One might think that now that Bernie Sanders has entered the campaign for President, those on the Left would be gleefully supporting him. His platform addresses the most important issues that the Left has been agonizing over for decades, including wealth inequality, government corruption, campaign finance reform and global climate change. His proposed solutions, rather than the timid half-measures of Obama and Hillary Clinton, are boldly progressive to a point where the mainstream press (when they deign to mention his candidacy at all) have labeled them extremist. So you would think that the American Left would be jumping in to work for a Sanders’ Presidency.
If you think that, you are not well-acquainted with the American Left.
Before Sanders announced his candidacy, there was a large Facebook group that was encouraging Sanders to run for President as an Independent or Green Party candidate. Some members of that page estimated the number at around ten thousand before Bernie announced. The group page was called Bernie Sanders for President 2016. The members fully supported Bernie as a politician with integrity who understood the problems we are facing and would fight to solve them while being a voice for the people.
And then Sanders announced his intention to run for President—as a Democrat. That is when the shit hit the fan.
The same group of Independents, Greens and Socialists that had supported a Sanders campaign as an Independent, could not bring themselves to support a Sanders campaign as a Democrat. They left the Facebook group in droves, including the administrator, abandoning the group for whoever chose to take it over. [As it turns out, the group was taken over by someone who is believed by many to be defrauding people via a “Bernie” SuperPAC. So I guess it wasn’t a total loss for the far Left which is now vocally anti-Bernie Sanders and has been attacking him ever since.]
Hence we come to the subject of my ramblings—CounterPunch, and their continuous attempts to smear Bernie Sanders as not being Left enough. There is a virtual drumbeat of anti-Bernie rhetoric published almost daily. The one that caught my eye was a recent article by Joshua Frank attacking Sanders as…guess what…not Left enough.
Those of you who aren’t familiar with the far Left might find it educational to peruse some of the articles there which tend to paint Bernie Sanders as a war hawk, minion of the Democratic Party, Zionist, Anti-Semitic (Palestinians are Semites, too) sell-out. And while you are perusing the articles, it might strike you to wonder how in the world they come up with their conclusions.
So, in case you haven’t come across some of the attacks on Bernie Sanders from the Left, let me acquaint you with the rhetoric and the reasoning (what little there is of it).
• Bernie Sanders is not trying to build a movement. Progressives would be better off working to reinvigorate the antiwar movement and Occupy than spending time and money on Bernie’s hollow campaign. (A direct quote)
• Since Bernie has already said that he would endorse Hillary Clinton if he loses the nomination, and refuses to attack Hillary Clinton on her neo-liberal agenda, that makes him a sell-out to the Democratic Party. They also cite the fact that he refuses to run attack ads as evidence that he is actually in the race to help Hillary Clinton.
• Bernie Sanders made a secret deal with the Democrats in 1990 which makes him some sort of double-naught spy against the “True Left.” Bernie is the DNC’s dupe (again an exact quote).
• “Because any direct challenges need to build outside the party,” Bernie is helping to elect a Democrat to the White House and pulling unsuspecting progressives into the party.
• Bernie has to drop off the Democratic ticket and “run as an Independent right now…hold Hillary accountable until the bitter end…work to break through the Commission on Presidential Debates and force his way onto the stage…” or else his candidacy is completely illegitimate.
• Bernie is a militarist warhawk. Because, they claim, Bernie Sanders “supported the ugly war on Kosovo, the invasion of Afghanistan, funding for the endless Iraq disaster as well as the losing and misguided War on Terror” he will continue the neoliberal policies of endless war like every Democrat or Republican President since Reagan.
• Bernie is a Zionist and unapologetic AIPAC puppet because Mondoweiss says. Because he voted for things that the extremist Left believes he should not have and was not vocal enough against Israel’s attack on Gaza last summer. They link to an entry on the “informed comment” website by Juan Cole that they apparently believe supports their theory, but the entry does not link any sources for the information it provides in regards to Sander’s alleged Israel policy.
Their main source of “evidence” that Bernie Sanders is an anti-Palestinian, Pro-Isreal warhawk is the video of a town hall exchange between Sanders and activists from CodePink that we have all seen. In most of the media coverage of that exchange, it was described as an exchange between Sanders and his constituents. If you weren’t a close follower of anti-war movements, and/or an astute reader of many sources, you would never know that the people that confronted Sanders at that Town Hall were activists that went there with the express intent to disrupt and confront. That is not the picture that the media painted, and CounterPunch, though they describe themselves as “Moral Oxygen in a corrupt Empire” seem to have no qualm about leaving out the facts either.
The article that they link to in order to support their claims links back to the Juan Cole entry (which, remember, doesn’t link to any source in its assertions of where Bernie stands on Israel), which asserts Sanders’ stance as a “yeoman defense of Israel” (whatever the hell that is supposed to mean) during the attack on Gaza, which assertion is based upon the assertion that “Sanders formed part of the “unanimous consent” to a resolution to support Israel in its attack.” All assertions based upon assertions without solid evidence to back anything up.
What is not made clear in this article is the process by which these resolutions achieve “unanimous consent.” A resolution is introduced on the floor of the Senate and whoever is there votes up or down. If everyone that is THERE votes “yea” then the resolution is said to have achieved unanimous consent. Bernie Sanders, along with 13 Democratic Senators, was not present and did not vote. But that has not stopped detractors on the Left from claiming that Sanders supported the resolution.
As to the argument that Bernie is somehow a Democratic operative, in cahoots with the Hillary campaign to draw in progressives only to “deliver us” to Hillary when the chips are down, it illustrative of the cynical and misanthropic worldview of the Extreme Left. It assumes that people who support Sanders would a) follow any order he gave, even if it went against our values; or b) support someone who is the complete antithesis of the person that they originally supported. This argument assumes the absolute worst about people, including Bernie Sanders and all of his followers. And it is, again, not based on any facts, but on opinion and a cynical worldview.
But what about the fact that Bernie says he would endorse Clinton if he were to lose the nomination, they would ask. They hold this “fact” up as evidence of his collusion. But this does not even BEGIN to support the argument that they are making. Sanders will endorse Clinton if she gets the nomination DOES NOT EQUAL Sanders has sold out to the Democrats. Just because there are a group of people who believe it does, does not make a fact out of their subjective opinion.
And the whole idea that he can only be “legitimate” in their eyes as an Independent candidate is an argument that actually DEFIES logic. There has been no successful third-party candidate in any Presidential election in my lifetime. And why is that? It is because ours is a two-party system. The rules are created for a two-party system. The framework of campaigns and elections is set up for two parties –to the REAL EXCLUSION of any third party. Third party candidates have difficulty getting on the ballot in every state, and even if they could, there is a solid belief in this country that third-party candidates cannot win. That belief has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. John Anderson, Ralph Nader and Jill Stein have all run principled campaigns that got them and their supporters nowhere. There are real obstacles that make it impossible for a third-party candidate to win an election.
Yet, disregarding all possible lessons learned by past experience, the far Left has convinced itself that if they could get enough people to support a third party, they could build it and it could break the deadlock of the two corrupt parties (the duopoly). You should also keep in mind that they do not make any distinctions at all between the two parties. Since they are both corrupt (a point with which I would agree) they are exactly the same (a point with which I must disagree). And so anything that comes into contact with them is corrupt. Ergo, the fact that Sanders is running as a Democrat magically transforms him into a Democrat simultaneously tainting his character and his candidacy. It is therefore impossible for him to be a legitimate candidate in their eyes because he isn’t running as an Independent. They are not swayed by the fact that he is not a Democrat.
Their logic completely fails to take into consideration that Sanders would have absolutely no chance to win the campaign as an Independent. He would not be allowed to take part in the debates, he would have no credibility with a huge chunk of voters, he would have even less visibility in the media than he has now and he would have made exactly ZERO impact in the bargain. What the far Left is saying then, is that they would prefer a principled stand with limited visibility over the possibility of real power to make real change.
The foundation for many of the arguments made by the far Left is the defeatist idea that Sanders can't win, which runs like a toxic stream throughout. It is the self-fulfilling prophecy of defeatists that are afraid to take a chance, afraid to trust or have just been burned one too many times. And the craziest part of their rationale winds up being that Sanders has less of a chance at winning as a Democrat than he would have had running as an Independent. Their repetition of the “Sanders can’t win” rhetoric is antithetical to their “Sanders should have run as an Independent” argument.
The same baseless arguments are made over and over again, as if by repeating them, they will somehow gain a semblance of truth or reason. It makes perfect sense to the purists on the Left; but when you subject it to scrutiny, it falls apart. So they just keep repeating the same biased analysis, the same groundless opinion over and over again.
That is also when the insults begin.
Because Sanders supporters cannot seem to grasp what the far Left believes to be their “superior” reasoning, they are forced to paint supporters as mindless BernieBots in these arguments. Supporters must either be incapable of reason or have simply refused to use their ability to reason. So because the far Left can’t make good arguments using sound evidence, they now have to convince their readers (and themselves) that the tens of thousands of Bernie supporters are mindless followers—sheep or robots. (Ironically, Hillary supporters are already employing this rhetoric too, and seem to have started it first.) Or worse, we begin to see the return of the “savior” and “true believers” rhetoric that was aimed at Obama supporters in the 2008 election.
Despite the fact that Sanders continually calls for citizens to be active and be ready to remain active; despite his repetition of the statement “This campaign is not about me” at every single event that he does, and despite his calls for a Political Revolution, the far Left is attempting to resurrect the savior rhetoric in an effort to twist the campaign into a Cult of Personality that it clearly is not. Strangely enough, I have encountered this in the mainstream media and Hillary supporters in the comment sections thereof. It is a dismissal of supporters as loons or fanatics and of Sanders as some sort of quixotic, faux-savior. It is an attempt to degrade and disrespect not only the candidate but anyone that supports him. How ironic that the far Left now employs the same pathetic devices to undermine Sanders as the establishment that they profess to despise. It is almost like they are working with them.
My personal opinion is that these far Left arguments against the Sanders’ candidacy are mainly personal opinion stemming from personal problems perhaps created by bad experiences over years of fighting the system. They can be characterized as largely puritanical, cynical and defeatist. Sadly, just when there is the slightest possibility of a successful way to fight the system, they've all given up because they are defeated already.
[NOTE: There is an excellent refutation of many of these arguments here. I strongly recommend the read.]
This diary entry was originally posted at SandersWarren2016