Bernie Sanders, Labor, Ideology, & the Future of American Politics
The Bernie Sanders presidential campaign, contrary to all expectation, has become the most important left insurgency in the United States in nearly half a century. A year ago, even his most optimistic supporters might have hoped that Sanders would enliven the presidential debates by challenging Hillary Clinton on issues of Wall Street power and big money corruption, and perhaps garner a quarter to a third of the primary vote. Instead, Sanders won primaries and caucuses in 23 states, and amassed over 12 million votes and nearly 43% of the pledged delegates. And all this while unapologetically and unabashedly proclaiming himself a “democratic socialist,” re-legitimizing a systemic critique of US capitalism for the first time since the one-two punch of Cold War reaction and neoliberal triumphalism froze the left out of mainstream American discourse two generations ago. The power of Big Banks, job-killing trade deals, ending the corrosive influence of big money in elections, eliminating private insurance companies from the health care system, and the merits of a “political revolution” became staples of prime-time presidential debates. Once stunning poll numbers now seem commonplace: 43% of Iowa caucus goers, including roughly a third of Clinton supporters, describing themselves as “socialists”; a New York Times poll late last year which said that 56% of Democratic primary voters had a “positive view of socialism;” and Sanders’ overwhelming support among young voters, by margins as high as 84% in Iowa and New Hampshire, but even reaching the low 60s in states like South Carolina, where he was otherwise crushed. Indeed, Sanders’ remarkable popularity among “millennials” prompted John Della Volpe, the director of a long-running Harvard University poll of young people, to tell the Washington Post that Sanders is “not moving a party to the left. He’s moving…the largest generation in the history of America…to the left.”[1] Something significant is definitely going on. [...]
Movements, Frances Fox Piven, has argued, do not move in straight lines. They ebb and flow, sputter and erupt, unpredictably. Five years on, we continue to live in the Occupy moment, and the breadth of Sanders’ appeal reveals that anger at the economic and political status quo seethes like a lava flow across the landscape. Until now, with the notable exceptions of the Fight for $15 and the intense mobilization against the Trans Pacific Partnership trade deal, labor has contributed relatively little to stoking the flames of insurgency. But it is out of precisely such moments that workers’ revolts acquire the force and legitimacy that enable new movements to be built. It is impossible to predict what lies ahead, but a withering labor movement must seize whatever opportunities now present themselves, thanks to Senator Bernie Sanders.
The Struggle Continues (video)
Could California flip for Bernie Sanders?
Nearly 2 Million Votes Are Still Uncounted
This is where things get a little confusing. Not all the votes have been counted yet. This PDF document by the California Secretary of State gives you a detailed look at the unprocessed ballots for the election per county, and which ones are provisional vs vote-by-mail vs “other.” In the entire state, 1.959 million ballots are still uncounted. 712,849 of these are provisional and 1.173 million are vote-by-mail. Many of the provisional ballots, and many of the vote-by-mail ballots, are NPP (No Party Preference) voters who support Sanders.
In many counties, same-day mail-in-ballots are just now being counted and provisional ballots haven’t even been looked at yet. Not all provisional ballots will be counted, unfortunately. But 2008 might be a good indicator of how many will. In 2008, less than 17 percent of the provisional ballots were rejected.
Clinton Supporters’ Newest Delusion about Bernie Sanders
Paul Krugman seized on the Achens/Bartels piece to construct a frankly bizarre taxonomy of Sanders supporters, from the naive young idiots to the outsider experts, all driven by their fervent resentment of the influence and esteem that people like Paul Krugman enjoy. Jonathan Chait, who had previously argued that Sanders was merely the candidate of good government, suggested that the way Clinton could win over Sanders supporters was to actually move right. [...]
What is needed, I think, is a retreat from endless parsing of The Data and a little common sense. Bernie Sanders has been for years the most left-wing member of the Senate, from the second-smallest state in the nation. He ran on extremely aggressive and easy-to-understand left-wing policy. In contrast to the other white man in the race, the young, handsome, and (before the primary started) much more famous Martin O'Malley, Sandersstubbornly embraces one of the most toxic labels in American politics. But he completely blew O'Malley out of the water, and gave Clinton a serious run for her money, on the strength of colossal margins among young people — most of whom have come of political age in the worst economic environment in 80 years.
This is an abbreviated edition of the BNR. LieparDestin posted today’s Progressive News Roundup here.
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