A mantra? “ Half
the country, after all, now lives in poverty. None of us live in freedom.”
By Chris Hedges
February 15, 2016
Bernie Sanders, who has attracted numerous young, white, college-educated supporters in his bid for the presidency, says he is creating a movement and promises a political revolution. This rhetoric is an updated version of the “change” promised by the 2008 campaign of Barack Obama and by Jesse Jackson’s earlier National Rainbow Coalition. Such Democratic electoral campaigns, at best, raise political consciousness. But they do not become movements or engender revolutions. They exist as long as election campaigns endure and then they vanish. Sanders’ campaign will be no different.
By Chris Hedges
February 15, 2016
Bernie Sanders, who has attracted numerous young, white, college-educated supporters in his bid for the presidency, says he is creating a movement and promises a political revolution. This rhetoric is an updated version of the “change” promised by the 2008 campaign of Barack Obama and by Jesse Jackson’s earlier National Rainbow Coalition. Such Democratic electoral campaigns, at best, raise political consciousness. But they do not become movements or engender revolutions. They exist as long as election campaigns endure and then they vanish. Sanders’ campaign will be no different.
No movement or political revolution will ever be built
within the confines of the Democratic Party. And the repeated failure of the
American left to grasp the duplicitous game being played by the political
elites has effectively neutered it as a political force. History, after all,
should count for something.
The Democrats, like the Republicans, have no interest in
genuine reform. They are wedded to corporate power. They are about appearance,
not substance. They speak in the language of democracy, even liberal reform and
populism, but doggedly block campaign finance reform and promote an array of
policies, including new trade agreements, that disempower workers. They rig the
elections, not only with money but also with so-called superdelegates—more than
700 delegates who are unbound among a total of more than 4,700 at the
Democratic convention. Sanders may have received 60 percent of the vote in New
Hampshire, but he came away with fewer of the state’s delegates than Clinton.
This is a harbinger of the campaign to come.
If Sanders is denied the nomination—the Clinton machine and
the Democratic Party establishment, along with their corporate puppet masters,
will use every dirty trick to ensure he loses—his so-called movement and
political revolution will evaporate. His mobilized base, as was true with the
Obama campaign, will be fossilized into donor and volunteer lists. The curtain
will come down with a thunderclap until the next election carnival.
The Democratic Party is a full partner in the corporate
state. Yet Sanders, while critical of Hillary Clinton’s exorbitant speaking
fees from firms such as Goldman Sachs, refuses to call out the party and—as
Robert Scheer pointed out in a column in October—the Clintons for their role as
handmaidens of Wall Street. For Sanders, it is a lie of omission, which is
still a lie. And it is a lie that makes the Vermont senator complicit in the
con game being played on the American electorate by the Democratic Party
establishment.
Do Sanders’ supporters believe they can wrest power from the
Democratic establishment and transform the party? Do they think the forces
where real power lies—the military-industrial complex, Wall Street, corporations,
the security and surveillance state—can be toppled by a Sanders campaign? Do
they think the Democratic Party will allow itself to be ruled by democratic
procedures? Do they not accept that with the destruction of organized labor and
anti-war, civil rights and progressive movements—a destruction often
orchestrated by security organs such as the FBI—the party has lurched so far to
the right that it has remade itself into the old Republican Party?
The elites use money, along with their control of the media,
the courts and legislatures, their armies of lobbyists and “think tanks,” to
invalidate the vote. We have undergone, as John Ralston Saul has written, a
corporate coup d’état. There are no institutions left within civil society that
can be accurately described as democratic. We do not live in a capitalist
democracy. We live in what the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls a
system of “inverted totalitarianism.”
In Europe, America’s Democratic Party would be a far-right
party. The Republican Party would be extremist. There is no liberal—much less
left or progressive—organized political class in the United States. The growth
of protofascists will be halted only when a movement on the left embraces an
unequivocal militancy to defend the rights of workers and move toward the
destruction of corporate power. As long as the left keeps surrendering to a
Democratic Party that mouths liberal values while serving corporate interests,
it will destroy itself and the values it claims to represent. It will stoke the
justifiable rage of the underclass, especially the white underclass, and
empower the most racist and retrograde political forces in the country. Fascism
thrives not only on despair, betrayal and anger but a bankrupt liberalism.
The political system, as many Sanders supporters are about
to discover, is immune to reform. The only effective resistance will be
achieved through acts of sustained, mass civil disobedience. The Democrats,
like the Republicans, have no intention of halting the assault on our civil
liberties, the expansion of imperial wars, the coddling of Wall Street, the
destruction of the ecosystem by the fossil fuel industry and the impoverishment
of workers. As long as the Democrats and the Republicans remain in power we are
doomed.
The Democratic establishment’s response to any internal
insurgency is to crush it, co-opt it and rewrite the rules to make a future
insurgency impossible. This was true in 1948 with Henry Wallace and in 1972
with George McGovern—two politicians who, unlike Sanders, took on the war
industry—and in the 1984 and 1988 insurgencies led by Jackson.
Corey Robin in Salon explained how the Clintons rose to
power on this reactionary agenda. The Clintons, and the Democratic
establishment, he wrote, repudiated the progressive agenda of the Jackson
campaign and used coded language, especially regarding law and order, to appeal
to the racism of white voters. The Clintons and the party mandarins ruthlessly
disenfranchised those Jackson had mobilized.
Sanders’ supporters can expect a similar reception. That
Hillary Clinton can run a campaign that defies her long and sordid political
record is one of the miracles of modern mass propaganda and a testament to the
effectiveness of our political theater. Sanders said that if he does not
receive the nomination he will support the party nominee; he will not be a
“spoiler.” If that happens, Sanders will become an obstacle to change. He will
recite the mantra of the “least worst.” He will become part of the Democratic
establishment’s campaign to neutralize the left.
Sanders is, in all but title, a Democrat. He is a member of
the Democratic caucus. He votes 98 percent of the time with the Democrats. He
routinely backs appropriations for imperial wars, the corporate scam of
Obamacare, wholesale surveillance and bloated defense budgets. He campaigned
for Bill Clinton in the 1992 presidential race and again in 1996—after Clinton
had rammed through the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), vastly
expanded the system of mass incarceration and destroyed welfare—and for John
Kerry in 2004. He called on Ralph Nader in 2004 to abandon his presidential
campaign. The Democrats recognize his value. They have long rewarded Sanders
for his role as a sheepherder.
Kshama Sawant and I privately asked Sanders at a New York
City event where we appeared with him the night before the 2014 climate march
why he would not run for president as an independent. “I don’t want to end up
like Ralph Nader,” he told us.
Sanders had a point. The Democratic power structure made a
quid pro quo arrangement with Sanders. It does not run a serious candidate
against him in Vermont for his U.S. Senate seat. Sanders, as part of this
Faustian deal, serves one of the main impediments to building a viable third
party in Vermont. If Sanders defies the Democratic Party he will be stripped of
his seniority in the Senate. He will lose his committee chairmanships. The
party machine will turn him, as it did Nader, into a pariah. It will push him
outside the political establishment. Sanders probably saw his answer as a
practical response to political reality. But it was also an admission of
cowardice. Nader paid a heavy price for his courage and his honesty, but he was
not a failure.
Sanders, I suspect, is acutely aware that the left is broken
and disorganized. The two parties have created innumerable obstacles to third
parties, from locking them out of the debates to challenging voter lists and
keeping them off the ballot. The Green Party is internally crippled by endemic
factionalism and dysfunction. It is dominated in many states by an older, white
demographic that is trapped in the nostalgia of the 1960s and narcissistically
self-referential.
I spoke three years ago to the sparsely attended state
gathering of the Green Party in New Jersey. I felt as if I was a character in
Mario Vargas Llosa’s novel “The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta.” In the novel,
Mayta, a naive idealist, endures the indignities of the tiny and irrelevant
warring sects of the Peruvian left. He is reduced to meeting in a garage with
seven self-described revolutionaries who make up the RWP(T)—the Revolutionary
Workers’ Party (Trotskyist)—a splinter group of the marginal Revolutionary
Worker’s Party. “Stacked against the walls,” Llosa writes, “were piles of
Workers Voice and handbills, manifestos and statements favoring strikes or
denouncing them which they had never got around to handing out.”
I am all for a revolution, a word Sanders likes to throw
around, but one that is truly socialist and destroys the corporate
establishment, including the Democratic Party. I am for a revolution that
demands the return of the rule of law, and not just for Wall Street, but those
who wage pre-emptive war, order the assassination of U.S. citizens, allow the military
to carry out domestic policing and then indefinitely hold citizens without due
process, who empower the wholesale surveillance of the citizenry by the
government. I am for a revolution that brings under strict civilian control the
military, the security and surveillance apparatus including the CIA, the FBI,
Homeland Security and police and drastically reduces their budgets and power. I
am for a revolution that abandons imperial expansion, especially in the Middle
East, and makes it impossible to profit from war. I am for a revolution that
nationalizes banks, the arms industry, energy companies and utilities, breaks
up monopolies, destroys the fossil fuel industry, funds the arts and public
broadcasting, provides full employment and free education including university
education, forgives all student debt, blocks bank repossessions and
foreclosures of homes, guarantees universal and free health care and provides a
living wage to those unable to work, especially single parents, the disabled
and the elderly. Half the country, after all, now lives in poverty. None of us
live in freedom.
This will be a long and desperate struggle. It will require
open confrontation. The billionaire class and corporate oligarchs cannot be
tamed. They must be overthrown. They will be overthrown in the streets, not in
a convention hall. Convention halls are where the left goes to die.
