№38 / SUMMER 2020 R E A S O N I N R E VO LT J AC O B I N M AG .

C O M

AFTER
BERNIE
“The long, dark night of the end
of history has to be grasped as an
enormous opportunity. The very
oppressive pervasiveness of capi-
talist realism means that even
glimmers of alternative politi-
cal and economic possibilities can
have a disproportionately great
effect. The tiniest event can tear a
hole in the grey curtain of reaction
which has marked the horizons of
possibility under capitalist realism.
From a situation in which nothing
can happen, suddenly anything is
possible again.”

— Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism:

Is There No Alternative? (200
009)
Citoyens
E D I TO R & P U B L I S H E R R E S E A RC H E R
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Features

55 MATT KARP 74 JARED ABBOTT 90 RONAN BURTENSHAW

Bernie Sanders’s The Two Paths How the Labour

Five-Year War of Democratic Party Lost
Socialism: the Chance of
Coalition and a Lifetime
Confrontation
Contributors
cover art by
Zohar Lazar
Jared Abbott is a PhD candidate in
the Department of Government at
Harvard University.
Seth Ackerman is Jacobin's
executive editor.
Marilyn Arwood was a field
organizer for the Bernie
Sanders 2020 campaign, and is
presently the chair of the
Philadelphia chapter of the
Democratic Socialists of America.
Phoebe Braithwaite is a PhD
student at Harvard University
working on Stuart Hall and
British Cultural Studies.
David Broder is Jacobin’s Europe
editor and a historian of French
and Italian communism.
Ronan Burtenshaw is the editor
of Tribune.
Meagan Day is a staff writer at
Jacobin. She is the coauthor
of Bigger than Bernie: How We
Go from the Sanders Campaign
to Democratic Socialism.
Daniel Finn is the features editor
at Jacobin. He is the author of
One Man’s Terrorist: A Political
History of the IRA.
Briahna Joy Gray is an American
political commentator, attorney,
and political consultant who
served as the National Press
Secretary for the Bernie Sanders
2020 presidential campaign.
Anton Jäger is a doctoral student
at the University of Cambridge,
working on the history of populism
in the United States.
Cedric Johnson is associate
professor of African American
studies and political science
at the University of Illinois at
Chicago and editor of The
Neoliberal Deluge: Hurricane
Katrina, Late Capitalism and
the Remaking of New Orleans.
Matt Karp is an associate professor
of history at Princeton University
and a Jacobin contributing editor.
He is the author of This Vast
Southern Empire: Slaveholders
at the Helm of American
Foreign Policy.
Dominik A. Leusder is an economist
and writer. He is currently a
graduate student at the London
School of Economics.
Alex Niven is lecturer in English
literature at Newcastle University
and editor-at-large at Repeater
Books. His latest book is
New Model Island: How to Build
a Radical Culture Beyond the
Idea of England.
Hannah Proctor is a Wellcome
Trust Research Fellow at the
University of Strathclyde in
Glasgow, interested in histories
and theories of radical psychiatry.
Ari Rabin-Havt served as deputy
campaign manager on Bernie
Sanders’s 2020 presidential
campaign and deputy chief of staff
in his Senate office.
David Sirota is editor-at-large
at Jacobin. He edits the Too Much
Information newsletter and
previously served as a senior
adviser and speechwriter on Bernie
Sanders's 2020 presidential
campaign.
Jeff Weaver is a political strategist
who served as campaign manager
for the Bernie Sanders 2016
presidential campaign and an
advisor for the Bernie Sanders
2020 presidential campaign.
Departments

FRONT MATTERS MEANS OF DEDUCTION READING MATERIEL

08 12 32 35 39 43
party lines the soapbox vulgar uneven & canon fodder field notes
empiricist combined
We Won’t Letters The Prophet The Enemy
Forget the The Social How We Lost of Inequality Within
Questions Democracy Michigan
Bernie Asked Index

13 14 52
the soapbox struggle session canon fodder
Internet Speaks The Oral Reading
History of Victor Serge
the Bernie from the
Campaign Depths
of Defeat

CULTURAL CAPITAL THE TUMBREL LEFTOVERS

101 104 113 116 123 126

bass & beyond a girondins worst estate popular front popular front
superstructure boundary
Did Americans We Don’t Live We Knocked Let’s Talk
Don’t Look Where Have Want a in Weimar on a Million About South
Back in Anger All the Political Germany Doors for Carolina
Political Revolution? 45,000 Votes
Footballers
Gone?

109 132
ways of seeing means and ends
Mark Fisher’s The Victory
Popular to Come
Modernism
8 № 37  /  SPRING 2020
Front Matters
GLORY DAYS

PANDEMIC POLITICS 9
 FRONT MATTERS
PARTY LINES
We Won’t Forget
the Questions
Bernie Asked
After half a decade of Bernie
Sanders, the genie doesn’t go back
in the bottle.
I didn’t know I was a socialist until
Bernie Sanders’s first presidential
campaign. I knew I was repulsed
by exploitation and oppression, and
I even understood that capitalism
perpetuated much of the injustice I
saw around me. But I had never
even once considered the possibility
that I myself was a socialist. No one
had ever asked.
It was Bernie Sanders, eventually,
who asked. He asked: Why should
10 № 38  /  SUMMER 2020
BY MEAGAN DAY
ILLUSTRATION BY
DANIEL HASKETT
you tolerate a system that privileges
the profit-making activities of a
tiny minority over the humanity of
the vast majority? He asked: Are
you willing to fight for someone you
don’t know? He asked: Which side
are you on?
These questions cut right to the
core of what it means to even have a
society: what we believe to be the
purpose of the institutions we’ve
erected to facilitate our coexistence,
on whose terms they do and should
operate, and to what ends. These
are the questions that have always
animated the socialist movement.
They are also the questions that
Bernie himself grappled with as a
student when he first experienced
a political awakening as a member
of the Young People’s Socialist
League. “It helped me put two and
two together, in my mind,” Sanders
recalled of his time in the YPSL.
AFTER BERNIE
“We don’t like poverty, we don’t
like racism, we don’t like war, we
don’t like exploitation. What do
they all have in common?... What
does wealth and power mean? How
does it influence politics?”
Bernie encountered an institution
dedicated to exploring those ques-
tions just in time, as the socialist
movement was poised for decades
of obscurity. During those dark
decades, the questions were not
11
 PARTY LINES
routinely posed in politics or pop-
ular culture. They were, in effect,
already answered.
This is what the cultural theorist
Mark Fisher has called “capitalist
realism,” the naturalization of the
reign of profit and the total foreclo-
sure on other possibilities, even in
the imagination. It’s best exempli-
fied by the words of Margaret
Thatcher, who understood the deep
unpopularity of her neoliberal
agenda of austerity and privatiza-
tion, but who leveled, “I believe
people accept there is no real
alternative.”
It is exemplified, too, by the acci-
dental slogan of the Joe Biden
campaign, words of reassurance
that he spoke to a private audience
of wealthy donors: “Nothing will
fundamentally change.” Biden rose
to prominence in this period of
capitalist realism, and he belongs to
it. His nomination has naturally left
many crestfallen, fearing that the
Democratic Party has successfully
stamped out the promise of the
movement that coalesced around
Bernie Sanders.
12 № 38  /  SUMMER 2020
We wanted the presidency, and we
didn’t get it. Even so, Bernie Sand-
ers’s two national campaigns have
left an indelible impression on the
American political imagination.
They asked the unasked questions
once again, and it’s impossible, now
that tens or even hundreds of mil-
lions of people have been put on the
spot to answer them, for our polit-
ical landscape to simply revert to its
previous configuration.
Tens of thousands of people have
answered these questions by
becoming organized socialists.
Workers around the country have
answered these questions by
becoming union activists and taking
workplace action without a union at
their back. People who never cared
about a political campaign before in
their lives answered these questions
by becoming not just voters but
volunteers. Where they will apply
their newfound confidence and
skills next is anybody’s guess. Some
of them have already become work-
place organizers and party builders,
particularly in the Democratic
Socialists of America. A few will no
doubt run for office themselves.

Since Bernie ended his campaign,
unprecedented numbers have filled
the streets amid a global health
crisis to demand justice for George
Floyd and Breonna Taylor, two
black Americans murdered by
police officers. According to an
analysis published in the Wash-
ington Post, this is the broadest
protest movement in the history of
the United States, taking place in
more cities, towns, and suburbs
than any before it. Its chief slogan is
“Black Lives Matter,” and its cen-
tral demand is to defund the police
and invest instead in public safety
alternatives as well as other neces-
sary and sorely lacking social
programs.
This is not Bernie’s movement, nor
can it simply be described as the
next phase of his movement. It has
its own character, its own influen-
tial figures, and its own politics. But
on the streets, in the masked
crowds, demanding racial equality
and the reversal of austerity, are
many whose political consciousness
was elevated and transformed by or
against the backdrop of the Sanders
AFTER BERNIE
We Won’t Forget the Questions Bernie Asked
campaigns. They have quickly
found themselves acting in a dif-
ferent capacity, but their presence
at these protests reveals a conti-
nuity in their devotion to collective
struggle — a commitment to being
the “us” in “Not Me, Us.” They are
politicized and here to stay.
We are living through one of the
most volatile situations in modern
political history, marked by a pan-
demic, mass unemployment, and
intense social unrest. Nobody
knows what happens now. But after
half a decade of Bernie Sanders in
the spotlight, forcing the nation to
entertain the notion that our society
has not reached the final stage of its
evolution, the genie doesn’t go back
in the bottle.
There will be many more struggles
to come for democracy, equality,
and human freedom. And from this
point onward, wherever such strug-
gles take place, we will find among
the ranks of the resisters those who
chose their side during these last
five years. They heard Bernie
Sanders ask: Will you fight for
someone you don’t know? And their
answer was yes.
13
 FRONT MATTERS
THE SOAPBOX
Letters
Send us your deepest thoughts —
we’ll try to publish them.
On “Health Care Heroes”
I am a first-year internal medicine resident in New
York City, working on the front lines since the
beginning of this pandemic.
People cheer us for putting our lives on the line, but
in reality, we don’t have much choice. We don’t
voluntarily come into work everyday knowing we will
be unprotected. We risk our lives, or we risk our
livelihoods.
We need to redirect our focus from idolizing
martyrdom to policies that guarantee the protection
and safety of all. The fact of the matter is, nobody
wants to be a hero right now. We just want to live to
see another day.
– Zaki Azam, New York, NY
14 № 38  /  SUMMER 2020
LETTERS@JACOBINMAG.COM
East Harlem’s Socialist Past
I came across your magazine while researching the
socialist congressman Vito Marcantonio. My
grandmother’s family came from Italian Harlem, and
one relative worked for Mayor Fiorello La Guardia,
Dominic Felitti.
Uncle Mimi, as we called him, would sometimes
discuss Marcantonio with my dad. They would say he
was a good guy, just a little “too left.” I knew he was
for civil rights and that he was a suspected communist
during the McCarthy era.
Anyway, thanks for writing about him [“New York’s
Last Socialist Congressperson” by Benjamin Serby],
and I loved the photo of him with Paul Robeson and
W. E. B. Du Bois. He was AOC before AOC.
– Claudia Tedesco-Colmer, Los Angeles, CA
Credit Where Credit’s Due
Let’s be fair here, John Bolton
has always been known first and
foremost for the ridiculous walrus
stache. At least have the common
courtesy to mention that before
bringing up the fact that he’s been
one of the early 21st century’s
biggest warmongers.
— Travelling Curmudgeon
Stay Tuned for the Summer 2036
Issue of Jacobin
Social democrats betraying the
working class and undermining
their struggle in the pursuit
of shallow electoralism? What a
completely unprecedented
and unexpected turn of events.
— Alexander Goldhill,
London, England
Spawn Campers for Socialism
Just remember that gamergaters
are a small minority and that the
poor working conditions of games
developers are major issues. The
4chan dwellers can stay and rot.
Plus you can point out big issues
with loot boxes, games as service,
and pay to win aspects of games
and you’ll always find a larger
audience.
— Ralph Long, Columbus, OH
Internet Speaks
It was another fine quarter in the
comments section.
Too Bad AVALANCHE Are
Ultra-Left Adventurists
Final Fantasy 7 was formative in
my move to the left.
— Kathyrn Till, Peekskill, NY
Woke Capitalism to the Rescue
I was just thinking about the “Join
the Conversation” Kylie Jenner
advertisement. If only we could
dispatch cans of Pepsi to all in
these troubled times.
— Bill Zeiser, Detroit, MI
AFTER BERNIE
Say “No” to Essentialism
Sartre! One of the Frenchest
thinkers of all time. We salute
him!
— Alex Roberts, Paris, France
We Need a National Health
Service
I’ve been a bedside RN for over
25 years. My career has been a
horror story. From the anti-labor
environment you work in to
watching people get jacked by the
profit driven system. This virus
will open the eyes of many. Sadly,
the system will probably win.
— Rich Barber, Philadelphia, PA
15
 FRONT MATTERS
STRUGGLE SESSION
The Oral
History
of the Bernie
Campaign
Four key figures in Bernie
Sanders’s quest for the
White House on what really
happened.
Joining the Revolution
Jeff Weaver (JW) I got thrown
out of school for protesting against
apartheid in 1986. So I went back
to rural Vermont, where I was
from. I discovered that the
progressive mayor of Burlington
was running for governor. With
no electoral experience, I was
made the county coordinator in
the county I lived in in Vermont.
It should have been a big warning
to me about the campaign, but I
was overjoyed. I met Bernie not
long after at a dairy festival that I
staffed with him, holding a sign
and handing out buttons to
16
BRIAHNA JOY GRAY
ARI RABIN-HAVT
DAVID SIROTA
JEFF WEAVER
ILLUSTRATION BY
DANIEL HASKETT
people. He invited me to work in
Burlington two days a week, which
turned into seven days a week,
twenty-four hours a day. And the
rest is history.
David Sirota (DS) I met Bernie
in 1999. I applied for a job — back
then, you didn’t know who you
were applying to. I remember that
I got a call from Jeff Weaver after
I sent my résumé in. He said, “It’s
Congressman Bernie Sanders’s
office.” I didn’t know who he
was — or certainly wasn’t very
familiar with him. I remember
some moment where it was like,
“Oh, that’s the socialist guy.”
№ 38  /  SUMMER 2020
Ari Rabin-Havt (ARH) My first
contact with Bernie was not with
Bernie, but with Bernie’s world. It
was in ’06, when I was working for
Harry Reid. I was obviously
excited when Jim Jeffords retired,
and Reid and [Chuck] Schumer
quickly coalesced around Bernie
as the preferred Senate candidate
in Vermont. I fantasized to my
colleagues about Bernie
filibustering — what it would be
like when he would no longer
be limited to one minute but get
to spend nine hours speaking!
Briahna Joy Gray (BJG)
I met Bernie when I covered an
event for the Intercept — his
Martin Luther King Day speech in
Jackson, Mississippi, and in
Memphis, Tennessee. I was
invited to do it off the record, to
travel with him between those
places, and I traveled with him in
the car and had an off-the-record
conversation. It was the first time
I met him and got to know
him — though he’s exactly the
THE PARTY WE WANT 9
 STRUGGLE SESSION
same in person. There’s literally
no difference other than, you
know, he’ll plop down on a sofa
more casually and loosen his tie,
take his jacket off, maybe use
language that’s a little bit more
colorful ...
ARH I always viewed my work
for John Kerry, Harry Reid, and
others as a kind of training ground
for when I could work for an
ultimate fantasy candidate. And
that was Bernie Sanders, a
candidate who actually fulfilled
the vast majority of the agenda
that I personally believe in.
DS I wish my foundational story
with Bernie was more of a
lifelong-dream, movie-scripted
kind of thing, where I always
wanted to work with Bernie.
Actually, the night before I took
the job, I almost turned it down
because I was afraid that — and
you have to remember, this was
the late ’90s — I was afraid that
going to work for a self-described
socialist would mean getting
blacklisted for the rest of my life in
politics.
JW I became Bernie’s driver and
constant companion, his “guy
Friday,” and he got 14 percent of
the vote in a three-way race
against a liberal Democrat
incumbent and a moderate
Republican. So, in the traditional
metric of “did you win,” [his
gubernatorial campaign] did not
go well. But he had a strong base
of support in the working-class
parts of Burlington, where he was
still mayor at the time. But he
also did disproportionately well in
the northern parts of Vermont,
18
the more rural parts of Vermont.
Bernie was incredibly popular
with French Canadian folks living
in northern Vermont.
I remember distinctly being at
a place with Bernie called Saint
Anne’s Shrine, which is a religious
shrine in the islands between New
York and Vermont. We went to
the cafeteria at Saint Anne’s
Shrine, and it was an old-style
cafeteria, with metal rails where
you run your tray down and
shelves of food, the Jell-Os with
the whipped cream on it, the
cellophane on top. It was
everything you’d think of in an
old-style cafeteria. It was staffed
by a lovely group of French
Canadian grandmothers, much
like my own. When we were
in there, Bernie Sanders was not
hugely known, but they were
literally, and I mean literally,
crawling through the food to get
to shake hands with Bernie
Sanders. It really was a powerful
demonstration of the way he could
connect with ethnic communities
that have faced oppression and
economic disadvantage.
ARH On the Kerry campaign, I
saw Democrats being scared. It
was a carryover from the post-9/11
period, where Democrats were
just fearful and didn’t want to
fight and didn’t have the moral
fortitude. It wasn’t ideological. It
didn’t have to do with economic
progressivism. It didn’t have to do
with an issue difference. It had to
do with the fact that they were so
scared of taking on people and
fighting.
DS It was such an eye-opening
experience. It was very much a
№ 38  /  SUMMER 2020
congressional office that — you’re
in the foxhole. You’re behind
enemy lines and surrounded by
the enemy on all sides. You don’t
know exactly who the hell your
allies are. Sometimes your best
allies are right-wing Republicans
on certain issues, and the
Democrats are your huge
problem; other times, the right-
wing Republicans are your
problem, and the progressive
caucus is your best ally.
ARH The demarcation moment
of those years that to me
demonstrated, beyond policy, the
separation between insiders and
outsiders was the reaction to
Stephen Colbert’s speech at the
White House Correspondents’
Dinner.
DS There was a me — a political
me before Bernie, and a political
me after Bernie, and they’re not
the same people. It’s just not the
same human being. It absolutely,
positively changed my entire life,
working for him for about two and
a half years.
The First Run
for the White House
JW I left the Hill in 2009 and
had a comic book store, which I
love. I love sitting in the back
room with my old books. And then
Bernie tells me he’s going to run
for president — I said, if this isn’t
a campaign to win, if it’s just an
educational campaign, where
we’re going to go out and you’re
going to talk about some issues,
raise consciousness and whatever,
then I said, “I’ll send you the

maximum contribution, and I’ll
talk you up, but to upend my life
to do that? I’m not willing to do
that.” He assured me that it was a
campaign to win. Having worked
with him on so many campaigns, I
knew it was a long, long shot but
that it was possible.
ARH To be frank, I didn’t think I
wanted to be part of what was
coming in 2016, when Hillary
Clinton was going to just waltz
through.
JW Everybody has this notion
that Vermont is a deep blue,
hippie-dippie place, where
everybody’s socialist. But that is
not what Vermont is. And I saw,
over the years, Bernie’s incredible
appeal with working-class people,
both in Burlington and in rural
parts of the state, so I knew the
potential. And, as we saw in
his career in Vermont, the more
people got to know him over
time, the better he did electorally.
BJG In 2015, I remember I was
at work one day, working on a
weekend, and I had a Skype call
from my mom and my brother,
who were at a Bernie rally. I was
like, “I don’t even know who this
AFTER BERNIE
The Oral History of the Bernie Campaign
“You’re behind
enemy lines and
surrounded by
the enemy on all sides.
You don’t know
exactly who the hell
your allies are.”
person is. What’s going on?” She
was like, “Oh, I’ve always loved
Bernie Sanders! He’s one of the
few people in Congress who
actually reflects my values.” I
started watching the debates, and
it became immediately clear that
Bernie was, for the first time in my
life, I think, someone I could
unreservedly get behind.
JW The media derisively called
July and August 2015 the
“Summer of Sanders,” which
suggested that Bernie would get
big crowds in the summer, but
they wouldn’t vote for him when
19
 STRUGGLE SESSION
the time came. But that summer,
the events that he held across
the country — tens of thousands,
in some cases, came out to a
single event — I think that took
everybody by surprise.
ARH Then Bernie was thinking
of running, and early on, before he
officially announced, I was
thinking, “I hope they do well
enough that it doesn’t diminish
progressive ideological causes.”
That’s the fear — that you run a
Dennis Kucinich campaign. That
fear was quickly dissipated in
one day of his campaign. Literally
one day after seeing the public
reaction to his campaign.
JW At the end of July 2015, we
had twenty-eight staffers total,
including the people we had
on the ground in Iowa and New
Hampshire. So we told people,
“You should self-organize,” and
they did, incredibly. You know,
farmers’ markets, they did
20
door-knocking, they did all kinds
of things on their own.
BJG It was enormously
frustrating to watch the coverage
of those debates, and the coverage
of the campaigns being so enor-
mously biased — not reflecting
what you could see with your own
eyes as a viewer. That very quickly
can push you from being a casual
supporter to being a radicalized,
active person.
JW Suddenly, you had this army
of people, and the campaign had
the financial resources to deploy
all the modern tools of
campaigning, and that put Bernie
Sanders in a position that nobody
else with his politics has been in,
maybe not ever in US history. On
top of that, critical to that, is that
you have a trusted messenger, an
authentic messenger — he hates
the word “authentic” — but an
authentic messenger, with a clear
vision of where the country should
№ 38  /  SUMMER 2020
go, and an incredibly sharp
analysis of why things were the
way they were.
BJG It was easy to forget how
much work it was in 2016, how
simplistic the argument was. It
was really, “How could you like
Bernie? Black people don’t,” and
you’re literally saying it to a black
woman’s face. I was getting into
fights with everybody at the
workplace — all of my friends —
because the only comeback they
had to why Bernie was superior
was that black people didn’t like
Bernie.
JW Just by looking at the
outcomes and where the votes
come from, you can see that you
do have this split [in the
Democratic Primary electorate],
and it’s not so much progressive
versus moderate; it’s called wine
track versus beer track. Hillary
Clinton was the beer-track
candidate in 2008. In 2016, she

was the wine-track candidate.
Bernie Sanders was the beer-track
candidate.
DS Bernie benefited from a
relatively unique situation in
which it was a one-on-one race,
and the candidate he was running
against was arguably uniquely
unpopular.
JW As people got to know
Bernie, when we started off the
campaign, he was at 3 percent
in Iowa, and by the end of the Iowa
caucuses, with state delegate equiv-
alents, we were tied with Hillary.
Given what I know now about the
Iowa caucuses, I’m fairly confident
that he won the popular vote in
Iowa quite handily in 2016.
DS I don’t want to second-guess
the ’16 campaign — I wasn’t on
it — but if he had hit a little
harder ... People who say, “Oh, he
was so negative on Clinton” —
that’s a joke, that’s a complete
“That’s the fear — that you run a Dennis
Kucinich campaign. That fear was quickly
dissipated in one day of his campaign.”
joke. I think there’s a much better
argument to be made — not a
criticism, but a “What could
Bernie have done more in ’16?” It
would have been to be far more
contrasting with Hillary Clinton. I
always go back to the ’08 race
between Clinton and [Barack]
Obama, which wasn’t even one of
the nastiest races ever, but it was a
lot of back-and-forth! If Bernie
Sanders in ’16 had done the kind
of daily, every-single-day, sharp
contrast with Hillary Clinton that
Barack Obama did in 2008, I don’t
know — maybe he would have
won!
JW I know a lot of people have
feelings about 2020, which I share,
but the posture of the party as an
institution in 2016 was very
different than in 2020. The truth
of 2016 has come out over time, in
WikiLeaks, and in Donna Brazile’s
book, and in other places — the
party as an institution, the dnc
AFTER BERNIE
The Oral History of the Bernie Campaign
[Democratic National Committee]
as an institution in 2016, was
actively trying to keep Bernie
Sanders from [winning] — and
that was not the case in 2020, by
the way, in my opinion. I’m not
saying that the establishment wing
of the party wasn’t opposed to
him, but the institutional party
was not deployed against us in
2020.
ARH I covered election night at
the Javits Center for Sirius. At that
point, I thought that Hillary was
going to win, and that it would be
progressives’ job to fight her
administration every day. It was
very early in the night, and I was
interviewing Mary Kay Henry
from SEIU [Service Employees
International Union]. A Hillary
staffer came into the hall and
literally ripped all of the surrogates
out. Mary Kay was at my table,
and the staffer was trying to phys-
ically pull her away.
21
 STRUGGLE SESSION
At first, I was like, “Oh, she
has to go to another interview.
That happens.” And then I look
around, and I see that she’s
running around the hallway,
getting all of the surrogates out of
there. That’s when I went on air
and said, “I think Hillary’s lost.”
The Second Run
for the White House
DS I was wondering if he was
going to do it in early 2019, and to
be honest, I really didn’t think he
was going to do it. I knew he had
concerns about the slog of doing
another national campaign against
the odds, and how a campaign
would once again require him to
be away from Vermont and his
grandkids for long periods of time.
Then all of a sudden, I got a call,
and it was like, “This is going to
happen. Would you want to do it?”
ARH The first big conversation
about 2020 took place in January
2018, in my apartment. Bernie was
there, Jane was on the phone, and
many of the people who ultimately
became part of the senior team
were there. Also, the dml [Devine
Mulvey Longabaugh, the
campaign strategists] guys were
there — specifically Julian Mulvey
and Mark Longabaugh — and
some prominent surrogates. One
of the variables that got discussed
was: Does Joe Biden run? Does
Elizabeth Warren run? Each
scenario would create a different
dynamic in the race.
BJG I had a reporter’s
relationship with some of the
Sanders communications team.
22
Around early 2019, they reached
out and asked if I was available.
It became clear that they were
interested in me coming onto the
campaign. It was a big decision
to make, because I was very happy
at the Intercept, and it wasn’t
clear to me that it would be useful
for Bernie to take one of these
reporters who openly shared their
politics, especially a black reporter
who was a progressive, and
prevent me from speaking freely
as an independent party.
ARH I know this sounds like
pure bullshit, but Bernie did not
make his decision to run for
president until January 2019.
When we started talking about
what 2020 would look like, there
were lots of side conversations.
We figured that somebody would
rise out of nowhere, but nobody
thought that it would be Pete
Buttigieg. People generally
believed Kamala Harris and Cory
Booker would be more formidable
candidates than they ultimately
were.
Whether or not Biden would
run would hugely impact our
strategy. If Biden wasn’t in, we
would be number one in the polls
from the start. If Biden was in, we
would be number two in the polls.
This would heavily influence how
the campaign was treated by the
media and other candidates.
JW I don’t want to just beat
up on the media, but let’s be clear
of the extent to which Bernie
Sanders was discounted. There
was a huge period of time which is
well known as the Bernie Blackout.
№ 38  /  SUMMER 2020
ARH The Bernie Blackout had a
silver lining, because unlike other
candidates, our base would not
turn on us based on a cable news
narrative. Bernie’s 15 percent was
never going anywhere. Nobody
else had a floor like that.
Everybody else had a base that was
extremely reactive to the national
media narrative. At some points in
the campaign, that was to our
advantage. In the doldrums of the
summer, while we weren’t moving
forward, we could hold our
15 percent. And post–heart attack,
our floor remained high.
The Heart Attack
DS It wasn’t a good summer.
The campaign was languishing.
The polls showed that.
BJG We were all at work, and
they called us into an impromptu
meeting, and they told us, minutes
before the rest of the world knew.
It was really sad and scary. It was
very quiet; it was a very solemn
atmosphere. Some people started
to cry.
DS I don’t want to say I thought
the race was over with the heart
attack, but the campaign had not
been going in the right direction
for a while now. And now this! We
had navigated some icebergs, and
the hull of the ship had been
scratched up, and now we just hit
the big one. That’s really how it
felt.
BJG The reality of what Bernie
represented and how unique it
was, and how there was no
substitute for that, really hit

home. With him, if he hadn’t
pulled through, all of those ideas
would have died with him, is how
it felt. There are a lot of amazing
progressives coming up the ranks.
But in terms of having that kind of
stature and ability to command
attention, there is only Bernie.
ARH In terms of electoral
position, we had a 15 percent base
that wasn’t leaving, regardless of
the national media narrative,
whereas every other candidate had
a 15-point swing. Look at Kamala
Harris’s campaign. She bounced
into second place in the polling
after the first debate and then fell
off the face of the earth.
DS The aoc [Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez] thing was huge in
the sense of creating a
comeback-kid narrative, which
served us really, really well. Bernie
“I know this sounds
like pure bullshit, but
Bernie did not
make his decision to
run for president
until January 2019.”
handled it really well. The upsurge
in support for him after that
was — some of it was people
suddenly realizing what politics
would be like without somebody
carrying the torch. I think that
shook people up, like, “Wow, we
would really lose something here,”
and that was a big boost to the
campaign.
The Comeback
BJG First the news trickled
in — I think it was Ilhan Omar,
and then Rashida Tlaib, and then
aoc. It really did feel like the end
of an action movie, where your
hero’s down and out, and there’s
that nice ending, the figure that
steps in ... I felt a level of affection
for those women, a gratitude, a
sense of camaraderie.
THE PARTY WE WANT
The Oral History of the Bernie Campaign
I will never forget what they
did for us. The office was jubilant.
If I recall correctly, the news came
out after a debate in which Bernie
had done well, and it was the first
debate after the heart attack. Two
weeks after the heart attack.
They had a bus for us, and we
went down to New York. It felt
like anything was possible.
Standing in that crowd, it could
not have been a more beautiful
day. It could not have been more
perfect. It felt like it was — I
joined the campaign, and I didn’t
think about whether we were
going to win or lose; it just felt like
something I had to do. But in that
moment, I think it was the first
time I allowed myself to think,
truly, that this was possible,
despite all we know about all of
those institutions that are going to
line up to try to block us. It was so
beautiful.
15
 STRUGGLE SESSION
ARH The truth is, electability
arguments were a real problem
that we knew about from the start.
It’s why you saw the “Bernie Beats
Trump” messaging constantly
echoed by our campaign. We
needed it to sink in with those
voters.
JW At the heart of this is the fact
that Bernie Sanders is a principled
candidate. He doesn’t like
scorched-earth politics. I will say
that, in this campaign, we did run
contrast ads against Joe Biden
on Social Security. It was the first
time in Bernie’s career that he
ran those kinds of ads; we ran them
in Iowa, and they, in fact, were
effective, frankly.
ARH The Social Security
contrast was effective against
Biden and did help Bernie move
up in Iowa. In Iowa, the more
voters got to see Biden, the less
they liked him. The more voters
see Bernie, the more they were
reminded of why they liked him.
JW After Iowa, with Pete
Buttigieg rising rapidly in the polls
and gaining 2 points a day, about
to overcome us, Bernie went to a
traditional political event in New
Hampshire called Politics &
Eggs — a breakfast event. Bernie
Sanders took out a sheet that had
headlines about Pete Buttigieg’s
corporate ties and bad positions,
and basically just read the
headlines.
ARH And it worked. You could
see immediately, in the tracking
polling, that [Buttigieg’s]
momentum just ceased once we
did that.
24
JW That was very effective at
blunting Pete Buttigieg’s
momentum, allowing Bernie to
win in New Hampshire.
ARH In early 2019, if you asked
me, “What is the ideal world for
the Bernie campaign coming out
of Iowa?”, it would be to win Iowa
without Joe Biden coming in
second. Ideally, second place in
Iowa would go to a clearly weak
candidate, who was unlikely to win
the Democratic nomination
elevating them. That happened.
JW I’ve also heard some
criticism that we were not focused
enough on the activist left. We
were trying to mobilize young
people, who are on college
campuses, trying to mobilize
working-class people who have
given up on the political process,
trying to mobilize Latino voters.
You have to reach people who are
beyond the normal reach of the
activist left. It’s just not a big
enough pool of people.
The Warren Factor
ARH In 2018, I remember
hearing reports from people that
Elizabeth Warren was calling
them. These are people who would
never have endorsed Elizabeth
Warren, even if Bernie wasn’t in
the race.
JW Obviously, Elizabeth Warren
was a complicating factor in the
race. I don’t think that would
come as a shock to anyone. And it
was more complicating in the early
fall, when she almost had the
nomination sealed up. She was
№ 38  /  SUMMER 2020
almost at 30 percent in Iowa and
New Hampshire, and rising
steadily.
ARH Warren’s campaign could
have killed us in October. I
remember conversations where
we’d say, “She’s going to go on air
and could blow us out of the
water.” She had the financial
resources to do it in the early fall.
Instead, they stayed off tv, except
for a few minor buys. That allowed
us to start rising. Remember, the
Des Moines Register poll had us in
fourth in Iowa, and her in first, in
early October.
JW I don’t like to Monday-
morning-quarterback other
people’s campaigns, because
obviously I could be Monday-
morning-quarterbacked myself.
It’s justifiable — you make
decisions in the moment that you
believe are right and that turn out
not to be right, but you make the
best decision you can in the
moment. But I will say that
structurally, her campaign and her
reliance upon inside-the-Beltway
actors, at the end of the day,
became a huge problem that cost
her the nomination. If they had, in
the fall, when they were
ascendant, gone on TV in a
massive way, I think she would
have locked up the nomination
probably by November, and the
campaign would have been over.
But in my view, they had an almost
digital-exclusive notion of politics,
which in 2080 may be the way to
run a race, but in 2020 is not going
to do it.
ARH If you are asking me what
Bernie could have done to

convince Elizabeth Warren not
to run, I don’t think there was
anything.
BJG I’d never run a campaign
before. I didn’t really have a sense
of what was normal, or what kind
of position you should expect to be
in at a given moment. At that
point, it did feel as if Warren was a
much bigger threat, because she
was getting a lot of positive media
attention, and the argument was
that if you care about these
policies, why not take them
coming from a woman, and then
you also get the representational
value?
ARH With the heat they took on
Medicare for All, they created that
problem for their campaign.
Bernie was willing to acknowledge
that the middle class would pay
more in taxes but save money
overall. Warren was unwilling to
acknowledge this, which put their
campaign in a position of having
a difficult time raising the revenue,
if you accept the claim that
you have to pay for it. But you just
have to be willing to have that
conversation and understand that
Republicans are going to say
you’re raising taxes anyway. And
if you are going to make the
argument, do it early on in the
campaign. Not in October or
November.
DS [Warren] had it in the bag.
But she couldn’t close the deal.
Her campaign collapse is one of
the most epic political collapses in
modern history. We had our
mistakes — sure, absolutely. But
the collapse of the Elizabeth
Warren campaign is one of the
biggest acts of political
malpractice that has ever
happened in the Democratic
Party.
JW Electoral politics is a very
specialized endeavor. In many
ways, it is like a war. And you
require soldiers to win a war. And
I think our campaign was better
staffed with soldiers.
The Accusation
ARH That was probably the most
difficult moment in the campaign.
DS My first reaction [to the
sexism accusation] was: “Let me
get this straight. You haven’t
criticized or juxtaposed yourself
against [Biden]? You’re the
anti-corruption candidate who will
not ever mention, now, the
corruption in your own party,
won’t punch to the right in the
primary, but the one time you’re
going to get in the squabble,
you’re going to punch left? That’s
what you’re going to do?”
BJG Well, has Bernie ever had a
conversation where he said, “It’s
going to be tough, given [Donald]
Trump and his misogyny, and how
misogynistic America is — it’s
going to be tougher for her to win
this cycle”? I can believe that. I
can believe something like that,
but it’s very different from what
Warren said, and what Warren
hoped to imply was very clear.
DS I don’t even want to engage
in the “Oh, was it true, did he say
it?” You only have a certain
number of proverbial punches to
[throw in a campaign]. She tried to
AFTER BERNIE
The Oral History of the Bernie Campaign
be above the fray for most of the
race and then made her big thing
“I’m going to attack Bernie” —
what is wrong with you?
BJG It’s very difficult [to
counterattack], for all the reasons
you understand. We had a
month-long media cycle about the
snake emojis, and Elizabeth
Warren’s internet post — at the
same time that someone brought a
Nazi flag to a Bernie Sanders rally,
and it wasn’t covered once.
DS I was a fan of Elizabeth
Warren; I’ve known her for a long
time. How she goes from Joe
Biden’s biggest critic — which
is literally how she’s been in
American politics since the
mid-2000s, it’s who she is — and
then she finally gets into the
championship match with her
longtime nemesis, and she
suddenly goes silent? I mean, it’s
unbelievable. I’ll never be over
that.
The Front-Runner
BJG People say a lot of things,
but folks tend to be surer with
their money. [After the Nevada
caucuses,] when the betting
markets had us winning every
Super Tuesday state, or close to
every state ... it was thrilling. We
had just won, depending on how
you see it, the first three states.
Depending on how you feel about
Iowa, which was ultimately havoc,
we had just won. Even the polls in
South Carolina had showed us
within 5 points.
25
 STRUGGLE SESSION
JW That week after Nevada —
we had a theory of the case, as
every campaign does, about how
you win, including how you
consolidate the party at some
point, and if you look at the week
after Nevada, what clearly set in
was panic among establishment
players in the party and their allies
outside the party. Bernie had just
gone three for three.
BJG In February, Bernie was
number one with both black and
Latino voters in the polls. Both.
Both! Okay? I never saw a single
news story on that. I never turned
on the TV once and saw anybody
mention that fact.
ARH Chris Matthews compared
Bernie Sanders winning Nevada to
the Nazi army advancing across
Europe, while Chuck Todd
compared our actual supporters to
Nazis.
BJG And in Nevada, he
completely exploded the Bernie
Bro myth by overwhelmingly
winning the Latino vote, although
people still don’t appreciate the
extent to which the Latino vote
helped to propel him in Iowa in
2020.
ARH We thought we were going
to win Nevada, but those fifteen
Strip caucuses? That would be a
tough climb. The Culinary Union
controls those rooms, and we were
obviously not in a good place with
their union’s leadership. We were
staying at an mgm property, and
we did a back-of-house visit at the
Grand.
So, we walk in. All of these
culinary workers are super
26
excited, hugging Bernie and
getting selfies. We turn in to the
employee cafeteria, which is a big
meeting and congregating place.
In the front of the room, it was the
same atmosphere. We turn right,
and there is a guy who is clearly a
Culinary Union organizer, who
begins coordinating a group of
workers, sending them over to
Bernie, reading stories like, “My
kid has this disability. Why are
you trying to take away my health
care?”
I don’t begrudge it at all — it
was good organizing, but you
could see it happening. Now,
Bernie’s really good in those
situations, and he responded that,
of course, they would have health
care under his plan. He wasn’t
taking it away. They were
organizing against Medicare for
All and essentially against Bernie.
And it was a complete failure. We
won every Strip caucus except
one, which are nearly all Culinary.
JW The demonstration he had to
make in terms of electoral
strength to force a surrender was a
much higher bar for him. Nevada
almost got us there, but with Joe
Biden’s better-than-expected
performance in South Carolina,
we needed Super Tuesday, really,
and the delegate lead to create the
environment where the party
establishment would acknowledge
defeat.
ARH There was a concerted
effort to work hard to get more
mainstream endorsements. Bernie
did call a bunch of the candidates
who had dropped out. He actually
did make those calls. The thing we
did not do, that people have
№ 38  /  SUMMER 2020
criticized — he did not want the
campaign pushing on Elizabeth
Warren to drop out. He did not
feel that was the right thing to do.
BJG Right after Nevada, I
remember Soledad O’Brien —
they were having the same
conversation; they were saying,
“Oh, Bernie maybe can do this,”
and she tweets, “I’ll wait to see
what happens when a diverse state
votes.” [Laughter.] You know,
complete Latino erasure — this is
a woman of Cuban descent.
Complete Latino erasure, like,
literally, Latinos did not matter in
this election. Nobody cared about
them. If you were at all paying
attention, you realized that the
states that are electorally relevant
in a general election are very
heavily Latino. We’re talking
about the swing states in the
Southwest, and we’re talking
about Texas, we’re talking about
Florida. Bernie Sanders had 60, 70
percent of the Latino vote. I think
it was 70! It was an outrageous
supermajority.
JW It sure looked like the wheels
were coming off our opponent —
Joe Biden had not only lost but
was just decimated in those first
three states. They were in panic
and rapidly trying to figure out
what to do. And I think there were
other people who were Bernie-
sympathetic or, let’s say, open to
Bernie, who were waiting for just a
little bit more of a push, and the
expectation was that that push
would come after Super Tuesday,
with a demonstration of support
broadly across the country.

“Bernie took out a
sheet that had
headlines about Pete,
and basically just
read the headlines.”
AFTER BERNIE
The Oral History of the Bernie Campaign
DS You don’t lay back on your
laurels, you double down on the
offense on Joe Biden, who had
been destroyed in New
Hampshire. The campaign just
didn’t.
ARH We had been talking for
months about how we were going
to blow out Nevada on the
strength of our Latino base.
JW What we could not have
anticipated is the collapse, the
literal folding of the tent, of Pete
Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar
after Biden won South Carolina —
essentially by the same margin
that we won Nevada.
DS The couple of days after
Bernie lost South Carolina,
somebody added the rough
equivalent of $100 million in three
days of essentially free good
press — the ad equivalent of $100
million of “Joe Biden is going to
win.” That has a huge effect.
ARH Think about how amazingly
incredible it is that you have
somebody like Pete Buttigieg, who
comes out of nowhere, has a
delegate lead over Joe Biden, and
who knew that his campaign was
going to get blown out in Nevada.
He then drops out of the race
before Super Tuesday. If he stays
in, he splits the moderate vote
and, you could argue, has a better
rationale than Biden going into a
brokered convention.
JW It’s not as though [Biden]
had done something unique. But
[Buttigieg and Klobuchar] folded
their tents pretty quickly and
coalesced around him.
27
 STRUGGLE SESSION
ARH Buttigieg makes the
decision to drop out simply to
prevent Bernie from winning.
JW The media narrative in that
period, that short period between
South Carolina and Super
Tuesday, was overwhelming.
ARH That was what ultimately
beat us. The question is, what
could the campaign do to stop that
collective action among moderates
that took place over the course of
basically twenty-four hours?
JW If you look at the Warren-
plus-Bernie total in Texas, Bernie
wins; Bernie wins Massachusetts,
Bernie wins Maine, Bernie wins
Minnesota. Everybody’s voting
base is complicated and diverse. I
don’t just mean racially diverse, I
mean politically diverse.
Motivations are diverse. But I
think it is fair to say — certainly
the research I saw showed that the
overwhelming [majority] — not
entirely, but the vast majority — of
Warren voters were second-choice
Bernie. With Biden consolidating
the center and us having votes
split on the Left, we just were not
able to get over that last hurdle.
When people conflate the fact
that the establishment rallied
around Joe Biden after Nevada
with the rigging that went on in
2016 — to me, those are very
different things. It’s not a shock to
me, nor do I think it’s out of line
that the establishment would rally
around their candidate in the
election.
DS Bernie said, “If you elect me,
the next eight years are going to be
all struggle and fighting, because
28
these problems we have are so
enormous.” And Biden said, “If
you elect me, for the next eight
years, you can all just go back to
sleep! I’ll fix everything, and it will
go back to normal.” And if you’re
the average voter, you’re like:
“You’re telling me I can vote for
Joe Biden, and everything will be
easy? Cool!”
The End of the
Campaign
ARH Now lockdowns are
starting, and there are two
elements — Bernie rightfully
believes his voice is important. He
wants to make sure the issues he
cares deeply about are still part of
the national dialogue. It’s not
about him, it’s about the issues.
DS I reject the idea that in the
2020 campaign, the problem was
that Bernie didn’t reach out [to the
Democratic establishment]. I just
fundamentally reject that idea. I
think folks with that analysis
fundamentally do not understand
campaigns in general, and
specifically the challenges of what
we were trying to accomplish.
ARH Bernie actually met with
[Jim] Clyburn a number of times
in 2018 and 2019. They were
meeting about community health
center legislation. That’s much
more effective and important than
a conversation between Bernie
and Clyburn focused on “will you
endorse me in the primary,” which
was always an impossibility.
BJG You can sit around and talk
about black voters and Barack
№ 38  /  SUMMER 2020
Obama and all of that stuff, but at
the end of the day, 30 percent of
voters in North Carolina and
Michigan, some of those earlier
voting states — that’s why I know,
because it’s before we went into
quarantine — thought that Joe
Biden supported Medicare for All.
Sanders was thought to be the
best, most trusted person on
health care, close next to Joe
Biden, who was up there.
Enormous percentages of Joe
Biden supporters, people who
actually pulled the lever for him,
thought that he supported
Medicare for All. That’s true. The
vast majority of voters have no
idea about his record on Social
Security, including black voters.
ARH The secret about Social
Security is that older voters are
not as impacted by Social Security
messaging. Whereas voters
approaching Social Security age
are very responsive. People in
their fifties are much more
responsive to messages about
Social Security than people in
their eighties.
BJG I think it’s a mistake to give
up on older voters. I think it was a
mistake for the campaign not to
target older voters. I felt like a lot
of times, our advertising on
Twitter was preaching to the
choir. Bernie had a platform for
older voters. He had Social
Security expansion and
protection — a record of actually
protecting it. He had home health
care.
DS Former vice presidents have
never run for president and not
won their party’s nomination.

They are the archetype of the
inside establishment, by
definition.
BJG Literally no one, of the
twenty-six candidates or however
many there were, took any
meaningful aim at Joe Biden, with
the exception of Julián Castro,
who basically got slapped on the
wrist for it — for being a mean,
ungrateful boy! For dipping his toe
in that water. And Cory Booker
had one little line — he had a
post-debate interview where he
hinted at it, and I think the mood
in the room shifted such that he
basically petered off and dropped
it because it was toxic.
ARH Bernie is a fighter. If he’s
punched, he will punch back. But
he does not like personal attacks.
That is not how he believes politics
should work.
DS If you’re like, “I realize I’m
running for a real political
revolution; that means I
understand that I’m going to need
to take down and defeat the
former vice president in a singular
way, and I’m going to wake up
every day knowing that that is my
job,” I think that would have given
us the best chance to win. I’m not
sure we would have won. Really,
I’m not. But I think that would
have given us the best chance to
win.
BJG It seems that, out of the
tragedy that was the coronavirus
crisis, there was an opportunity to
break through on messaging. And
remember, what we had was that
last debate — we immediately
went into quarantine after the
debate. That was the last time I
went to the office, watching the
debate. Bernie did a good job, but
he needed to eviscerate Biden — it
didn’t happen that way. It
probably wasn’t his fault; the
media coverage just allowed Biden
to lie repeatedly throughout that
debate, didn’t call him on it, so it
was perceived to be an even draw.
But then, that same night, you had
Symone Sanders telling people
that it was safe to go and vote,
when the cdc [Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention]
had just issued recommendations
that it was not, in fact, safe to be in
a group of more than fifty people.
ARH I think those of us who are
more ideologically inclined or on
the activist left, we underestimate
the extent to which a lot of
working-class people who vote in
Democratic Party primaries like
their party and its leaders. Unlike
in the Republican field, voters
wouldn’t stand [it] if Bernie
started making comments like
Trump made about Ted Cruz in
2016 — which Bernie would never
do. Especially with regard to
Biden, who was generally well
liked, even by those not voting for
him.
DS It is very, very difficult,
arguably impossible, to run from
the actual outside. Not the fake
outside, but the real outside — to
represent an actual challenge to
the system. And we haven’t had a
candidate who has really mounted
a serious campaign challenging the
system from the Left in ... I mean,
at the presidential level, I can’t
name one in a hundred years. The
one-foot-in-the-tent,
AFTER BERNIE
The Oral History of the Bernie Campaign
one-foot-out-of-the-tent ... it
probably won’t work. If you’re
going to run as a revolutionary,
and that’s Bernie’s word —
“political revolution” — if you’re
going to run as a revolutionary,
you’re off-brand when you are
trying to show or behave in a way
that suggests that you’re on the
inside.
BJG We had tools in our arsenal
that, I think, could have put a dent
in Joe Biden’s support. But Joe
Biden was in the lead the entire
time, and there were other
moments in the campaign when
the other candidates rallied
together to come for the one who
had emerged at the top.
Sometimes that was Bernie,
obviously — pretty much every
debate — but there was a moment
when it was Michael Bloomberg.
There is strength in numbers, and
it’s interesting that nobody ever
tried that with Joe Biden, either
because they didn’t see him as a
real threat, which would have been
naive, or because they didn’t want
to hurt him. Depending on how
conspiratorial you’re feeling at a
given moment ...
JW Bernie had said from the
beginning of 2020, just as he had
in 2016, that he was going to
support the Democratic nominee.
And it became clear after Super
Tuesday, and confirmed by the
contests after that, that Biden was
going to get the requisite number
of delegates; Bernie was not. But
the fight for a more equitable,
more progressive America is not
over.
29
 STRUGGLE SESSION

ARH What I am amazed by
sometimes, in the online
discourse, is that sometimes you
get, “You should have just gotten
Bernie to do x, and then
everything would have been
better.” I don’t think silver bullets
exist, or they rarely exist in
politics. There is the occasional
Todd Akin moment, but they are
very rare, and it’s usually a
mistake by your opponent, not
something you’ve done.
BJG It’s hard for me to sit here
and Monday-morning-
quarterback when, in many ways,
2016 was more successful. It was
very different. We won more
states; the race was closer; the race
went longer; the opposition was
openly disgusted; the Stop Bernie
movement was less explicit, or
something. It felt like the
gaslighting was worse — it was
like they hadn’t organized yet; it
was less effective. It felt, in some
ways, more hopeful, looking at it
from the outside.
There’s not a ton you can do to
push back against millions of
dollars in free advertising for your
opponent, unless you’re willing to
take on a truly outsider position,
the way that, frankly, Donald
Trump did, and go whole hog on
the media, completely invest in
your own independent messaging,
throw money at Facebook ads and
your own videos, and do stunts
that command the attention of the
media, draw strong contrasts with
your opponents.
ARH The problem we faced in
the end, the deficit that existed,
was not the amount of paid media
or field staff we had. That was not
our problem. Our biggest problem
at the tail end of the primary was
the sheer quantity of negative
messages being directed at us and
positive messages about Biden on
cable news and other media. There
was a study that showed we faced a
more than $70 million earned
media blitz in the three days
between South Carolina and Super
Tuesday. But I don’t know what
another $10 million in paid media
does for us on Super Tuesday,
especially considering the fact that
Joe Biden wasn’t spending shit.
BJG Sometimes I do wonder if a
last-ditch Hail Mary, where Bernie
morphed into the person that he
was portrayed as but never
was — you know, actually loud,
actually aggressive, actually in
your face and critical of the other
candidates — then it might have

“We walked into that meeting, and it was like

a procession of exotic animals that
people had never seen, from another planet.”

30 № 38  /  SUMMER 2020


turned it around. But I don’t know
how helpful it is to imagine,
because I also want to respect that
not doing it that way did [in 2016],
I think, contribute to Bernie’s
being the most trusted, most liked,
most popular politician in the
country.
DS This whole “revolutionary
versus reformer” thing — Bernie
tried to thread the needle, and by
the way, I think you can thread the
needle as a legislator. I actually
think you can as a senator or as a
House member. I do think you can
represent a political revolution
and also operate in the system.
But I think if you’re running to
actually run the system and
change the paradigm at the very,
very top, you’ve got to pick one or
the other.
The Oral History of the Bernie Campaign
Where We Go Now progressive, or social democratic,
or in some cases even socialist. But
even if we are successful, that
JW One of the areas we have
other part of the party is not going
seen progress is in the
to go away in the two-party
composition of the party. I
system. You have got to make sure
remember the first dnc meeting
that the social-democratic wing of
that I was with Bernie at in
the party is the dominant wing.
2015 — the summer meeting held
The good news is the seeds of
in Minneapolis. We walked into
that change are happening. In the
that meeting, and it was like a
wake of 2016, there were huge
procession of exotic animals that
numbers of Bernie-aligned people
people had never seen, from
who were elected to the dnc as a
another planet. We were so
result of Bernie winning in states
removed from their world.
across the country. You go to a
That shouldn’t be surprising,
meeting now, and 25, 30 percent
because with the ascendancy of
of the dnc-elected officials are
the neoliberals in the 1990s, the
Bernie people, maybe more. And
orientation of the Democratic
the tone — the room is just
Party switched to being one
different. You can’t believe the
controlled by neoliberal
progressive wing of the party
professional classes — but that
doesn’t exist when a third of the
retained a wing which is
room is Bernie people.
AFTER BERNIE 31
 STRUGGLE SESSION
DS My hope is this scenario
where Trump is defeated but you
have a president who is not
beloved, coming into office feeling
like people are not giving
deference, and people are at that
president’s throat, forcing that
president, kicking and screaming,
where they have to deliver. I think
the scenario is, at least right now,
looking like a very real possibility.
Nobody loves Joe Biden.
JW To be clear, we are also
winning the policy battle in the
party and across the country. Exit
polls in state after state showed
strong and, in most cases, majority
support for Medicare for All
among Democratic voters, even in
states Joe Biden won handily. But
we have a lot of challenges.
ARH Millions of dollars were
spent by insurance companies and
drug companies attacking
Medicare for All. There are
institutions that fight for Medicare
for All on a daily basis, and while
we have great organizations in the
field, we have no group like the
Partnership for America’s Health
Care Future. Frankly, you have to
solve a problem where there’s no
funding mechanism that exists for
an institution like that.
JW So much of the Left today is
not rooted in any consistent
ideology — which is why it’s going
through this bout of defeatism at
the moment, when it has been
more ascendant than it has been in
decades.
I have recently reread one of
my favorite political tracts,
Lenin’s “Left-Wing” Communism:
An Infantile Disorder. I come back
32
“I doubt Bernie
would run again.
He doubts it.
But let me tell
you ... that guy is
Wolverine! His
genetics
are ridiculous.”
to it every decade or so, but it’s
particularly appropriate in this
moment, when so many folks are
threatening to check out of politics
altogether or vote for nonviable
third parties when we are
confronted by Trump. As bad as he
is, what comes after him can be
even worse if his brand of
authoritarianism is not defeated,
even if that means electoral
alliances with non-social-
democratic factions.
DS There were, especially during
the campaign, not an infrequent
number of days when I would say
to my wife, “Not only did I wish I
didn’t do this campaign, but I wish
I had never met Bernie.” And then
she would yell at me and be like,
“You’re crazy!” And then there
were days when I was like, “My
God, it’s so crazy to me — what
would I be if I hadn’t met Bernie?”
It’s like that stupid old movie,
Sliding Doors. Had Jeff Weaver
№ 38  /  SUMMER 2020
not answered ... had I sent in my
résumé and he never called
me — it’s mind-boggling to think
about.
BJG Biden is not beholden to
anyone; his only obligation is to be
a smidge better than the
Republican alternative is. There’s
no one else coming to save us.
There’s no existential aoc that’s
going to swoop in in the ninth
inning, in the third act, that’s
going to pull us out from this. We
have to think, really consider
what power we have and leverage
it wisely, and if you aren’t doing
something that makes people
angry, it’s probably pretty
impotent.
JW We have to have a long-term
vision. I reject the idea that
suggests if Bernie Sanders had
been elected president, that every
social and economic ill in the
country would have been cured.
Clearly that is not the case, and
he’d be the first one to tell you that
that is not the case.
ARH I doubt Bernie would run
again. He doubts it. But let me tell
you ... that guy is Wolverine! His
genetics are ridiculous. You never
know.
JW We have to keep moving
forward, but we have to keep
focused on the goal: building
democratic power for working-
class people of all races. Because
at the end of the day, if that’s not
your reason for being in politics,
if that’s not the goal, then you’re
just a militant liberal, whether
you support Medicare for All
or not.
Means of
Deduction
NUMBERS DON’T LIE
 MEANS OF DEDUCTION
VULGAR EMPIRICIST
The Social
Democracy
Index
We looked at the best polling
from the 2020 primary season.
Turns out, you can spot a
Bernie Sanders supporter not
just by their age, but by their
support for social-democratic
policies.
In the survey, each respondent was randomly
assigned a selection of questions to answer,
including the following six:
• Raise the minimum wage to $15/hour
• Guarantee jobs for all Americans
• Enact a Green New Deal
And three questions about single-payer health
care, each worded differently:
• Provide government-run health
insurance to all Americans
• Enact Medicare for All
• Abolish private health insurance and
replace with government-run health
insurance
Although each individual respondent was
asked a different list of questions, the
randomized assignment of questions ensured
that different demographic groups, taken as a
whole, tended to receive questions in roughly
the same proportions.
34
Bernie Supporters
Know What They Want
This chart divides registered voters into ten
income groups and six age brackets, making
a total of sixty subgroups, each of which is
represented by a red circle.
It turns out that social-democratic policy
views are uniquely correlated with favorable
views of Sanders.
The chart shows that a given group’s score on
the social-democratic index (horizontal axis)
reliably predicts how favorably that group
views Bernie Sanders, as measured by his net
favorability (vertical axis). The r₂ — a measure
of correlation — is a robust 0.74.
They Also Know What
They Don’t Want
An even clearer way of illustrating this
pattern is to take the respondents who rated
one candidate more favorably than the
other — who had, say, a “very favorable” view
of Biden but only a “somewhat favorable”
view of Sanders, or vice versa — and calculate
the percentage preferring Sanders.
This chart plots “Sanders-Biden preference”
(vertical axis) against social-democratic
attitudes along the horizontal axis.
Again, it yields a strong correlation, with
an r₂ of approximately 0.50. Thus, social-
democratic attitudes not only strongly
predict favorable views of Sanders, but
a preference, specifically, for Sanders
over Biden.
№ 38  /  SUMMER 2020
 The Social Democracy Index
80%

75%
Social-democratic
policy views Sanders
70% net favorability

65%

60%

55%

50%

45%
R² = 0.7492

40%

Sanders net favorability

35%

-35% -25% -15% -5% 5% 15% 25% 35% 45% 55%

115%

105%

Social-democratic
95% policy views

85%

75%

65%

55%

45%

35% R² = 0.5437

25%
Sanders-Biden preference
15%

-65% -45% -25% -5% 15% 35% 55%

AFTER BERNIE 35
 VULGAR EMPIRICIST

Net Clinton Social- Net Sanders-

2016 Democratic Biden
Margin Attitudes Preference

Low Income -15% 0.58 +1%

NO
COLLEGE
Middle Income -27% 0.54 +1%

High Income -21% 0.48 -4%

Low Income -8% 0.58 +5%

SOME
COLLEGE
Middle Income -20% 0.46 -5%

High Income -23% 0.44 -3%

Low Income -10% 0.57 +5%

BA+ Middle Income +2% 0.51 +1%

High Income -3% 0.46 -8%

Total -11% 0.50 -2%

Social Democracy Is Working-Class Politics

The chart divides white registered
voters into nine groups, defined
by three education categories
(no college, some college, and four-
year degree) and three income
categories (the lower, middle, and
upper thirds of the income
distribution).
Importantly, we have adjusted
incomes for differences in age, so
that a person in, say, the “top
third” income category is in the
upper third of their age group,
rather than of Americans as a
whole. This way we can be sure
that the income differences we see
here aren’t merely due to differ-
ences in age.
Despite their very real Republican
leanings, non-college-educated
whites are more supportive
of Bernie Sanders’s core social-
democratic policy agenda than are
whites with college degrees,
even though levels of Democratic
identification are much greater
within the latter group. Taken as
overall averages, the difference
between the two education groups
isn’t that large — 0.54 versus 0.49.
But within each education
group, income levels move steeply
and negatively with scores on
the social-democratic index.
The average social-democratic
score for lower-income whites
without college degrees (0.58) is
0.12 points higher than that for
upper-income whites with college
degrees (0.46). That difference
is large — amounting to more than
20 percent of the gap between
the average liberal Democrat
and the average conservative
Republican.
Data from: Tausanovitch, Chris and
Lynn Vavreck. 2020. Democracy
Fund + UCLA Nationscape, October
10-17, 2019 (version 20200131).
Retrieved from voterstudygroup.org,
compiled by Seth Ackerman.

36 № 38  /  SUMMER 2020

 MEANS OF DEDUCTION
UNEVEN & COMBINED
The Sanders campaign routed
Hillary Clinton in Michigan in
2016, winning seventy-two of the
state’s eighty-four counties. The
victory seemed to vindicate
Bernie’s appeals to working-class
Rust Belt voters: in Michigan’s
open primary, Sanders com-
manded significant backing from
independents, young voters, and
others outside the typical Demo-
cratic Party electorate. And
nowhere was this support more
obvious than in the rural and
deindustrialized areas that liberal
commentators had earlier
dismissed as irredeemably
conservative and backward.
Michigan experienced another
stunning result in 2020 — but this
time, Bernie was on the losing
end. Joe Biden won every single
county in the state. There were
undoubtedly many factors
contributing to this loss, including
the Democratic field’s
How We Lost
Michigan
In 2016, Bernie won a major upset
in Michigan, thanks in part to a
groundswell of support in the
state’s rural areas. In 2020, he lost
every county in the state — and the
numbers show he lost many of his
rural supporters, too.
consolidation around Biden and reflected antipathy for Hillary
the accelerating coronavirus Clinton more than genuine
pandemic, which, at the time of support for Sanders’s political
Michigan’s primary, had not yet revolution; others have empha-
reached crisis proportions but sized voters’ heightened
nonetheless suppressed turnout. sensitivity to electability concerns
in 2020. But it’s clear that, for
Another component seems to be
Bernie Sanders, a great many of
that Bernie lost much of the rural
the voters who had earlier
support he enjoyed in 2020. It’s
delivered him the state either
impossible to say exactly what’s to
stayed home or pulled the lever
blame for Bernie’s steep drop-off
for his opponent.
in Michigan’s rural counties. Some
have suggested that 2016’s results
AFTER BERNIE 37
 UNEVEN & COMBINED

2016 Michigan Democratic

Presidential Primary

Urban counties (less than 50% rural)

won by Clinton

Rural counties (more than 50% rural)

won by Clinton

Urban counties won by Sanders

Rural counties won by Sanders

38 № 38  /  SUMMER 2020

 How We Lost Michigan

2020 Michigan Democratic

Presidential Primary

-30% -10% +10%

Signifies percent change in margin

between 2016 and 2020 for Sanders.
The one pointing right (Livingston)
is the only county where his margin
improved against Biden compared
to Clinton.

Urban counties won by Biden

Rural counties won by Biden

AFTER BERNIE 39
Reading
Materiel
TAKE A LOOK,
IT’S IN A BOOK
 READING MATERIEL
CANON FODDER
Before Thomas Piketty, there was
Bernard Sanders. “The American
people are angry,” he declared on
the Senate floor in 2012. “Angry
that the middle class is collapsing
because of the Wall Street-caused
recession ... angry that unemploy-
ment is sky-high, that 50 million
people lack health insurance, and
that working families can’t afford
college for their kids.” Sanders
went on to recite statistics about
the skewed income distribution in
a country still reeling from a
severe recession.
It was another year until Piketty’s
magnum opus on the dynamics
of inequality in capitalist societies,
Capital in the Twenty-First
Century, burst onto the scene.
Battles for economic redistribu-
tion found a new intellectual
undergirding. But we still seem
a long way from enacting such
a program in practice, especially
with the electoral defeats of
Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn.
Piketty’s long-awaited sequel,
Capital and Ideology, might help
us understand why. If the goal
of his first book was to describe
the evolution of income and
wealth inequality in the industrial
countries, this new work focuses
on the persistence and legitima-
tion of such inequalities. Every
capitalist society comes up with
its own justification for a partic-
ular set of property rights. Piketty
defines ideology rather straight-
forwardly as a “set of a priori
BY ANTON JÄGER & DOMINIK LEUSDER
REVIEW OF: Capital and Ideology by
Thomas Piketty, trans. Arthur Goldhammer
(Harvard University Press, 2019).
The Prophet of
Inequality
Whatever its shortcomings,
Thomas Piketty’s latest book,
Capital and Ideology, is a serious
attempt to map our social
world without resorting to easy
abstractions.
plausible ideas and discourses would never forgive its people for
describing how society should be being the first nation to decolonize.
structured.”
Although the French Revolution
Capital and Ideology describes had proclaimed a formal equality
at length the ownership regimes of rights, the right of property
in Europe’s eighteenth- and was then sanctified as a new
nineteenth-century “propri- religion. Part of this consecration,
etarian” societies, where the Piketty argues, stemmed precisely
sacralization of property rights from a lack of agreement over
was carried to extremes. The where redistribution might stop
abolition of slavery may have been if it was to happen at all, and
viewed as a crowning achievement persistent fears that it might go
for liberal, enlightenment values, too far. This kind of argument
but the slaveholders were — in will sound eerily familiar to those
perfect harmony with prevailing who have followed recent
norms — lavishly compensated for attempts to obstruct progressive
their lost property. Haiti spent reforms with vague reference
more than a century paying off its to “unintended consequences”
“debt” to the slavers; the West and “moral hazard.”
AFTER BERNIE 41
 CANON FODDER
The constant invocations of
nominally socialist regimes as
a bogeyman are another modern
equivalent of the eighteenth
century’s “thin end of the wedge”
argument. One prominent
example is the idea that garden-
variety redistributive measures,
such as publicly funded health
care — which, in the United
States, would amount to a transfer
of income from corporate
profits to wages — might lead to
a Venezuelan-style outcome.
Back to Normal
However, Piketty’s main concern
lies not with the inequality regime
itself or its legitimacy problem,
but with the development of
progressive taxation. The book
tells the familiar story of how
the rise of marginal income-tax
rates made the modern state
possible. The tax haul of European
states rose steadily from a modest
average of 1–3 percent of national
income in the centuries preceding
the Industrial Revolution to
30–50 percent in the postwar era.
Progressive fiscal policies and
welfare regimes stabilized capi-
talism by resolving the problems
associated with widening inequali-
ties. Piketty echoes other
economists and historians of our
time by arguing that the
42
subsequent “neoliberal” period
has simply been a case of capi-
talism reverting back to normal:
the old regime of sacralized
property rights has reasserted
itself after three decades of
war-induced fever dreams.
Capitalism’s default trajectory
was always unequal. As the forces
that had counterbalanced the
proprietarian ideology either sold
out or dried up — mainly
social-democratic parties, who,
according to Piketty, have
“Brahminized” themselves into
exclusively middle-class layers
and are now hemorrhaging
support outside of ethnic-minority
working-class constituencies —
the “hypercapitalism” of the last
thirty years has emerged
triumphant.
Piketty follows up his diagnosis
with a prescription. The solution,
he argues, lies in the restoration
of a progressive tax regime, now at
a global level, allowing for a
peaceful, policy-driven transition
to a kind of “participatory
socialism,” in which everybody
will enjoy “a universal right to
education and a capital endow-
ment, free circulation of people,
and de facto virtual abolition
of borders.”
But Piketty’s socialist vision goes
further than this call for permanent
redistribution through the tax
system. His plan openly questions
bourgeois property rights, and
thus, it reaches well beyond the
proposals of the Bernie Sanders
campaign. This is — from a
prominent, mainstream econo-
mist — a straightforward guide to
transcending today’s capitalism.
№ 38  /  SUMMER 2020
Specters of Marx
It’s surprising, then, that most
commentary on Piketty’s work
from the socialist left has been
dismissive — insofar as there has
been any serious engagement
with it at all. The most common
response has been to accuse
Piketty of being insufficiently
Marxist, irrespective of the
homages in his book titles.
However, there is a legitimate
question as to how far socialists
should follow Piketty. Capital and
Ideology promised to correct the
shortcomings of his previous
work, whose quantitative focus on
equality left the issue of how
elites justify those inequalities
unaddressed. As with his previous
volume, the most impressive
aspect of Piketty’s work is
empirical: he brings together
a medley of sources — inheritance
documents, census lists, tax
receipts, cadastral maps — to form
massive quantitative data sets.
Some Marxist economists might
complain about Piketty’s seeming
inability to grasp some of the
more esoteric concepts associated
with their tradition. Where he

plainly outclasses most of them,
however, is in sheer empirical
curiosity: here is a serious attempt
to map our social world without
resorting to easy abstractions.
Piketty loves a good graph, and it’s
often a joy to behold.
But data sets are ultimately no
substitute for a theory of history.
Too often, Capital and Ideology
feels like a form of structuralism
for the ted Talk age. Though
Piketty has read the literature and
mastered the statistics, his
analysis lacks the glue needed to
tie all these facts together.
There is, after all, some merit
to the “Marxsplaining” criticism
of the great economist’s work.
As the French philosopher
Frédéric Lordon noted, Piketty
is effectively “playing the Marxist”
without having learned the
instruments, Auto-Tuning his way
into an established discourse
without a proper grasp of the
notes. When asked whether he had
read Karl Marx’s Capital at all,
Piketty replied that he found the
work “too difficult.”
In the end, Piketty’s notion of
capital is too rigidly economic,
lacking the rich social context
in which Marx embeds it, caught
on the surface level of balance
sheets and inheritance sums.
Piketty’s methodology is quantita-
tive, after all. Mesmerized by
numbers, he barely explores the
question of how certain forms
of wealth differ across historical
periods.
Modern Times
Even so, Marxists can learn a lot
from Piketty’s work. What it lacks
in synthesis, it makes up for in
sheer sophistication and scope. No
AFTER BERNIE
Running Hed
society is destined to be unequal,
he insists. Sweden was formerly
one of the most unequal countries
in the Western hemisphere —
only after a decades-long struggle
waged by the country’s labor
movement did it become an exem-
plar of social mobility. Inequality
declined, not because of culture or
nature, but through the political
will to replace one dominant
ideology with another.
Piketty summarizes his book’s
central argument near the
beginning: “every society must
attempt to answer questions
about how it should be organized,
usually on the basis of its own
historical experience but some-
times also on the experiences
of other societies.” In this context,
“ideology” is a way of justifying
social arrangements that might
disproportionately benefit certain
groups. Each society will one
43
 CANON FODDER
day have to come up with its own
intellectual justification for how it
is organized.
But Piketty also overstates the
importance of ideology — in his
sense of the term — as an explana-
tion for the stability of modern
capitalism. That stability probably
owes far more to a mood of
resignation, as people make peace
with a world that is hostile to
their flourishing. They know this
world to be a product of human
agency, but they cannot control it.
Our everyday relationship to
markets is a perfect example of this
dynamic at work. Although we
know that the action of human
beings is what establishes prices in
a market, we can’t simply decide
collectively to change those prices.
We depend on markets for
survival, and we have to accept
them as if they were an immutable
product of nature. “Ideology,”
here, is not so much a matter of
conscious elite manipulation
as it is a fate to which we resign
ourselves.
In the end, it’s easier to rationalize
our own suffering than to imagine
that things could be different.
The Bernie Sanders campaign
asked Americans to make a bet on
“political revolution”: many of
them found that bet too risky.
Economic WikiLeaks
Piketty himself found resignation
to be an obstacle for his political
endeavors in recent years. Despite
Corbyn and Sanders’s best efforts,
union density is still plummeting
across the developed capitalist
44
world, and a new round of
quantitative easing is turbo-
charging inequality. In this
landscape, Piketty risks becoming
a political equivalent of
WikiLeaks.
WikiLeaks played a courageous
role, exposing the crimes that
were being committed by govern-
ments all over the world: mass
surveillance, extrajudicial killings,
and illegal wars. Yet the public
impact of such revelations was
limited. In the absence of a
credible social agency that could
challenge the status quo,
whistleblowing alone can’t rouse
people out of their complacence.
Sure, things may be bad, but
what difference does that knowl-
edge make if we see no way of ever
improving them?
Over the last ten years, we have
witnessed an explosion of empir-
ical scholarship on inequality,
driven partly by a data revolution
in econometrics and increasingly
digitized archives. Political
movements challenging these
inequalities have wielded Piketty’s
data sets as intellectual weapons.
But without a practical strategy
and the organizational weight to
bring it to fruition, these move-
ments struggled to win the broad
popular support they needed to
effect change.
In the end, “inequality” becomes a
problem once we’ve decided to
make it one, and not a moment
before. And, as Machiavelli
reminds us, the only prophets to
have emerged victorious were the
ones who armed themselves.
№ 38  /  SUMMER 2020
 READING MATERIEL
FIELD NOTES

In April 2020, someone leaked an internal British

Labour Party report to journalists. Party officials had The Enemy
produced the report at the request of Jennie Formby,
Labour’s general secretary from 2018 to 2020. It had
been intended to serve as part of Labour’s submission
Within
to the Equality and Human Rights Commission
(ehrc). The new party leader, Keir Starmer, decided
not to send the report to the ehrc.

The ehrc opened an investigation into Labour at

the request of two groups that accused the party of
“institutional antisemitism.” In contrast, the govern- Leaked messages from Labour
ment-funded body has repeatedly refused to Party staff littered with casual
investigate the Conservative Party for racism, despite racism and sexism show that they
having received a lengthy dossier from the Muslim
Council of Britain documenting the party’s track worked against Jeremy Corbyn and
record. The leaked Labour report sought to demon- wanted to keep the Tories in power.
strate that several other party officials who were
hostile to Jeremy Corbyn had been negligent in their
handling of antisemitism complaints. Those officials
had appeared in a BBC documentary in July 2019,
where they were presented as “whistleblowers,”
accusing Corbyn’s leadership team of frustrating their
efforts to combat discrimination.

As well as the specific issue of antisemitism, the
report sheds light on Labour’s wider organizational
culture during the first three years of Corbyn’s
leadership. Jennie Formby’s predecessor, Iain
McNicol, remained in his post until March 2018,
along with many other staffers who effectively
controlled the party’s considerable resources. The
report reproduces WhatsApp conversations between
those staffers, where they discussed their work
for Labour.
It shows that they were bitterly hostile to Corbyn’s
leadership at all times on ideological grounds, and
that they wanted Labour to suffer a heavy defeat
in the 2017 general election. They greeted Labour’s
unexpectedly strong performance in that election,
depriving the Conservatives of their parliamentary
majority, with unconcealed horror.
The report also reveals a deeply troubling attitude
toward racism on the part of Labour’s anti-Corbyn
old guard, along with their strong commitment
to a militarized, neo-imperial foreign policy. One
comment on the Manchester Arena bombing of May
2017 captures both aspects of their mentality: “In
the face of a terror attack, normal people do not blame
foreign intervention. They blame immigration.”
Most British journalists have ignored the report, citing
vague legal concerns, although nobody has questioned
the authenticity of the messages between party
officials. Keir Starmer set up an inquiry that bore all
the hallmarks of a cover-up, though he had to
abandon plans to appoint one of the people who
features heavily in the report as Labour’s new general
secretary.
At a time when the history of British politics from
2015 onward is being frantically rewritten to
the detriment of Jeremy Corbyn, the leaked report
confirms in abundant detail one of the principal
claims made by Corbyn’s supporters: from the very
beginning of his leadership, he had to grapple with
a campaign of sabotage from Labour’s intransigent
right-wing faction, who preferred a Tory government
of any kind to a Labour Party with a left program.

AFTER BERNIE 45
 FIELD NOTES
In February 2017, Labour officials
discovered that the MP Diane
Abbott was crying in a toilet cubicle
because she had been overwhelmed
by the racist and sexist abuse she
was receiving online.
13:04 Patrick Heneghan
Abbott found crying in the loos
13:27 Julie Lawrence
:’(
One Labour MP, Jess Phillips,
launched her media career
by falsely claiming to have told
Abbott to “fuck off.” Phillips
has since gone on to publish
two books: Everywoman: One
Woman’s Truth About
Speaking the Truth and Truth
to Power: 7 Ways to Call Time
on BS. On becoming leader,
Keir Starmer appointed her to
a position in his shadow
cabinet.
13:27 Tracey Allen
Abbott memorial cupboard works well
A study found that Abbott —
the first black woman elected to
Westminster — received far
more abuse than any other
British MP during the 2017
election campaign. Nearly half
46
of all abusive tweets sent to
women MPs were directed
at Abbott.
15:52 Patrick Heneghan
Diane in Leon on vic street
15:52 Fiona Stanton
Shall we tell michael crick
Michael Crick was the polit-
ical correspondent for Channel
4 News until 2019.
15:53 Patrick Heneghan
Already have
Heneghan went on to serve as
chief executive for the anti-
Brexit People’s Vote campaign,
bankrolled by the millionaire
Roland Rudd, although he was
forced to resign under contro-
versial circumstances in
November 2019.
On May 22, 2017, a suicide bomber
blew himself up at a pop concert in
Manchester, killing twenty-three
people and wounding 139, the
majority of whom were children.
The election campaign was tempo-
rarily suspended. On the morning
of May 26, Corbyn resumed the
campaign with a speech that
addressed the Manchester Arena
№ 38  /  SUMMER 2020
 Leaked Labour Report

bombing and the wider issue of I have never been more ashamed to work

terrorism. Two Labour Party for this party

officials, Francis Grove-White and

09:06 Francis Grove-White
Jo Greening, discussed the speech
Ditto
and its likely impact.
09:06 Jo Greening
May 26, 2017
and I have been very ashamed in the past!
they are vile
09:06 Francis Grove-White you are right
How are we actually in the same party as have you seen the line on soldiers?
these vile, opportunistic morons?
Corbyn addressed British
Having paid tribute to the
soldiers directly with the fol-
victims and their families, and
lowing message: “You are
praised the emergency services
doing your duty as you have
for their response, Corbyn
done so many times before. I
noted that “many experts,
want to assure you that, under
including professionals in our
my leadership, you will only be
intelligence and security ser-
deployed abroad when there is
vices, have pointed to the
a clear need and only when
connections between wars our
there is a plan and you have
government has supported or
the resources to do your job to
fought in other countries, such
secure an outcome that delivers
as Libya, and terrorism here
lasting peace.”
at home.” He stressed that this
observation “in no way reduces
09:06 Francis Grove-White
the guilt of those who attack
Yep
our children,” who would
“forever be reviled and impla-
09:10 Francis Grove-White
cably held to account for their
The speech is astonishing on so many
actions.” levels. It’s so woefully written, intellectually
incoherent, factually inaccurate and
devoid of any attempt to be constructive
09:06 Jo Greening
or analytical that it is in effect a Donald
I am furious Trump speech. It’s easy to forget that only
FURIOUS yesterday morning they were briefing
that they would be easing back into the

AFTER BERNIE 47
 FIELD NOTES
campaign slowly and not doing
anything political
I despise these people more than ever
Corbyn praised “the solidarity,
humanity and compassion that
we have seen on the streets
of Manchester this week” and
urged people not to hold
Muslims collectively responsible
for the actions of the terrorist,
Salman Abedi.
09:10 Jo Greening
excellent analysis
me too
I hope I see not a single one of them today
09:11 Francis Grove-White
I actually felt quite sick when I saw that
YouGov poll last night
The YouGov poll put Labour
at 38 percent — the party’s
best polling score by that stage
of the campaign — with the
Tories at 43 percent.
09:12 Jo Greening
no its [sic] great
09:12 Francis Grove-White
Not that I think we will end up there or
probably anywhere near
09:12 Jo Greening
and I shall tell you why
it is a peak
48
and the polling was done after the
Manchester attack
so with a bit of luck this speech will show
a clear polling decline
and we shall all be able to point to how
disgusting they truly are
(now obviously we know it was never
real — but that isnt [sic] the point
in politics!
09:13 Francis Grove-White
Yeah I’m sure that’s right
09:16 Francis Grove-White
My fears are that: a) the speech won’t go
down as badly as it deserves to thanks to
the large groundswell of ill-informed
opposition to all western interventions.
And b) they will use that poll to claim they
were on course to win and then
Manachester [sic] happened.
And whether or not JC goes, lots of the
membership will buy that argument
Like after the referendum when they
distorted the polling and claimed wee [sic]
had overtaken the Tories before the
“coup” happpened
A poll conducted by YouGov
after the Manchester speech
showed that a plurality of
voters believed the UK was
wrong to participate in mili-
tary action against Iraq in
1991, Afghanistan in 2001,
Iraq in 2003, and Libya in
2011. And 55 percent believed
that Tony Blair’s invasion
of Iraq was wrong: just
18 percent now supported
the war.
№ 38  /  SUMMER 2020
 Leaked Labour Report

09:17 Jo Greening drink it we’d all be doing very

if this speech gets cut through — as I well. We were hearing people
think it may — it will harden normal people
against us
who hadn’t voted for a long
definitely while voting Labour yesterday
in the face of a terror attack normal evening, who were inspired by
people do not blame foreign intervention the policies — and, it has to be
they blame immigration said, by Jeremy — to vote
YouGov asked voters if they Labour last night.”
agreed with Corbyn’s argu- but that this speech particulalry [sic]
ment that “wars the UK has was toxic
and Manchester had happened when
supported or fought ARE
that poll was in the field
responsible, at least in part, for on the supporters
terror attacks against the I personally think we are going to do very
UK”: 53 percent endorsed the badly in deed [sic]
statement, while 24 percent and I think it will shock a lot of them how
disagreed. badly we do
including JC
whats [sic] more — all they will hear is we
so everyone has to be ready when he is
dont [sic] want to respond strongly
in shock
we want peace with ISIS
it has to be clean and brutal
it all plays into a bigger picture of how
they see corbyn When John McDonnell went
so I have a feeling this will cut through to Labour’s Southside HQ
you are right on the second point with some of Corbyn’s aides on
it has to be up to the MPs though to
the night of the election results,
demonstrate how toxic he is on the
doorstep throughout they found that their electronic
passes no longer granted them
When the election results came entry to the building. Iain
in, Corbyn’s 2016 leadership McNicol adamantly denied
challenger Owen Smith that this was in preparation
praised his performance effu- for an attempted leadership
sively: “He’s proved me wrong heave if the Tory landslide that
and lots of people wrong and I his officials were anticipating
take my hat off to him ... I had materialized.
don’t know what Jeremy’s got
and not involve the party at all in
but if we could bottle it and my opinion

AFTER BERNIE 49
 FIELD NOTES
those crazy people who now make up our
membership never want us to win in
anycase [sic]
they are communists
and green supporters
even if Manchester hadnt [sic] happened
and we got smashed
they would have never changed
their minds
09:23 Francis Grove-White
Yeah that’s true
I agree with all of that. And I think you’re
right — most people will see this speech for
the nonsencial [sic] and ill-judged turd
that it really is
Andrew Grice of the liberal
Independent confidently
predicted that Corbyn’s speech
would backfire: “This is a
debate the Tories are delighted
to have; it will help them a lot
more than it does Labour.”
YouGov, on the other hand,
found that “voters from across
all parties were more likely to
side with the Corbyn stance
than not . . . in most instances
Corbyn appears to be on the
right side of public opinion.”
09:25 Jo Greening
the crazies wont [sic] — they will love it
09:25 Francis Grove-White
Yeah of course — but the wider electorate
and floating voters
50 № 38  /  SUMMER 2020
I CANNOT WAIT to see Andrew Neil rip
him to pieces over it tonight
The campaign ended two weeks
after Corbyn’s Manchester speech,
with Labour winning 40 percent of
the vote — the party’s best result
since 2001, and the biggest increase
in vote share for either of the two
main parties since 1945. While
Labour supporters were jubilant,
the mood in Southside was more
subdued: party officials described
themselves as being “in need of
counseling,” “stunned and reeling,”
silent and grey faced.” According to
one official, Tracey Allen, the result
was “opposite to what i had been
working towards for the last couple
of years.”
June 8, 2017
22:24 Julie Lawrence
Patrick if anyone in war room needs some
safe space time they can come to gso
GSO: General Secretary’s
Office
22:25 Tracey Allen
More like in need of counseling!
22:41 Emilie Oldknow
What’s the atmosphere like there?
 Leaked Labour Report

22:41 Simon Mills 22:47 Julie Lawrence

Depends which side of the building! Not if we go into coalition and lose short
money

22:41 Patrick Heneghan “Steve” walking the floor

Awful
22:48 Emilie Oldknow
Help
Oh no

22:42 Simon Mills

22:48 Patrick Heneghan
Split between euphoria and shock
Everyone needs to smile
I’m going into room of death
22:42 Julie Lawrence
We are stunned and reeling.
22:48 Emilie Oldknow
Everyone needs to be very up beat
22:45 Tracey Allen
They are cheering and we are silent and
grey faced. Opposite to what I had been 22:48 Julie Lawrence
working towards for the last couple of Its [sic] hard but yes
years!! :’(

22:52 Iain McNicol

22:45 Emilie Oldknow
I’m not in smiling and mixing and doing the
We have to be upbeat 2nd floor.

22:47 Emilie Oldknow 22:53 Iain McNicol

And not show it
Emilie Oldknow was Keir
Starmer’s first choice to take
over as Labour’s general
secretary this year, but she
dropped out of the running
after the report was leaked.
Everyone else needs to do the same.
It is going to be a long night.
News of one Labour gain in
London’s Kensington & Chelsea
constituency came as an unwelcome
shock.

June 9, 2017
22:47 Emilie Oldknow
And at least we have loads of
money now ... 13:30 Sarah Mulholland
Kensington and Chelsea? I’ve just woken
up and confused by Twitter. Did we
gain it???

AFTER BERNIE 51
 FIELD NOTES
Days after the election, the
Grenfell Tower fire killed
seventy-two people in Emma
Dent Coad’s new constituency.
Dent Coad was widely praised
for her work representing the
families of the victims.
13:30 Patrick Heneghan
Count again at 6pm
13:31 Sarah Mulholland
Omg. That Emma Coad is a grade 1 tool.
Dent Coad narrowly lost her
seat to the Conservatives in the
2019 general election after the
anti-Brexit “Best for Britain”
campaign and the liberal
Observer urged pro-Remain
voters in the constituency to
support the Liberal
Democrats. Dent Coad was an
opponent of Brexit who sup-
ported a second referendum;
the Lib Dem candidate was a
Tory defector who lied about
Grenfell during the election
campaign.
 READING MATERIEL
CANON FODDER
Reading Victor
Serge from the
Depths of Defeat
Despite isolation, political defeat,
and incalculable grief, the Russian
revolutionary Victor Serge
persisted in writing in collective
rather than personal terms.
In Christian Petzgold’s 2018 film
Transit, a man assumes the
identity of a dead anti-Nazi writer.
He circles, alongside other
refugees, among bureaucrats in
Marseille in an attempt to secure
the requisite paperwork to leave
Europe. Although it is based on
a 1944 novel of the same name by
the German Jewish Communist
Anna Seghers, the film is set in
something resembling the present,
shot through with anachronisms —
though the streets, cafés, and
54
BY HANNAH PROCTOR
police cars are contemporary, most
details are not updated. The
parallels are oblique rather than
direct, as Petzgold shows how
the violent regimes, persecutions,
and displacements of the present
resemble, without being identical
to, those of the past.
Seghers herself left Marseille
for Mexico in 1941. On the same
boat was the writer and agitator
Victor Serge (1890–1947). He
describes the “castoffs of Europe
№ 38  /  SUMMER 2020
on a drifting wreck,” gambling
for matchsticks and drinking on
deck, remarking on the incon-
gruous persistence of apparent
frivolities in dark times: the “true
end of the world will be the day
there are no more cocktails.”
Notebooks: 1936–1947 documents
his final years. Following
international protests, Serge was
permitted to leave the Soviet
Union in 1936, just before Stalin’s
purges, living in exile in Belgium
and France and then escaping to
Mexico. The last entry was written summaries of Hollywood films; Memoirs of a Revolutionary,
in November 1947, the month caustic thumbnail sketches of translated by Peter Sedgwick and
of his death from heart failure. other exiles; descriptions of cacti, first published in 1963, then
butterflies, sunsets, oceans, released in an unabridged format
Unlike his epic novels and
lakes, and at least one volcano; by nyrb Classics in 2012,
memoirs written during the same
predictions for the future, covers Serge’s experiences as a
period, the notebooks intersperse
responses to current events, and young anarchist, Bolshevik,
chronicles of world historical
reflections on past failures; and Left Oppositionist. It is less an
events with what Serge describes
speculations on psychology; autobiography of an individual
as an attentiveness to life “in
observations of Mexican archaeo- than a biography of a political
its details, its dailiness, a ceaseless
logical sites and city streets; generation of which Serge was a
curiosity about the earth and
and documentation of Serge’s rare survivor. His writing often
ideas.” The notebooks encompass
shifting moods and increasingly serves as a book of the dead. Serge
discussions of Surrealist art;
poor health. records the deaths and recalls

AFTER BERNIE 55
 CANON FODDER
Serge’s rejection of the lives of people he knew who
were executed in Stalinist and
historical fatalism Francoist prisons or killed in Nazi
is tied to his conviction concentration camps, battles,
that “we have an and sieges, as well as those who
died from disease, old age, or
unforeseeable future suicide. He expresses occasional
in our hands.” guilt at sitting in calm gardens
listening to birdsong in the midst
of war but acknowledges that
“it’s mad to wish, even subcon-
sciously, unconsciously, for
everyone’s participation in the
catastrophe.”
Though long accustomed to exile,
Serge complains in his notebooks
of the absence of the “environ-
ment” previously provided by his
comrades: “Terribly difficult to
create in a void, without the least
support, without any atmosphere.”
Yet despite struggling to find
publishers, he wrote prolifically in
this period — novels, memoirs,
essays, articles, letters, poems —
and described his capacity to
continue working as a capacity for
hope. “Perhaps a secret joy is
needed to write a poem, even in the
depths of suffering,” he wrote.
Serge does not doubt that the
“tyrannies will last longer than I
have left to live,” yet he never
stops imagining that things might
one day improve through renewed
collective efforts. Though he
expresses no optimism for the
immediate future, his rejection of
historical fatalism is tied to his
conviction that “we have an
unforeseeable future in our hands.”
In Mexico City, he pays visits to
Leon Trotsky’s widow, Natalia
Sedova. Alienated from the Fourth
International (he supported the
56 № 38  /  SUMMER 2020
anti-Stalinist but non-Trotskyist
poum in the Spanish Civil War),
Serge expresses exasperation that
the “gossip of narrow-minded
malevolent sectarians” continued.
But despite tensions, he is
determined to maintain a relation-
ship with Sedova, whom he sees as
the only other survivor of “twenty
years of struggles.” He describes
her as a “living shadow,” mourning
not only her partner but “an era
and an uncountable crowd.”
They share an “immense bereave-
ment” — for individuals, for a
collective, for an unrealized ideal.
But Serge makes clear that
mourning should be combined
with a continued commitment
to life: “All our ideas about death
are ideas of the living. To think
of death is an act of life, an act of
faith in life.”
Despite isolation, political defeat,
and incalculable grief, Serge
persisted in writing in collective
rather than personal terms.
Petzgold’s adaptation of Seghers’s
novel demonstrates that historical
analogies are never precise, but
as another global catastrophe was
unfolding, I found myself writing
lines from Serge’s notebooks
in mine: “In the depths of defeat
what is left to us is nonconsent
to the inhuman; the refusal to
close our eyes; the refusal to lose
hope in ourselves and so in
everything.”
Image Credits: Victor Serge. Death mask,
from front, left and right. Serge, V. “Una
página del diario de Victor Serge. Los
Alemanes” typescript, corrected. Serge,
V. (1940). “L'assassinat de Trotsky (d'après
les journaux américains du moment)”
typescript, corrected.
 A B
3
Bernie Sanders’s
4
Five-Year War
5
8
One mild April afternoon in 2015, deep within
the ideological dead zone of the second Obama
9 administration, Bernie Sanders took a break
from his Senate workday and stalked out to the
10 lawn in front of the Capitol building. Unfolding
a crinkled sheet of notes, the Vermont senator
11 took less than ten minutes to tell reporters
why he was running for president: Americans
12 were working longer hours for lower wages,
while the rich feasted on profits and billionaires
13
ruled the political system. The country faced
its greatest crisis since the Great Depression,
14
he said.
Five years later, on an April morning
15
in 2020, Sanders stood inside his home in
16
Burlington, Vermont, and announced that
he was suspending his second campaign for
17 president. This race, like the contest four
years earlier, had ended in defeat, and though
18 Bernie gave an inspirational fifteen-minute
speech — quoting Nelson Mandela and
19 thanking supporters for their blood, sweat,
tears, and social media posts — even a sym-
20 pathetic viewer might wonder what, exactly,
all this passionate effort had yielded.
21
Income and wealth inequality have soared
to new heights; a billionaire sits in the White
22
House, while the opposition party turns to
its own billionaires for leadership; and the
23
covid-19 pandemic has left the United States
24
not merely approaching its greatest crisis
since the Great Depression but thoroughly
25 immersed in it.
26
AFTER BERNIE
MATT KARP
How he lost and where we
go from here.
Sanders lost. He waged a five-year war
against the billionaire class and the Democratic
Party’s leadership — a war across six Aprils —
and in the end, he was beaten on both fronts.
Those of us who soldiered in Bernie’s beaten
army must reckon hard with the nature and
significance of this defeat.
The Sanders project was among the most
significant left political events of the twenty-
first century, linking for the first time minimal
but foundational socialist demands to a base
of millions in the nerve center of global capi-
talism. Its conclusive defeat this spring, amid
an apocalyptic atmosphere of disease, depres-
sion, and unrest, offers enormous temptation
for the Left to fall into despair.
Already, we have seen a range of broad-
sides against Sanders and the legacy of his
campaigns, whether inflected by the far left,
pleased to move on from a long detour into
electoral politics; the liberal center, eager to
submerge all possibility outside the present
field of vision; or the traditionalist right, only
too happy to proclaim a left-wing retreat from
class to culture war.
The corporate press, meanwhile, has
jumped at the chance to throw Bernie — and
his insistent call for massive material redistri-
bution, funded by corporate profits — straight
into the dustbin of history. Even the mass
protests over the police murder of George
Floyd somehow became an occasion for the
New York Times to announce the end of
57
BERNIE SANDERS’S FIVE-YEAR WAR
A B
the Sanders era. “Bernie Sanders Predicted
Revolution, Just Not This One,” blared the
headline, building off intersectionality theo-
rist Kimberlé Crenshaw’s analysis that “every
corporation worth its salt” has now surpassed
Sanders in the battle against “structural racism
and anti-blackness.” Goodbye Medicare for
All, hello Jeff Bezos clapping back against “All
Lives Matter.”
These are all artifacts of defeat. Sanders
lost, and both his fair-weather friends and his
permanent enemies are now eager to consign
him to the grave. But neither a defeat at the
polls nor a shift in the discourse is reason to
abandon the essence of Bernie’s struggle. Mass
protests against police violence and racism
can only begin to realize their aims if joined
to a broader, Sanders-style democratic move-
ment — large enough to shape national politics
and determined enough to challenge capital —
capable of winning the material concessions
necessary for a truly free and equal society.
An accurate balance sheet for the Sanders
campaigns must have at least two columns:
first, an accounting of achievement, substantial
on its own terms and unprecedented in more
than fifty years of US political history; and
second, a reckoning with limits, which now,
in the aftermath of 2020, appear both larger
and more intractable than at almost any point
since 2016.
To this accounting we can add a third
column, on the prospects for future struggle —
foreshortened in the present, blurry in the
near future, but possibly brighter in the
decades ahead.
I. Bernie’s Achievement:
Two Lessons
When Bernie Sanders announced his candi-
dacy in 2015, his press conference appeared on
page a21 of the New York Times, far behind
articles about the Obama presidential library, a
58
testing scandal in Atlanta schools, and Martin
O’Malley’s record as Baltimore mayor. This
was no more than what was due for a candi-
date polling at 3 percent, in a newspaper that
had not actually printed the words “Medicare
for All” in the calendar year before Sanders
entered the race.
From the perspective of 2020, it is diffi-
cult to remember the narrowness of the policy
girdle that fitted American left liberalism in the
years just before Bernie’s first campaign. As
progressives like Keith Ellison, Michael Moore,
and Susan Sarandon urged Elizabeth Warren
to run for president, the Massachusetts senator
appeared alongside Tom Perez at an afl-cio
summit in January 2015. There, Warren won
headlines for a “fiery” speech in which she
denounced “trickle-down economics” and
called for new financial regulations, the
enforcement of existing labor laws, protec-
tions for Medicare and Social Security, and
an unspecified increase in the minimum wage.
“The striking thing about this progres-
sive factional agenda,” noted Vox’s Matthew
Yglesias at the time, “is there’s really nothing
on it that Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton
would disagree with.”
Today, that 2015 reform package sounds
a lot like the Joe Biden 2020 platform, and
no one, outside of a tiny caste of professional
propagandists, affects to call it “left-wing.”
Bernie’s five-year war, even in defeat, taught
the American left two fundamental lessons.
First, it demonstrated that bold social-
democratic ideas, well beyond the regulatory
ambitions of Obama-era progressives, can
win a mass base in today’s United States. An
uncompromising demand for the federal gov-
ernment to provide essential social goods for
all Americans — from health care and college
tuition to childcare and family leave — stood at
the heart of the Sanders project from beginning
to end. Starting at 3 percent in the polls and
conducting two presidential campaigns almost
№ 38  /  SUMMER 2020

C D
entirely on the strength of this platform,
Sanders built the most influential left-wing
challenge in modern history.
Yes, candidates from Jesse Jackson to
Dennis Kucinich also supported single-payer
health insurance, but their campaigns did not
end with polls showing a newfound majority of
Americans backing Medicare for All, let alone
massive supermajorities among Democrats
and voters under sixty-five. Yes, leftists from
Michael Harrington to Ralph Nader had long
declared that a bipartisan corporate class rules
America, but they did not turn that insight
into a political movement capable of winning
primaries in New Hampshire, Michigan,
or California.
Nor is the partial success of the Sanders
campaigns merely a hollow “discourse victory.”
It has presented concrete evidence for a prop-
osition that mainstream political observers
scoffed at five years ago, and that the American
left itself had grandly announced rather than
demonstrated: that “democratic socialism,”
driven by opposition to billionaire-class rule
and dedicated to universal public goods, can
win the support of millions, not just thousands.
Across the last half century, any activist with
a bullhorn could proclaim this to be true, but
Bernie Sanders actually fucking proved it.
Of course, as Bernie’s defeat makes clear,
there is a vast gulf between winning exit polls
and winning power. If the Sanders campaigns
illuminated American social democra-
cy’s unknown political resources, they also
revealed, in a dramatic fashion, the determi-
nation of their opponents. This is the second
practical lesson of Bernie’s five-year war: the
unanimity and ferocity of elite Democratic
resistance, not only to Sanders himself, but
to the essence of his platform.
In its general outlines, this has been vis-
ible since early in the 2016 campaign, when
Democratic Party officials, TV pundits, and
prestige print writers — across an ideological
AFTER BERNIE
MATT KARP
spectrum, from centrists like Claire McCaskill
and Chris Matthews to liberals like Barney
Frank and Paul Krugman — universally
scorned the Sanders campaign and its agenda.
Yet in other ways, the depth of Democratic
opposition to Sanders was not obvious until
this year, either to Bernie’s friends or to his
enemies. Throughout February, as Sanders
won New Hampshire and lapped the field
in Nevada, panicked centrist commentators
called on the remaining Democrats in the
race to unite behind a single anti-Bernie can-
didate. But their palpable angst betrayed a
near-universal belief that this would not actu-
ally happen. For “a critical mass” of Bernie’s
rivals to withdraw at the last minute, reported
the New York Times on February 27, “seems
like the least likely outcome.”
We all know what happened next. Just
three days later, on the evening before Super
Tuesday, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar
suddenly withdrew from the race and endorsed
Joe Biden, joined by Beto O’Rourke, Harry
Reid, and dozens more prominent Democrats
and former Obama officials.
This great consolidation around Biden,
following his victory in South Carolina, pro-
duced perhaps $100 million in “free” laudatory
media coverage — more than Sanders spent on
advertising all campaign long — compressed
into a single weekend before the most critical
election of the primary. The result was a Super
Tuesday stampede for Biden, even in states
where Sanders had led the pack only a week
before, from Maine to Texas. It gave Biden a
commanding lead that he never relinquished.
In retrospect, it may seem hopelessly naive
for Sanders and his allies to have counted on
an indefinite division of the Democratic field.
Yet there is a reason that even Bernie’s most
bitter enemies shared the same calculus, with
dozens of party operatives telling the Times
in late February that it might take a brokered
convention to stop him.
59
BERNIE SANDERS’S FIVE-YEAR WAR
A B
After all, Buttigieg was proclaimed the
winner in Iowa and finished a close second in
New Hampshire; never since the birth of the
modern primary system has a candidate with
that profile quit the race nearly so early. Even
as an ideological move to throttle the Left,
the Biden coalescence had no precedent in
its swiftness and near-perfect coordination.
When Jesse Jackson briefly threatened to
take the Democratic Party by storm in 1988,
establishment rivals Michael Dukakis, Al Gore,
Dick Gephardt, and Paul Simon all remained
in the running until the end of March, when
more than thirty-five primary contests were
complete.
This time, the core establishment forces
managed to clear the field after just four prima-
ries, leaving just a single centrist alternative to
Biden, the vain billionaire Michael Bloomberg.
(Elizabeth Warren’s persistence in the race
only helped the anti-Sanders effort, since she
was somewhat more likely to siphon votes
from the left than the center.) And after Super
Tuesday, of course, Bloomberg promptly quit
and endorsed Biden. Warren, when she left the
race, would do Sanders no such favor.
Though, in many ways, the Democratic
Party of 2020 is much weaker than it was thirty
years ago — it controls eleven fewer state legis-
latures, for instance — the current Democratic
leadership, in its influence over party politi-
cians, is stronger than ever. Buttigieg, who had
campaigned hard in Super Tuesday states —
on February 29, he held the primary’s single
largest rally in Tennessee — did not drop out
because of a predictably poor showing in South
Carolina. (Even there, he still finished ahead
of Warren for the fourth consecutive race.)
Buttigieg abruptly abandoned millions
of dollars of advertising and perhaps thirty
thousand Super Tuesday volunteers because
Barack Obama told him to — and because he
knew that his own career prospects, in today’s
Democratic Party, depend less on winning
60
popular support in his own name than on
gamely joining the team effort to halt Sanders
and “save the party.”
The speed and thoroughness of this elite
consolidation — which also made Biden
an instant donor-class favorite — makes a
mockery of the implausible idea, floated by
some reporters and pundits, that Sanders
blew a golden opportunity to win over the
Democratic establishment through better
manners.
Obama, Hillary Clinton, and their cor-
porate allies — never mind the consultants,
hedge fund managers, and tech ceos who
built “Mayor Pete” — did not capriciously
decide to close ranks against Bernie because
he did not make enough polite, endorse-
ment-seeking phone calls after Nevada.
Their profound ideological opposition to
the Sanders project has been plain for a long
time; what we didn’t know is just how rapidly
and effectively that private opposition could
be translated into public fact.
This hard lesson is not only enough to
prevent anyone in the Sanders camp from
looking for meaningful concessions from
the Biden campaign; it underlines the sharp
limits of any institutional politics within
the existing Democratic Party. Whatever
Democratic voters think — and most of them
like Bernie Sanders and his platform — the
dominant bulk of Democratic officials oppose
them both with an organized vigor they
seldom bring to combat with Republicans.
In 2016, Sanders won more than 40
percent of the primary popular vote but
earned endorsements from just 3.7 percent
of congressional Democrats (seven of 187
representatives). Against a far more crowded
field in 2020, Sanders won the first three con-
tests and around 35 percent of the vote, but
got the support of just 3.8 percent of congres-
sional Democrats (nine of 232). That is not a
marker of institutional progress.
№ 38  /  SUMMER 2020
 MATT KARP

C
Primary Popular
D
Vote vs.
Congressional Endorsements

2016
Even the Congressional Progressive
Caucus (cpc), whose cochairs gave Sanders
a splashy endorsement, furnished more sup-
port for Biden (twelve members) than for
Sanders (eight) before Super Tuesday. In the
brief two-way contest between March 3 and 43.3% 3.7%
March 17, Biden racked up twenty further
cpc endorsements, compared to just one
for Sanders.
In this critical respect, the institutional
Democratic Party did not really “move left”
at all between 2015 and 2020. Yes, various ele-
ments of the Sanders agenda have migrated Endorsements From
Primary Votes
onto party platforms and campaign websites, Congressional Democrats
and some left-leaning policies, like the $15
minimum wage, have even been introduced
at the state level. But in national politics,
the line guarding the party’s left flank — a
steel barricade that separates Obama-style
kludge politics from Sanders-style demands
for universal public health care, education, 31.2% 3.8%
3.8%
and family support — is now more heavily
policed than ever.
This hard-won knowledge itself is a
weapon against liberal elites who usually
prefer to obfuscate differences rather than
fight over them. “Bernie Sanders’s ideas are 2020 (Before March 17)
so popular that Hillary Clinton is running on
them,” gushed Vox in April 2015. Of course,
Democrats will peddle this message again in
2020, but for the millions of Sanders voters sour futility of third-party campaigns or the
who have just watched the party establish- saccharine cheerleading of party-approved
ment spend five years suffocating a platform “progressives.”
of Medicare for All and free public college, Yet this is where the real trouble begins.
it’s a much tougher sell. The Left, after Bernie, has finally grown just
The major achievement of Bernie’s strong enough to know how weak it really is.
five-year war, then, is an invigorated and The essential problem, after all, is not
a clarified movement for American demo- that the corporate establishment com-
cratic socialism — newly optimistic about mands Democratic politicians — it’s that it
the appeal of its platform, yet intimately still commands most Democratic primary
aware of the power of its enemies. Sanders voters. Given a clear choice between Bernie’s
has left the Left in a stronger position than demand for another New Deal and Biden’s
he found it, both larger and more self- call for a “return to normalcy,” about 60 per-
aware, and far less tempted by either the cent of the Democrats who went to the polls

AFTER BERNIE 61
BERNIE SANDERS’S FIVE-YEAR WAR
A B
The Left, after Bernie,
has finally grown just
strong enough to know
how weak it really is.
apparently picked Warren G. Harding over
Franklin D. Roosevelt.
The harsh truth, proved harshly across
these six Aprils, is that a social-demo-
cratic majority does not yet exist within the
Democratic electorate, never mind the United
States as a whole. Sanders has given the Left
new relevance in national politics, but to make
the leap from relevance to power, we need
to build that majority — and this is not the
work of one or two election cycles, but at least
another decade, and maybe more.
II. A Closer Look at Defeat
In 2016, Bernie Sanders led the largest left-
wing primary campaign in Democratic Party
history, winning far more votes and delegates
than Jesse Jackson, Ted Kennedy, or even the
victorious George McGovern. He entered the
2020 race as a serious contender, not a long-
shot underdog. In the end, however, Joe Biden
beat Sanders with a voting coalition that both
resembled and subtly differed from the coa-
lition that propelled Hillary Clinton to the
nomination in 2016.
62
A look at local results from the two elec-
tions suggests that Sanders was defeated
by three key factors in 2020: First, despite
a substantial effort, the Bernie campaign
struggled to make inroads with black voters,
which turned out to be a far more intractable
problem than it seemed four years ago. Second,
and relatedly, despite considerable success
in winning working-class support compared
to 2016 — mostly with Latino voters — the
campaign failed to generate higher participa-
tion among working-class voters of all races.
Finally, above all, Bernie was swamped by a
massive turnout surge from the Democratic
Party ’s fastest-growing demographic:
former Republican voters in overwhelmingly
white, wealthy, and well-educated suburban
neighborhoods.
Let’s take each of these in turn.
Struggling to Win Black Voters
After the 2016 campaign, in which Sanders’s
struggles with black voters cost him dearly,
the 2020 campaign made a range of well-doc-
umented efforts to court African Americans, in
both substance and style. The goal, as Adolph
Reed Jr and Willie Legette have argued, was
never to win a singular, homogenous, and
mythical “black vote” — but in order to com-
pete in a Democratic primary, Sanders did
need to convince a lot more black voters.
In 2019, the campaign released an ambi-
tious plan to fund historically black colleges
and universities; supported by scholars like
Darrick Hamilton and leaders like Jackson,
Mississippi, mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba,
Sanders railed against the racial wealth gap
and delivered substantive plans to close it.
His campaign poured resources into South
Carolina, which Sanders visited more times
than Joe Biden or Elizabeth Warren; Bernie
himself went on The Breakfast Club and said
his 2016 campaign had been “too white.”
№ 38  /  SUMMER 2020

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None of it seemed to make an appreciable
difference. In South Carolina, where Sanders
won 14 percent of black voters in 2016, exit
polls showed him winning 17 percent in 2020.
In the state’s five counties with a black popu-
lation over 60 percent, Sanders increased his
vote share from 11 percent to 12 percent.
It was no better for him on Super Tuesday
and beyond. In the rural South, from eastern
North Carolina to western Mississippi, Sanders
struggled to break the 15 percent threshold in
majority-black counties. In some black urban
neighborhoods, like Northside Richmond and
Houston’s Third Ward, he made small gains
on his 2016 baseline, occasionally winning
as much as a third of the vote; but in others,
like Southeast Durham and North St. Louis,
Sanders fared even worse. On the whole, Biden
clobbered him just as comprehensively as
Clinton had four years earlier.
After 2016, it was still possible to argue,
optimistically, that black voter preferences
reflected Clinton’s advantage in name recogni-
tion and resources, along with Sanders’s need
to focus on the early contests in Iowa and New
Hampshire. All the best survey data showed
reliable and enthusiastic black support for
the core items on Bernie’s social-democratic
agenda. With improved messaging and a more
serious investment in voter outreach, surely
an insurgent left-wing candidate could breach
the Democratic establishment’s “firewall” and
win a large chunk of black voters.
Bernie Sanders was not that candidate,
either in 2016 or in 2020. But after years of
struggle, it is time to revisit the assumption
that superior policy, messaging, and tactics are
enough for any insurgent to overcome black
voter support for establishment Democrats.
After all, Sanders is far from the only left-wing
candidate who has struggled on this front.
In the 2015 Chicago mayoral election,
Rahm Emanuel beat Chuy García with huge
AFTER BERNIE
MATT KARP
margins among black voters; the same pattern
was visible in gubernatorial races in Virginia,
New Jersey, Michigan, and New York, where
black voters overwhelmingly backed Ralph
Northam, Phil Murphy, Gretchen Whitmer,
and Andrew Cuomo against progressive out-
siders. In last year’s race for Queens district
attorney, Melinda Katz barely edged past
Tiffany Cabán with the strong support of black
voters in Southeast Queens.
Nor have anti-establishment black can-
didates necessarily fared much better with
black primary voters. Jamaal Bowman’s recent
victory over Eliot Engel is a meaningful and
inspiring win for the Left, but not many left-
wing candidates have had the advantage of
facing a severely out-of-touch white opponent
in a plurality-black district. Far more often,
under different circumstances, the result has
gone the other way. In the 2017 Atlanta may-
oral race, the business-friendly party favorite
Keisha Lance Bottoms creamed Vincent Fort,
who had been endorsed by both Bernie Sanders
and Killer Mike. And in congressional contests
from St. Louis and Chicago to Columbus, Ohio
and Prince George’s County, Maryland, black
progressive insurgent campaigns have failed to
catch fire, with black voters ultimately helping
establishment-backed incumbents coast to
victory at the polls.
Black voter support for mainline
Democrats is a broader trend in American
politics — a trend approaching the status of a
Sanders’ Performance in South Carolina
Among Black Voters
2016 14%
2020 17%
63
BERNIE SANDERS’S FIVE-YEAR WAR
A B
fundamental fact — and it cannot be explained
with reference to Bernie Sanders alone.
After 2016, some argued that a clearer
focus on racial justice and a concerted effort
to woo activists might boost a left-wing cam-
paign with black voters. But the 2020 race
offered slim evidence for that proposition,
either in Sanders’s performance or in the frus-
trations of the Elizabeth Warren campaign,
whose platform included a prominent focus
on black maternal mortality, grants for black-
owned businesses, and targeted reforms to
help “farmers of color.”
This rhetoric won black organizers in
droves but hardly any black votes: among
African Americans, exit polls showed Warren
trailing not only Biden and Sanders but
Bloomberg, too, in every single state, including
her own. In North Carolina’s rural black-ma-
jority counties, farmers of color did not turn
out for Warren, who actually received fewer
votes than “no preference.”
Another popular view is that black voters
have the most to fear from Donald Trump
and the Republicans, and thus tend to favor
moderate, conventionally “electable” candi-
dates. But while concerns about electability
surely played a key part in Bernie’s 2020
defeat, there is little evidence to suggest that
it mattered more to black Democrats than
white Democrats (if anything, polling sug-
gests the opposite). Fear of general election
defeat also cannot explain why black voters
favored Joe Crowley over Alexandria Ocasio-
Cortez, Andrew Cuomo over Cynthia Nixon,
or establishment leaders in other deep-blue
areas where Republicans are banished from
politics altogether.
Nor can the phenomenon be explained by
actual ideological conservatism, or any real
hesitance to get behind a politics of material
redistribution. In fact, black voters support
Medicare for All at higher rates than almost
any other demographic in the country.
64
The institutional conservatism of most
black elected leaders, on the other hand,
continues to stack the deck against left-wing
politics. Powerful black politicians like Jim
Clyburn and Hakeem Jeffries, as Perry Bacon Jr
has argued, support the establishment because
“they are part of the establishment.” The
Congressional Black Caucus has not tried to
disguise its fierce hostility to left-wing primary
challenges, even when the progressive chal-
lengers are black, like Bowman and Mckayla
Wilkes, and the centrist incumbents are white,
like Engel and Steny Hoyer.
Overcoming the near-unanimous opposi-
tion of black elected leaders is difficult enough,
but the problem for left-wing insurgents is
even greater: it’s hard to win black voters by
running against a party establishment whose
preeminent figure is still, after all, America’s
first black president. In the age of Obama, as
Joe Biden’s primary campaign showed, black
primary voters may well be moved more by
appeals to institutional continuity than either
personal identity (as Kamala Harris learned)
or political ideology.
After fifty years of living in a system where
profound material change seems almost impos-
sible — and black politics, like many other
zones of politics, has become largely affective
and transactional as a result — that feeling
is understandable. Black voters, of course,
must be a critical part of any working-class
majority. But as long as every black political
figure with significant institutional standing
remains tied to Obama’s party leadership, and
remains invested in using that tie to beat back
left-wing challenges, anti-establishment can-
didates will face tough odds.
If there is hope for the Left here, it is that
black support for establishment Democrats
remains tenacious rather than enthusiastic —
strong support from a relatively small group
of primary voters. Campaign boasts and press
puffery aside, there was no black turnout surge
№ 38  /  SUMMER 2020

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for Joe Biden. Across the March primaries,
even as overall Democratic turnout soared in
comparison to 2016, it dropped absolutely in
black neighborhoods across the country.
In Michigan, Democratic participa-
tion bloomed by more than 350,000 votes
but wilted in Flint’s first and second wards,
where turnout declined from over 25 per-
cent of registered voters to under 21 percent.
Similar declines from 2016 were recorded in
Ferguson, Missouri, in North St. Louis, in
Houston’s Kashmere Gardens, Sunnyside, and
Crestmont Park, and in Southeast Durham —
even as statewide Democratic turnout soared
in Missouri, Texas, and North Carolina.
This follows a pattern already evi-
dent in the 2016 general election, in which
poor and working-class black voters — like
working-class voters generally — appear to
comprise a smaller and smaller share of the
active Democratic voting coalition.
That is no consolation for Bernie Sanders,
whose campaign was premised on its ability
to help generate working-class participation
in politics. But it does suggest that in some
ways, the Left’s struggles with black voters
are a specific symptom of a more general
disease. The Sanders campaign, in both its
remarkable strengths and its ultimately fatal
weaknesses, illuminated the larger problem
that has plagued left politics across much of
the developed world: a failure to mobilize,
much less organize, the majority of workers.
Working-Class Complexities
This is perhaps the central fact of transatlantic
politics in the last fifty years. In his recent book,
Capital and Ideology, Thomas Piketty offers an
efficient summary of the basic problem: since
the 1960s, left-of-center parties in Europe and
North America have lost support from the tra-
ditional working class, remaking themselves
into a “Brahmin left,” crucially dependent
on the votes of professionals. (Conservative
AFTER BERNIE
MATT KARP
parties, though winning more working-class
votes, largely remain under the thrall of a
business-dominated “merchant right.”)
The causes behind this shift on the Left
are disputed: Piketty, along with Jacobin and
other socialist critics, blames globalized capi-
talism, the decline of organized labor, and the
centrist policy turn of major party leaderships;
many liberals, meanwhile — ironically joined
by the “populist” right — tend to emphasize
the sharpening cultural conservatism of ethnic
majorities within the working class.
To the extent that Bernie Sanders aimed
to reverse this global trend in the space of two
presidential primary races, he failed. Yet the
dynamics of that failure are more complex
than most analysis so far has acknowledged.
Compared to 2016, the Sanders campaign
in 2020 struggled with what pundits call “the
white working class”: white voters without col-
lege degrees. Against Hillary Clinton, Bernie’s
strength with this share of the primary elec-
torate propelled him to victory in states like
Indiana and West Virginia. But this spring,
as many analysts have highlighted, Joe Biden
turned the tables on Sanders and beat him
outright in predominantly white working-class
counties across the South and Midwest.
In retrospect, it seems clear that some
of Sanders’s former strength in these areas
owed to the particular conjuncture of the
2016 campaign. Low-turnout caucuses over-
stated Bernie’s actual rural support in states
like Maine, Minnesota, and Washington; a
deep hostility to Clinton, as some suspected at
the time, seems to have boosted his vote total
everywhere, and particularly in conservative
regions like Appalachia, the Ozarks, and the
Great Plains.
Bernie’s leading opponent in 2020 was
much stronger on this terrain. Though Biden’s
actual record in the Senate is that of an exem-
plary corporate neoliberal — apathetic if not
hostile to working-class interests — some
65
BERNIE SANDERS’S FIVE-YEAR WAR
A B
combination of age, guile, and good-natured
imbecility have allowed him, even and perhaps
especially in his declining years, to produce
an effective impression of a vanished breed of
New Deal Democrat, experienced enough to
know his way around Washington but always
willing to throw a punch for “the little guy.” In
this respect, the Sanders campaign knew from
the start that Biden would be a formidable rival
for working-class votes, white and black alike.
But by far the most significant difference
between 2016 and 2020 is the incumbent pres-
idency of Donald J. Trump. Since the creation
of the modern primary system, the presence of
a rival in the White House has nearly always
led opposition parties to pick nominees per-
ceived as moderate and safely electable: Mitt
Romney in 2012, John Kerry in 2004, Bob
Dole in 1996, Bill Clinton in 1992, and Walter
Mondale in 1984 all fit that mold. (The only
partial exception is Ronald Reagan in 1980,
and the incumbent president he faced, Jimmy
Carter, was so weak that he could not even
avoid a serious primary challenge of his own.)
Apparently riskier candidates like Trump and
Barack Obama, with more ambivalent relations
White Voters
Without a Degree
Biden Sanders
Nevada 14 35
South Carolina 25 30
California 34 34
Texas 31 33
Colorado 21 26
Vermont 21 53
66
to their party’s establishment, have flourished
only in open-year elections.
The incumbent effect has hampered pri-
mary challengers for forty years, but never has
it been stronger than in 2020, when a dominant
majority of Democrats believed that beating
Donald Trump was more important than
all other issues put together. Even in 2004,
much less than half of that memorably ner-
vous Democratic electorate said that beating
George W. Bush was so important.
Any attempt to explain Bernie’s defeat
chiefly through the desertion of white workers
must founder on the larger fact that Sanders
lost ground to Biden with every group of white
voters. (The richer the group, the more ground
he lost — but more on this to come.) A gen-
eral incumbent effect, as Dustin Guastella has
argued in Jacobin, was far more significant
than any specific question of campaign tactics
or cultural signaling.
In fact, it is easy to overstate the scale of
Bernie’s defeat among the so-called “white
working class.” In virtually every state, Sanders
did better with white voters without a col-
lege degree than with their better-educated
counterparts.
In Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada,
South Carolina, California, Texas, Colorado,
and Vermont, Sanders actually led or tied
Biden among white voters without a degree.
Everywhere, too, Sanders fared even better
with white, working-class men, winning them
outright in all of the above states, plus North
Carolina, Tennessee, Maine, and Washington.
In both Michigan and Missouri, Sanders trailed
Biden among white men without degrees by
less than 5 points — but Biden won women in
this group by 17 and 30 points, respectively.
Bernie’s particular struggles with
women — much more concerned with beating
Trump than men, according to polls — fur-
ther suggest that the decline in his white
№ 38  /  SUMMER 2020
 MATT KARP

C D

working-class support had less to do with Sanders’ Performance Among

culture or ideology than with a perception of White Voters With and Without Degrees
electability.
A serious class analysis of the evolving
Sanders coalition must also take note of the
massive group Bernie brought into the fold
this year — Latino voters, the fastest-growing
White Voters White Voters
portion of America’s working-class electorate.
With Degrees Without Degrees
All over the greater Southwest, from the Rio
Grande in Texas to California’s Central Valley,
Sanders dominated the Latino districts that he
had mostly lost to Hillary Clinton in 2016. In
Nevada +11
heavily Latino neighborhoods from East Los South Carolina +12
Angeles to Northside Houston, “Tío Bernie” California +3
often won more votes than Biden, Bloomberg,
Texas +8
and Warren combined.
This was not a regional phenomenon, nor Colorado +4
was it limited to Mexican-American areas. Vermont +4
Sanders also won big with working-class
North Carolina +12
Puerto Rican and Dominican-American voters
in Holyoke and Lawrence, Massachusetts, Tennessee +6
as well as in Central American immigrant Maine +2
neighborhoods in central LA and Southwest
Houston. Washington +10
In nearly all these places, Sanders had to Michigan +2
overcome the opposition of the Latino polit-
Missouri +5
ical class, which was scarcely more favorable
to him than the black political establishment.
By early March, Sanders had received just
two endorsements from the Congressional In numerical terms, Bernie’s huge gains
Hispanic Caucus; Biden had fourteen. Yet with Latinos may well have offset the decline
there is no such thing as a Latino Obama, and in his white working-class support. And given
the institutional ties linking Latino voters to that Sanders won over these voters, in large
the Democratic establishment, we learned this part, by doubling down on the redistrib-
year, may be relatively weak. utive bread-and-butter issues that Latino
In the end, few elected Latino leaders voters prize most, it may well be that the
delivered their constituents to Biden. Across 2020 Sanders coalition, though smaller than
four Southern California congressional dis- the 2016 version, was in fact even more fully
tricts represented by Lucille Roybal-Allard, grounded in the US working class. Certainly,
Lou Correa, Tony Cárdenas, and Juan given this significant shift, it is too soon to
Vargas — Biden endorsers all — Sanders beat pen epitaphs to the possibility of class-driven
his multiple rivals with an outright majority politics within the Democratic Party.
of votes.

AFTER BERNIE 67
BERNIE SANDERS’S FIVE-YEAR WAR
A B
Michigan Primary Voters
Income Under $50,000
31% OF VOTERS
Sanders 49%
Biden 42%
Yet even this silver lining carries with it an
inevitable touch of gray. Sanders won Latino-
majority areas overwhelmingly, but mostly
without increasing voter turnout. In Roybal-
Allard’s working-class South LA district,
which Bernie won with almost 57 percent of
the vote — his single best congressional district
in the country — almost ten thousand fewer
voters came to the polls than in 2016. The
same pattern held in many of Bernie’s stron-
gest areas in Southern California. And across
Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, and in Houston’s
Latino-majority neighborhoods, Sanders won
decisively, but overall Democratic turnout (as
a share of registered voters) was either flat or
declined from 2016.
This suggests that his campaign’s Latino
outreach efforts were enormously successful
in convincing 2016 Clinton voters to jump on
the Bernie bus — an impressive feat on its own
terms — but less successful in bringing new
working-class Latino voters into politics. The
68
other possibility, no more inspiring, is that
the new Latino voters Sanders gained were
offset by an equally large number of voters who
dropped out of the primary electorate in 2020.
It is just one more enumeration of the ele-
mental problem that confronts any effort to
run left-wing candidates in the Democratic
Party: the relative decline of working-class
political participation — black, brown, and
white alike.
From Patagonia to Halliburton
In the mainstream press, Sanders’s defeat in
Michigan, the Waterloo of his 2020 campaign,
was largely attributed to the desertion of the
working-class voters who had propelled him
to victory four years ago. Yet among Michigan
voters making under $50,000 a year, he beat
Joe Biden by 7 points — a larger margin than
in 2016, when he beat Hillary Clinton by just
3 points with that same group.
Sanders was not defeated by lower-income
voters at all, who gave him solid support in
Michigan and elsewhere. Nor did the real
hammer blow come from working-class or
lower-middle-class voters of any kind. It came,
with devastating force, from the rich suburbs.
In Detroit’s Wayne County, Sanders lost
by almost the exact same margin as he had in
2016. In middle-class Macomb County, ances-
tral headquarters of the Reagan Democrat
and the Obama-Trump voter, Sanders took a
serious hit, losing by twenty thousand more
votes than in 2016. But in the wealthy, well-
educated suburbs of Oakland County — the
richest county in Michigan — Bernie’s deficit
swelled by fifty thousand votes.
A closer look at precinct results from three
smaller Michigan communities illuminates
this even more vividly. The two working-class
wards of northwestern Flint, including some
of the neighborhoods where children were
notoriously exposed to lead in city water, are
about 90 percent black. The northern seven
№ 38  /  SUMMER 2020

C D
wards of Bay City, near Saginaw, are about
85 percent white, but like Flint, the city has
been punished by deindustrialization, and par-
ticularly by the decline of General Motors.
Meanwhile, the prosperous Oakland County
town of Birmingham — original habitat of
ur-suburban homeowner Tim Allen — boasts
median property values ($488,000) and
income levels ($117,000) three to five times
greater than Bay City or Flint.
All three districts are largely Democratic;
all contain between 16,900 and 18,100 regis-
tered voters. In Flint’s northwestern wards,
where turnout sagged, Biden actually won 600
fewer votes than Clinton received in 2016. In
the northern bulk of Bay City — including the
working-class neighborhood where Madonna
Louise Ciccone was born to a gm employee —
Biden picked up 300 more votes than Clinton,
just enough to beat Sanders citywide. But
among the tall backyard fences and expensive
mega-garages of Birmingham, Biden picked
up nearly 2,300 votes — more than enough to
bury Bernie Sanders under a heap of luxury
home improvement products.
This same pattern played out in every state
and metropolitan area where a primary vote
was held. From the beachfront retirement
communities of coastal South Carolina to the
colonnaded ranch manors of Contra Costa,
California, wherever Democratic turnout
climbed from 2016, it climbed highest in the
wealthiest and whitest suburbs, which threw
their collective weight against Bernie Sanders.
In North Carolina, where the total
Democratic vote dipped from the eastern
swamps to the western mountains, the rich
suburbs of Raleigh and Charlotte saw 40 to 50
percent bumps from 2016. In Missouri, where
the vote declined in Ferguson and the Ozarks
alike, it climbed by 50 percent in the country
club precincts of St. Louis County. And in
wealthy Fairfax County, Virginia, the arche-
type of the Democrats’ twenty-first-century
AFTER BERNIE
MATT KARP
suburban strategy, the primary vote soared by
70 percent, with nearly a hundred thousand
new voters joining the party of Biden.
In many areas, the power of the suburban
surge was so great that even very small wealthy
communities had a larger impact on the elec-
tion than much larger working-class areas. In
Massachusetts, compared to 2016, Sanders
lost more votes to Biden and Bloomberg in just
three fancy South Shore towns — Hingham,
Duxbury, and Norwell (total population:
51,753) — than in all of Hampden County,
home to the city of Springfield and its work-
ing-class suburbs (population: 466,372).
Last fall, with Elizabeth Warren leading
Democratic polls, debate swirled over the role
of so-called Patagonia Democrats: affluent
liberals in deep-blue districts who had flocked
to Warren’s planful policy agenda. Like many
Sanders supporters, I was skeptical of the claim
that such professional-class voters — whatever
they told pollsters — could really serve as the
electoral base for a redistributive agenda.
But in retrospect, neither Jacobin nor Vox
anticipated the real story of the 2020 primary,
which did not involve Warren-style liberals,
but a much more conservative tribe of wealthy
In heavily Latino
neighborhoods from
East Los Angeles to
Northside Houston,
“Tío Bernie” often won
more votes than Biden,
Bloomberg, and
Warren combined.
69
BERNIE SANDERS’S FIVE-YEAR WAR
A B
suburbanites — disaffected Republicans who,
since the 2016 election, have thrown them-
selves whole into Democratic Party politics.
All across the Sun Belt, from the defense con-
tractors of Northern Virginia to the energy
corporations of Texas and California, Joe Biden
was boosted not just by Patagonia Democrats
but by newfound Chevron, Raytheon, and
Halliburton Democrats.
After 2016, the “Never Trump Republican”
became a punch line on the Left — in a party
where Trump enjoyed 90 percent approval,
self-important critics like Jennifer Rubin and
David Frum appeared to form an editorial
page whose staff was larger than its read-
ership. But in 2020, these neoconservative
Never Trumpers had the last laugh. Craftily
rebranded as “moderate” pundits, forgiven
their cheerleading for the Iraq War, and
handed outsize platforms in the liberal cor-
porate media, it turned out that their true
audience was not Republican at all, but affluent
purple-state suburbanites, who shared both
their cultural distaste for Trump and their
material opposition to Sanders.
All across the Sun Belt,
Joe Biden was boosted
not just by Patagonia
Democrats but by
newfound Chevron,
Raytheon, and
Halliburton Democrats.
70
Though Democratic turnout rose every-
where in the wealthy suburbs, from Silicon
Valley to metro Boston, a clear pattern was
visible: the richer and more conservative the
suburb, the more dramatic the increases. In
Virginia, Fairfax County’s stunning 70 per-
cent increase was surpassed by neighboring
Loudon County — the richest county in the
United States — where Democratic turnout
nearly doubled from 2016.
Once again, the picture is most vivid at
the neighborhood level. In greater Houston,
Biden scored some of his most impressive gains
in wealthy, traditionally Republican suburbs
like Bellaire and West University Place, which
flipped from Mitt Romney to Hillary Clinton in
2016 and helped elect Lizzie Pannill Fletcher
to Congress in 2018. Primary turnout in these
areas doubled from four years ago, reflecting
the success of Democrats’ concerted effort to
retain Romney-Clinton voters.
And in relative terms, the most staggering
turnout gains did not come in the Houston pre-
cincts Democrats won in 2016 or 2018, but in
those that they lost. In the extremely rich and
conservative oil-money districts of River Oaks,
Afton Oaks, and Tanglewood — the neighbor-
hood where Jeb and George W. Bush grew
up — Democratic turnout often tripled, with
nearly all of it going to Biden or Bloomberg.
Some of these voters, to be sure, only cast
their ballots in an open Democratic primary
because there was no competitive Republican
contest on offer. (In that sense, the incumbent
effect took another massive toll on the 2020
Sanders campaign.) And if Trump is convinc-
ingly repudiated in November, a fraction of
these wealthy suburbanites may attempt to
return to a chastened Republican Party.
More of them, though, seem likely to stick
around as Halliburton Democrats. The sub-
urban surge of 2020 fits into a larger pattern:
in the Bush family’s historic Tanglewood pre-
cinct, Democrats won under 18 percent of the
№ 38  /  SUMMER 2020
 MATT KARP

C D

general election vote in 2012, but nearly 30 Harris County Precinct 0269
percent in 2016 and over 34 percent in 2018, (DEMOCRATIC VOTE SHARE IN
with a higher share likely to follow in 2020. TANGLEWOOD, HOUSTON)
In recent weeks, even as Democrats have
sought to present themselves as the party
of George Floyd, it is worth knowing that
Houston’s River Oaks — home to Joel Osteen
and former Enron ceo Jeffrey Skilling — now
40%
boasts higher Democratic primary participa-
tion than the Third Ward, where Floyd was 30%
born and raised.
In the United States, at least, the margin 20%
between Piketty’s “Brahmin left” and “mer-
chant right” is rather blurry at the top of the
wealth pyramid, and it’s getting blurrier. Not
10%
only do many merchant princes of the bil-
lionaire class — perhaps a majority, outside a
handful of extractive industries — already lean
2012 2014 2016 2018
Democratic; their corporate vassals, in pros-
perous metropolitan areas from Houston to
Charlotte to Grand Rapids, are now trending
2012 17.7%
Democratic, too.
This year, Halliburton Democrats may
2014 18.8%
well have swung the election against Bernie
Sanders. With their voices amplified by pres-
2106 29.4%
tige media, and their votes eagerly courted
by leading candidates, they helped make sure
2018 34.2%
Democrats would emerge from the primary
season as something closer to the party of Bill
Kristol than the party of Krystal Ball. It is not
What we learned over the course of
likely that they will be going anywhere soon.
Bernie’s five-year struggle is that a national
presidential campaign, however successful
III. A Majority in Embryo in other ways, could not reverse or even
arrest these trends on its own.
No doubt, there are tactical lessons to be drawn Sanders-style democratic socialism
from the Bernie 2020 campaign, both in its has not yet won a majority in the United
achievements and in its possible missteps. States, either inside the Democratic Party
Yet the major electoral forces that defeated or outside it. But not having a majority is no
Sanders at the polls — the establishment pref- excuse for not building one. And while the
erence of black primary voters, the declining Sanders coalition was not ready for victory
participation of working-class Democrats, and in 2020, there are reasons to believe that
the mass arrival of rich suburbanites into the his five-year war has put social-democratic
party — all predate Sanders and will likely live reform on the path to a national majority
on beyond him, too. in the next decade.

AFTER BERNIE 71
BERNIE SANDERS’S FIVE-YEAR WAR
A B
In both of his campaigns, Sanders won
younger voters by historic margins, and he won
them not with style or charisma but with per-
haps the most brusquely ideological platform
in Democratic primary history. His five-year
struggle simultaneously reflected, galvanized,
and shaped the worldview of an entire genera-
tion of voters — forging a new and serious bond
between the material conditions of Americans
under forty-five and the Sanders brand of
“class-struggle social democracy.”
As Jacobin’s Connor Kilpatrick has argued,
Bernie’s dominance with young voters is sig-
nificant for at least two reasons that should
shape left strategy in the 2020s. First, despite
the understandable skepticism about “gener-
ational politics,” there is simply no precedent
in US history for an ideological candidate win-
ning younger voters on a scale like Sanders
did — not George McGovern and certainly not
Barack Obama, whose youthful support was
much thinner and less evenly distributed. In
the 2008 race against Hillary Clinton, Obama
won voters under thirty in California by 5
points, and in Texas by 20 points. This year,
against a larger primary field, Bernie won that
group in both those states by at least 50 points.
In both his campaigns, Sanders won young
white voters, he won young black voters, and
he won young Latino voters — the latter group
by outrageous margins (84 percent!) in states
like California. Very probably, he won young
Asian voters, young Muslim voters, and young
Native voters with similar levels of enthusiasm.
Second, Sanders did not just win big with
kids fresh out of school: across five years of
campaigning, he showed persistent strength
with middle-aged voters in their forties. Of
the twenty states that conducted exit polls,
more voters under forty-five chose Sanders
than all the “moderate” Democrats combined
(Biden, Bloomberg, Buttigieg, and Klobuchar)
in sixteen of them.
72
In Missouri and in Michigan, he won
voters between forty and forty-five outright.
And in key states like Texas, Massachusetts,
and Minnesota, where Bernie lost overall,
he still managed to win voters under fifty by
double digits.
Notoriously, these younger voters did
not turn out in large enough numbers to
help Sanders on Super Tuesday and beyond.
But the media’s glib conclusion on this sub-
ject — that youth voting actually declined in
2020 — was based on flawed 2016 exit polls,
whose methodology changed significantly this
year, rendering crude comparisons about the
shape of the electorate practically worthless.
In the context of rising overall turnout,
it is almost certain that the absolute number
of younger primary voters actually rose in
2020. (In South Carolina, where official state
numbers have been released, more than forty
thousand new voters under forty-five cast
a Democratic ballot, and their turnout rate
increased, too.) Though outnumbered by the
surge of older, richer Halliburton Democrats,
these new, younger voters flocked to Bernie’s
standard to an extent that helped change the
geography of his coalition.
Though Sanders struggled to win many
of the rural areas he had carried four years
ago, his strength in cities — and especially in
younger, racially diverse, lower-income urban
neighborhoods — actually grew from 2016 to
2020. With younger Latino voters now firmly
in his coalition, Bernie not only swept the bar-
rios of East LA, he won overwhelming victories
in the mixed, immigrant-heavy precincts of
San Diego, Denver, Seattle, and Las Vegas.
Sanders showed similar strength in
younger, lower-income urban areas all over
the country. In the majority-nonwhite ninth
ward of Minneapolis, where George Floyd was
killed, Bernie won an absolute majority. In
smaller cities across the Northeast and the
Midwest, his support was undiminished, if not
№ 38  /  SUMMER 2020

C D
enhanced from 2016 — with younger urban
voters helping Sanders in the early states and
beyond, from Portland, Maine, to Duluth,
Minnesota.
Although easily dismissed by critics as
a phenomenon of the “gentrifier left,” latte-
swilling graduate students did not power
Sanders to victory in working-class cities like
Manchester, New Hampshire, or Brownsville,
Texas. A much broader group of younger and
disproportionately urban voters, who make
far less money and own far less property than
the Democratic electorate as a whole, formed
the core of the Sanders coalition.
Working-Class Politics
Can Still Be the Future
Across the world, from Norway to New
Zealand, as working-class parties of the Left
have given way to their Brahminized descen-
dants, the scope and the horizon of left-wing
politics have changed. Less interested in trans-
formative economic redistribution — and far
less capable of delivering it, anyway — con-
temporary progressives have put their faith
and their energy in a range of other projects,
from environmentalism to questions of cul-
tural representation.
Yet socialists like Bernie Sanders under-
stand that few of these struggles for justice
can be won, in any meaningful or lasting way,
if they are not accompanied by a large-scale
transfer of power and resources, won by a
determined working class.
All by itself, Bernie’s five-year war did not
succeed in reanimating twentieth-century class
politics. But if there is any hope for a return
to the electoral alignment that produced every
major social-democratic reform in history —
uniting a diverse working class around pressing
demands for redistribution — it lies with the
cohort of Sanders voters under age forty-five.
Not only do two-thirds or more of these
younger, poorer Americans support Medicare
AFTER BERNIE
MATT KARP
for All, wealth taxes, and other significant
reforms — they have shown, in two different
primary campaigns, that those fundamental
redistributive commitments are strong enough
to guide their voting choices. This is not yet a
socialist majority, but it is, perhaps, a socialist
majority in embryo.
And even as the US population ages, this
embryonic majority grows every year, and
within every demographic. Despite the folk-
lore about voters growing more conservative
as they age, the academic consensus is that
ideological preferences are, in fact, quite stable
over time. Older millennials, locked out of an
increasingly unequal economy, do not appear
to be moving to the right. The supermajority
that demands national health insurance today,
we can bet, will demand national health insur-
ance tomorrow, too.
If Bernie Sanders was not fated to be the
Abraham Lincoln of the twenty-first-century
left, winning a political revolution under his
own banner, he may well be something like
our John Quincy Adams — the “Old Man
Eloquent” whose passionate broadsides
against the Slave Power in the 1830s and 1840s
By 2032, today’s Bernie
voters under fifty
will likely represent a
majority within the
party electorate. What
sort of left will be
there to greet them?
73
BERNIE SANDERS’S FIVE-YEAR WAR
A B
inspired the radicals who toppled it a gener-
ation later.
Over the next decade, this embryonic
majority faces at least two considerable chal-
lenges. First and most pressing, it must face
off against its principal antagonist within
the primary electorate: the older, wealthy,
and ever-growing coalition of Fairfax and
Halliburton Democrats, whose votes party
leaders continue to court with gauzy patriotic
rhetoric and concrete promises of tax relief.
In the short term, the most promising
avenue for attack is in the scores of mostly
urban legislative districts, from Los Angeles to
Denver to San Antonio, where younger voters
predominate, and where Sanders outpolled
all of his centrist rivals combined. Recent
left-wing insurgent victories in Philadelphia,
Pittsburgh, Washington, DC, and New York
suggest that there is more room for democratic-
socialist politics to grow in cities across the
Northeast, too.
Even in the short term, though, younger
urban districts alone will not be sufficient for
Sanders-style left-wingers to outvote Fairfax
Democrats within the party caucus — much
less to wield meaningful fiscal power in larger
state governments or in Congress.
And in the longer run, a laser-like focus
on extremely liberal urban districts on
the coasts — an electoral map that follows
Brahminized progressives wherever they go —
risks accelerating the Left’s drift away from
the fundamental questions of class power and
material redistribution.
For some Brahmin activists, this is pre-
cisely the point: a retrograde focus on class has
prevented progressives from understanding
that their natural base lies with white-collar
suburbanites, who already share liberal cul-
tural politics. “I can take someone who is
74
deeply concerned about patriarchy and I can
make them understand how patriarchy inter-
sects with capitalism,” argues Sean McElwee,
“much more than I can take someone who’s
mad because gm took their job away and make
them understand socialism.” The broader
decline of working-class participation in pol-
itics may even be something to celebrate, from
this angle, if it turns more congressional dis-
tricts from red to blue.
Sanders had a different theory, and his
campaigns assembled a different coalition,
centered on younger, lower-income voters
from Brownsville to Duluth. In 2020, that
working-class coalition was not enough to win
the Democratic nomination. And no, Sanders
did not manage to turn history on its head and
bring the vast reservoir of alienated, apolitical
workers back to primary politics.
But by 2032, today’s Bernie voters under
fifty will likely represent a majority, and cer-
tainly a plurality, within the party electorate.
What sort of left will be there to greet them?
Will it be a thoroughly post-Sanders progres-
sive movement, whose priorities are defined
by social media discourse, billionaire-funded
activist ngos, and a friendly working relation-
ship with the corporate Democratic Party?
Imagine Sean McElwee giving a keynote
address at the Walmart Center for Racial
Equity — forever.
Or will it be a political left that con-
tinues the work, to borrow from Lincoln at
Gettysburg, that Sanders has thus far so nobly
advanced? A left grounded in class politics,
and aimed fundamentally at majority-building
demands for material redistribution — health
care, education, jobs, and family support for
all, paid for by the rich? The future is still
unwritten.
№ 38  /  SUMMER 2020
THE TWO PATHS OF
DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM:
COALITION &
CONFRONTATION
DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISTS in the United States face a cru-
cial test, one more significant than any since the mass
1930s incorporation of the industrial working class into
the Democratic Party coalition. The Bernie Sanders
campaign has politicized thousands of new democratic
socialists; the covid-19 crisis may create political space
for social-democratic policies unlike anything we have
seen since the Great Depression; and a tidal wave of
mass protests for racial justice has upended conventional
politics throughout the spring, with far-ranging political
consequences we are only beginning to understand.
The situation is fraught with extraordinary uncer-
tainty — simultaneously creating the conditions for
a resurgent left, as well as an even stronger and more
emboldened right-wing nationalism. Quite simply, we
are living through an epoch-defining moment for the
Left. Depending on how we respond, the coming years
may offer unprecedented opportunities for the growth of
democratic-socialist politics, or else lead to the socialist
left’s increasing isolation and irrelevance.
In this piece, I lay out two basic paths socialists might
take on the electoral front, each of which can operate on
different scales (local, state, regional, and national). The
first broad approach has been advocated in some form
by left-liberals as well as pragmatic-minded socialists,
ranging from Data for Progress to the Working Families
Party and Justice Democrats. This orientation exhorts
progressives and leftists to build common cause with
as broad a coalition of Democrats as possible, within
legislatures as well as among the electorate. That means
seeing most elected Democrats as potential allies —
while also working to primary conservative Democrats
in liberal districts — and widening our support among
both working- and middle-class voters.
The second option, proposed by socialists in the
Sanders universe such as Jacobin’s Seth Ackerman,
Meagan Day, and Micah Uetricht, is to bring together
different forces within and beyond the Sanders coalition
around a combative, class-centered, left-wing organi-
zation that takes elections seriously. This organization
would run its own candidates, usually on the Democratic

76 № 38  /  SUMMER 2020

After Bernie Sanders, democratic socialists in
America face a vital strategic dilemma. Do we go
the Justice Democrats route of winning gains
as the junior partner in a progressive coalition, or
do we take a gamble on more independent
class organization and struggle?
Party ballot line, and would view class — rather than
partisan identification — as the primary criterion for
building an electoral base. Of course, these are stylized
renderings of strategic hypotheses that rarely appear
in such pure form on the ground, but hopefully they
can help to clarify some of the key discussions around
democratic-socialist strategy.
I have previously advocated for my own version of
the latter orientation in the pages of Jacobin, and, as I
discuss below, I continue to believe it offers a number
of strategic advantages. That said, serious challenges to
this approach — underscored by the lack of empirical
support we’ve seen for key assumptions underlying
Sanders’s 2020 electoral strategy — remain unresolved,
and to date there has not been a particularly fruitful dia-
logue between proponents of the two strategies. In this
piece, then, my goal is not to take sides, but rather to lay
out the terms of debate. Each approach has important
strengths and weaknesses, and we must grapple with
them seriously if we hope to emerge from the coming
period in a United States where democratic socialism
can reach new heights.

Electoral Politics Matter

Now More Than Ever
Before diving into the contrasting electoral strategies
socialists might pursue, it is worth first explaining why
a focus on electoral politics makes sense at all. Given
socialists’ weak ties to working-class communities and
organizations in the United States, perhaps we would
be better served concentrating on social-movement and
trade-union activities. Indeed, a number of commen-
tators have reasonably concluded that, in the absence
of a stronger organic base — within, for instance, the
organized labor movement — socialist electoral projects
will be, at worst, totally irrelevant, and, at best, entirely
dependent on continued support from elected officials
over whom we have little political leverage.
These concerns are valid. To the extent that social-
ists can broaden our base through different forms of

AFTER BERNIE 77
JARED ABBOTT THE TWO PATHS OF DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM: COALITION & CONFRONTATION
organizing — in communities, among tenants, on the
shop floor — while strengthening our ties with labor,
we will be in a stronger position both to wage electoral
campaigns and to exert broader political influence.
At the same time, however, the non-electoral strat-
egies proposed by skeptics are pitched at a scale that is
nowhere near adequate to build serious political strength
in the foreseeable future. Crafting effective community
organizations and progressive union locals takes years,
even decades, and generally does not allow leftists to
reach a mass audience.
Under ordinary circumstances, such a focus would
be understandable. When general political headwinds
are against us, there is very little that the organized left
can do beyond engaging in various forms of political
education to keep the home fires of socialism burning,
and carrying out local experiments in community and
electoral organizing that might serve as models for future
struggles. Furthermore, under these conditions, most
progressive electoral struggles will be defensive, aimed
more at stopping the rollback of previous gains than
pressing forward an assertive agenda. For around three
decades between the late 1970s and the late 2000s, there
was little that electoral politics could do to advance a
democratic-socialist agenda at state or national levels.
Today, however, things are different. Our ideas are
very popular, and it is now conceivable that we could
win majority legislative support for some of them at the
state and even national level. Under these circumstances,
electoral organizing has the capacity to significantly
alter the playing field on which future socialist struggles
will take place. Election campaigns can popularize our
ideas among the public on a mass scale — just look at
Bernie Sanders’s 2016 and 2020 efforts. They can also
be used to push through structural reforms that will
make future organizing easier (such as labor, voting
rights, and campaign-finance reforms), and to open the
door to major victories around racial justice, health care
expansion, green infrastructure investment, or public
jobs programs.
78 № 38  /  SUMMER 2020
These measures can show skeptical Americans
that real alternatives to the status quo do exist, and
can generate massive new constituencies committed
to defending and deepening gains. Many reforms
along these lines would also have the benefit of putting
working people in a stronger position to demand more
by insulating them from the vagaries of the labor market.
In other words, these reforms represent potentially
epoch-defining changes in the terrain of US politics.
The electoral paths that I explore in this essay would
face several barriers: a lack of institutional support
from the labor movement, the Left’s relatively weak
connections with working-class communities, and an
overdependence on charismatic political leaders. And,
of course, a strategic focus on electoral politics by no
means implies eschewing other forms of organizing at
the same time. On the contrary, these should be mutually
reinforcing activities.
Yet sitting out the electoral fight, or putting it on the
back burner, would be a serious mistake in this period
of extraordinary opportunity. Barring legal changes
that might tilt the playing field of industrial struggle
in favor of workers, a major upsurge in union strength
is not going to materialize, even under the most opti-
mistic assumptions. Increased strike activity may well
result from the economic downturn to come, but this is
by no means inevitable, as strikes are historically more
common in tight rather than slack labor markets.
To be sure, widespread strikes by workers in stra-
tegic industries — particularly logistics — could help
to force significant concessions from major corpora-
tions, and could produce broader political ripple effects.
Beyond that, mass protests may intensify in response to
corporate greed, police brutality, and the government’s
poor response to the coronavirus crisis. As the dramatic
upsurge of protest around the country after the killing
of George Floyd has shown, these protests can play an
important role in shifting public opinion and ensuring
progressive and democratic-socialist policies make it
onto the legislative agenda.
Sitting out the electoral fight would
be a serious mistake.
As important as these developments could be,
however, their impact would be severely limited in the
absence of significant electoral advances. Our unfortu-
nate reality is that the historic weakness of the US left
and labor movement means that turning democratic
socialism into mass politics will depend heavily on a rel-
atively narrow window of opportunity to make advances
in the electoral realm. The legislative and broader polit-
ical effects of these advances can alter the structural
limitations we face and create more favorable conditions
for future working-class struggles.
The Path of Coalition
The first option for socialists is to create a new electoral
project or to join an existing one, focused on building
constructive relationships with as many Democrats as
possible. The goal would be to forge broad coalitions
to support key progressive reforms. In the legislature
(whether local, state, or national), this would mean
working to persuade Democrats that such reforms
are in their own political interest. In terms of the elec-
torate, it means targeting working-class voters, but also
middle-class professionals — including more centrist
suburban Democrats. This strategy could be imple-
mented at whatever levels are possible, based on the
success that progressives and socialists have in forging
relationships with new coalition partners.
Building such coalitions by no means rules out the
idea of waging primary campaigns against conservative
Democrats. Indeed, electing more progressive candi-
dates in Democratic primary contests is an important
aspect of the coalition strategy, since the larger the
progressive legislative bloc, the more influence it can
exert. At the same time, the plan does assume that
the most likely political allies for progressives will be
other Democrats. From this perspective, unnecessarily
attacking fellow Democrats makes little sense and would
be counterproductive.
The idea is to push and persuade mainstream
Democrats as much as possible, but also to avoid
AFTER BERNIE
alienating them. Justice Democrats communications
director Waleed Shahid puts it this way:
A good way of thinking about the situation in
American politics today is that the left wing of the
party — whatever label you want to use for it — is a
junior partner to a senior partner in a coalition gov-
ernment. The senior partner is the party of Pelosi
and Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries and Dianne
Feinstein. They have more power. But we are in a
coalition together to get over 50 percent and keep
the Republicans out of power.
This approach has been championed recently not
only by Justice Democrats but also by liberal strategists
such as Sean McElwee, as well as by leaders of other
progressive electoral organizations such as the Working
Families Party and Our Revolution.
The experience of organized labor from the 1930s
to the 1950s is perhaps the most important example of
the coalition strategy. During this period, the Congress
of Industrial Organizations (cio) made common cause
with the Democratic Party to ensure the gains of the
New Deal were preserved and to push for further labor-
friendly legislation. This involved trying to push the
party in a leftward direction by channeling money to
progressive candidates, working to shape the party
platform in a pro-labor mold, and proposing mecha-
nisms to ensure that congressional Democrats would be
more accountable to the party’s working-class elements.
However, cio leaders knew, even at the height of their
power, that they could not exert enough influence in
Democratic Party politics to secure outright congres-
sional majorities.
Furthermore, since coalitions with progressive
Republicans were not viable, the Democrats were
labor’s only plausible allies. In turn, because cio
leaders considered the idea of starting a third party
to be far too great of a political risk, labor’s leverage
with Democrats had to come through persuasion and
delivering votes, rather than the threat of exit. While
the gains labor achieved through its alliance with the
79
JARED ABBOTT THE TWO PATHS OF DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM: COALITION & CONFRONTATION
Democrats were disappointing when compared with the
advances made by social democrats in Europe around
the same time, proponents of this strategy argue that
the key question is what would have happened if labor
had pursued another strategy.
Political scientist Daniel Schlozman, for instance,
argues that cio leaders simply understood the limits
of their influence and crafted the best strategy pos-
sible given the constraints they faced. Consequently,
he contends, “the most plausible alternative to labor-
Democratic alliance was not industrial democracy,
but a far less consequential partnership that simply
entrenched the prerogatives of white unionists — or
no alliance at all.” From this perspective, the labor-
Democratic alliance facilitated the rise of civil rights
as a core issue on the Democratic agenda, giving rise
to the defection of Southern Dixiecrats from the party
and paving the way for the Great Society reforms of the
1960s. In sum, while leftists might have hoped for more,
the coalition strategy ultimately maximized progressive
gains under less than ideal circumstances.
80 № 38  /  SUMMER 2020
Proponents
of the coalition
strategy can also argue that con-
ditions today may be even more
propitious for sweeping progressive
legislation than they were during the
New Deal era. While they will not
rack up the overwhelming congressional
majorities enjoyed by fdr, if Democrats can
win majority control of both houses of Congress this
time, they will not depend — as the party did in the ’30s
and ’40s — on a powerful bloc of reactionary Southerners
to pass legislation. On the contrary, Democratic law-
makers today have constituencies that support key
planks of the progressive policy by often overwhelming
margins, and the Democratic establishment has shifted
further to the left in recent years than we have seen in
decades. When you combine this with the possibility
that aspects of the progressive agenda might face less
intransigent opposition from sectors of capital than we
would expect under normal circumstances, when the
economy is not teetering on the brink of collapse, the
coalition strategy appears plausible.
Beyond its prospects for exerting legislative influ-
ence, there are also reasons to believe that the strategy
can deliver more progressive electoral victories, in work-
ing-class as well as middle-class districts. For instance,
let’s take membership of the Congressional Progressive
Caucus (cpc) as a rough proxy for progressive legislators
in the US House of Representatives who more or less
The threat of exit from the Democratic
coalition in our winner-takes-all
electoral system would simply not be
taken seriously.
follow the coalition strategy. The figure below shows
that progressive candidates perform significantly better
than other Democrats in working-class districts that
have relatively low proportions of non-college-educated
white voters.
What’s more, there are 162 congressional dis-
tricts that fit these criteria, so progressives have ample
opportunity to augment their ranks through an elec-
toral strategy focused on those districts. And while cpc
members are less competitive than other congressional
Democrats in more affluent areas, they nevertheless
won in nearly thirty such districts in 2018 (representing
just under 30 percent of all cpc members), suggesting
that they can simultaneously compete well in predomi-
nantly working-class districts as well as ones with more
middle-class liberal voters.
The coalition strategy, then, has much to recom-
mend it. It offers a plausible theory for how progressives
can exert influence over legislators from a position of
relative weakness, while also demonstrating a capacity
for electoral success in a large number of congress-
ional districts.
But the strategy also has important limitations.
First, it does not explain how the movements that get
progressive and democratic-socialist legislators into
office can hold them accountable once they are there.
What kind of leverage do we have over officeholders,
in the absence of a clear political platform they must
adhere to or risk losing our financial and organizational
support? How can we pose a credible threat to elected
officials if we see them primarily as coalition partners
we depend on to advance our political agenda, rather
than as strategic allies who must deliver for us to ensure
our continued backing?
The coalition strategy’s theory of progressive polit-
ical influence is based primarily on the idea that voters
in Democratic districts support a progressive agenda
and arewilling to punish legislators and candidates who
don’t support that agenda. The successes of insurgent
progressives in recent years at all levels of government
lend some credence to this theory, but the extent of such
AFTER BERNIE
successes remains limited, and it’s not clear how much
further they can be pushed.
In turn, the coalition strategy assumes that a rela-
tively small but committed group of progressives can
have an outsize influence on policy-making. The capacity
of politicians like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-
Cortez, and Rashida Tlaib to affect nationwide political
discourse suggests this theory is valid, at least when it
comes to agenda-setting, if not actually passing legis-
lation. There are also historical examples to suggest
that having strong, influential progressives in strategic
positions during key moments can be critical. The work
of New York senator Robert F. Wagner and his staff in
drafting and skillfully building a coalition to support
labor reforms in 1935 comes to mind.
Nonetheless, a modest increase in the number of
insurgent candidates, and the hope that a small but
well-organized bloc of electeds can work legislative
magic during a time of crisis, falls short of explaining how
leftists can hold legislators accountable to our agenda.
The recent failure of Congressional Progressive Caucus
members to ensure the inclusion of a paycheck protec-
tion element in the heroes Act points to the limits of
the coalition approach.
Another limitation is its electoral weakness in
areas with large concentrations of non-college-edu-
cated white voters. As we can see below, while around
40 percent of all congressional districts fit this profile,
they only account for 13 percent of the cpc membership
(twelve representa-
tives). Democrats
can clearly win a
majority in the
House without
relying on dis-
tricts with
large concen-
trations of
these voters;
however,
81
Share of CPC and Non-CPC Democratic Districts with Primarily
Low-Income or Low-Education Voters (Excluding Majority White
Non-College-Educated Districts)

All Congressional Districts

Poor or
Low-Educated
Districts
Non-CPC Democrat Districts

Low-
Educated
Districts
CPC Districts

Poor Districts

0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70

Share of CPC vs. Non-CPC Democratic Districts:

Majority White Non-College Districts

All Congressional Districts

Non-CPC Democratic Districts

CPC Districts

0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40

such voters currently make up most of the elec-
torate in twenty-seven US states. This means
that the coalition strategy is less suitable for win-
ning the presidency or securing a majority in the
Senate, not to mention in state houses across
the country.
If establishment Democrats can argue convincingly
that an overly progressive message amounts to electoral
suicide in national politics, they will continue to wield
an effective veto over any progressive legislation, even
if Democrats control the presidency and both houses
of Congress. And we will have no credible leverage

82 № 38  /  SUMMER 2020

How can we pose a credible threat
to elected officials if we see
them primarily as coalition partners
we depend on?
with which to stop them. The threat of exit from the
Democratic coalition in our winner-take-all electoral
system, where the opposing Republican Party is openly
hostile to every aspect of the progressive agenda, would
simply not be taken seriously.
Finally, since the coalition strategy depends to a
considerable extent on middle- and upper-middle-class
liberal voters, it may be less effective in promoting a
radical, redistributive program than a strategy that is
focused primarily on support from working-class voters.
Indeed, the notion that middle-class Democratic voters
are afraid of redistribution has been a driving force in
pushing Democratic politicians to the right on eco-
nomic issues for decades. What’s more, careful empirical
studies have shown that the economic preferences of
middle-class voters diverge substantially from those of
working-class and poor voters, and that politicians are
consistently more responsive to the former.
This is not to deny that middle-class Democratic
voters often have favorable views of virtually all planks
of the progressive agenda, including those with major
redistributive implications. Indeed, analysts have shown
that college-educated voters (across all ethnicities) hold
just as progressive, if not more progressive, views on eco-
nomic redistribution compared to non-college-educated
whites. They might become even more egalitarian in the
future, as well. To the extent that relative prosperity for
middle-class voters over the past few decades has made
them resistant to a redistributive agenda, the historic
economic fallout from the coronavirus crisis may well
shift middle-class voters to the left, at least for a while,
as it did in the 1930s.
However, the bulk of the evidence suggests that
expressed preferences in opinion surveys of middle-class
voters don’t necessarily conform with their behavior at
the ballot box. As we saw above, for instance, members of
the Progressive Congressional Caucus were notably less
successful in predominantly middle-class districts com-
pared to other Democrats in 2018. Democratic elected
officials who are chiefly accountable to middle-class
voters will likely remain a serious political liability for
economically progressive policy-making.
AFTER BERNIE
The question, then, is whether any realistic alternative
exists to mitigate the anti-redistributive, middle-
class bias of many Democratic politicians by building
broad, multiracial, working-class electoral coalitions that
can hold elected officials accountable to a Sanders-style
political program. This is the wager made by proponents
of confrontation.
The Path of Confrontation
The second electoral strategy socialists might choose
is to build new organizations or coalitions based
explicitly on a zero-sum, class-based political logic.
Rather than trying to work with existing bases of power
in the Democratic coalition, this strategy seeks to create
new legislative blocs and electoral constituencies based
on a message of confrontation with the Democratic
leadership and their principal donors.
In the legislature, this will mean doggedly advo-
cating for a clear, working-class-oriented platform, and
threatening Democrats with primary challenges when-
ever they fail to support that platform. In electoral terms,
it entails building a primarily working-class support
base, focused on nonvoters and independents with weak
partisan attachments to the Democratic Party, as well as
working-class Democratic partisans who feel sufficiently
disillusioned with the party leadership to take a chance
on insurgent primary candidates.
The confrontation strategy could also be carried
out at any level of government, depending on what
resources are available. This approach by no means
rules out the possibility of making strategic alliances
with existing blocs in the Democratic Party coalition: the
decision of Bernie Sanders to caucus with congressional
Democrats, despite his strong, public denunciations of
the Democratic Party over several decades, is a good
example. In general, however, the confrontation strategy
privileges electoral threat over persuasion and mutual
accommodation.
Confrontation will almost certainly alienate poten-
tial allies, both in the legislature (Democrats) and
83
JARED ABBOTT THE TWO PATHS OF DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM: COALITION & CONFRONTATION
among the electorate (middle-class liberals and strong
Democratic partisans, across class lines), but if suc-
cessful, it could generate a larger number of new allies.
While it’s been a common strategy employed by pop-
ulist politicians around the world during periods of
time when traditional parties have experienced sharp
declines in electoral support, confrontation has rarely
been employed effectively at the national level in the
United States. This is because of the relative stability
of the two major parties over time, and the failure of
third-party electoral projects that have attempted to
supplant one or both of them.
That said, there have been attempts to execute a
strategy along these lines at the national level through
Democratic (and Republican) primaries. Generally,
however, these battles have been waged between
powerful blocs within the party establishment — the
1912 Republican contest between Teddy Roosevelt
and William Howard Taft, for example, or Franklin
Roosevelt’s effort to purge the Democratic Party of
anti–New Deal Southern Democrats in 1938 — rather
84 № 38  /  SUMMER 2020
than by an outsider bloc against party insiders writ large.
These efforts were also not particularly successful.
Bernie Sanders’s two presidential campaigns rep-
resent something closer to the confrontation approach
applied to groups outside the party establishment.
Sanders openly challenged Democratic Party leaders,
sought to build an electoral apparatus without depending
on any traditional sources of funding from within the
Democratic coalition, and enjoyed the support of only
a handful of elected Democrats. He explicitly sought
to bring nonvoters and low-propensity voters into his
coalition, in order to compensate for the low levels of
support he received among strong Democratic partisans
(particularly those over thirty-five). Yet this strategy
faced limitations that ultimately proved insurmountable,
and it underperformed expectations in key respects,
particularly in terms of mobilizing working-class voters
to take part in the Democratic primary.
The most successful examples of the confrontation
strategy have come at the state level, most notably in
North Dakota and Minnesota in the 1910s and 1920s. In
North Dakota, the Nonpartisan League (npl) success-
fully took over the Republican Party between 1916 and
1918 by creating an electoral organization distinct from
that party. The organization used the primary system
to wage an open electoral war against the Republican
establishment in the state. By 1918, as Richard Valelly
describes, the npl had “seized control of North Dakota
government to an extent simply unknown in American
state politics before
or since then.”
Based on this
extraordinary
electoral suc-
cess, the n p l
in 1919 was able
to push through
wide-ranging
reforms in edu-
cation, health
care, and other
public services, even in the face of extreme opposition
from elites in the state.
In Minnesota, the npl created an electoral organi-
zation to compete in the Republican primaries. It was
so successful that it prompted Republicans to ban npl
candidates from running independent campaigns in
the general election after first losing in the Republican
primaries. Since Minnesota was effectively a one-party
(Republican) state at the time, and since the npl was
already a powerful electoral force, in 1922 it chose to
abandon its Republican primary strategy and instead
create the independent Farmer-Labor Party (flp).
During its heyday in the 1920s and ’30s, the Minnesota
flp was able to elect three governors, four US sena-
tors, and eight US House representatives, in addition to
securing majorities in the Minnesota state legislature.
A similar strategy today, carried out at either the
state or national level, would offer several important
advantages. First, as I mentioned above, winning leg-
islative majorities requires a strategy with wide appeal
across the working class. As we saw above, the coalition
strategy has not been electorally successful in areas with
large concentrations of white workers. By contrast, while
Sanders’s support declined in white working-class areas
in 2020, there is some evidence that his confrontational
class rhetoric, combined with a platform based on pol-
icies that are popular across the broad working class,
could be more effective than the coalition strategy in
securing red-state victories.
For instance, Sanders has a long track record of elec-
toral success in heavily working-class areas in Vermont,
and he consistently outperformed his coalition-oriented
progressive rival Elizabeth Warren in head-to-head con-
tests against Donald Trump throughout battleground
states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
This is consistent with evidence suggesting that Sanders
was viewed less unfavorably by rural Americans than
all the other 2020 Democratic primary contestants.
Furthermore, polling has found that key planks of
Sanders’s economic program, particularly Medicare
for All, are more popular in rural areas than they are
AFTER BERNIE
in both suburban and urban communities. Finally, the
strong negative correlation between income level and
support for Sanders in the 2020 primaries indicates
that his populist economic message can resonate with
working-class voters.
A second potential benefit of the confrontation
strategy is that it could be more effective in holding
elected officials accountable. Historically, progressives
in the Democratic Party have been keenly aware of the
inherent difficulties in enforcing discipline around
progressive planks of the party program when relying
on a political strategy that seeks the broadest possible
support among legislative and electoral blocs within
the ideologically diffuse Democratic coalition. There
were important movements in the 1950s and ’70s that
aimed to address this problem by overhauling the party’s
internal structure (such as by implementing biannual
national conventions, adopting a party platform, and
abolishing seniority rules).
Though these efforts did produce some gains,
they were largely unsuccessful. This failure can be
explained, at least in part, by the fact that the progres-
sives pushing for reform could not credibly threaten to
exit the party if their demands were not met, and they
were unwilling or unable to use primary challenges on
a large scale. However, if a similar approach were to be
taken today, by an organization that was independent
of the Democratic Party’s formal structures — one that
focused on Democratic primary challenges — it could
conceivably enjoy greater success.
Instead of directly contesting for power within
the key institutions of the party apparatus (like the
Democratic National Committee, or state and local
85
JARED ABBOTT THE TWO PATHS OF DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM: COALITION & CONFRONTATION
committees), this organization would create a parallel
structure with its own internal decision-making proce-
dures, fundraising mechanisms, and political identity.
We would be hearkening back to the npl strategy
discussed above. Our formation would require all can-
didates it supported to commit to a clear platform, and
would itself commit to withdrawing organizational and
financial support from elected officials who reneged on
that commitment. If we were successful in winning a
significant bloc of seats in a state legislature (or in the
US House), our threat to primary recalcitrant Democrats
might be taken seriously enough to push some of them
leftward on key policies.
Finally, the confrontation strategy could help to
build an organized long-term base for left politics in
the United States. The exigencies of the electoral cycle
mean that progressive moments come and go, and it
is very difficult to convert the energy of an insurgent
electoral campaign into a durable political organization
capable of patient movement-building. Indeed, virtually
every important national-level left-wing insurgency
in the last century — from Robert La Follette and the
Conference for Progressive Political Action in 1924,
to Jesse Jackson and the Rainbow Coalition in 1988 —
squandered any chance of building durable progressive
organizations through an excessive
reliance on the insurgent presi-
dential candidate.
Employing a confronta-
tional strategy in the wake of
Sanders’s 2020
presiden-
tial bid
and
86 № 38  /  SUMMER 2020
the economic downturn caused by covid-19 could be
an effective way of creating a political home for people
who have lost faith in the Democratic Party establish-
ment and its capacity to meet the needs of working
people. Even if its short-term electoral prospects were
relatively limited, an organization formed along these
lines could be effective in long-term constituency and
movement-building, while also playing a role in popu-
larizing leftist ideas among an increasingly sympathetic
working class.
Such an organization would run primary challenges
against incumbent Democrats at all levels of government
(depending on its organizational and financial resources),
and would also carry out sustained voter outreach cam-
paigns in working-class communities between electoral
cycles. If the group maintained a clear and consistent
program that distinguished it from the Democratic
establishment, while offering its membership a more
significant role in organizational decision-making, it
could conceivably maintain a loyal base of support even
in the face of slow advances on the electoral front.
Why Confrontation Could Fail
All that said, the confrontation strategy also has serious
weaknesses. First, and perhaps most obvious, the elec-
toral viability of this approach is far from clear. Despite
the promising figures discussed above, the Sanders 2020
campaign fell far short of its own promise to dramatically
expand the electorate through bold redistributionist
demands. To the extent that Sanders did well in white
working-class districts in 2016, a prime cause was oppo-
sition to Hillary Clinton rather than the outright appeal
of democratic socialism.
Hence in 2020, when more moderate but also more
popular figures — relative to Clinton — like Joe Biden
were on the menu, many white working-class voters
jumped from the Sanders ship. Others simply didn’t
participate in the Democratic primary. Additionally,
the evidence from recent electoral cycles that economic
populists outperform centrists in congressional races is Workers of America’s 1943 decision to launch a
mixed at best. nationwide coal strike — in defiance of both the cio
Second, since the confrontational approach requires and the Democratic Party — backfired fantastically,
open conflict with the very legislators and constituencies supplying a pretext for the viciously anti-union Smith-
that currently offer the most plausible route to winning Connally Act later that year. Lewis’s efforts faced
key pieces of progressive legislation — which is to say, objective limits that no confrontational strategy,
the rest of the Democratic Party — it runs the risk of however bold or innovative, could have overcome.
producing outcomes that could ultimately put left polit- Other attempts have been made to forge a middle-
ical movements on a weaker footing. For example, cio ground strategy between open conflict and quiescence
president John L. Lewis attempted to chart an indepen- to Democratic Party leaders. At least one important
dent path from the Democratic Party in the early 1940s figure in the cio’s political leadership, for instance,
by supporting Republican presidential nominee Wendell called for progressive labor to seriously consider the
Willkie in threat of withdrawing its campaign resources from
1940. This Democrats in 1956. The goal, as explained by the cio
proved pac’s assistant director, Tilford Dudley, would have
disas- been to force the party leadership to drop the seniority
trous, rules in Congress that gave Southern Democrats out-
as size influence. According to Dudley: “If we really did
this, and meant it, it would be a thrilling revolution in
American politics. But we won’t do it.” It is
impossible to know how successful the cio
the vast would have been had they taken Dudley’s
majority of the labor move- suggestion seriously. Evidently, how-
ment — judging the political risks ever, virtually the entire cio leadership
to be far too great — was believed his strategy was not a risk worth
unwilling to follow taking, since it could further empower
him. the Republicans in
Congress.
Today,
This the labor
set back movement
labor’s has much less
electoral leverage over
efforts for Democratic
years, and leaders when
it left John compared
Lewis in the to the 1940s
political wild- and ’50s, and
erness. In turn, the only labor
the Lewis-led organizations
Un i t e d M i n e that would

AFTER BERNIE 87
Virtually every important insurgency in the
building durable progressive organizations
insurgent presidential candidate.
even consider the confrontational strategy lie at the mar-
gins of Democratic politics. Even if these groups were
willing to withhold support for mainstream Democrats,
their resources are so limited that losing them would
not prove fatal to many Democratic candidates. Most
Democrats would be perfectly happy to forgo the head-
ache of appeasing marginally useful, and potentially
antagonistic, progressive forces in their coalition.
Another alternative would be defection to a third
party, but unless that party’s constituency were large
enough to convince Democrats they could not win
without it, the most likely result would be marginal-
ization and a politically debilitated left. And given that
partisan polarization is, by many measures, higher today
than at any other time in modern US history, it is unlikely
that a significant percentage of the electorate will be
convinced any time soon that there is no meaningful dif-
ference between the Democratic and Republican parties.
This problem is compounded by the fact that the
most likely supporters of a Sanders-style third party
based on economic populism are the least likely to defect
from the Democratic Party. As the figure below shows,
it is neither disillusioned former Democrats, nor inde-
pendents who may not feel the party represents their
interests but who vote for it on strategic grounds, who
are most eager for more left-wing economic policy. To
the contrary, voters who identify strongly with, and feel
most adequately represented by, the Democratic Party
are the staunchest democratic socialists in the elec-
torate. Hence, a “successful” third-party challenge that
garnered enough votes to hurt Democrats and reward
Republicans, but not enough to position itself as a viable
electoral alternative, would make that party extremely
unpopular among the voters most receptive to its polit-
ical message. If anything, a third-party approach would
be likely to push progressive voters even closer to the
Democrats, as they sought to prevent further losses to
the Republicans.
The spoiler problem is precisely why even the most
vocal proponents of a third-party alternative from within
the Democratic coalition have ultimately decided against
88 № 38  /  SUMMER 2020
taking the plunge. An important example here is former
United Auto Workers (uaw) president Walter Reuther.
In response to growing disillusionment with the Truman
administration’s failure to press forward with the New
Deal agenda, Reuther in 1946 called on the uaw and its
allies “to work toward the eventual formation of a broad
new progressive party which will truly represent the
needs of our nation and its people.” In the end, however,
understanding the extraordinary political risk associated
with splitting the Democratic coalition during a period
of Republican resurgence, Reuther never took any con-
crete steps toward the formation of a labor party. It is
conceivable that things might have looked different if
Truman had been routed in 1948 (indeed, third-party
proponents in the uaw even planned an educational
conference to prepare for the formation of a labor party,
to be held on the date of Thomas Dewey’s 1949 inaugu-
ration), but as it happened, no mass defection from the
Democrats materialized.
The only real potential leverage that an organization
pursuing the confrontation strategy would have over
Democratic candidates and lawmakers is the threat of
waging as many primary challenges as its organizational
resources allowed (assuming, of course, that successful
insurgents could win in general elections). This approach
could certainly prove effective in increasing the number
of disciplined progressives and leftists in Congress and
state houses. Beyond the risk of alienating critical allies,
however, it would also run up against serious limitations
when it came to legislative influence.
Insurgent candidates could conceivably scare a fair
number of legislators to the left; if elected in sufficient
numbers, they could serve as a consistent voting bloc
to obstruct anti-progressive legislation. That said, left-
ists’ ability to force Democratic leaders in Congress and
state legislatures to actually pass progressive legislation
is limited, among other things, by the fact that those
leaders don’t believe they can win majorities if their
candidates in relatively moderate or conservative areas
are associated with overly progressive legislation. This is
the same problem already discussed above in connection
with the coalition strategy.
last century squandered any chance of
through an excessive reliance on the
Even if left-wing candidates and lawmakers were
totally willing to burn their political bridges with the rest
of the Democratic Party, then, they would still have little
capacity to ensure the passage of progressive legislation.
The only context in which the confrontation strategy
could succeed in guaranteeing such legislation would
be if insurgent lawmakers held a majority of seats, so
that they wouldn’t have to depend on alliances with any
other Democrats (as the nplers were able to do in North
Dakota in 1919, for example). This is unlikely to happen
in the foreseeable future, either at state or national level.
Short of that, it is possible that progressives could
exert more legislative influence if the Democratic elec-
torate shifted decisively to the left. This is arguably
why the Tea Party and its subsequent iterations have
been so successful in shaping the Republican agenda.
Republican leaders understand that their base is very
conservative — more than three-quarters of Republicans
identify as conservative — so they can afford to pass ele-
ments of the extreme-right agenda without generating
serious divisions among the party base.
By contrast, Democratic leaders face a more diverse
and less ideological base: only around half of Democrats
identify as liberals today, which is still a historic high (up
from 40 percent in 2010). As a result, in order to maintain
support among the broad set of interests and ideologies
that characterize the Democratic coalition, candidates
often have to distance themselves from elements of the
progressive agenda.
Yet even if the current leftward shift of Democratic
voters continues — assuaging the party’s fear of alien-
ating segments of its base by enacting progressive
legislation — Democratic leaders will still face a major
additional hurdle to progressive reforms: in order to
win the Senate or the presidency, Democrats have to
prevail in states with electorates that are majority con-
servative, and increasingly so. This means that they
have to appeal not only to centrist Democrats, but also
to right-of-center voters. Democratic leaders worry, not
illogically, that they cannot win if they make too many
policy concessions to the Left.
AFTER BERNIE
However, if Democrats could find a progressive
message that was as effective in highly liberal urban and
suburban districts as it was in rural districts, this could
change. The Sanders movement has suggested such a
message, and it may prove to be especially compelling
in the coming years if the Democratic Party is unable to
put forward economic solutions for working-class people
on the vast scale required by the coronavirus crisis. Even
so, it remains to be seen how realistic such a strategy
could be. Its proponents must continue experimenting
with models based on the most successful cases that
we’ve seen to date.
What’s Next?
In practice, the extent to which one approach is pursued
over the other in the short to medium term will depend
on the outcome of this year’s presidential and congres-
sional elections, as well as on the political learning that
occurs as we take stock of the last four years and update
our strategies based on dramatically evolving conditions,
both political and economic.
At the national level, if Donald Trump is reelected,
the prospects of either strategy will be limited in the
medium term. We will be forced to focus our ener-
gies on defensive battles against an almost certainly
emboldened and more dangerous second-term Trump,
and increasingly desperate Democratic voters will
become even more risk-averse than they were during
the 2020 primaries.
It is important to remember that, however much
establishment Democrats are loath to pass bold reforms,
even Obama-era Democrats took important steps to
stem the tide of rising inequality — though they were
unwilling or unable to pass sweeping legislation to actu-
ally reverse the decline in working-class living standards.
For almost all progressive voters, then, maximizing
Democratic electoral victories during a second Trump
administration will be much more important than
attacking establishment Democrats Democrats for not
doing more.
89
 4.0
Democratic Party Does Not Represent My
Interests (higher = stronger agreement)
3.5
3.0
2.5
2.0
1.5
1 2
If I Were to Vote for a Third Party, On Economic Issues
I’d Want It To Be (1 = More Liberal, 5 = More Conservative)
If Trump loses, by contrast, the medium-term pros-
pects of the coalition strategy will be enhanced. Under
these conditions — particularly if Democrats win the
Senate — there is a chance of passing popular, progres-
sive policies to avert economic depression. Yet we should
not be overly optimistic. Even with Democratic control
of the White House and both chambers of Congress, the
possibility of sweeping progressive reforms would be
limited by — to name just a few factors — a president
with little political vision who is reliant on a neolib-
eral brain trust, a non-filibuster-proof Democratic
majority in the Senate, and opposition from conserva-
tive Democratic senators like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten
Sinema. Nonetheless, the opportunities are real, and it
is difficult to imagine advocates of the confrontation
strategy finding too many progressives sympathetic to
their arguments under such conditions.
If Democrats win control of the presidency and both
houses of Congress, but they fail to deliver at least some
of the progressive agenda, however, the viability of the
confrontation approach might increase significantly.
More Democrats may become disillusioned with their
party, and more working-class Americans may be open
to a combative, populist message. Unfortunately, many
Americans may also become more receptive to an even
more insidious brand of Trumpism.
90
Strong Dem.
Dem. to Ind.
Dem. Leaner
Weak Dem.
3 4 5
 Source: Democracy Fund Voter Study Group data
set. “Dem. to Ind.” indicates voters who identified as
Democrats in 2011, but who no longer did so and did not
lean Republican in 2018.
The same logic might be applied to the confronta-
tion strategy’s prospects in the event of a defeat of Joe
Biden in 2020: in other words, mass disillusionment
with the party establishment’s capacity to beat Trump
(again) paves the way for an even stronger Sanders-style
insurgency within the party in 2024. But this scenario is
less plausible. It is more likely that a Biden defeat would
rally progressives further round the flag of electoral
pragmatism to stop additional Republican advances.
This possibility is all the more likely since we know
parties out of government are much more willing to
make rhetorical concessions to their activist base than
parties in power — after all, they have little to lose politi-
cally from doing so. In other words, a Biden defeat would
give establishment Democrats more political space to
appease progressive demands than a Biden presidency,
and this would be likely to further constrain insur-
gent challengers.
At the state level, the coalition strategy has a much
greater chance of success in strongly Democratic states,
№ 38  /  SUMMER 2020
 JARED ABBOTT THE TWO PATHS OF DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM: COALITION & CONFRONTATION
where a focused coalition of left and progressive electoral
groups could conceivably win enough seats in the next
couple of electoral cycles to constitute an influential
minority in the Democratic caucus, if not a majority.
In turn, if a wide range of progressive and left national
organizations concentrated their efforts on a confron-
tation strategy in one state or a small number of states,
they could conceivably make real headway (especially
if the coalition included significant elements of the pro-
gressive labor movement).
That said, the negative consequences of paying less
attention to other states or to federal races could be
considerable. If advocates of the confrontation approach
hope to demonstrate the viability of their strategy,
however, focusing on state-level races in one or a small
handful of states that are not Democratic strongholds
might be the most effective way to do so.
Finally, either approach might be successful in
specific municipalities, especially those with non-
partisan elections or with single-party Democratic
rule. Indeed, we have seen isolated successes of the
confrontation strategy in the not-too-distant past in
places like Burlington, Vermont; Jackson, Mississippi;
and Richmond, California — not to mention historical
examples in places like Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Reading,
Pennsylvania; and Schenectady, New York, to name
but a few — and we have seen many more successful
examples of the coalition strategy. Progressives and
socialists should certainly take advantage of local-level
electoral opportunities, particularly in larger cities, to
experiment with progressive policies, expand their elec-
toral base (especially among working-class communities
and communities of color), and deepen their bench of
effective candidates.
As important as these efforts are, however, the
fiscal constraints facing municipal governments limit
the broader impact of electoral gains at the local level.
Where possible, then, regardless of whether they focus
on the confrontation or coalition strategy, progressives
and socialists should set their sights on the state and
federal levels.
AFTER BERNIE
There is no simple means of adjudicating the relative
merits of coalition and confrontation: inevitably, both
will continue to be tested to one degree or another —
often in combination. The coalition strategy offers a
realistic theory for how progressives might expand their
ranks substantially in state and federal legislatures and
exert greater influence over lawmaking. Yet it does not
explain how progressives and democratic socialists can
hold elected officials accountable in the absence of a
serious electoral threat, nor does it offer a strategy for
progressive success in the many red and purple states
where a traditional liberal message tends to fail.
For its part, the confrontation strategy offers a way
to hold officials accountable and build electoral coalitions
across the broad working class, but it bases its claims
on limited evidence. If unsuccessful, the strategy could
generate serious negative political consequences for
progressives and leftists. In other words, the coalition
strategy offers less uncertainty but potentially fewer
benefits, while the confrontation strategy points to much
broader political horizons but is based on a number of
critical and largely untested assumptions.
Ultimately, progressives and socialists have to
seriously assess whether the coalition strategy rests
on a realistic assessment of the Left’s level of political
influence — or, alternatively, if it is based on a self-
defeating aversion to disrupting existing political
alliances within the Democratic Party that hinders a
bolder, and potentially more effective, confrontational
alternative. Conversely, is the confrontation approach
grounded in a hard-nosed appraisal of the objective
limits of reform and the nature of political leverage in a
capitalist democracy? Or is it based on a set of idealistic,
if not naive, assumptions about the prospects of class
politics in the United States that could undermine less
flashy but ultimately historic advances?
These are the questions we should be debating, as the
answers will have major implications for democratic-
socialist strategy during a period when the stakes could
not be higher.
91
 How the
Labour Party
Lost the
Chance of a
Lifetime
BY RONAN BURTENSHAW

Corbynism had a popular

program — but not the
popular insurgency it needed
to fight for it.

when we look back at this era of British politics, it will be defined by

the battle between two projects for radical change: Brexit and Corbynism.
Both claimed the mantle of deep public frustration with not just a single
policy or government but decades of developments. Both promised
fundamental transformation in the nature of democracy. Both mounted
insurgencies against the gatekeepers of Westminster politics. In December,
one vanquished the other.
This trajectory was not set in stone. The 2017 general election came
just one year after the Brexit referendum. Then, Labour recorded its
largest increase in vote share since 1945. Brexit influenced the campaign
but didn’t dominate it. Instead, Labour’s left-wing policy platform proved
hugely popular. The British Election Study estimated that between 26
and 34 percent of Labour’s supporters voted Leave just one year earlier. It
seemed plausible that economic inequality would be the issue that defined
politics for years to come.
Three years later, Corbynism is over. Labour is recovering from an
election defeat in which it lost seats it had held for decades, in some cases
for a hundred years. The political terrain is shaped by Brexit — young versus
old, cities versus towns, cosmopolitans versus patriots — and the prospects
for class politics appear bleak. But it didn’t have to be this way.

ILLUSTRATION BY HARRY HAYSOM 93

HOW THE LABOUR PARTY LOST THE CHANCE OF A LIFETIME
In 1959, Nye Bevan said of the Left that “we have
never suffered from too much audacity; we have suffered
from too little.” Sixty years later, the same was true of
Corbynism.
Changing the Common Sense
in the weeks since December’s defeat, the 2017
election has scarcely been mentioned in the media.
But the fact remains that Labour under Jeremy Corbyn
secured nearly 13 million votes, far surpassing not only
the Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband election defeats,
but even the last two Tony Blair victories. It was a
remarkable comeback performance from a party that
had been more than 20 points behind at the beginning
of the campaign. Euphoria ensued: Labour rose to a clear
lead in national polls, and mps who had savaged their
leader only months earlier now proclaimed themselves
Corbynites.
However, the results of 2017 disguised serious
problems. The Left had not won the battle for the party,
which remained largely unreformed and, especially in
parliament, opposed to its agenda. It faced a ferociously
hostile media — not only in the right-wing press but
in nominally left-leaning outlets such as the Guardian
and the Mirror. And in many heartland seats, from
Bassetlaw and Bolsover to Great Grimsby and Don
Valley, victory in 2017 came alongside major increases
for the Tories, who had captured votes cultivated by the
UK Independence Party in the decade prior.
Fundamental and irreversible shifts in wealth and
power are not achieved without stubborn resistance. This
should have been expected. But Corbynism had another
problem: in two years, it hadn’t managed to change the
broader political landscape outside Westminster. There
was no sign of an uptick in class conflict; trade union
membership was continuing its slow decline. Days lost
to strike action were minimal; even social movements,
which had murmured with life in the years prior to
2015, had fallen back into hibernation. Corbynism had
a popular program — but not the popular insurgency it
needed to fight for it.
The socialist premise has always been that
entrenched opposition can be overcome by uniting
the working-class majority of the country. This means
building a coalition based on majoritarian material
interests that can challenge the power of concentrated
94 № 38  /  SUMMER 2020
wealth. But the entire apparatus of British politics — its
parties, its papers, its patrons — acts to ensure that this
is not the basis on which national debates take place.
Instead of conflict between classes, their hope is that
the conflict is limited to the one within the ruling class,
between those with liberal and conservative worldviews.
It is not possible to overcome this dynamic inside
Westminster alone. For Corbynism to be successful, it
had to change how politics was done, sustaining a vibrant
grassroots movement that could fight for its policies
outside of parliament as well. This meant fundamentally
transforming the Labour Party and breaking with its
tendency to see politics entirely through an electoral
lens. And it meant rebuilding social institutions — the
basis of working-class community across Britain — to
stem the tide of atomization that threatened the basis
of collective action.
Without such a strategy, class politics would always
be impossible to maintain. Corbynism had tapped into
widespread anger — but this anger could be released
through other forms of politics as well. The most potent
was one centered on globalization, which relied on
culture wars and divided people based on their social
views rather than their interests. Corbynism had one
chance to prevent its rise: it had to seize on the 2017
general election result to remake politics in its image.
The Months We Wasted
in many ways, it is understandable that the movement
around Corbyn was disoriented by 2017. It had spent
the previous two years under siege. Corbyn was elected
Labour leader in September 2015 — by November, the
right-wing press had whipped up a frenzy over whether
he bowed deeply enough to the Queen, and half of his
shadow cabinet was in revolt over his refusal to bomb
Syria. The next year saw the Brexit referendum and then
an attempted coup against his leadership. The attacks
were relentless.
June 2017 brought a very different experience:
popularity. Corbyn himself had endured a remarkable
rise in his approval ratings during the campaign and was
now feted by many commentators who had previously
labeled him an extremist. The path forward for any
ambitious Labour mp was clear: they had to make their
peace with Corbynism and its burgeoning support base
if they were to stand any chance at career progression.

For a brief moment, it seemed as though those
obstacles — the opposition within the party, the hostility
of the press — were not so great, and that a left-led
Labour government was just around the corner. But, of
course, this was not the case. The establishment had not
dropped its opposition to socialist policies just because
they proved popular.
Corbynism, meanwhile, put itself in “permanent
campaign mode.” There was talk about using this
strategy to keep the grassroots mobilized, but its chief
function was to prolong the high of the campaign for as
long as possible — and to avoid returning to the harder
and more conflictual realities that had preceded it.
Instead of using the political capital earned by 2017’s
remarkable performance to tackle the deeply entrenched
Labour under Jeremy
Corbyn secured nearly
13 million votes, far
surpassing not only the
Gordon Brown and Ed
Miliband election
defeats, but even the last
two Tony Blair victories.
AFTER BERNIE
RONAN BURTENSHAW
obstacles inside and outside the party, the movement
seemed intent on basking in the glory.
The months after the summer of 2017 were the
moment when a second wave of Corbynism had to be
built. Questions should have been asked about why the
level of struggle outside parliament — in workplaces and
movements — was so low. After surging in the cities and
among younger people, determined efforts needed to be
made to reach out to voters in heartland areas where the
Tories were making gains.
Instead of mock-Glastonbury festivals like Labour
Live, which spoke only to the converted, resources
needed to be directed to building lasting social
institutions that could give the project a meaningful
presence in communities. There was a time when
95
HOW THE LABOUR PARTY LOST THE CHANCE OF A LIFETIME

trade union branches, Labour associations, and

party street captains served this function. The last
century was full of ambitious attempts to go beyond
them, too — from socialist Sunday schools to Clarion
Instead of remaking
cycling clubs. No serious attempt was made under
Corbynism to reverse the decline of these institutions. politics in its image,
We were not present in working-class people’s day- Corbynism was
to-day lives. Right-wing tabloids like the Sun and the
remade by Brexit.
Daily Mail were.
As 2017 drew to a close, it was clear that the much-
prophesied collapse of the Tory government was not on
the horizon. Instead, Corbynism was gradually sucked
back into the old Westminster politics where its energies
had been stunted in years prior. The battle was soon
underway again in the party, too. As Corbynmania faded,
elite liberal interests set about shifting the debate away
from class questions, where they had found themselves
increasingly squeezed. Instead of challenging the Brexit
culture war, their intention was to force the Labour Party
into it on the side of Remain. In April 2018, the People’s
Vote movement was launched.

The Brexit Culture War

labour’s brexit policy in the 2017 general election
was highly effective. At that time, the party promised to
respect the referendum result and to focus the debate on
“what sort of country we want to be after Brexit.” The
reason why Corbynism, which had supported Remain
in the referendum, chose this path was clear: no class-
based coalition for socialist politics could be built while
promising to overturn the referendum. Whichever way
you assessed class — by income, skill level, education,
abcde social grades, or self-identification — most
working-class people had supported Brexit.
For millions of workers, that vote was not just like
any other. It was an expression of dissatisfaction with
decades of political and economic action, as well as an
attempt to force those in power to listen to people and
places that had been neglected. This was not the only —
or even the dominant — part of the Brexit coalition.
But it was a substantial part that could not be ignored
by the Labour Party. It also happened that 148 of
Labour’s own seats voted Leave, compared to just 84 that
voted Remain.
For class politics to have any chance of dominating
the national debate in the years that followed, the potency

96 № 38  /  SUMMER 2020


had to be taken out of the Brexit divide. Labour had to
be the party that argued it was time for Britain to move
on from the referendum. This didn’t mean avoiding
the issue or trying to triangulate between its two sides,
but instead putting forward a comprehensive policy
backing either a customs union or a Norway-style deal.
That kind of approach would have made life much
harder for Theresa May and Boris Johnson. They
wanted the culture war battles, which could give the
Conservative Party the appearance of speaking on behalf
of the people against a Westminster establishment.
These battles would also distract from the fact that,
while in Westminster, successive Tory governments
had overseen policies that savaged the living standards
of millions in favor of the interests of millionaires.
If Labour had put forward a viable alternative to Tory
Brexit during the years of parliamentary wrangling that
followed 2017, it could have avoided being painted as
merely an obstructionist force. And if this alternative
had been complemented with a genuine commitment
to renewed democracy and regional rebalancing of the
economy, the party’s prospects of being seen as a vehicle
for real change by many in its heartland areas would
surely have been significant.
But Labour failed to take a decisive position.
Week by week, the project was drawn further into a
Westminster battle it could not win. Corbyn’s opponents
in the Parliamentary Labour Party grew stronger, using
the wedge of a second referendum to undermine his
leadership and speak to party members who had all but
written them off only months earlier.
They were supported by a lavishly funded liberal
campaigning effort — whose leading figures, including
Alastair Campbell and Peter Mandelson, knew only
too well that defeating Corbyn was as important as
defeating Brexit. Their focus was almost exclusively
on the Labour Party, which they attacked on a daily
basis while providing a stream of positive coverage for
the Liberal Democrats.
Instead of remaking politics in its image, Corbynism
was remade by Brexit. It was forced to adapt to its divides
and respond to its developments. By the time the 2018
Labour conference arrived, many party members saw
Brexit and not the prospect of a Corbyn government
as the key political issue of the day. They duly voted
through a motion — with the strong support of Keir
Starmer — that opened the door to a second referendum.
AFTER BERNIE
RONAN BURTENSHAW
The prospect of Corbynism being an insurgency in its
own right was over.
Taking the Easy Road
the failure to be decisive on Brexit was
immensely costly. Over the months that followed,
Corbyn, who had grown in popularity during the
election as a campaigner that exuded authenticity, was
reduced to a figure of calculation and parliamentary
intrigue. In truth, the failures over Brexit summed up
Corbyn’s limitations — he excelled as a moral leader
but failed as a political one. His greatest moments came
when defending principle under pressure, but he rarely
demonstrated the comfort with strategy necessary to
lead a project as ambitious as his own to power.
This strength as a moral leader also came under
attack throughout 2018. Labour’s antisemitism
controversy, which had developed prior to the 2017
election, returned with a vengeance. It is easy to point
to errors — from Corbyn’s endorsement of a clearly
conspiratorial mural to the party’s failure to put in place
effective procedures soon enough. But the recently
leaked report (excerpted in this issue of Jacobin) has
made clear that many of Corbynism’s early failings on
the issue were the result of deliberate sabotage on the
part of the Labour right.
The truth is that only a tiny fraction of Labour’s
members held antisemitic views — far less, in fact, than
those of other parties. That this issue became headline
national news owed far more to a campaign against
the Corbyn project than to the specifics of the cases.
This broader effort had a clear aim: to paint the entire
movement as racist and thereby dent the moral appeal
it possessed when challenging the genuine racism
and class spite of the Tory government. Once again, a
lack of decisive leadership had contributed to signifi-
cant damage.
The same couldn’t be said of the Brexiteers. At each
moment when they possessed political capital, they used
it. They pushed Theresa May into a hard-line position
she didn’t believe in, then sabotaged her deal when
she showed signs of compromise. They ensured her
departure when she refused to renegotiate, then backed
the Brexit Party in European elections to remind the
Tories of the likely outcome if they did not replace her
with someone committed to Brexit.
97
HOW THE LABOUR PARTY LOST THE CHANCE OF A LIFETIME
Later, upon Boris Johnson’s ascendancy, they wasted
no time in disposing of those Tories who objected to the
trajectory — kicking Father of the House of Commons
Kenneth Clarke and Churchill’s grandson Nicholas
Soames out of the parliamentary party. This is the kind
of ruthlessness that tends to characterize successful
insurgencies.
But, as time wore on, Corbynism increasingly took
the easy road. Not only did it refuse to mount a fight
within the parliamentary party, it leaned into those parts
of its base — the young, the urban, the well educated —
that were already onside and that best suited the terms of
the Brexit culture war. The project narrowed at precisely
the moment it needed to broaden, and and by 2019 it
was tangibly speaking more to its own supporters and
less to the class as a whole.
In 2015, Labour had promised to reverse the long
decline the party was suffering in its heartlands, a process
that dated back to losing 5 million votes during the Blair
government. But by 2019, it had become clear that this
erosion was, in fact, continuing. Rather than being
seen as a break with so much of what postindustrial
communities hated about New Labour, Corbynism came
to be seen as similarly distant and associated with the
same aloof attitudes.
The Left has tended to blame this on objective
factors, such as the malign influence of the right-wing
press — and their impact shouldn’t be underestimated.
But even here, the question has to be asked: What was
the strategy to defeat them? More than 60 percent of the
newspapers people read each day in Britain are owned
by Rupert Murdoch and the Daily Mail. This isn’t a
new phenomenon.
Corbynism wasn’t present in the vast majority of
postindustrial communities in a way that might have
circumvented their influence. Was the plan to win over
the existing left-leaning press? Little effort seemed to be
exerted here, which is understandable, given the hostility.
But social media alone could never be sufficient. In this
context, the failure to seriously explore media alternatives
seems even more shortsighted. After all, even the timid
Labour leadership of the 1980s had lent its support to
the abortive News on Sunday effort. Why was the project
so reluctant to explore building our own institutions?
The tragedy of all this was that, unlike in previous
years, Labour had a message worth communicating.
Its proposed policies — a national investment bank,
98 № 38  /  SUMMER 2020
a real overhaul of transportation networks, proper
funding and powers for local councils, and thousands
of green industrial jobs — would have substantially
undone the damage inflicted by Margaret Thatcher
on working-class areas. Sadly, in a political landscape
dominated by Brexit, they didn’t resonate — or at least
not sufficiently to drown out the Tory narrative: Labour
no longer respects the result of the referendum because,
fundamentally, it doesn’t respect you.
The Red Wall Crumbles
corbynism’s accumulated failures were laid
bare on December 12, 2019. An opposition party with a
popular policy program had been thumped by a ten-year
party of government that oversaw an economy most
people felt was moving in the wrong direction. That
simply does not happen without Brexit — which came
to dominate British politics and, in the process, rescued
the Conservatives from their own record.
A lot of criticisms have been made of Labour’s
election campaign. It lacked the dynamism of 2017,
with fewer and more sparsely attended rallies, a video
campaign that only found inspiration in the dying days,
and a slogan — “It’s Time for Real Change” — that felt
every bit the focus-grouped fudge it was. The manifesto
had excellent policies, but it lacked a coherent vision of
what a Labour society might be about — allowing it to
be caricatured as a laundry list of fantastical promises.
But, in truth, the die had been cast long before
December. By 2019, Corbynism was not a project that
working-class communities felt any ownership over. Its
insurgent appeal had faded. Trapped in a Westminster
game it couldn’t win, Labour felt like just another
political party. Meanwhile, the debate over the future of
the country revolved around Brexit. The class coalition
that socialist politics relies upon was torn apart by its
competing camps.
Remain advocates would point to the fact that
Labour lost more than a million voters to anti-Brexit
parties. This is true, although many of those votes were
in Scotland, where the dynamic was quite different. The
People’s Vote campaign’s relentless focus on Jeremy
Corbyn and Labour had taken a toll. In the end, however,
its strategy came up disastrously short. Not only did the
Liberal Democrats have a dismal night, Tory Remainers
largely stuck with their party.

For all the multiple millions
of pounds poured into
their efforts, the Remain
campaign’s only meaningful
contribution was to damage
the Labour Party and defeat
Jeremy Corbyn.
AFTER BERNIE
RONAN BURTENSHAW
The Liberal Democrats’ post-election report was
scathing in its account of their “high-speed car crash”
of a campaign. In fact, it went so far as to admit that
the party’s policy of revoking Brexit “alienated large
chunks of the population” — including those who had
voted Remain.
For all the multiple millions of pounds poured into
their efforts — and, at one stage, People’s Vote alone
had a comparable number of staff in its headquarters to
the Liberal Democrats — the Remain campaign’s only
meaningful contribution was to damage the Labour
Party and defeat Jeremy Corbyn. We should be under
no illusions that this will be a worthy consolation for
many of those involved.
But it was Leave voting areas that defined the
election. Fifty-two of the sixty seats Labour lost had
voted Leave in 2016. A YouGov poll shortly after the
election showed that Labour lost 40 percent of its 2017
Leave vote to the Tories and the Brexit Party. Only the
Brexit Party’s decision not to stand down in contests
for Labour seats prevented another dozen or more
being lost where their vote was higher than the margin
of victory.
Another YouGov poll demonstrated the reason for
the switch: 49 percent changed their votes because of
Brexit, and only 27 percent because of Corbyn. The
Labour Party’s internal report into the election failing —
which was clearly written to justify Keir Starmer’s
moderate political line — nonetheless noted that the
Tories had managed to turn out almost 2 million previous
nonvoters, largely older white men, over the question
of Brexit.
Many of the seats that Labour lost were party
strongholds across generations. It had held Leigh since
1922, Newcastle-under-Lyme since 1919, and Rother
Valley since 1918. In many seats, Labour didn’t just
lose — it was decimated. In Ashfield, the party lost
18 points and finished third. In Great Grimsby, its vote
share fell by 17 points, and there is now a Tory majority
of more than 7,000 in a seat Labour had held since the
Second World War.
In all of these places, Labour’s downward trend
began more than a decade ago, with 2017 merely a blip
on the road. But even then, there were clear warning
signs. In Leave-voting seats that the party lost during
the Corbyn surge, 2019’s picture is truly disastrous.
The Tory majority in Stoke-on-Trent South is now
99
HOW THE LABOUR PARTY LOST THE CHANCE OF A LIFETIME
11,000; in Walsall North, it is almost 12,000; in North
East Derbyshire, it is nearly 13,000; and in Mansfield,
it is 16,000. These are seats that had Labour mps less
than five years ago.
Winning the Battle, Losing the War
the party’s right has used December’s election
defeat to argue that the Corbyn project in its entirety
failed and should be consigned to history. Whatever
Keir Starmer might have protested during his campaign,
this is the logic he is following, too — summed up by his
recent sacking of the most prominent Corbynite in his
shadow cabinet, Rebecca Long-Bailey.
Starmer’s politics are an attempt to turn back
the Labour clock to the “soft-left” positions of Ed
Miliband — ones that were soft enough to include attacks
on benefit scroungers and trade unions, it should be
added. Starmer hopes to carry this off more competently,
by appealing to Britain’s right-wing press with “sensible
opposition” that, in reality, offers little resistance to the
Boris Johnson government.
This program has produced a poll boost for the party,
but it still languishes well below where it was at the
height of Corbynism in late 2017 and 2018. And even if
Starmer were to restore the party’s polling fortunes with
this approach, an election is probably five years away.
His politics will guarantee that those five years are spent
with a prolonged shift to the right on everything from
the economy to civil liberties to foreign policy.
It is worth remembering that, even in defeat,
Jeremy Corbyn received more than 10 million votes —
substantially more than the party had received under
soft-left Ed Miliband. In fact, the 2017 result of almost
13 million votes under Corbyn’s left-wing leadership is
the only election since 1997 when Labour could claim
widespread support in the country.
The reason for this is clear: Labour’s policy program
under Corbyn was enormously popular. Polling from
bmg Research after the election demonstrated its
enduring appeal. There were thumping majorities for
policies like free personal care (83 percent in favor, just
3 percent against), net-zero carbon emissions by 2030 (70
to 7), a £10 minimum wage (67 to 12) and tax increases
for those earning over £80,000 (60 to 16).
Labour’s nationalization plans also drew
significant support — with clear support on rail (57 to
100 № 38  /  SUMMER 2020
16), water (53 to 18), energy (52 to 20), and mail (48
to 21). Renationalization of the nhs (48 to 19) gained
similar approval. Even nationalized broadband —
widely cited by critics as a policy that contributed to
Labour’s downfall — was approved by a margin of
47 points to 21.
In the past four years, Labour under Jeremy Corbyn
has profoundly transformed the debate over the
economy. As recently as the 2015 general election, the
party had accepted that austerity was a necessary evil.
It promised to match the Tories cut for cut outside of a
small number of protected areas. Its headline manifesto
commitment was to “cut the deficit every year.”
Today, the tide has turned against austerity. But
more fundamentally, it has turned against the market.
In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher sold the market as a
panacea for Britain’s economic problems — dynamic,
efficient, and delivering benefits for consumers. That
common sense endured for decades, but Corbynism
brought it crashing down.
The pandemic has made clear the degree to which
there is now a consensus that the state and the public
should play a larger role in the economy. Even the
Conservative government has had to abandon its
Thatcherite roots and flirt with a more interventionist
approach. It has pledged increased spending on the
nhs and infrastructure, and it has supported an
unprecedented underwriting of wages in the form of
the pandemic-induced furlough.Already, this is placing
its own coalition under pressure.
Changing the economic debate wasn’t Corbyn’s only
legacy. After so many years in which party memberships
declined and politics appeared to be hollowing out,
Corbynism produced a remarkable growth in Labour
Party membership — taking it to more than 500,000
at its height. It won a generation of younger people to
socialist politics and forced anti-war positions onto the
political agenda. It made millions of people believe that
real change could be achieved through collective action,
and that politics could be about more than choosing
between the lesser of two whatevers.
These legacies must be built upon, not cast aside. The
battles Corbynism waged were ones that will confront
any Labour Party that aspires to shift the balance of
power in favor of workers. Now is not the time to shy
away from these fights — it is the time to prepare the
ground to win them next time.
 Cultural
Capital
CAPITALIST REALISM

102 № 37  /  SPRING 2020

 CULTURAL CAPITAL
BASS AND SUPERSTRUCTURE
One advantage of being a millen-
nial is that we have no real
equivalent to the New Left apogee
of 1968. As a result, freed from
wistful thoughts of political and
cultural might-have-been, we tend
to look forward rather than back
when we dream of a revolutionary
moment. Having said that, for
many of us — especially (but not
only) those of us who grew up
in Great Britain— there is one
period in recent history that
does tend to induce an ambivalent,
slightly sheepish reverie.
For those who lived through it, the
so-called summer of Britpop,
which began in 1994, following the
death of Kurt Cobain, and ended
with the election of Tony Blair as
prime minister in May 1997,
will always seem like a cultural
high-water mark of some kind.
But though most of us would agree
that there was something pivotal
about the mid-’90s, there is wild
disagreement about the historical
significance of Britpop. Was it
ALEX NIVEN
Don’t Look
Back in Anger
Britpop is often dismissed as an
embarrassing, retrograde moment
in British culture. But at its best,
it hinted at what might have
happened if the working class had
managed to regain its sense of
power and pride after the defeats
of the 1980s.
a failed breakthrough for an gaudy, louche, and — above
authentic modern populism, all — popular.
or just another tacky and reac-
In the view of alpha Britpop bands
tionary example of postmodern
like Suede, who emerged in
“retromania”?
1993 with an eponymous debut
album inspired by glam rock
Britpop Sociology and the “bedsit pop” of the Smiths
and Pet Shop Boys, the puritan
The tackiness was always there in
post-punk tradition had fizzled
abundance, of course, even when
out with the high seriousness and
Britpop was at its most exhila-
dead-end nihilism of grunge.
rating. This was, at its roots, a
In response, Suede offered an
musical movement that rejected
exaggeratedly British tableau of
the pretension and political
“crimplene, glamour, wit
earnestness of ’80s indie rock in
and irony” — a counterblast to
favor of an aesthetic that was
AFTER BERNIE 103
 BASS AND SUPERSTRUCTURE
grunge’s supposedly American
emphasis on hard-rock
authenticity.
But over time, these shallow nat-
ional caricatures, worked up
by a British music press desperate
for a new domestic scene to
promote, would give way
to something more inclusive of
the whole atmosphere of the
High Nineties (if you’ll pardon
the phrase). Boiled down to its
sociological essence, Britpop was
a sort of mad, mass-cultural
symposium about class.
Underneath the Union Jack
imagery and the cartoon nation-
alism, Britpop unfolded as a
dramatic battle between different
ideas about the fate of the British
proletariat. After a long decade
in which the Conservative govern-
ment had done a pretty good
job of destroying the material
basis of working-class identity in
organized labor, Britpop cele-
brated a residual aesthetic
tradition: the British mass culture
of the postwar period, from David
Bowie and the Beatles through
punk and rave.
A Shallow
Piece of Dignity
The big question was whether this
would turn out to be a wake or
a renaissance for working-class
Britain and the moderate forms of
104
empowerment it had achieved in
the twentieth century. As the
Welsh band Manic Street
Preachers put it in one of the most
timely lyrics of the period:
“Libraries gave us power / Then
captured — and helped to shape —
work came and made us free /
the atmosphere of Britain between
What price now / for a shallow
1994 and 1997.
piece of dignity?”
On the one hand, Britpop was Football, regional accents, crates
a dubious parody of British of beer, and vintage sportswear —
working-class experience. In regardless of where you sat on the
a summary that has never been class spectrum, this was the
bettered, the critic Jon Savage unavoidable cultural mainstream
called it an “outer-suburban, in these years. But while Blur’s
middle-class fantasy of central ambiguous art-school send-up of
London street life, with exclu-
sively metropolitan models.”
At the forefront of this tendency
LIBRARIES GAVE US POWER
was Blur, whose lead singer,
THEN WORK CAME
Damon Albarn, had grown up on
AND MADE US FREE
the fault line between urban East
WHAT PRICE NOW
London and nouveau riche Essex.
FOR A SHALLOW PIECE
Although Blur was a complex
OF DIGNITY?
proposition overall, the band’s
1994 album, Parklife, was at least
partly guilty of co-opting the
mores of the British proletariat in proletarian leisure activities was
the way Savage describes. Britpop’s early public face, its
heart and soul would arrive in the
Parklife featured artwork depict-
form of an unequivocally working-
ing greyhound racing, “mockney”
class band.
vocals that flattened vowels
and exaggerated glottal stops, and
a series of songs smirking at Looking for
subjects like Mediterranean
package holidays, drinking lager
Some Action
down the pub, and unemployed The five original members of Oasis
teenage layabouts. Its tongue- grew up in the council estates
in-cheek, carnivalesque portrait and Irish immigrant enclaves of
of working-class culture South Manchester. As such,
whatever else can be said about it,
there is no question that the
Oasis phenomenon that eventually
swallowed Britpop whole was
rooted in the lived experience of
working-class community in
№ 38  /  SUMMER 2020

the 1980s and ’90s — its resent-
ments, disappointments, bursts
of optimism, and spasms of
political rage. Anyone looking for
answers to the big questions
Britpop posed about class must
examine the Oasis narrative in all
its seedy, intoxicating glory.
I was looking for
some action
but all I found was
cigarettes and alcohol.
Oasis had very little to do with
Britishness per se. Their debut
album, Definitely Maybe, appeared
in the same year as Parklife. But
in place of that album’s knowing
cameos of life in suburban
London, Definitely Maybe offered
a more universal vision, which
spoke of a Western postindustrial
proletariat undergoing its own
“end of history” moment.
Oasis songs were, on the surface,
full of classic rock traits and
simple lyrics about seizing the day.
But even in this superficial sense,
they were a product of their social
context. For example, songwriter
Noel Gallagher partly derived
his willingness to “steal” from the
rock canon, all in the service of
a good time, from his experience
of the “dole culture” of the
’80s and ’90s. One consequence
of neoliberal mass unemployment
was the rise of a subversive,
hedonistic lifestyle fueled by
cheap intoxicants and enlivened
by the nearest pop-cultural
artifacts at hand.
This was the wellspring of the
Oasis sound and worldview. As
one of Definitely Maybe’s most
anthemic lyrics opined, over a riff
stolen from T. Rex: “I was looking
for some action / But all I found
was cigarettes and alcohol.” Oasis
emerged from the scorched earth
of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain,
offering a dream of escape into a
sun-filled landscape of communal
release. The quintessence of
Gallagher’s idealistic side can be
heard on the chorus of 1995’s
“Acquiesce”: “We need each other/
We believe in one another / And
I know we’re going to uncover /
What’s sleepin’ in our soul.”
The Interregnum
However, Oasis’s mix of simulated
euphoria and underlying melan-
choly also expressed a deeper
truth about ’90s Britain. As
Britpop escalated, there was a
growing sense in the country that
better times were coming. The
political reasons for this were
quite specific. Thatcher’s suc-
cessor, John Major, presided over
a deeply unpopular Conservative
government. Meanwhile, his
opposition counterpart, Tony
Blair, enjoyed sky-high approval
ratings after he became Labour
AFTER BERNIE
Don’t Look Back in Anger
we need each other
we believe in one another
and I know we’re
going to uncover
what’s sleepin’ in our soul.
leader in July 1994, and he was
clearly the coming man.
Major was not duty-bound to call
an election until 1997. This was,
if you like, a classic Gramscian
moment — the old was dying, but
the new could not be born. Yet,
crucially, the long Britpop summer
that Oasis came to dominate was
decidedly not a time of morbid
symptoms.
As it turned out, Blair’s New
Labour government mostly ended
up continuing Thatcher’s political
legacy after it came to power in
1997. But before this disillusion-
ment kicked in, for a couple of
years, the people of Britain were
able to dream of an enlightened
sequel to Thatcherism, founded in
the purely imaginative, utopic
world of popular culture.
Perhaps Britpop was nothing
more than a fleeting, culturalist
daydream. But there is surely
something worth remembering
about this strange glitch in the
neoliberal timeline, which hinted
at what might have happened if
the British working class really
had managed to regain its sense of
power and pride after the defeats
of the 1980s. If you listen hard to
the best Britpop music, you can
hear the tragedy and the heroism
of this failed dream echoing
through the decades.
105
 CULTURAL CAPITAL
BEYOND A BOUNDARY
Where Have
All the Political
Footballers
Gone?
“Football gives meaning to life,
yes. But life also gives meaning
to football.”
Asif Kapadia’s film Diego
Maradona is a superb documen-
tary, but it’s also a time capsule
from another age. Watching it,
you can’t help comparing
Maradona to his fellow Argentine
Lionel Messi.
If Kapadia wanted to make a study
of Messi’s life twenty years from
now, he would have little to work
with: a highlights package of
wonderful goals, interspersed with
talking heads paying tribute
to Messi’s footballing genius. The
extracurricular drama of
Maradona’s life would be entirely
absent.
106
DANIEL FINN
ILLUSTRATION BY
CHARLIE LE MAIGNAN
As far as Messi himself is con-
cerned, this is probably no bad
thing: he’s better off without
Maradona’s cocaine habit, alleged
domestic violence, or compromis-
ing ties with the Neapolitan
Camorra. But something impor-
tant has been lost along the way,
too. Maradona’s career sheds light
on some of the great political
dramas of his time.
In part, this was a matter of
what he symbolized rather than
the opinions he expressed: an
Argentinian footballer scoring
twice against England in the 1986
World Cup, four years after the
№ 38  /  SUMMER 2020
Falklands War; the world’s
greatest player coming to Naples,
at a time of mounting regional
tensions, and lifting its team from
mediocrity to claim the Italian
championship at the expense of
richer clubs from Turin and Milan.
However, Maradona also took
political stances of his own,
associating with Fidel Castro and
Hugo Chávez, and joining protests
against George W. Bush in 2005.
Messi, who’s been carefully
chaperoned by his club, Barcelona,
since he was a teenager, keeps a
much lower profile.
 Where Have All the Political Footballers Gone?

Corporate Men
The gulf between the two men
reflects the changing nature of the
game. In his book The Football
Men, Simon Kuper describes how
the growing professionalization
and commercialization of
European football has effectively
killed off two archetypes: the
hedonistic, rock-star player
(Maradona, George Best) and the
charismatic leader (Franz
Beckenbauer, Johan Cruyff ).
As Kuper explains, modern
footballers are “actively discour-
aged from developing interests
outside the game” and cut off from
their peer group at a very early
stage. They receive media training
to learn the art of speaking at
length without saying anything
controversial. The clubs that
invest so heavily in a player’s
career want him to be “a slightly
monomaniac corporate man
and yes-man.”
no need to worry, as long as they
manage their money well.
At the highest level of the game,
players circulate freely between
cities and countries, going from
Madrid to Manchester, Munich,
and Milan without having to
change their habits or lifestyle.
This is not an environment that
encourages people to develop
strong political views, let alone
express them in public.
“The Socialism
I Believe In”
This is not to say that football was
a hotbed of politics before the age
of Sky Sports and the Champions
League. The degree of politiciza-
tion varied: football in Italy had
a strong connection with the
country’s political struggles, as
John Foot shows in his great
history Calcio. Roma and Lazio,
the two teams from the Italian
capital, had the image of being left-
wing and right-wing clubs,
respectively. No English team
enjoyed the same reputation.
Marcello Lippi, who coached Italy
to World Cup triumph in 2006,
is the son of a trade-union militant
at the Fiat auto plant in Turin.
According to Lippi, when he took
a job in the ’90s as manager of
Juventus — owned, like Fiat, by the
Agnelli family — he went to his
father’s grave to apologize: Lippi
Sr had despised the Turin club
and “all it stood for.”
In English football, it was often
managers rather than players who
were politically outspoken. Bill
Shankly, who first established
Liverpool as one of England’s top

In Britain, home of the world’s

most lucrative football league,
soccer players are almost unique
among high-profile professions
because they are drawn over-
whelmingly from the working
class. In contrast with fields like
politics, media, business, and
law, privately educated footballers
are vanishingly rare figures. Yet
the wages they receive lift them out
of the working-class experience
altogether.

In the recent past, players could

make a decent living but would
still have to find a new source of
employment when they retired,
often as managers or pundits.
Their latter-day counterparts have

AFTER BERNIE 107

 BEYOND A BOUNDARY

clubs, was an avowed socialist,
whose concise definition of his
political outlook still features
on T-shirts and banners in the city:
“The socialism I believe in is
everybody working for the same
goal and everybody having a share
in the rewards. That’s how I
see football, that’s how I see life.”
Brian Clough and Jack Charlton
were vocal in their support for the
miners’ union during the great
strikes of the 1970s and ’80s. The
miners’ leader Arthur Scargill
liked to tell a story about Charlton
lending his car to the local union
office during the 1984–85 strike.
He borrowed it for the day to drive
to Nottingham for a professional
meeting with Clough, only to find
himself stopped on the way to
the city by a police blockade.
The officers had orders to prevent
any flying pickets from entering
Nottinghamshire, so when
they saw Charlton’s coal not
dole sticker, they hauled him
aside. Charlton asked the police
to imagine what the famously
irascible Clough would do to them
all if he was late for his meeting,
and they immediately waved him
through.
I grew up in a very working-class
area of Glasgow ... believing
Labour was the party of the
working man, and I still believe
that . . . All my life I’ve seen
Labour as the party working to
get better health care for ordi-
nary people, and the Tories
really only caring about the
people at the top.
In 2012, Ferguson sent a message
of support to Irish factory workers
who were occupying their plant in
Cork, recalling his own career as a
union activist half a century earlier.
Two Exceptions
Shankly, Clough, Charlton, and
Ferguson all grew up in working-
class communities in Scotland
or Northern England, at a time
when the Labour Party and the
trade unions were part of the social
fabric. Modern-day footballers
usually don’t have that experience.
At the game’s summit, superrich
clubs produce a standardized
product for the world market, mimick-
ing the development of global
capitalism. Most of them are
no longer socially embedded in any
meaningful sense. The company
that owns Manchester City
has turned “City” into a transna-
tional brand, with franchise
clubs in Melbourne, Mumbai, and
New York.
Owners don’t even use their team
as a vehicle for success in national
politics, in the way Silvio
Berlusconi once used ac Milan as
a launchpad for his career as Italy’s
prime minister. The Russian
oligarch Roman Abramovich and
the Emirati royal Mansour bin
Zayed Al Nahyan bought Chelsea

The last representative of this

tradition was the Manchester
United manager Alex Ferguson,
who led a strike by engineering
apprentices in the Glasgow ship-
yards before he made a career
in football. Ferguson was one of
the celebrity backers that New
Labour liked to parade in Tony
Blair’s pomp. But the way he
justified his support for the party
had a distinctly “Old Labour”
thrust:

108 № 38  /  SUMMER 2020

 Where Have All the Political Footballers Gone?

and Manchester City in the hope

of laundering their reputations
(“sportswashing”). They seem to
have no interest in the British
political scene, however, as long
as it doesn’t interfere with

LlIbErtAT
their business.

There are two main exceptions to

this rule among the European
superclubs: Barcelona and
Liverpool. The Catalan team has
such a strong connection with
FC
national identity that it couldn’t
BARCELONA
help being caught up in the
agitation for statehood of recent
years. The former Barcelona
manager Pep Guardiola, a product
of the club’s youth academy, is a
vocal supporter of the Catalan inde-
pendence movement who has used
his media platform to denounce
the repression of its leaders.

Liverpool, meanwhile, has earned
its reputation as the most left-
wing, anti-Tory city in England.
The Hillsborough disaster of 1989
established an inextricable link
between football and politics in the
city. Ninety-six fans died because
of gross negligence by the same
police force that had stitched up
the miners at Orgreave a few years
earlier. Senior police officers lied
about what had happened to cover
their tracks, with the enthusiastic
support of Rupert Murdoch’s Sun,
which published revolting,
defamatory lies about the club’s
supporters on its front page.
Three decades later, a boycott of
the Sun by Merseyside remains
firmly in place. Liverpool fans
have never forgiven their former
manager Graeme Souness for
granting the paper an interview in
the early ’90s, when the wounds
from Hillsborough were still
raw. The long campaign of the
Hillsborough families for justice
has done as much as anything to
expose the dark heart of the British
state: not only have the families
established the culpability of the
police for “gross negligence
manslaughter,” their efforts have
also shed fresh light on the
policing tactics used during the
miners’ strike.
Gary Neville Is a Red
It’s not surprising that the former
Liverpool captain Jamie Carragher
should have been a Labour
supporter in last year’s general
election. Carragher, who grew up
in Liverpool and spent his whole
career in the city, takes a few pages
in his autobiography to explain
why he cared far more about the
club than the English national team:
[W]henever I returned home
from disappointing England
experiences one unshakeable
overriding thought pushed itself
to the forefront of my mind, no
matter how much the rest of
the nation mourned. “At least
it wasn’t Liverpool,” I’d repeat
to myself, over and over ... If
people want to condemn me and
say I’m unpatriotic, so be it ...
We all hear about the impor-
tance of 1966 to the country. For
my family, the most important
event at Wembley that year was
Everton winning the fa Cup.
Carragher explicitly links this
disdain for England’s fortunes with
a “them and us” mentality that
took root on Merseyside during the
Thatcher years: “I’ve heard the

AFTER BERNIE 109

 BEYOND A BOUNDARY
“The socialism I believe
in is everybody
working for the same
goal and
everybody having
a share in the
rewards. That’s how
I see football,
that’s how I see life.”
Kop sing ‘We’re not English, we
are Scouse’. There’s no affinity
with the national team.”
There was a touching moment
on election day last year when
Carragher’s great rival, Gary
Neville, joined him in urging a
vote for Labour. The Manchester
United player was notoriously
hostile to Liverpool as a club —
“Gary Neville is a red, he hates
Scousers” was a familiar chant at
Old Trafford — but his evident
loathing for Boris Johnson put
him on the same page as the vast
majority of Liverpool fans.
James McClean
Hates the Queen
Of course, Barcelona and Liverpool
still function in the same way as the
other megaclubs, in a multibillion-
dollar sport that is full of ethically
dubious commercial entangle-
ments. There’s no such thing as
a socialist football club at this level
of the sport, nor could there be.
However, a strong social context
110
is sometimes enough to lift players
out of the conformist, depoliti-
cizing marsh of the modern game.
The Manchester United striker
Marcus Rashford recently
spearheaded a successful cam-
paign pressuring the British
government to extend the
provision of free school meals
for poor families into the summer
holidays. Rashford recalled
his own experience of childhood
poverty in a letter to mps:
As a family, we relied on break-
fast clubs, free school meals, and
the kind actions of neighbours
and coaches. Food banks and
soup kitchens were not alien to
us; I recall very clearly our visits
to Northern Moor to collect our
Christmas dinners every year.
Another striking example in the
Premier League is the Irish foot-
baller James McClean. McClean
comes from Derry, a city that
witnessed the Bloody Sunday mass-
acre in 1972. For the last decade,
he has been virtually the only high-
profile figure to resist the mawkish,
stultifying culture of jingoism
built up around Remembrance
Sunday (described by one broad-
caster as “poppy fascism”).
The poppy celebrates all the wars
that the British Army has fought,
including those in Ireland.
Unsurprisingly, McClean had no
interest in joining in, and he
declined to wear a jersey with the
poppy symbol attached. Since
making that fateful choice,
McClean has been the target of an
orchestrated hate campaign,
whipped up every year by the right-
wing press, who pretend not to
№ 38  /  SUMMER 2020
understand the reasoning behind
his decision, no matter how many
times he respectfully explains it.
Like the Liverpool fans who have
done more to challenge Rupert
Murdoch than any center-left
politician in Britain, Australia, or
the United States, McClean and
Rashford have shown that sport
can still be a tool for political
mobilization as well as a profitable
enterprise.
Football for the People
Bill Shankly once playfully
remarked that football wasn’t
a matter of life and death to him:
“It’s more important than
that.” The passage of time has
turned that wry, self-deprecating
comment into a rather stale
cliché. A couple of years ago, the
Manchester United legend
Eric Cantona published a fine
article calling for the sport to
be transformed:
Football is one of life’s great
teachers. It is one of life’s great
inspirations. But the current
business model of football
ignores so much of the world ...
Football should be for the
people. This does not have to
be a utopian idea.
Cantona described the influence
on his life and career of his
grandfather, a Spanish Republican
refugee who came to France
in 1939. It’s a fair bet that Shankly
would have endorsed his view
of the game’s social importance:
“Football gives meaning to life,
yes. But life also gives meaning
to football.”
 CULTURAL CAPITAL
WAYS OF SEEING
At the heart of the work of Mark
Fisher is something he called
“popular modernism.” By this, he
meant a kind of culture — most
often found in music — that
straddled the experimental and
the mainstream. While popular, it
required work to be fully under-
stood, doing away with past forms,
following a modernist “make
it new” imperative. As an idea, it
was based on the claim that the
most interesting postwar culture
had developed out of a flourishing
welfare state, made by the
students of municipal art schools
and the recipients of higher
education grants.
Pop modernism, Fisher argued,
embodied a sense of possibility
that never fully recovered from
the thoroughgoing attack it
underwent in the 1980s. However,
he was by no means ignorant of
contemporary pop music: he went
from praising the “sadness” and
“ambivalence” of early Rihanna to
applauding the “existentialism”
BY PHOEBE BRAITHWAITE
Mark Fisher’s
Popular
Modernism
It’s been three years since we lost
Mark Fisher, but his vision of a
socialist future endures.
of Dido. While he found a natural death was a great loss to socialist
habitat in polemic, Fisher’s intellectual life.
primary work was a matter of
Fisher’s philosophy of “going
fleshing out alternative realities,
beyond the pleasure principle”
breathing form into the lost
underpins this writing. As he
futures that haunt our present.
argued in Capitalist Realism, we
An 800-page volume, k-punk: The are trapped in a state of “depres-
Collected and Unpublished sive hedonia”: not “an inability to
Writings of Mark Fisher, was get pleasure” but “an inability
released in 2018 by Repeater to do anything else except pursue
Books, the publishing house pleasure.” The work in the anthol-
Fisher set up with Tariq Goddard ogy explores this state through
after leaving Zero Books. It a wealth of genres, art forms, and
collects writings, interviews, and ways of life — hip-hop, indie,
blogs from 2004 to 2016 and neo-noir — in a style that mashes
attempts to set in order the together a lay criticality with
thinking of a figure whose 2017 an eclectic array of philosophical
AFTER BERNIE 111
 SUB-DEPARTMENT NAME
reference points. Fisher insisted
that theory should be used
to intensify the examination of
everyday life, and his work is
underwritten by a moving sense
of the freedom gained through
mastering these methods of
analysis. He was exposed to this
culture by the music journalism
of the 1980s: “No sob stories,” he
wrote, “but for someone of my
background, it’s difficult to see
where else that interest would
have come from.” His writing has
the feeling of a system — an
entire architecture — coming
into being, each blog post an
opportunity to fine-tune its pillars
and boundaries.
Fisher’s emphasis on the everyday
places him in the vein of the
Birmingham School and the trad-
ition of cultural studies, of Richard
Hoggart and Stuart Hall, who
were, in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s,
navigating a path between the
machine of high theory and
the feelings and events it claimed
to discuss. Like them, Fisher
understood that it wasn’t just
protest songs that contained
political content. But Fisher, for
his part, railed against academia
and the stolid manner of interro-
gation to which it too often gave
rise, and he expressed his frustra-
tion with academic leftism and
its dogmatic adherence to a quasi-
Marxist “theology.”
112
Blogging became a kind of respite
from this fustiness. In 1999,
Fisher had completed a doctorate
in philosophy at the University
of Warwick. Starting his blog five
years later and announcing
himself as “k-punk,” he described
his relationship to the academy as
“uh difficult.” “PhD work bullies
one into the idea that you can’t say
anything about any subject until
you’ve read every possible
authority on it ... Blogging was a
way of tricking myself back into
doing serious writing,” he said in
a 2010 interview. K-punk also,
of course, nurtured its own
community, becoming a hub of
online interconnection in a spirit
of techno-idealism still viable
in the early 2000s.
The new volume contains a
previously unpublished introduc-
tion to a book Fisher had been
working on called Acid
Communism. Disturbed by the
№ 38  /  SUMMER 2020
cruelties of the unfolding conjunc-
ture — Brexit, Donald Trump, the
bitter nature of online interaction —
Fisher was looking for new ways to
connect, and he unexpectedly
chose the averted utopianism of
the psychedelic counterculture
of the 1960s as a locus for revival.
He hoped we could find in this
a kind of consciousness capable of
overcoming the legacies not only
of neoliberalism but of an “author-
itarian leftism” that had neutered
these experiments in the ’70s.
Fisher looks to Stuart Hall and the
New Left as forerunners in this
project: “The socialism that Hall
wanted — a socialism that
could engage with the yearnings
and dreamings that he heard
in Miles Davis’ music — was yet to
be created, and its arrival was
obstructed as much by figures
from the left as from the right,”
Fisher writes. The aim was
to imagine new ways of getting
through to one another. “We
on the left have had it wrong for
a while,” he writes — it is not that
we are anti-capitalist, but that
capitalism is anti-us. It is only by
“unforgetting” our collective
capacity to produce, care, and
enjoy that we will overcome it.
The Tumbrel
STILL ROASTING LIBERALS
 THE TUMBREL
GIRONDINS BY DAVID SIROTA

At this point, the autopsy process

has almost run its course — most
of the postmortems about the

Did Americans
2020 Democratic primary have
been written, and the sniping,
mocking, and football-spiking is
dying down on social media. If
there is any lasting political lesson
Want a Political
Revolution?
from the yearlong race, it is
probably a simple and boring one:
former vice presidents are tough
candidates to defeat in nominating
contests.

Still, the primary does leave open

a question — one that has nothing
to do with ideology and everything Joe Biden told us there was an
to do with honesty.
easy path. Reality will soon catch
Can elections be won by telling up to that fantasy.
Americans the truth about what
we must do to survive the crises
threatening our survival?

The contrast between Senator

Bernie Sanders, for whom I was a
senior adviser and speechwriter,
and former vice president Joe
Biden was muted by the two
candidates’ personal affinity for
each other. While their disputes
on specific issues occasionally
took center stage, they were most
often in the background (and
they were further muddled by
Biden lying about the basic facts
of his own conservative record).
And yet there was a huge differ-
ence in visions that did define
the race.
Sanders told America that if he
won the White House, it would
not be the end of the battle — it
would be the beginning of a
protracted war to defeat the elite
and transform US society. He
leveled with the country by
acknowledging that taxes would
have to go up and systems would
have to be rebuilt or built from
scratch. But he went further than
merely challenging our conception
of policy — he asked America to
think beyond its psychological
affinity for the path of least
resistance. He told us that there is
no easy path to attaining the kinds
of policies that are necessary to
save millions of lives as well as our
democracy.
“This struggle is not just about
defeating Donald Trump — this
struggle is about taking on the
incredibly powerful institutions
that control the economic and
political life of this country,” he
said in the speech launching his
campaign.
I’m talking about Wall Street,
the insurance companies, the
drug companies, the
military-industrial complex,
the prison-industrial complex,
the fossil fuel industry, and a
corrupt campaign finance
system that enables billion-
aires to buy elections. Brothers
and sisters: we have an
enormous amount of work in
front of us.
Biden told America the opposite
story. Evoking Warren G.
Harding’s famed “return to
normalcy” theme, he insisted that
there is an easy path. The former
vice president essentially argued
that Donald Trump is the singular
problem in the United States, and
that once Trump is defeated, the
battle is over — we can restore
stability and go back to the kind of
incrementalism that has defined
Democratic presidencies for more
than forty years.

AFTER BERNIE 115

 GIRONDINS
“I believe history will look back on
four years of this president and all
he embraces as an aberrant
moment in time,” Biden said at the
beginning of his primary cam-
paign, and a year later, he capped
off that primary run by telling nbc
News that “Americans aren’t
looking for revolution.”
In the interim, Biden’s campaign
spent months telling voters that
we can solve climate change with a
“middle ground” policy, we can
solve the health-care crisis with an
incremental public option, and we
can solve economic inequality
even if we make sure that “nothing
would fundamentally change” for
billionaires.
If the Sanders-Biden battle was
perceived as a choice between
Sanders’s daunting promise of an
exhausting revolutionary struggle
and Biden’s promise of a glide
path back to normal, then it’s no
mystery why Biden ultimately
prevailed. Easy street was an
understandably alluring vision for
an electorate already tired out by
Trump’s never-ending conflicts
and controversies.
In reality, though, this was not a
choice between two possibilities —
it was a choice between honesty
and fantasy, and Democratic
voters picked the latter.
That’s a problem, because Sanders
was giving voice to truths that we
cannot keep avoiding, omitting, or
rejecting at the ballot box if we
hope to survive the disasters
engulfing our society.
The fossil fuel industry isn’t going
to voluntarily stop exacerbating
the climate crisis. The health care
industry isn’t going to voluntarily
116
stop profiting off sickness. The
private prison industry and the
police are not going to voluntarily
stop fortifying an inhumane and
racist criminal justice system.
Billionaires and corporations are
not going to voluntarily stop using
an army of lobbyists to rig the tax
system for the wealthy, and they
are not going to voluntarily stop
exploiting a system of legalized
bribery to buy our elections.
Fixing our country and our world
will require transformational
policies — or, as Sanders calls it, a
“political revolution.” And
yes — enacting those policies will
require exactly the kind of
struggle that Sanders envisioned
and earnestly acknowledged
during the Democratic primary.
Those crises will not just go away
or get better by replacing Trump
with a Democratic president who
prioritizes comity, decorum, and
incrementalism over struggle,
conflict, and radical change.
But can candidates win office
while admitting that?
In every contested primary,
progressives will inevitably face
Joe Bidens — corporate-backed
moderates who reassure us that
there is no need for a slog, who tell
us a fantastical and inspiring tale
about how we can fix the country
through half measures, bipartisan-
ship, and polite requests for
national unity.
In the face of that appealing sales
pitch, can progressive candidates
up and down the ballot win power
while leveling with voters about
how hard it will be to actually save
our country and the planet?
№ 38  /  SUMMER 2020
On that score, the results of the
2020 Democratic primary were
not a hopeful sign. However,
reality may finally be over-
whelming the power of fantasy.
Since Biden became the presump-
tive nominee, more than 120,000
Americans have died in a lethal
pandemic, and millions have lost
their existing health care cov-
erage — all as the economy has
continued to enrich billionaires.
At the same time, an explosion of
police violence and mass protest
has spotlighted the bigotry and
inequality tearing apart the social
fabric of communities across the
country. Meanwhile, the climate
crisis helped create a 100ºf day in
the Arctic Circle.
In light of these emergencies,
politicians face an altered political
topography. They risk looking
tone-deaf if they try to pretend
that the panacea is some easy half
measure or singular electoral
victory. The converse is also
true — candidates may end up
seeming more authentic and
electable by fessing up to
impending cataclysms and echoing
the call for the kind of struggle
that will be necessary to rescue
ourselves.
In short, events occurring outside
of the political arena in the
terrestrial world — in the streets,
hospitals, schools, and communi-
ties we live in — are intervening to
change elections in a way that
could make honesty a winning
strategy.
If that shift continues, it will be
unfolding at too late a moment to
put Sanders in the White House —
but if we are lucky, it will happen
in time to save the world.
 Did Americans Want a Political Revolution?

WHO SHOULD I VOTE FOR?

MEDICARE?

Medicare For All! Malarkey!

For....All?

WELLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL....

POLITICAL REVOLUTION?

Now! Listen here, Jack, how do I open PDF?

FOREIGN POLICY?

No wars. Cut the Pentagon budget. I looked straight in Saddam’s

eyes and said “Listen here, Fat!”

Evo Morales told me a woman couldn’t be president.

RACIAL JUSTICE?

Address massive disparities. Let me tell you about a fella

named Corn Pop.

I will consult a national intersectional

directorate of bipoc nine-year-olds.

BERNIE WARREN BIDEN

AFTER BERNIE 117

 THE TUMBREL
WORST ESTATE
We Don’t Live in
Weimar Germany
Liberals say that socialists who
don’t support Joe Biden are
“like the German Communists who
refused to fight Hitler.” The
analogy doesn’t hold up — and it’s
also historically illiterate.
Labeling social democrats as
“social fascists” doesn’t sound like
mature political analysis. And the
Nazi triumph in 1933 was a
damning retrospective judgment
on those who couldn’t tell the
center left apart from the far right.
As an oft-repeated legend has it,
the German Communist Party
(kpd) was too sectarian, too purist
to ally with the Social Democrats
(spd) to defend democracy. With
the Left failing to identify who its
real enemy was, Adolf Hitler could
destroy the labor movement
almost without a fight.
For liberals, this divided resistance
to Nazism serves as an enduring
118
BY DAVID BRODER
indictment of left-wing sectari-
anism. They plastered this parable
across centrist outlets during
Hillary Clinton’s campaign in
2016, arguing that Bernie Sanders
was dividing the united front
against Trumpian “fascism”
simply by contesting the Demo-
cratic nomination. Their British
counterparts also deployed this
“lesson from history” against
Jeremy Corbyn, accusing him of
not fighting Brexit with sufficient
vigor.
In the weeks after Joe Biden’s rise
to become Democratic Party
nominee this March, many
pundits hastened to roll out the
№ 38  /  SUMMER 2020
same narrative. For some, the
disappointment of those who
supported Bernie Sanders in the
primary offered a perfect target
for such criticism. We should not
bang on about the “sins of the
center left,” a piece in Prospect
averred, but instead direct our fire
against the real enemy. Any failure
to cheer on the anti-fascist
standard-bearer Biden would
mean repeating the kpd’s
“superhuman myopia” in the fight
against Hitler.
The most obvious response is that
left-wing activists in the United
States are fighting Donald Trump
and his far-right agenda — and not
only at election time. Yet the fable
of the kpd isn’t really about
strengthening the fight against
fascism, or even about learning the
lessons of the past. Rather, it’s a
bid to demonize today’s left — and
conceal the dismal record of
liberals themselves in combating
the far right.
Liberal Fascism
One problem with the story that left-
wing sectarians hobbled the
resistance to fascism arises from a
primary historical test case — the
rise of Benito Mussolini in Italy.
Here, the Fascist movement
emerged in 1919, greatly strength-
ened by the masses of soldiers who
had been thrown onto the streets
in the wake of World War I.
Italy’s liberal postwar govern-
ments did not attempt to suppress
the movement, seeking instead to
integrate and contain it within
established institutions. When the
liberal defense minister Ivanoe
Bonomi decided that Mussolini’s

Blackshirts could remain in the
army, but communists and
anarchists couldn’t, Antonio
Gramsci dubbed him “fascism’s
main organizer.”
Bonomi was a renegade ex-socialist,
and the approach adopted by
the most conservative forces in the
labor movement was also pro-
foundly harmful. Already during
the biennio rosso of worker
militancy in 1919–20, the Black-
shirts had started to win the
backing of industrialists and
landlords by violently repressing
labor and peasant unions in “red”
regions like Emilia-Romagna. Yet
Italy’s social democrats eschewed
confrontation and sought a
“pacification pact” with the
Fascists — one that excluded the
fledgling Communist Party —
in the hope that it would reduce
violence. Local Fascist squads paid
no attention to the truce and
continued to slaughter their left-
wing opponents.
As the Blackshirts extended their
street presence across Italy, by fall
1922, the main liberal and
conservative forces had united
behind Mussolini’s candidacy for
prime minister, claiming that it
would “moderate” him. He was
appointed to the office by consti-
tutional and parliamentary means,
even though his party only
accounted for thirty-five of the 535
mps in the chamber of deputies.
Indeed, when it received its initial
confidence vote, Mussolini’s
government enjoyed the support
of the previous five liberal prime
ministers — including Bonomi
and the elder statesman Giovanni
Giolitti — alongside the
philosopher Benedetto Croce,
later a prominent opponent of
fascism. Only the Socialists and
Communists voted against him.
Who Let Hitler
Come to Power?
In a repeat of the Italian pattern,
World War I and the intense social
struggles that followed it radical-
ized and militarized the German
right. Yet the rising Nazi move-
ment also had to contend with the
Social Democrats (spd), a
workers’ party with a much
stronger mass base than anything
that confronted Mussolini. Its
eventual success was thus owed
greatly to the fragmentation of
centrist and right-wing middle-
class parties, which had survived
the hyperinflation crisis of 1923
only to collapse under the impact
of the Great Depression. In the
face of escalating social tensions,
these parties were consistently
anti-communist, but only fleet-
ingly anti-Nazi.
One major test came in December
1929, with the elections in the
state of Thuringia. While the spd
came first, with 32 percent, the
smaller right-wing (thlb, dnvp)
and national-liberal (dvp) parties
formed a bloc with the Nazis in
order to keep out the Left. Hitler’s
ally Wilhelm Frick became
minister of the interior. After
passing an Enabling Act in March
1930 that allowed it to rule by
decree, this liberal-conservative-
Nazi alliance went on to purge
the state administration of spd
supporters. It sacked Communist
teachers en masse and promoted
AFTER BERNIE
We Don’t Live in Weimar Germany
Left-wing activists
in the United
States are fighting
Donald Trump
and his far-right
agenda — and
not only at election
time.
race theory in public schools.
Events followed a similar trajectory
in Braunschweig beginning in
September 1930.
The situation in the Weimar
Republic’s largest state, Prussia,
was different. The spd led a
coalition with the Catholic Center
Party and their smaller liberal
allies. Yet this bloc against the
so-called twin extremes of Nazism
and Communism had an equally
unimpressive record of defending
democracy. After banning a Hitler
rally in December 1928, the state
government generalized the ban
on demonstrations across Prussia.
When the kpd went ahead with its
march on May Day 1929, the
Prussian police, presided over by
the Social Democrat Karl Friedrich
Zörgiebel, opened fire on the
crowd, killing thirty-three people.
Instead of protecting democratic
rights, the spd was curtailing
119
 WORST ESTATE
1 The burned-down
plenary sessions hall of
the Reichstag, 1933.

2 SPD logo isolated

those rights in the name of the
from a poster.
fight against “extremism.”

In 1925, Paul von Hindenburg had

been the victorious right-wing
candidate for president against
opposition from the working-class
parties. However, by the time
Hindenburg stood for reelection
in March 1932, the spd had
decided that the veteran militarist
was the “lesser of two evils” in
comparison to his chief rival,
Hitler, and the party threw its
weight behind his candidacy. With
the backing of most German
industrialists and the country’s
centrist forces, Hindenburg took
53 percent of the vote. 3
Addressing
Yet the anti-communist offensive crowds at Speakers’
of the German right immediately Corner in Hyde Park,
turned on the spd itself. The Communist MP calls
for the release of
government of the right-wing
the Reichstag Fire
chancellor Franz von Papen
suspects in Germany,
fabricated evidence of an
1933.
spd-kpd plot to stage a “Marxist
putsch,” prompting Hindenburg
to dismiss Prussia’s spd govern-
ment in July 1932. Just six months
later, the man that the spd had
seen as the “lesser evil” appointed
Hitler as Germany’s chancellor.

In March 1933, Hitler passed an

Enabling Act allowing him to rule
by decree — the instrument by
which he ruled as a dictator until
1945. The spd voted against
4
it — the kpd would have, if not for A group of Fascist
the fact that Hitler banned the Blackshirts is about to set
party and jailed its parliamentar- fire to portraits of Marx and
ians after the Reichstag fire. Lenin during the elections
of May 1921.
Hindenburg, who was still pres-
ident, however, gave the Enabling
5
Act his wholehearted approval. A communist speaker
Indeed, liberal, centrist, and addresses a large crowd in
Berlin to protest about the
unemployment situation in
Germany, circa 1920.

120 № 38  /  SUMMER 2020


11 Letter to organize
a nationwide general
strike against the Nazi
government, 1933.
7 matter of “purist” sectarians at
Isolated text from
a KPD poster.
6 social revolution, the Social
Adolf Hitler reads the
Enabling Law in the Garrison
Church at Potsdam, 1933.
10
KPD members in Berlin
during a protest against
Nazi and right-wing groups.
9 appendage of the spd. By June
Anti-Hitler
demonstrators lead a
procession representing
the Reichsbanner
Organisation, the
Trade Unions and the
Workers’ Sports Clubs
at Wilmersdorf, Berlin.
8 to send German workers to war,
The tomb of Karl
Liebknecht and Rosa
Luxemburg, designed by
Mies van der Rohe in
Berlin-Friedrichsfelde, 1927.
AFTER BERNIE
We Don’t Live in Weimar Germany
conservative MPs failed to cast
a single vote against the abolition
of Weimar democracy.
Even the left-liberal German State
Party (dstp), heir to the Demo-
cratic Party cofounded by Max
Weber in 1919, voted to grant full
powers to Hitler. Still, just as
the spd’s supposed proximity to
the kpd had been used to
condemn it as a “revolutionary
Marxist” threat to the state, the
dstp was, in turn, labeled a mere
1933, the Nazis had banned it, too.
KPD Sectarianism
The Weimar Republic had
emerged from the chaos that
followed World War I: throughout
its lifespan, political violence
was a familiar sight, especially in
the years immediately after the
war and again during the Great
Depression. The mass parties had
their own armed militias, which
could recruit their members from
trained war veterans who often
still had their weapons, as well as
from the growing ranks of the
unemployed.
This backdrop of violence was
closely linked to the sharp
hostilities between Communists
and Social Democrats — hardly a
loggerheads. In 1914, the spd’s
members of parliament had voted
and even after the naval mutinies
of fall 1918 sparked a far-reaching
Democrats were never on the side
of the insurgents. Even as it
121

WORST ESTATE
declared a republic, the spd
sought allies in the old military
leadership to reimpose order;
in January 1919, its leaders made a
pact with the far-right paramili-
taries of the Freikorps in order to
crush the Spartacist uprising,
itself led by communists who had
opposed the war.
These bitter clashes — including
the murder, still fresh in the
memory, of communists Rosa
Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht —
created lasting hostilities between
the kpd and the spd. But this
was fed by a sociological divide.
The Communists were rooted in
sections of the population whom
the spd most failed in govern-
ment — by 1932, the unemployed
made up a massive 85 percent
of the kpd’s membership. As Eve
Rosenhaft’s study Beating the
Fascists? documents, the Commu-
nists built up their base through
direct action, whether that meant
defending tenants against
evictions, mounting rowdy
demonstrations at unemployment
offices, or resisting Nazi gangs.
Hence, while the kpd theorization
of impending revolution pointed
to the industrial might of factory
workers, its revolutionary promise
and confrontational organizing
methods — so adept in mobilizing
the unemployed — set it at odds
with the defensive attitudes that
prevailed among employed
workers during the Depression. If
Communists were hardened in
a militant but sectarian niche — in
essence, preparing a militarized
organization for an ultimate clash
with the combined forces of
reaction — they were only further
122
Image Credits: 1. Imagno / Contributor 3. Keystone/Getty Images 4. Mondadori via
Getty Images 5. FPG / Staff 6. Heritage Images / Contributor 8. ullstein bild/ullstein
bild via Getty Images 9. Keystone / Staff 10. ullstein bild Dtl. / Contributor 11. ullstein
bild Dtl. / Contributor
entrenched in this stance by the sentiment in a small party faced
repressive actions of spd-led with the murder of hundreds of its
governments, combined with their militants, the trade unions’ retreat
own gloomy economic situation. into passivity, and the outright
hostility of its “bigger brother” in
Damning Weimar’s failures, the
the spd.
kpd consistently denied support
for any regional or national
government from 1923 onward. Why Weimar?
Such was its en-masse rejection
Yet the interesting thing about this
of — and by — all other parties.
history is not so much the factors
kpd propaganda tended to
behind the kpd policy — aptly
present Hitler’s rise as another
addressed in Rosenhaft’s study —
passing phase in the hardening
as the political reasons for its
of bourgeois reaction, prepared by
frequent invocation today. The
countless other instances of
claim that every fresh opponent of
repression, rather than the
liberalism — from Saddam
affirmation of the single figure
Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi to
who would stabilize a dictatorship
Donald Trump — is really a “new
far more total than what had
Hitler” evidently seeks to drama-
come before. The writer c. l. r.
tize the moral binary and serve as
James would lampoon this
a call to action. But what use is it
approach with a widely cited but
comparing our own situation with
inaccurate claim that the kpd had
that of Weimar Germany, even in
raised the slogan “After Hitler,
countries that bear almost none of
Our Turn,” creating the legend
its defining traits?
that it had willed him to power
in order to destroy the spd and One insight comes from Jacobin
allow its own ultimate victory. contributing editor Daniel
Bessner, who has compared the
Telling, however, is the fact that
use of the Weimar analogy in
this specific slogan was first used
different eras. In his telling, in the
not by kpders but by spd
period around 1968, older
supporters — indeed, after Hitler
intellectuals who had emigrated
had already become chancellor in
from Germany to the United
January 1933. This was an
States often brandished the
expression of defiance, not of
Weimar analogy in order to damn
complicity. For its part, the kpd’s
the excesses of the US extra-
claims that Nazism would prove
paramilitary left. Such claims
ephemeral directly followed from
were repudiated not only by those
its effort to recruit “honest
who defended anti–Vietnam
workers” from Nazi ranks — a
War protests outright, but also by
botched tactical ruse rather than a
others who considered the
show of complacency, per se.
Weimar comparison hysterical.
The fact that most kpders went
However, according to Bessner,
along with this line suggests that,
when this same historical analogy
rather than it being merely
was deployed in the 2016 election
“crazy,” this was a galvanizing
cycle — now taking Trump for a
№ 38  /  SUMMER 2020

new Hitler — even those histo-
rians who rejected the comparison
tended to invoke definitional
distinctions rather than profess
any deeper faith in the longevity of
US democracy.
We would be wise not to jump to
comparisons with post–World
War I Germany. In the absence of
mass violence claiming hundreds
of thousands of lives, a recent
military defeat, or — for now, at
least — large-scale paramilitary
mobilization, even our coronavirus-
addled time is a pale shadow of
the chaotic Weimar era. Yet, as
Bessner argues, the claim that
German democracy was destroyed
by the new mass politics has
often been used as an argument
for technocratic alternatives,
narrowing the range of political
choice in order to protect it from
the masses’ irresponsibility.
When Joe Biden has so little else
with which to win our support,
what better way to glorify his
campaign — and smear its left-
wing critics — than to wrap it in
the colors of anti-fascism?
The history we’re told of the
kpd’s errors neglects to mention
why the Weimar Republic’s
own social base fell apart. No
wonder the main use of that histor-
ical fable today is as a diversion:
We Don’t Live in Weimar Germany
its purpose is to wish away the
reasons why many are so unenthu-
siastic about Biden’s candidacy.
It should be enough, we’re told,
that Biden is not a wannabe Hitler,
and asking for anything more than
that is putting our selfish whims
before the victims of fascism.
It’s likely that Biden will be able to
mobilize enough people worried
about stopping Trump to win this
November. But if we really are
threatened with another Weimar,
we’ll need to do a lot more than
just get the “good guys” to vote
against the Nazis.
 Leftovers
THE STRUGGLE CONTINUES
 LEFTOVERS
POPULAR FRONT
“They might have the money, but
we have the people,” is something
I’d often tell Bernie Sanders
volunteers in Iowa before sending
them out to knock on doors.
Canvassing is the most important
thing you can do as a volunteer on
an electoral campaign, but you still
need some inspiration to get out
there in the thick of Iowa’s caucus
season, when temperatures are
often in the single digits.
After all was said and done, our
supporters knocked on almost a
million doors in Iowa — a state
with a total population of 3 million
and a Democratic caucus turnout
of about 180,000 — and the
campaign managed to eke out
a popular-vote victory. Sanders
mobilized something like ten
thousand volunteers across
the country to hit the pavement in
early states, a feat that none of
his rivals came close to matching.
We had a tremendous manpower
advantage — yet Joe Biden
ultimately prevailed in many
states where he lacked any real
field presence.
Rhetorically, the Sanders cam-
paign set itself the goal of
mobilizing a new electorate that
would first win the primary and
eventually go on to beat Donald
Trump. Bernie’s advantage was
supposed to be the dedication of
his volunteers and the enthusiasm
of his supporters. The campaign’s
slogan, “Not Me, Us,” alludes to
MARILYN ARWOOD
We Knocked on a
Million Doors for
45,000 Votes
I helped organize Bernie Sanders’s
canvassing efforts in Iowa, and
I learned that we can knock on as
many doors as we want, but to
make lasting change, we need to
think beyond election day.
one of our perceived strengths — presidential primary, work in
a vast base capable of making more the field is not decisive. Even the
voter-contact attempts than our biggest advocates of canvassing
rivals. Although we did see some admit that its impact comes into
evidence of that materializing — play at the margins.
a plurality of new caucusgoers
The profile of campaign workers
went for Sanders in Iowa, and
and volunteers tends to be, on
Bernie won the youth vote — there
average, very different in demo-
was no significant boost in
graphic and cultural terms when
turnout, and the campaign was
compared to the swing or low-
unable to get traditional nonvoters
turnout voters that campaigns
to participate in the primary.
seek to win over. If this observa-
tion holds for the average
At the Margins Democratic Party candidate, the
contrast is likely to be even more
The bad news here is essentially
pronounced for Sanders, whose
the same as the good news: for a
base of support is much younger —
AFTER BERNIE 125
 POPULAR FRONT
A canvasser prepares to knock on doors in Davenport, Iowa, February 1, 2020.
and more ideological — than
the overall composition of the
Democratic Party.
This mismatch between can-
vassers and voters doesn’t mean
that volunteers are totally
ineffective; it just means that
they’d probably have more impact
on their home turf, and volunteers
would do well to remember
that the people they are trying to
win over are likely to be less
ideological than they are. We saw
this divide playing out in the
primary this year: while Bernie
supporters were motivated by
a wide array of issues and causes,
126
the average Democratic primary
voter was focused on the
imperative of “beating Trump.”
Though thousands of left-wing
volunteers from coastal cities may
not have been the ideal messen-
gers to win over new voters, I
don’t believe that our field
campaign was the decisive factor
in the primary. Nor do I think it
could have been. However, if
we’re going to continue knocking
on doors, it’s worth spending
some time critically evaluating
how well the tactic works.
Bernie’s 2020 campaign proved
that there’s a massive reservoir of
№ 38  /  SUMMER 2020
time and energy from volunteers
that is ready to be put to use.
Nothing else is quite like the
presidential race, and down-ballot
races in which direct voter contact
makes more of a difference will
account for most left-wing
electoral activity in years to come.
In the future, we can learn to focus
our messaging on core demands
that have broad appeal. One thing
we learned from the primary is
that although Bernie didn’t have
enough support to win the
nomination, his agenda is very
popular with voters. Never forget
that in 2020, a majority wanted

to replace private insurance with
Medicare for All in twenty
consecutive states — and that was
before the coronavirus pandemic.
Strategic Organizing
We were also successful when we
organized strategic constituencies:
for example, Bernie won nearly all
of the Iowa satellite caucuses by
proactively registering workers
who were getting off the third shift
at Tyson’s meatpacking plant, at
mosques, and in Spanish-speaking
communities. Sanders dominated
the caucuses on the Las Vegas
Strip because his campaign had
prioritized organizing taxi drivers
and culinary union workers — in
spite of opposition from union
leaders. Campus organizing led to
increased turnout from students,
whom Bernie won over in droves.
Obviously, we didn’t get the result
we wanted, and any number of
postmortems can reflect on
perceived strategic missteps.
Ultimately, though, it’s unlikely
that the presidential primary
was — or could have been —
decided by ground game. Yes, we
have to keep knocking on doors,
but it won’t be enough to foster the
kind of political engagement that
can seriously wrest power away
from the neoliberal consensus.
Direct voter contact through
canvassing and phone banking
only has a marginal impact,
because it works through extrinsic
motivation to vote: the commit-
ment of signing a pledge, coupled
with the thought that someone
will follow up on whether you
actually go to the polls, is supposed
We Knocked on a Million Doors for 45,000 Votes
to bring you out for the candidate.
While this is effective for gotv
(“get out the vote”) efforts, it’s a
fairly shallow type of engagement,
not to be confused with the project
of building a coalition that lasts
Conjuring a national
beyond election day.
A presidential campaign, even coalition every four
when it’s well resourced, is a years is resource-
machine that is obliged to intensive and
constantly adapt and reconstitute
unlikely to succeed,
itself. Only in early primary states
is there the time and the budget as we’ve now seen
to build a long-lasting and from the two
effective field campaign. And Bernie campaigns.
“long-lasting,” in this case, is a
strictly relative term — something
like eight months. In states that
voted later, the Bernie campaign
increasingly relied on a combina-
tion of featherweight state staff
teams, nationally distributed incredible shortcut. While the
digital organizing, and — to a huge zeal of supporters and the stalwart
degree — volunteers to take on door-knocking effort we all put
the work of planning and exe- in wasn’t enough to win this time,
cuting canvasses and phone banks. the campaign showed us the
opportunity we might have if we
were organized to compete in
Digging Deeper
races on an ongoing basis, not just
Conjuring a national coalition once every four years.
every four years is resource-
It’s a huge testament to the
intensive and unlikely to succeed,
organizing strength and dedica-
as we’ve now seen from the two
tion of everyone who worked
Bernie campaigns. Socialists need
with the Sanders campaign that
to build permanent organizations
we were able to conjure up
that actually bring in more of the
such a formidable national
disaffected, nonvoting working
voter-contacting network, and
class, developing the kind of class
there’s no doubt it was a huge
consciousness and political agency
asset. But the less exciting
that runs deeper than the biennial
races, the ones where the gap
reminder to turn out to the polls.
in volunteer power can’t be
Without any durable left political canceled out by $70 million in
institutions that can compete earned media in three days,
and wield power at a national are the ones where we might
level, a winning Bernie 2020 expect to see these efforts pay
campaign would have been like an off in the future.
AFTER BERNIE 127
 LEFTOVERS
POPULAR FRONT
Let’s Talk About
South Carolina
Bernie Sanders didn’t lose because
of the “black vote,” but winning
places like South Carolina is crucial
to building a left majority.
Joe Biden made history twice
when he was interviewed by
Breakfast Club cohost Charla-
magne tha God in late May. He
likely became the first white man
since the end of Jim Crow to
challenge a black man’s blackness
without losing his teeth. He also
set the record for the most uses of
“man” in one conversation, with
the previous record being set in
1977 by a leisure-suited pimp on
the corner of 42nd and Broadway.
Biden would have been real cool
on that corner in the ’70s, but this
performance reeked of pandering.
128
CEDRIC JOHNSON
Sadly, in the national electoral
politics of 2020, pandering has
become “the new black.”
With Vermont senator Bernie
Sanders exiting the race weeks
before that interview, Biden was
the assured Democratic Party
nominee. Charlamagne was not in
the mood for celebration, how-
ever, and he pressed the former
vice president about what he
would do specifically to address
black voters’ concerns. Biden, for
his part, wasn’t in the mood for
defending his commitments to
blacks. “You’ve got more
№ 38  /  SUMMER 2020
questions?” Biden quipped. “Well,
I’ll tell you what, if you have a
problem figuring out if you’re for
me or Trump, then you ain’t
black ... take a look at my record,
man!”
The problem with Charlamagne’s
line of questioning, just like
Biden’s response, is that he
operates on the falsehood that the
black population is a singular
constituency, unified around
common interests.
Charlamagne is not alone in this
thinking, and his interview
channeled recent comments by
music mogul Sean “Diddy”
Combs, who called on blacks to
withhold their votes from the
Democrats if their demands were
not met. Charlamagne’s and
Combs’s concerns about not being
taken for granted by the Demo-
cratic establishment are real, but
the idea that the black vote is
united and can be withheld
because a few entertainers or black
political leaders say so is foolish.

The roots of this debacle, with its
interplay of race whispering and
pandering, lay in Charlamagne’s
home state, and the supersize role
South Carolina has come to play in
Democratic presidential nomina-
tion contests.
During the 2016 and 2020
Democratic primary elections,
Sanders offered an alternative to
the New Democratic triangulation
of Hillary Clinton and Biden, but
in both contests, the Sanders
campaign lost in South Carolina.
And in both campaigns, the
narrative of Democratic Party
insiders, Twitter activists, and
the corporate chattering classes
alike was that Sanders lost because
he wasn’t strong enough “on
race,” which was a vessel that
could accommodate whoever was
speaking on behalf of blacks at
that moment.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t
attempt our own accounting of
Bernie’s struggles, despite the
popularity of his message. There
are important lessons to be
gleaned from the South Carolina
primaries in 2016 and 2020, but
I’ll focus on three core points for
now. First, Sanders didn’t lose
because of the “black vote,” and
black voters are not simply
motivated by racial appeals, as so
many pundits and party insiders
assert. Second, Sanders won
the ideological fight across the
country, which is a different
plane of struggle than an electoral
campaign. Third, the South
Carolina defeats represent the
next battlefront for forces who
want to advance the egalitarian
politics of the Sanders campaigns.
What Happened in
South Carolina?
The South Carolina black vote
has taken on mythical propor-
tions. In 2016, it was Hillary
Clinton’s firewall. In 2020, it was
Biden’s. For the liberal punditry,
it was their proof that Sanders’s
democratic socialism was not
viable. And for the Democratic
elites over the last few election
cycles, the South Carolina black
vote was their saving grace in
times when neoliberalism has
been facing a crisis of legitimacy.
In South Carolina, blacks make up
56 percent of the Democratic
base, and in the 2020 primary, a
majority of those voters supported
Biden — some 64 percent,
compared to only 17 percent for
Sanders.
Extrapolating from those num-
bers, pundits not only argued that
Sanders failed to win most black
voters, which is empirically true,
but many took the line further,
beyond the immediate results and
exit polls, and beyond the state
limits, to speculation about black
voters nationally.
In the run-up to the South
Carolina primary, Eugene Daniels
drew on the voting intentions of
his grandmother Ruby Brown as a
portent of Biden’s good fortunes
among “one of the Democratic
Party’s most dependable constitu-
encies: older black women.” “After
fighting so hard for the right to
vote — Nana included,” Daniels
continued in an article for Politico,
“older black voters have a
pragmatic streak that Biden
represents.”
AFTER BERNIE
Let’s Talk About South Carolina
Of course, there is some truth to
the account — older voters tend to
be more pragmatic, and unlike the
younger voters of all races who
have been drawn to Sanders,
older voters can recall the limited
political horizons imposed
by Cold War anti-communism and
Jim Crow segregation. They’re
less likely to believe that a viable
candidacy by a socialist, even
a democratic socialist, is possible.
However, most of these popular
explanations, especially as they
were repeated incessantly by
superdelegates and party insiders,
assume that race was the primary
theme motivating black voters in
South Carolina, a claim that
reduces the different interests and
motivations of black publics to
the discrete concerns advanced by
party insiders and self-ordained
spokespersons for the “black
community.”
The “black vote” is a powerful
myth, one with roots in the world
of Jim Crow, where African
Americans were restricted from
full participation in public life.
Within that segregated context,
educated blacks, ministers,
ward bosses, and precinct captains
were called on to voice the
concerns of the black body politic.
That segregated world, where all
blacks were subjected to second-
class status in the South, regard-
less of education and wealth,
has vanished, but the representa-
tional practices and leadership
claims set in motion during Jim
Crow persist. Some of this is kept
alive by self-appointed brokers,
but these practices also have an
institutional basis.
129
 POPULAR FRONT
What remains in parts of the
country like South Carolina,
however, are majority-black
legislative districts and black-
governed cities with patron-client
relations that give material
weight to more abstract claims
of racial representation. In
Sanders’s two South Carolina
defeats, his campaign ran up
against those relations in the form
of the local machinery of James
Clyburn, and the party establish-
ment amplified the defeat as
a general failure of Sanders in
appealing to black voters.
The Palmetto State is one of a
handful of Southern states where
black registered Democrats
outnumber those who are white,
and it is the first of those states
to vote in the Democratic
presidential primaries. This has
given South Carolina an
important but contradictory role
in recent election cycles.
The South Carolina primary has
become the place where Demo-
cratic candidates are expected to
demonstrate their capacity to
attract black
voters, but South Carolina is not
typically in play as a possible
Democratic win in general
elections. Hence, the state is more
important in terms of agenda
setting than for the party’s
national electoral calculus.
Since the beginnings of the
Democratic Leadership Council
(dlc) in the late ’80s, which
pledged to put the party back on
a center-right path, the South
Carolina primary has played a
critical role in shaping the
party’s racial overtures. Recall
130
At one point, Clyburn
even offered that old
chestnut of conservatives,
“Nothing in life is free.”
that Jesse Jackson won the South real and imagined habits, customs,
Carolina primary in 1984 and norms, and modes of thinking
1988, and that the threat of his associated with antebellum slavery
campaign helped precipitate the and Jim Crow apartheid.
dlc’s neoliberal project.
If the notions of the black commu-
During the waning years of the nity and the black vote serve as
Obama administration, South powerful myths at the national
Carolina became a powerful level that reduce complex interests
symbol of a gathering anti-racist animating millions of people to
politics reflected in the Black the favored vanity issues
Lives Matter slogan. On June 17, embraced by the professional
2015, Dylann Roof, a twenty-one- class, in local contexts like South
year-old white supremacist, Carolina, these notions take on a
walked into a bible study session more concrete meaning within
at Mother Emanuel African the realm of social relations and
Methodist Episcopal Church in Democratic Party patronage
Charleston and shot and bonds. Contrary to the prevailing
killed nine people, including state line of Democratic centrists, black
senator and pastor Clementa voters did not choose to support
Pinckney. Ten days later, film- Clinton in 2016 and Biden in 2020
maker and activist Bree Newsome because Sanders was weak on race.
scaled the flagpole atop the Black voters, like all other voters,
South Carolina statehouse and harbor many different motiva-
removed the Confederate battle tions, and many voted defensively
flag in an act of civil disobedience. and pragmatically.
It should be noted, as well, that The 2020 South Carolina primary
South Carolina is the ancestral was, in many ways, a replay of the
home of many blacks who reside in 2016 contest, but with some
the Northeast. It is essentially important differences. Sanders
a synonym for “the South” and a didn’t face the same hurdle of
repository of all manner of
№ 38  /  SUMMER 2020

name recognition as he did in the
previous race, but the large field in
2020 likely posed new challenges
for his campaign in the state.
Moreover, the successful election
of Donald Trump, which seemed
highly unlikely to many Americans
in the spring of 2016, now
intensified existing concerns and
anxieties for many black South
Carolinians.
As others have noted, the longtime
South Carolina congressman and
House majority whip James
Clyburn played a critical role as
kingmaker in both of these
contests, and he emerged as a
vocal foe of Sanders’s social-dem-
ocratic agenda. Clyburn’s stature
in the Democratic nomination
process has been years in the
making. In 2008, he may well have
tipped the balance in favor of
then-presidential-hopeful Barack
Obama, after Clyburn deemed
some of former president Bill
Clinton’s comments about Obama
disrespectful. The optics of that
exchange ultimately backfired on
the former president and his wife’s
campaign. In 2016, however,
Clyburn made amends, throwing
his support behind Hillary Clinton
and against the democratic
socialism of Sanders.
In both 2016 and 2020, Clyburn
engaged in a folksy form of
red-baiting. In 2016, Clyburn was
joined by congressman John Lewis
in his attack on Sanders, claiming
that the Vermont senator’s
proposal of free higher education
was not feasible. At one point,
Clyburn even offered that old
chestnut of conservatives,
“Nothing in life is free.” Clyburn’s
assertion that Sanders’s proposal
to make tuition free at public
universities would hurt black
institutions was false, however,
since many black universities
are public, and thousands of black
students nationwide would
stand to benefit immensely from
such a program.
The 2020 primary saw more of the
same, with Clyburn saying at
one point, “I do not believe there
are any free lunches. And certainly
there’s not going to be any free
education,” again sounding more
like a budget hawk than a
liberal Democrat. This time,
Louisiana congressman Cedric
Richmond took over as Clyburn’s
sideman on the trail. Picking up
his mentor’s script, Richmond
charged that Bernie’s free higher
education proposal would
disadvantage black private
colleges like Richmond’s alma
mater, Morehouse College. As
before, such claims were disingen-
uous and deceptive, appealing to
constituent needs through
conservative common sense rather
than visionary public policy, but
this is precisely the kind of
rhetoric that plays well in a state
where blacks are far outnumbered
by white Republicans.
Clyburn was not a fan of Medicare
for All, either. How could he be,
when he is a darling of the
pharmaceutical industry, having
received more than $1 million in
campaign donations from the
sector over the last decade — more
than any other sitting member of
Congress?
Sanders’s troubles in the state
were not merely a problem of
picking better surrogates, as
AFTER BERNIE
Let’s Talk About South Carolina
some have claimed, or even of
committing more time on the
ground there. Clyburn’s influence
is maintained through his constant
presence; the dense social
relationships that he, his staffers,
and his surrogates maintain with
local constituents and organiza-
tions; the real, material benefits
like jobs, economic investment,
scholarships, and infrastructure
improvements that his office
delivers to black South Carolin-
ians; and the reputation those
deliverables have created over a
long career of public service. That
kind of clout can’t be achieved or
dethroned in an election cycle,
certainly not through stop-and-
drop voter canvassing runs and
political rallies, but is rather
earned by much more involved
and intensive political organizing.
How Sanders Won the
Ideological Battle
In the weeks after the South
Carolina primary in 2020, Sanders
took to saying that the campaign
was winning the battle over
ideology but not the battle of
electability. As the South Carolina
results came in, Pete Buttigieg and
Amy Klobuchar stepped aside and
endorsed Biden, and the party
rapidly united around the former
vice president, with endorsements
coming from retired Senate
majority leader Harry Reid and
Illinois senator Tammy Duck-
worth. After Super Tuesday,
Sanders’s path to the presidential
nomination narrowed further still.
Even in defeat at the ballot box,
Sanders succeeded, however, in
building a popular base for
131
7
 POPULAR FRONT
Medicare for All, the signature
legislation touted by his campaign.
As he exited the race, the policy
achieved majority support
nationally.
Contrary to those who argue that
blacks in general were cold
toward Sanders’s social demo-
cratic program, African Americans
are the most likely group of
voters to support single-payer
health care nationally, with some
74 percent saying they are in favor
in some polls.
In their postmortem on the South
Carolina primary, Adolph Reed Jr
and Willie Legette, political
scientists and organizers of South
Carolina’s “I’m a Medicare for All
Voter” campaign, reported that
half of Democratic primary voters
in the state supported single-payer
health care. Another measure of
the campaign’s progress was in
garnering more than eighteen
thousand pledge cards from South
Carolina voters, most of them
African Americans, who said they
would only vote for candidates
supportive of Medicare for All.
Over the course of the campaign,
black South Carolinians’ support
for government health insurance
grew despite the efforts of the
Partnership for America’s Health
Care Future, an anti-single-
payer lobby that ran nonstop ads
against the policy.
Reed and Legette’s explanation of
the apparent disjuncture between
strong support for Medicare for
All and inadequate support for its
foremost champion in the
democratic primary is insightful.
“People take different criteria to
132
candidate selection than to their
estimations of the issues that most
concern them,” they write. “In
part that is the result of decades of
bipartisan neoliberal hegemony in
which electoral politics has been
drained of serious policy
differences.”
Moreover, Reed and Legette
contend that in South Carolina,
“Democratic party politics is
fundamentally transactional,
where people are habituated to
making electoral choices based on
considerations like personal
relationships or more local
concerns that do not center so
much on national policy issues.”
The result of these local and
personal voter determinations
within the context of neoliber-
alism is a citizenry that does not
view electoral politics as the
“appropriate domain for trying to
pursue policies that address
people’s actual material concerns
like health care, education, jobs
and wages, or housing.”
The low expectations of the
political process Reed and Legette
describe here are the consequence
of decades of neoliberal retrench-
ment, and digging out from under
this will take more than a few
election cycles. The experience of
neoliberalization, which has left
joblessness, a crisis of affordable
housing, economic insecurity, and
social precarity in its wake, has
also softened the ground for the
Sanders campaign, as millions of
Americans have warmed up to
socialist ideas, although most polls
do not specify what that might
entail. And even when they are not
committed to socialism per se,
№ 38  /  SUMMER 2020
many more Americans now
support the expansion of public
goods. The Sanders campaigns
provided a model for a different
kind of left electoral politics
going forward, but in places like
South Carolina, much more work
remains to be done.
Why South Carolina
Still Matters
Over the last few years, I’ve
listened to some on the Left rail
against any focus on the expansion
of public goods as “mere social
democracy,” with the implication
being that a $15 minimum wage,
single-payer health care, free
higher education, and the like are
not radical enough, but are rather
simply modifications of capitalism.
I have also been labeled —
wrongly, I should say, by some
friends, comrades, and foes
alike — a “social democrat,” often
for daring to suggest that there
were meaningful gains made by
blacks and other working people
through the New Deal, or worse,
that the path to socialism might
actually begin with policy fights we
have a chance of winning.
Two immediate problems are
always evident whenever the
“social democrat” epithet is
leveled. Usually, the person who’s
yakking is not particularly worried
about where their next meal is
coming from, how they’ll pay off
their student loans, or whether
they’ll have to choose between
paying the electricity bill or their
ailing mother’s medical co-pays
and prescriptions this month. The
other problem is that most of
these critics of social democracy

South Carolina represents the next
frontier of left politics, beyond
the coastal population centers,
metropolitan regions, college towns,
and union-dense locales.
hail from the most culturally
liberal and urbane corners of the
country. South Carolina is not that
place, and neither is my home
state of Louisiana.
In places like South Carolina,
Louisiana, and other states where
left bookstores (or any bookstores,
for that matter), socialist study
groups, liberal universities,
reproductive justice campaigns,
lgbt progressivism, and militant
trade unionism are not the norm,
a Sanders campaign seems less
viable, especially in the face of a
powerful Republican Party. The
electoral landscape and prevailing
conservatism necessitate tough
choices among voters with too few
good options.
South Carolina matters because it
represents the next frontier of left
politics, beyond the coastal
population centers, metropolitan
regions, college towns, and
union-dense locales where the
Sanders campaign had the most
traction.
Let’s Talk About South Carolina
The Palmetto State is tied for last
place in union density among
the fifty states. In both South
Carolina and North Carolina,
only 2.7 percent of the workforce
are unionized, compared to 10.4
percent of American workers
nationally.
Not surprisingly, the state has
also ranked consistently near the
bottom in terms of poverty
(thirty-ninth in 2018) and the
number of citizens relying on
federal food assistance (thir-
ty-eighth). South Carolina ranked
forty-seventh in terms of property
crimes per capita and forty-first
for violent crimes.
The Sanders campaign looked
different in places like South
Carolina. However, more work
needs to be done to build a left
political majority around the kinds
of policies Sanders popularized.
We should put the primary behind
us, but South Carolina remains a
critical battleground.
AFTER BERNIE
 LEFTOVERS
MEANS AND ENDS
The Victory
to Come
Bernie critics seem to think they
dodged a bullet. They haven’t —
the bullet is still on its way.
Imagine a time and place where, to
everyone’s astonishment, a
“socialist revival” sprouts up,
seemingly out of nowhere. At first,
it’s not much more than a literary
trend, involving writers and
intellectuals reading and talking in
big cities. But soon, the idea
penetrates the official world of
politics, where a lone independent
socialist — a gruffly earnest
politician-activist of working-class
stock, who keeps a defiant
distance from both major par-
ties — launches an improbable
campaign to push socialism into
mainstream political life.
134
SETH ACKERMAN
appointed its chairman, and
immediately he and his comrades
looked with bullish optimism to
the next general election: the first
great electoral test of the “socialist
revival,” then a decade old. (That
phrase, already in use at the time,
evoked the near disappearance of
English socialism after its
tumultuous climax in the 1840s.)
After two years of feverish
activity, and with voting just a few
months away, a confident Hardie
published an essay in a high-toned
London monthly to explain the
party’s aims and prospects.
“Owing to the rapid development
of the Independent Labour Party
during the past few months, it is
no exaggeration to say that it now
controls at least 25 per cent of the
total voting power in the centres
of industry,” he assured his
readers. Twenty-eight parliamen-
tary candidates were being run in
districts across Britain, and while
it was impossible to say in advance
just how many would win their
races, “at any rate, there will be a
This was Britain in the early
sufficient number in the next
1890s. And the gruff politician was
House of Commons to define the
Keir Hardie, the secular saint of
attitude of the Independent
British socialism and the central
Labour Party towards both
figure in the founding of the
parties.”
Labour Party.
In fact, the 1895 election was a
In 1892, Hardie left his life as a
disaster for the ilp. Every one of
union agitator in the Scottish
its twenty-eight candidates went
coalfields to run for parliament as
down to defeat — including
an independent. In the ebullient
Hardie — with several splitting
atmosphere that surrounded his
the Liberal vote and throwing
victory, a meeting of socialist
their races to Conservatives. A
activists convened in Bradford to
Westminster journalist who had
create an organizational vehicle
covered the party’s campaign
for their political hopes, which
compared its pre-election hubris,
they christened the Independent
and subsequent calamity, to the
Labour Party (ilp). Hardie was
frog in the Aesopian fable who
№ 38  /  SUMMER 2020

kept puffing himself up until he
burst. “The general opinion,” he
reported in the Fortnightly
Review, was that the ILP was now
“extinct and will never be
revived.” Beatrice Webb, the
Fabian socialist leader, called the
election “the most expensive
funeral since Napoleon’s.”
As ilp militants plunged into
despair and mutual recrimination,
a gleeful bourgeois press leapt
at the chance to declare the
fledgling movement defunct. A
crowing editorial in the Econo-
mist — headlined “The Rebuff to
Socialism” — judged the ILP’s
result “a most astonishingly
complete answer to the claim of
the Socialists to speak for the
working man and to represent the
people.” In line after line, the
editorialists unspooled their
contempt: “The voters will not
have Socialism at any price.” “The
mass of the electorate are Anti-
Socialist through and through.”
“Thousands of votes are in reality
turned purely by the dread of
Socialism.”
The contempt was bipartisan.
“There can be no doubt,” jeered
the Tory Spectator as it zeroed in
on Hardie’s demoralizing defeat
in his very left-wing London
district, “that Mr. Keir Hardie,
AFTER BERNIE
The Victory to Come
and the views and methods of
which he is one of the most
prominent exponents, have lost
hold on popular support
where there has been the fullest
opportunity of observing them.”
And yet, the 1895 election did not
mark the end of British socialism.
Within five years, the ilp had
joined with the trade unions to
launch the Labour Representation
Committee (lrc), an ad hoc
vehicle that ran union-sponsored
candidates in selected races. When
the lrc captured twenty-nine
parliamentary seats in 1906, it
restyled itself the Labour Party
and appointed Keir Hardie its first
135
 MEANS AND ENDS
parliamentary leader. In its new
constitution of 1918, the party
formally embraced socialism,
pledging itself to the “common
ownership of the means of
production, distribution and
exchange.” And in 1922, it finally
surpassed the Liberals to become
the largest parliamentary opposi-
tion to the Tories.
Almost fifty years to the day after
the Economist’s gloating eulogy for
British socialism, its editors grimly
relayed the news that Labour,
campaigning as “a Socialist Party,
and proud of it,” had won a
crushing victory over Winston
Churchill’s Conservatives in the
1945 general election — ushering
in a government that would, in
short order, nationalize one-fifth
of the UK economy, create the
National Health Service (nhs),
and lay the foundations of the
postwar welfare state.
There was just “one superlatively
good thing about the result of the
General Election,” the stunned
editorialists wrote:
It leaves no room for doubt
about the will of the people.
The Labour landslide is
complete and surpasses the
wildest dreams of [party
headquarters] ... Beyond any
possibility of mistake, the
country wants a Labour
Government and a Socialist
programme.
“Labour Landslide” was the
headline they chose for this
two-page swallowing of fifty-
year-old crow. But “Political
Revolution” would have been just
as fitting.
136
Unsettled Matters
This story, and countless others
like it that litter the early history of
socialism, holds a lesson for those
who despaired — and those who
exulted — at the failure of Bernie
Sanders’s presidential bid. It
reminds us that political revolu-
tions are won or lost over
generations, not individual
campaigns; that their progress can
be gauged only loosely by any
given vote; that they succeed
through defeat as much as through
victory. Unlike the general run of
ambitious office seekers whose
political horizons extend no
further than the next election
cycle, Sanders pursued a project
that would have remained
unfinished even had he spent eight
years in the White House. His aim,
like Hardie’s, was a permanent
realignment of politics around the
axis of working-class power.
In the consensus view of commen-
tators, Sanders’s defeat proved the
futility of class politics. It was “a
hammer blow to the left’s
class-based theory of winning
political power,” as Vox’s Zack
Beauchamp put it. The Sanders
camp, entranced by the senator’s
“Marxist political strategy,” had
wagered that “an unapologetically
socialist politics centering
Medicare-for-all and welfare state
expansions would unite the
working class and turn out young
people at unprecedented rates.”
When months of campaigning
failed to unite the working class,
and youth turnout failed to set
new records, Sanders’s strategy, in
Beauchamp’s account, stood
discredited.
№ 38  /  SUMMER 2020
This notion — that the “theory” of
an insurgent campaign is dis-
proved if the candidate loses — is
the primordial delusion of political
punditry, an eternally recurring
canard that appears at regular
intervals only to be exploded by
the evidence of history. When
Barry Goldwater lost to Lyndon B.
Johnson in a historic landslide, it
did not disprove his “theory” that
an unapologetically conservative
gop could win majorities by
courting Southern whites. When
William Jennings Bryan
attempted to remake the Demo-
cratic Party into a liberal reform
coalition by uniting rural populists
and Northern workers, even his
two consecutive election debacles,
in 1896 and 1900, could not, in the
long run, deal the concept a
“hammer blow.”
Yet that was not the impression
you would get from reading the
tide of triumphant commentary
that followed both men’s respec-
tive defeats. “Bryan and Bryanism
have passed into history,” declared
a jubilant New York Times in
November 1900, rejoicing that all
the issues Bryan had raised in his
two campaigns “have been settled
forever.”
“The election has finished the
Goldwater school of political
reaction,” the New Yorker’s
Richard Rovere assured his
readers early in 1965 — though if
they “keep at it,” he joked,
“Goldwaterism may triumph in
1996 or thereabouts.”
Today, Bryan is remembered by
historians as, in his biographer
Michael Kazin’s words, “the key
figure in transforming his party

The Roveres of the world
are immortalized for
their purblindness: their
bad takes literally enter
the history books.
from a bulwark of conservative Primary elections are unique
thinking and policy into the in that electability — defined
standard-bearer of modern as a candidate’s prospects for
liberalism.” The Goldwater winning the general election —
campaign is recalled by Sean is also included in the decision
Wilentz as an effort that, “despite calculus. The addition of the
[its] enormous defeat … marked a electability factor creates the
breakthrough for the conservative potential for voters to be faced
movement that never entirely with a tradeoff between a sin-
abated.” (The Roveres of the world cerely preferred candidate and
are immortalized for their a candidate who is less favor-
purblindness: their bad takes able but more likely to win.
literally enter the history books.) In such scenarios, it becomes
important to understand just
how much weight voters place
Why We Lost
on a candidate’s electability.
As for Sanders, any serious
The evidence is overwhelming
account of his defeat must start
that electability was the para-
with the underemphasized fact
mount issue in the minds of most
that the contest he lost was a
Democratic primary voters. In
primary, not a general election.
November, Gallup found that 60
Party primaries are a distinct kind
percent of Democrats preferred to
of election: not only are voters
see a nominee who had the “best
deprived of the partisan cues that
chance of beating Donald Trump,”
normally guide their voting
even if he or she didn’t agree with
decisions (since, in primaries, all
them on all the issues they cared
candidates run under the same
about; only 36 percent preferred
party label), but as everybody
the opposite. YouGov found
knows, strategic voting is the rule.
electability looming even larger in
As political scientist Elizabeth
this election than in past years.
Simas has put it:
AFTER BERNIE
The Victory to Come
And in the typical state exit poll,
electability voters ultimately
outnumbered issue voters by a 25
to 35 percentage-point margin.
That’s why, despite entering the
field with a larger pool of com-
mitted supporters than any other
candidate, Sanders knew he would
lose if he didn’t swiftly establish an
image as a vote-getter — which
meant winning early primaries.
His initial success on that front
brought instant results: after
Sanders’s New Hampshire victory,
the share of Democrats who
named him as the candidate most
likely to beat Trump jumped
from 23 percent to 29 percent, and
then jumped again, after his
massive victory in Nevada, to 34
percent — twice the level for Joe
Biden, according to the Morning
Consult poll.
By the end of February, Sanders
wasn’t just leading in horse-race
polls; he was beating Biden in
head-to-head matchups, in which
voters were asked whom they
would choose if the field were
narrowed down to those two. In a
March 2 Reuters/Ipsos matchup
poll, Sanders led Biden 54 percent
to 46 percent — which means that,
contrary to a number of analyses,
his polling lead had never
been that of a mere “factional
candidate” benefiting artificially
from a split in the moderate vote.
It was Sanders’s defeat in South
Carolina, and the coordinated
wave of Biden endorsements by
prominent Democrats, that threw
the trend into reverse. Within
days, the share of voters who
viewed Biden as the most electable
137
 MEANS AND ENDS
candidate doubled from 17 percent
to 33 percent, then surged to 51
percent after Super Tuesday.
Suddenly, 54 percent of Demo-
crats planned to vote for Biden.
Sanders never recovered his
momentum.
In short, Sanders was defeated
because a sizable segment of
rank-and-file Democrats, anxious
to defeat Trump, opted for the
candidate who party leaders had
assured them would stand the best
chance in November. It’s a simple,
obvious explanation, and if any
more evidence is needed, consider
this fact: Sanders, who lost sixteen
of the twenty-one primaries for
which there were exit polls, would
have won seventeen of those
contests had self-declared
“electability” voters stayed home
and left the field to the “issue”
voters.
Sanders’ “Marxist” electoral
strategy had nothing to do with
this sequence of events. The
Democratic establishment
marshaled its advantages against
Sanders — rank-and-file Demo-
crats’ hunger to defeat Trump, the
existence of a bloc of party
loyalists ready to be swayed by
endorsements, the self-propelling
dynamics of “momentum” in
primaries — but it could have done
that against any other candidate,
with any other “theory.”
A Possible Future
That’s not to say that the manner
of Sanders’s defeat holds no
lessons for socialist electoral
politics. Among other things, it
138
raises the intriguing question of attracted a tidal wave of Latino
whether he would have been less support: no less than 42 percent
vulnerable to the party’s machina- in national polls post-New
tions had 2020 — like 2008 and Hampshire, and a staggering 50
2016 — been an “open” race with percent of the Latino vote in
no Republican incumbent the Nevada caucus, according to
running; such contests seem to entrance polls.
mellow the primary electorate’s
Finally, there is the generational
obsession with electability.
phenomenon. Within almost
But what is most striking about every conceivable demographic —
the Sanders campaign in retro- from blacks, to rural whites, to
spect is how consistently it drew second-generation immigrants —
the support of the expanding, as Sanders led the field among the
opposed to the declining, elements young, winning majorities and
of American society. At a time often supermajorities. Even his
when the fastest growing religious dismal showing with older voters
group in the United States is the points to the same conclusion: that
“nones” (the religiously unaffili- the force of generational replace-
ated), Sanders was by far the ment is working silently in the
leading candidate within that background, shifting the electoral
group, and he received the least rolls in Sanders’s direction.
support from white evangelicals,
If a Martian were to land on Earth
the religious segment now
and watch the 2020 primaries
experiencing the fastest decline.
unfold, I suspect they’d be puzzled
At a time when Latinos are by the bluster of Sanders’s critics,
projected to reach nearly 20 who seem convinced that they
percent of the electorate in less dodged a bullet. They haven’t —
than two decades, Sanders the bullet is still on its way.
The Democratic establishment
marshaled its advantages against
Sanders but it could have done
that against any other candidate,
with any other “theory.”
№ 38  /  SUMMER 2020
 In memory of our
friend and comrade
Michael Brooks
(1983–2020)