGovern’s loss and a thirst for soft money.

Try to lead from the center, and someone else gets to turn the page.

But we can change that.

If Bernie’s Long March continues, Hillary will go where the party goes; that’s where she’s spent her life. If, if, the Sanders coalition continues, a Clinton victory doesn’t have to be the end of the ride.

DONKEY’S YEARS

And where, exactly, is the Democratic Party, the party of the late Wasserman-Schultz? Good question. There were lots of moments where the people on stage were doing Reagan cosplay, and we were all tremendously dazzled by the five million or so generals brought on stage. Michael Bloomberg, a walking homunculus compost heap of money and prole-measuring who was elected mayor of New York, proved to the world that America’s Frankenstein science knows no laws of God or man.

But in the spirit of full disclosure, when I was actually watching the DNC, I was on a continuous positive upswing. Emotionally it was somewhere between hearing the last copy of Eat, Pray, Love had burned and inhaling the aroma of fresh cedar. As a man who loves to laugh, the Democratic National Convention was a pure tragedy, a Burning Man for Volvo drivers – military boosterism and competency bromides. But as a citizen and fanboy of the old, crazy-ass, fratricidal corn-liquor-drinking Democratic Party, I was delighted by the speakers: they had Michelle, Warren, and Bernie in one night, and then Diamond Joe and Barry the next. It was a murderer’s row of grown-ups compared with the Republican Convention’s post-factual horde of all-mutant all stars.

My attention wasn’t really on them, though. I kept watching the hall. The arena was filled with signs denouncing the TPP and shirts telling me Black Lives Mattered. A contingent of Bernie supporters kept interrupting the speeches. There were close-ups on tear-stained faces and college kids in Robin Hood hats.

I knew these people. Not personally, but I knew the type. I’d seen them when I covered the Green Party’s Rally for Nader in the UIC Pavilion. Chicago. October 2000. That generation had been burned by eight years of Greenspan and dot-com blandishments, and were ready to follow Ralph into the wilderness.

Now, sixteen years later, this was a new generation, but without the bitterness I’d seen in Chicago. They were inside the party this time, and with numbers enough to interrupt speakers, to dictate terms to the Democratic Party platform. Back then, the Pavilion had been full of resignation and a more courteous version of revenge. But this summer, Philadelphia had a different air over it. Hope. Not the slick vintage peddled by Obama eight years prior. This was an alternative air of longing. Not acceptance. Anticipation.

Naturally, right after Hillary was officially nominated, the mourning process for the Prophet Sanders began. I understand this. I supported Bernie. I wish he had won. But this story — “we wuz robbed ” — is just wrong.

The Green Papers say Clinton won 16.8 million votes to 13.2 million for Sanders. There were 2814 Clinton delegates and 1893 Sanders delegates. Even without superdelegates, the totals would have been 2205 Clinton and 1846 Sanders. This disproves two popular stories I heard echoing out of the DNC. First, that Bernie’s supporters were universally loud, ridiculous goons—on Daily Kos, the depravity of the Sanderistas was a piece of holy writ. Second, the delusion that Clinton had hoaxed the election from the Lorax of Vermont.

Given the amount of delegates, had all of the Sanders people been booing, business would have been impossible to carry out. And if all of the Sanders delegates had been strong-armed out of the convention, as posters on social media claimed, there would have been a riot. It couldn’t have been done.

WHY THIS MATTERS

Those are pleasant fables. Let me tell you a real story: the political history of the United States in the start of the 20th century was the story of three big movements: The innovations of progressivism in the beginning, the countervailing rise of conservatism in the fifties and sixties, and the ostracizing of the left throughout. Although centrist parties adopted planks of progressivism, the quashing of anything that vaguely resembled the left parties in Europe was a constant; you could set your watch by it. When I say “left,” I’m not talking about Bolsheviks – I mean the garden-variety social democrat parties, like the British Labour Party. Parties who wanted pensions and worker’s laws.

The powers that be in America have always been terrified of anything vaguely left, and bitterly opposed anything that came near the word “socialist” for the last hundred-and-fifty years. The fact that American workers never had their own party explains why we have one of the most violent labor histories of any country in the world. In Europe, home of social democratic parties since the 19th century, most nations had child labor laws on the books by 1890. America had to wait until 1918 and 1922 to pass child labor laws, and when those were struck down, it took Congress until 1938 to pass the Fair Labor Standards Act, which was declared constitutional in 1941, three years before my father was born.

I cannot communicate this emphatically enough – in America, having a candidate who calls himself a socialist actually challenging a centrist establishment Democrat is a very, very big deal. No matter that Bernie isn’t an actual socialist, but a New Deal Democrat. This kind of thing doesn’t happen.

Let me repeat that. In 2016, a man calling himself a socialist could come very close from taking the nomination from a long-established, well-funded, immensely powerful heir-in-waiting. I don’t think people understand how commonplace the neoliberal assumptions are among the elite. You could have watched the national news media from sunup to sundown during the years 1992-2015 and precious few of the Very Serious People would have hinted that there was anything fundamentally, existentially wrong about our system of dividing the spoils.

That’s why this is important. My entire political life — about twenty-six years now — there’s been no real left alternative that was a real national threat to the elite consensus. There is now.

BUT BERNIE LOST ON NATIONAL TV, RIGHT?

Not exactly.

People who have never played sports imagine being an athlete is like this: Once you decide to make an effort, suddenly there’s a montage, and then a big game where you try extra hard, and that’s it, you win. But it’s never like that, where the protagonist unexpectedly has superior performance at the moment of triumph.

The truth is far more boring. What happens is that athletes in practice perform superbly a thousand times, ten thousand times — and then when the moment comes, at the Olympics or in the Finals, it’s just one more practice session, albeit in public and for high stakes. Incidentally, this is why it’s so rare to genuinely “discover” any great talent in any field: It’s almost never the case that an amazing musician or writer or artist or drug kingpin is totally unknown. Usually they’re succeeding on a smaller scale and then they get kicked up to the major leagues.

Sure, every once in a while, miracles happen, and a player nails a three-pointer they could never replicate, or the goalie has a bad day, or the American hockey team lucks out. But most of the time, it’s a long, slow climb to repetitive excellence. You spent years in Switzerland hitting tennis balls and one day you’re the Roger Federer the world knows.

Similarly, people who don’t spend most of their time thinking about elections think politics is like a Disney movie: We make a big speech in the end, the crowd turns our way, and that’s it. No.

The Civil Rights Act did not arrive when King walked across Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. That was important, but the Civil Rights Movement was the result of a decades of struggle, and specifically years of agitation in Dixie and organizing with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. It took years to do this. Years. When Katie Couric, like every other journalist, congratulated the pilot Chesley Sullenberg on his masterful water landing of U.S. Airways Flight 1549, Sullenberg replied, “One way of looking at this might be that for 42 years, I’ve been making small, regular deposits in this bank of experience, education and training. And on January 15 the balance was sufficient so that I could make a very large withdrawal.”

Politics is the same. Most of us are oblivious to the part of the game which is not summed up by televised speeches. A huge portion of what goes missing is the give-and-take of the political art. Cable news sells the moment of boiling and forgets all the kettle-watching.

It wasn’t always like this. We used to think more about Congress than we did the White House or the Court. Time was, American schoolchildren learned the names of the great members of the Senate: more people knew the names Clay and Webster than Fillmore or Van Buren. But the country changed, and all of the focus of our attention fell upon the President.

If you judge a party, politician, or movement by their capacity to capture the Executive Branch, if that’s your only standard, then you’re setting yourself up for disappointment, because the Presidents have usually been moderate white men from large states. Studying them is a poor way to understand the politics of our country. I can stare at Warren Harding’s bland Ohio face all day long and not read anything about the Battle of Blair Mountain, a labor strike and the largest uprising since the Civil War. It happened during his term.

We remember political history as the biography of great men and women, but this isn’t truth, just shorthand. My hero, Teddy Roosevelt, signed progressive legislation into law, and deserves credit for it. But there was an army of reformers pushing him forward. They had built a coalition stretching back decades; there had been progressive mayors and councilmen, Senators and Governors, before they found an ally in the Presidency.

Four years before TR became Vice President, Bill McKinley beat Democrat William Jennings Bryan, America’s best hope for change. At that moment, some of the reformers became convinced the movement was doomed: Vernon Parrington, a progressive intellectual historian, wrote an unfinished book chapter titled “William Jennings Bryan and the Last Battle.”

They didn’t see that the defeat of one man didn’t matter; as long as they kept up the fight, the dawn was still destined to arrive. Roosevelt signed the laws. He hadn’t even been their candidate, but he understood what was required. Curious thing about the tide — it comes in anyway. “It is remarkable that in so many great wars it has been the defeated who have won,” wrote Chesterton, adding that we may apply this insight to the:

epic of Republican war in the eighteenth century to which we Liberals owe our political creed. The French Revolution ended in defeat: the kings came back across a carpet of dead at Waterloo. The Revolution had lost its last battle; but it had gained its first object. It had cut a chasm. The world has never been the same since. No one after that has ever been able to treat the poor merely as a pavement. These jewels of God, the poor, are still treated as mere stones of the street; but as stones that may sometimes fly.

The fact is Sanders succeeded. Shallow observers claimed Bernie had failed, because he did not win the nomination. The truth is, Bernie is not a sellout, a dupe, or a martyr, and neither are his followers. Bernie is a political pro who made the best deal given the circumstances. He got the platform, Clinton got the throne.

If the only thing you think about is the Oval Office, then yeah, Bernie failed. But the White House is one office and four or eight years. In terms of pushing the party left — the Democratic Party, at the national, state, and local level — in terms of the ultimate goal, he was wildly successful. After years of neoliberal power, there is a no-kidding Left inside the party again. Some of us have been fighting for this for years.

THE ELECTORATE IS SHIFTING

Political events in our world tend to happen in parallel, especially between America and its Hogwarts-hiding older brother, the United Kingdom. Thatcher and Reagan climbed to power at about the same time, 1979 and 1981. Clinton became President in 1993 and Blair slithered into the Prime Ministership by 1997. Analysts have made much of the Tory Theresa May as a harbinger to Hillary’s own ascent.

I suggest a better analogue exists between our own Bernie “I Prefer Shouting” Sanders and Britain’s incorruptible lefty grandpa Jeremy Corbyn, who recently captured the Labour Party back from the insufferable financial-market-fetishizing Nineties Blairites. Despite Corbyn’s total inability at Machiavellian politicking – the old beardo prefers to garden — he beat a recent leadership challenge from the neoliberals in Labour. Corbyn held onto his position mostly because the rank-and-file believed in him, and yearned for an actual party again, after years serving as an appendage of the banks. To quote Phyllis “Queen of Darkness” Schlafly, they wanted a choice, not an echo.

It happened there. It’ll happen here. As long as I’ve been observing politics, clawing at the Clintons was equivalent to flicking matches at the sun: you got singed close at hand while the big fire burned on, untouched. Hell, the entire Republican party tried for years. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t topple them. You want to know their combined electoral defeats? Bill lost the Congressional race to Hammerschmidt in ‘74, lost the Governorship to Frank White in ’80, due more to his own incompetence than anything else. Misplaced’s a more accurate term. Hillary lost the nomination to Obama. And that’s it. Three elections in forty-two years. Obama beat them, but Obama had eloquence, charisma, youth, a great story, and the ruin of Bush and Iraq to build on. And, as it turned out, Obama wasn’t that liberal either.

It was the same old story. Not once, but over and over again, the left tried to take down the neoliberal heart of the Democratic Party, and failed. We saw it with Nader, with Kucinich. Year after year of delusional true believers convincing themselves this would be the season of rising.

This time? A hoarse, crusty old guy from a tiny New England state who wasn’t even in the party, a man doubling for a gigantic, homeless, suit-wearing bird — a half-groomed man who could have been a caricature of a Fifties leftist – this man, without Obama’s advantages, came within an arm’s-length of scuttling the Clintons, the most powerful and wealthy Democratic machine in a generation, in a race that Bill and Hillary had been planning for a decade. The moment I knew Bernie had impacted on the landscape was when people began hocking Etsy dolls of him. Grumpy leftists generally don’t incarnate in yarn. This one did.

The Prophet Sanders is not even the whole narrative. In the modern age, independent leftists have tended to do well with one audience and one audience alone — white cosmopolitan liberals. But Bernie’s backers cut across all demographic boundaries, and resonated with people below sixty to a shocking degree. That is the real story. A friend of mine, Michael Tanner Hunt, a Bernie supporter who is also from Lubbock, wrote to me that “There is something complex going on there. I can’t count on my fingers how many Trump supporters have told me they would have backed Bernie. It is a deep river running.” There are a dozen reasons for the Sanders moment – the collapse of 2008, the discrediting of neoliberal thought, the Iraq War, the greying of the Boomers, the rise of the millennials, the fading of Obama – but the time is ripe.

As I write this, a trade agreement with billions and billions of dollars backing it, with huge corporations and mighty states pushing for it, operating under the blessing of the Oval Office, is unlikely to pass. To say this moment is surprising is to understate the matter.

WHAT’S NEXT

Regardless of what happens this November, the Bernie movement goes on. Its success won’t come from a single Sorkin moment but from countless potlucks in Midwestern living rooms, from meetings in the South and open houses in Phoenix, in Tyler, Lawton, Tallahassee, Laramie, and Harlem, and in all the other places you wouldn’t think to find Sanders supporters. That’s the only way this works.

The revolution won’t be like it is in the popular imagination. It will happen like this: Bernie supporters doing the work of coalition-building, driving the neoliberals from the temple month after month, year after year. The real game is keeping the movement together when it is not an election year, and when Bernie isn’t available as the figurehead. But I think this will not be as hard as is imagined. This isn’t a bull session in a dorm room: the movement has a chance to become a power in the land.

Progressives will not win in one night. The conservatives conquered the GOP over many years, and in 1976 their guy, Reagan, lost to Ford. But people at the convention realized they’d made the wrong choice, and four years later, he won the Presidency.

If the progressives are to win, they need to learn from the right and make this a long march. We won’t drive the moneychangers out in one day, or one year, but this is the start. Let us be of good cheer, and we shall overcome.