Richard McLachlan: Bernie Sanders - Who Dares Wins

“I have been to the revolution before. It ain't happening.” (Jann Wenner, Rolling Stone editor.)

One of the more galling features of working in the New Zealand government was an abrupt and faux-authoritative response to new ideas put forward in meetings - “Oh, that won’t work”. The defenceless fetus of an interesting exchange, of a possibly fruitful discussion on policy matters, was aborted right there - in meeting after meeting. The realisation that these gatherings were a waste of time (and taxpayers’ money) was verified repeatedly by this timorous dictum. The stultifying effect of being told how the future is going to be (or not be) by someone who has no more idea than you do is hard to exaggerate.

And yet I can imagine the same response rolling down the years: Perhaps we should stop keeping slaves (‘Oh no, that’ll never work - think of the damage to the economy’), or “Don’t you think women should have the vote? (‘I support their idealism of course, but most women don’t want to vote) or Let’s stop people smoking in bars and other public places (‘Oh, no-one will ever agree to that) - or Let’s raise the minimum wage to $15 (It’ll destroy businesses - the economy again). And so on.

This past Wednesday, Rolling Stone magazine stamped the Clinton campaign with the boomer generation’s rock’n roll imprimatur. The editor Jann Wenner, in a cogent but not especially persuasive article, endorsed Hillary as the Joan of Arc of this current debacle. There is an almost unbearable tension here that I think will only increase over the coming months – between massive desire for change on the one hand, and fear of it on the other. The strong conservative impulse exists even in the face of increasingly serious warnings from reputable sources about economic and eco-system collapse. And I’m only talking about Democrats here.

I find myself trying to imagine being among the millions of voters who are younger than my own children, part of a national movement, with a politician they can finally believe in, with a consistent message expressing a vision sufficiently compelling for some to leave their hard-won jobs to work for Sanders’ nomination. Only to be told, “Oh, that won’t work” by some ‘adult’ waving his counter-cultural credentials and telling them “it is not enough to be a candidate of anger”.

Then in a descent from the trivializing to the patronizing, Wenner points out that “It is intoxicating to be a part of great hopes and dreams.” Does he think Ms Clinton needs his help against Sanders? - that she doesn’t have sufficient political and financial Establishment weight and behind her already?

Matt Taibbi, also from Rolling Stone, argues against his boss in a strong follow-up article that listening to young people is exactly what the US should be doing right now. He describes in some detail the sticky web that binds Clinton to the very establishment that is responsible for so much of what is wrong in the US right now. Taibbi describes Clinton and other Democrats as “bending so far back to preserve what they believe is their claim on the middle that they end up plainly in the wrong.”

Perhaps eight years of the middle is enough for now. Perhaps Obama’s successor needs to be something more than a steady hand on the tiller with willingness to re-friend Netanyahu. Maybe right now it’s time to look to Texan Jim Hightower. Maybe in the middle of this particular road there’s only “yellow stripes and dead armadillos.” Let’s at least have the discussion and give credence to Hillary’s opposition.

But I don’t want to dwell on Hillary’s faults or give inadvertent weight to what sometimes starts to look like misogyny. To my mind she is a high quality centrist candidate, if that is what you think is called for – and Wenner clearly does. But young voters, the ones for whom we baby-boomers can find no plausible justification for how badly our age cohort screwed things up, will make a future based on their own judgment. They don’t need a 70 year-old public figure telling Democrat voters his heart is with Sanders but Clinton is the only safe pair of hands. And he’s saying this before the primaries are even half way through – just as economic inequality is getting a decent public airing in the US.

Bernie Sanders’ announcement of his candidacy was quickly followed by endorsement from the Occupy movement, the people who brought us the ‘We are the 99 percent’ and ‘Feel the Bern’ memes and, more importantly, began to re-imagine the scope of participatory democracy. My only real contact with Occupy was in the immediate wake of Hurricane Sandy, when I saw the efforts of the New York City municipal authorities and the Red Cross completely eclipsed by the organizational finesse of Occupy in the devastated Rockaway peninsula. Any idea that the Sanders movement is peopled by political naïfs unaware that, to quote Wenner, “politics is a rough game”, will reveal itself as an establishment delusion soon enough.

Wenner’s argument is that Clinton is a seasoned fighter who knows how to ‘get things done’ and that a vote for Sanders is somehow a ‘protest vote’. Saturday’s decisive victory over Clinton in the Washington, Alaska, and Hawaii primaries shows more than just a protest vote. If people are queuing up for hours across the country to get into public meetings and then voting for substantive change, for a new dealer, as Noam Chomsky calls Sanders, surely the protest justifies closer scrutiny.

Of course it will be difficult to get anything past Congress. Obama’s Republican opponents’ sole platform was to make him a one-term President, and to block every attempt at legislation regardless. It’s not hard to argue that was because he is a black man with the gall to govern. Is there any reason to think those opponents won’t see a woman in the same light? Will Clinton really have more success than Obama or Sanders, in getting important legislation past Congress?

There is a risk, certainly, that Sanders does not have the deep influence, the networks of allegiance of the Clinton machine – and may fail to effect the sort of change that his constituency desires. But here’s another risk; millions of newly engaged, in some cases first-time voters, turn away from a process that makes no place for them, or they hold their noses and vote for incremental changes to a status quo they distrust - at best. With a recipe like that, we can witness the birth of political cynicism all over again.

To date and over the months to come, the digital technology firms that keep the US at the forefront of global innovation, will be lauded for their commitment to risk-taking, to disruptive innovation, to ‘thinking outside the box’ etc. Yet in the political sphere, the people to whom the future REALLY matters are being told, even by the sitting President, that it’s time to get serious and stay inside the square. Line up and vote with the party machine.

But surely success through holding to the status quo is predicated on some idea of what the political future might look like – and currently I don’t think there is any such idea. People are now starting to examine the ramifications for Republicanism should there be a Trump victory – in a sense there already is one, given the numbers in the Republican base that support him.

Conservative commentator David Brooks is already looking beyond Trump to a conservatism reborn. Ted Cruz, universally loathed on both sides of Congress, may be a more or a less disruptive influence than before. I suggest patrolling and securing Muslim neighborhoods puts him in the former category.

Clinton’s ‘effectiveness’, her ability to succeed where Obama failed, will surely depend on there being a framework of basic rationality in Washington. Neither a defeated Republican party dismembering itself in the House and Senate, nor a rampaging orange id in the White House looks like a promising framework for ‘getting things done’.

And in this environment the 80 percent of young voters who support Sanders are being asked to vote for the very person they really don’t want – just because she’s a Democrat? Given that thirty three percent of Sanders’ supporters have said they won’t vote for Hillary, shouldn’t efforts to influence their actions be, at the very least, saved for after the primaries and focused on getting them to vote at all?

This seems to be the moment for political revolution, or a New Deal, or even just a re-examination of what most say is an unworkable Washington status quo. Here is a constituency with a clear problem to address (even for Wenner, extreme inequality is “the defining issue of our times”), a candidate for whom that issue is a central and decades-old platform, and a passionate movement that could reanimate American democracy.

What better time to attempt a political revolution than when defeated Republicans are heading for the wilderness to lick their wounds and reconstruct themselves – post a Trump or Cruz electoral defeat. Assuming of course that they are defeated. Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept and Nathan Robinson of Current Affairs both argue strongly that Sanders is the nominee most likely able to defeat Trump, not Clinton.)

Or do we pretend that things aren’t really that different, set ourselves a low bar, assume that it’s just a matter of deploying a tough Congressional street fighter, and then as they used to say in the Ministry, and probably still do, achieve success by avoiding failure.

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