by Lance Selfa
Even though Sanders advocated policy positions that are radical when compared to today’s neoliberalized and corrupted conventional wisdom, his campaign was actually quite conventional. It was, as were Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition campaigns of the 1980s before it, an electoral campaign waged inside one of the two main political parties of American capitalism. Campaign “insider” reports emerging near the end of the primary season noted that Sanders’s top command chose to spend much of its prodigious fundraising haul on expensive, old-school television ads rather than grassroots field organizing.16 If the Sanders campaign wasn’t willing (or able) to organize a “grassroots army” during its primary campaign, it’s unlikely that it will leave much of an infrastructure of activists behind.
Subsequent developments seemed to bear this out. When Sanders announced his continuing vehicle, Our Revolution, in August 2016, four key staffers quit in protest.17 They objected to Sanders’s choice of Jeff Weaver, his longtime campaign manager, as director of the organization. They also opposed the group’s tax status as a nonprofit that can accept large anonymous contributions. To them, this indicated that Our Revolution would be just another Democratic Party super PAC accepting unlimited and anonymous donations and funneling them into Democratic Party electoral campaigns rather than into grassroots organizing.
The announcement of Our Revolution followed a few weeks after Sanders rendered his greatest service to the Democratic Party. In the midst of its Philadelphia convention, when the first WikiLeaks revelations were exposing the DNC’s blatant favoritism toward Clinton, Sanders moved to quell a revolt of a minority of his pledged delegates on the convention floor. Some Sanders delegates chanted “no war” during a speech by former CIA director Leon Panetta, and a few hundred walked out of the convention. But Sanders stepped into his long-established role. Not only did he endorse Clinton, he actually moved to throw all of his delegates behind her nomination. This allowed Democratic leaders to tout unprecedented party unity, and saved Clinton the embarrassment of seeing how Sanders delegates really felt about her during the convention roll-call vote. Sanders, having performed these “sheepdog” duties, received fulsome praise from Clintonite operatives who had, only a few months earlier, been calling Sanders and his supporters racist, sexist, “privileged,” and the like.18
Television coverage of Sanders’s Clinton endorsement speech zoomed in on groups of young Sanders delegates shouting or weeping as Sanders threw his support behind someone he had rightly criticized as one of the worst representatives of the corrupt bipartisan Washington establishment. And while one could sympathize with the sense of betrayal some young Sandernistas may have felt, Sanders and his closest advisers were hardly babes in the woods. They knew what they were getting into, and they knew what would be expected of them.
After the Democratic convention, Sanders served as a Clinton surrogate, one of whose main tasks was to dissuade his supporters from supporting the Green Party’s Jill Stein for president. “When we’re talking about president of the United States, in my own personal view, this is not the time for a protest vote,” Sanders told the Washington Post. “This is [the] time to elect Hillary Clinton and then work after the election to mobilize millions of people to make sure she can be the most progressive president she can be.”19
In the long history of “insurgent” campaigns inside the Democratic Party—Eugene McCarthy’s run against LBJ in 1968, Jesse Jackson’s “Rainbow Coalition” runs in the 1980s, or Dennis Kucinich’s antiwar campaigns in the George W. Bush years—the challenger may win “hearts and minds” of the most committed Democratic partisans. But, in the end, they become loyal soldiers in helping to herd their supporters behind the establishment choice. As it was in the past, so it was in 2016. Only this time, the “insurgent” was a self-described socialist and (formerly) political independent who animated millions—only to deliver them over to the candidate social democratic scholar Adolph Reed Jr. dubbed a “lying, neoliberal warmonger.”20 Tragically, Sanders not only campaigned for Clinton but also promoted her as the standard-bearer of his platform.
Far from helping to popularize “progressive” issues in the general election, Sanders’s work to elect Clinton helped her to marginalize any commitments to them. For most of the general election campaign, Clinton tailored her appeals to “moderate” Republicans repelled by Trump’s vulgarity and worried that Trump’s election would damage the US image overseas. Needless to say, a strategy of wooing suburban Republicans didn’t foreground issues of class and racial inequality in the United States. So Sanders tagged along to assure Democratic “base” voters that Clinton really was committed to implementing “the most progressive Democratic platform in history.” Yet, Clinton hardly mentioned the platform or any issue besides Trump’s “fitness” to serve as president.21 And she still managed to lose to the weakest major party candidate in a generation.
The Price of Defending “Hollow Tenets”
Assuming power in 2009 as the economic crisis hit with full ferocity, the Democrats were destined to face a difficult situation. But they also had an opportunity because they were thrust into a position to reorder American politics in the face of obvious crises. As Aziz Rana explained the conjuncture:
At a moment when the country faced convulsive social crises, and more and more of [Obama’s] supporters called for a fundamental reconstruction of American institutions, Obama marshaled his personal story and oratorical gifts to defend hollow tenets: the righteousness of American primacy, the legitimacy of global market liberalism, the need for incremental reform, the danger of large-scale structural overhaul. The consequence—intensified by a virulent right—was that fundamental problems continued to fester and became harder to ignore: mass incarceration and structural racism, dramatic class disparities in power and opportunity, interventionism abroad, and national-security abuses at home.22
The price of Obama’s defense of these, in Rana’s words, “hollow tenets” and the Democrats’ “suspicion of politics formed through mass democratic mobilization” was demoralization and despair that led eventually to the Trump disaster.
An honest assessment of the Obama years would also note the myriad ways—from championing austerity politics, to education privatization, to building a machine that deported more than two million undocumented immigrants—paved the way for Trump’s policies. Obama and the Democratic Party—the so-called party of the people—managed to position themselves as the chief defenders of a status quo that had led millions of Americans to despair. However cynically, the GOP managed to channel public outrage with that status quo into two “wave” midterm elections and an improbable presidential victory in 2016.
In the summer of 2009, when liberal commentators were waxing on about the potential of Obama to become another transformative president in the mold of Franklin Roosevelt, the writer Kevin Baker aired the unorthodox view that Obama was more comparable to Herbert Hoover, the Republican Roosevelt defeated in 1932.
Much like Hoover, “Barack Obama is a man attempting to realize a stirring new vision of his society without cutting himself free from the dogmas of the past—without accepting the inevitable conflict. Like Hoover, he is bound to fail.” Obama’s penchant to reach for compromise and “bipartisanship” was exactly the opposite of what the dire situation he inherited required—and what the American populace was ready for. Obama’s first term, Baker wrote, offered “one of those rare moments in history when the radical becomes pragmatic, when deliberation and compromise foster disas-ter.”23 In the wake of the election of Trump, Baker’s analysis looks more prescient than ever.
BLACK POLITICS IN THE TRUMP ERA
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Not so long ago, when Barack Obama became president of the United States, the national conversation in the country was whether or not the United States was going to become a postracial society. Indeed, in December 2008, Forbes magazine ran an overex-uberant editorial that claimed, “Racism in America is over.”
Nearly e
ight and a half years later, we could not be further from that conversation. Not only is racism not over in the United States, but an unabashed racist sits at the country’s helm. Donald Trump ran a campaign fueled on racism, anti-Muslim bigotry, sexism, and rabid nationalism. It is not hyperbole to say that white supremacy sits at the heart of the American government. Not only did Donald Trump choose as his chief strategist Steve Bannon, the former editor of the race-baiting, hate-mongering Breitbart News, which Bannon bragged was a platform for the so-called “altright”—simply a new name for the old term white supremacists—but there is also Stephen Miller, the architect of the first Muslim travel ban, who was a protégé of white supremacist Richard Spencer when they were both students at Duke University. As a candidate, Trump received the enthusiastic endorsement of white racists like David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan. Indeed, Trump’s entire posture as a “law and order” candidate developed in response to the growth of the Black Lives Matter movement. Some of his supporters have referred to the Black Lives Matter movement and affiliated organizations as “terrorists.”
With the election of Donald Trump, not only have the campaign promises of a bigot and sexual predator been brought to life, but Trump’s rise has also imbued the confidence of white supremacists and other racists who have had to operate at the margins of our society. They have been emboldened to come out into the open, spewing racism and instigating violence against nonwhite people. The growth of anti-Muslim organizations has tripled since Trump began his campaign for president in 2015 and continued to rise in the opening months of his presidency. Hate crimes and violence have occurred across the country, from the desecration of Jewish cemeteries to the burning of mosques and violent attacks on immigrants. When Srinivas Kuchibhotla, an Indian immigrant living in Kansas, was shot and murdered by a white racist, the shooter initially asked, “What visa are you here on?” before yelling “Get out of my country!” Donald Trump’s election has unleashed the beasts of racism and reaction.
Despite the so-called populist rhetoric of Trump during the campaign and his fake concern for the plight of “working-class white people,” his cabinet choices—an array of billionaires, campaign donors, and wholly unqualified individuals—betray an agenda intended to gut the living standards of ordinary and working-class people across this country, while continuing to line the pockets of the rich.
The already anemic and fragile remnants of social welfare and public services, intended to protect the general public from the ravages of the free market status quo, will be further shredded. Trump has put a fox in every henhouse with regards to the individuals he has chosen to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Justice, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the Department of Education, to name only the most egregious examples. These individuals question the very necessity of the agencies they have been tasked with overseeing—creating a recipe for either inaction or ineptitude. This unbridled effort to “deconstruct the administrative state,” as Steve Bannon has termed it, will have a disproportionate impact on the lives of Black people who disproportionately rely on public services and regulations. This is where the real harm of a Trump administration can be measured. It is not just his racist and dangerous rhetoric, but this threat to further weaken public institutions by starving them of desperately needed human and financial resources. It will also continue the perilous slide of the Black middle class, many of whom rely on government jobs for employment. The promises to “shrink” government will mean a rise in unemployment for Black women, for example.
Perhaps the greatest threat associated with gutting federal agencies, however, is the impact on the quality of life for African Americans. For example, the threats to dismantle and defund the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will be devastating for Black families who are overexposed to hazardous and toxic living environments. Environmental racism created the conditions for the lead-poisoned water of Flint, Michigan, and the lead-infested housing across Baltimore. In real terms, this means that Black children are twice as likely to have asthma as white children. It means that nearly half of Latino-majority communities live in counties that do not meet EPA air quality standards. Trump’s planned budget cuts to the EPA will wipe out the organization’s already flawed and insufficient plans to protect communities at risk of environmental poisoning.
The same story could be relayed about the attacks on public education. In the major metropolitan areas across this country, Black and brown children disproportionately rely on public schools as their source of education. All of the efforts to redistribute public dollars from public schools into charter schools and vouchers for private schools will come at the expense of public schools, where the majority of the students, nationally, are Black and brown.
All of these attacks on public institutions are what fuel the righteous fear and revulsion of Trump. They also animate the urgency of the budding movement of resistance to the dangerous administration. But the horrors and challenges presented by the Trump administration should not obscure the very important discussion of how the administration came into power. Our understanding of how we came to this moment in history impacts and guides what we do next. This also means locating that which connects the Trump administration to the past while allowing for what sets his administration apart.
After all, if we assign Trump and his band of rogues, racists, and reactionaries an exceptional or unprecedented place in American history, then we cannot even make sense of the most recent past. Plainly stated, if things were so great before Trump, why did Ferguson, Missouri, erupt in the summer of 2014; why did Baltimore explode eight months later; why, indeed, did a movement called Black Lives Matter arise during a time of the greatest concentration of Black political power in American history?
You cannot, in fact, understand the emergence of Trump without taking account of this recent history and the failure of the liberal establishment to provide a real alternative to the reactionary populism and isolationism of Trump. As wholly opposite in demeanor, aptitude, and temperament as Barack Obama and Donald Trump are, we cannot actually understand the rise of Trump without taking account of the failure of Obama to deliver on his promises of hope and change.
The multiple media narratives locating Trump’s rise solely in his ability to connect with the dispossessed white working class is incomplete at best and disingenuous and exaggerated at worst—the most unfortunate example of this being Van Jones’s suggestion that the election results were proof of a “whitelash,” or the idea that white voters voted for Trump as revenge for the role African Americans played in the election of Barack Obama. The first problem with this narrative, aside from the fact that tens of millions of white people voted for Obama twice, is that it promotes a mistaken story that African Americans somehow have benefited from the presidency of Barack Obama, and that those supposed benefits have come at the expense of ordinary white people. The genuine fear and disgust of Trump has contributed to intense revisionism and mythology of Barack Obama’s record as president. While we can all recognize the power of symbolism and even subscribe to the notion that there was meaning in the election of an African American to the highest office in a nation born and built on the backs of enslaved Black labor, we should not let that acknowledgment cloud our ability to think clearly and tell the truth.
Obama’s presidency was not a gift to African Americans; instead, it represented the painful continuity of racism, discrimination, and inequality that has always been at the center of Black life in America. Eight years later, Black unemployment remains twice the rate of whites; eight years later, 38 percent of Black children continue to live below the official poverty line; eight years later, a shocking 55 percent of Black workers—mostly Black women—make under fifteen dollars an hour. It was precisely the inability of the Obama administration to improve the conditions of ordinary Black people that gave rise to the Black Lives Matter movement.
Trump’s rise is a story about who did not vote more than who did vote. Tru
mp won with fewer voters than Republican candidate Mitt Romney had in 2012. The 2016 presidential election was about the tens of millions of Americans who did not bother to vote at all. There are 238 million eligible voters in the United States and of that number, only 60 million voted for Trump—and, even among that number, 17 percent of people who voted for him said he was unfit to be president. This doesn’t mean that racism was not a key and effective part of Trump’s electoral strategy. It clearly was. But we must also look more deeply into what could motivate millions of people to sit out the election in the first place. The media and the political establishment often describe the decision not to vote as apathy. It is an easy description that requires little analysis of what problems exist within our two-party system that create so little confidence and so much indifference, even when it appears that so much is at stake.
It is precisely the lack of real choices that underlines the problem. American voters are regularly told to “hold their noses” when voting, or we describe our vote as the choice between “a lesser of two evils.” But within the narrow space of choosing between one party of millionaires over another party of millionaires, the key questions facing ordinary people in this country go unanswered. In the narrow choices constrained between the Democrats and the Republicans, what go unanswered are the questions of who will stop police brutality; who will stop the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids in immigrant communities; who will stop the wars and occupations that feed the racism and bigotry of Islamaphobia; who will be for free education, universal healthcare, and an actual living wage—it all goes unanswered.
