Electoral Politics in the Age of Pandemics, Climate Change, and Late Stage Capitalism
Are We Ready for a #DemExit Yet?
2020: Hope For Reform?
In 2016, Bernie Sanders’ Presidential campaign’s unexpected success brought many issues and needed major political reforms to the national stage — universal health insurance, free public education, a living wage, etc. — to an unprecedented extent. And with Sanders’ rise from relatively unknown Senator to the country’s most popular politician, many of his supporters had high hopes of his being elected President in 2020 and leading the way to the enactment of his signature reform, Medicare For All, and other major social reforms. It didn’t work out that way. Bernie Sanders failed to replicate his success in the 2016 campaign — in which he won 22 states — only winning nine of the 30 contests that occurred prior to his dropping out of the race and endorsing Joe Biden in early April. Barring the DNC reconsidering in light of either questions around Biden’s cognitive competence or the recent rape allegations against him — which could certainly happen — Joe Biden will be the Democratic nominee. [Obviously, as we now know, the DNC never even considered dropping Joe Biden, demonstrating both its contempt for women and its confidence that the corporate media could successfully con the American public into accepting a demented right-winger with a sordid history with women as the Democratic nominee.]
What went wrong for the Sanders campaign? What, if anything, did it — or the campaigns of other reform-minded candidates such as Tulsi Gabbard, Andrew Yang, or Marianne Williamson — accomplish despite the loss? What did they advocate? What were the shortcomings of these campaigns? Has it been proven once and for all that the Democratic Party is, as radicals have been saying for many years, the graveyard of social movements? What does it say about Democratic National Committee (DNC) officials and Democratic Party politicians (including Bernie Sanders) that they are willing to support arguably the most repugnant presumptive Democratic nominee in modern history? And finally, where next for those who so yearn for the reforms Bernie Sanders or other reform-minded candidates advocated, or for an end to capitalism altogether? I will address these questions in detail below.
Rigged From The Start
In the 2016 Democratic primary, even though it was mathematically possible for Bernie Sanders to come back and win the pledged delegate count until quite late in the race, the ultimate outcome was clear by late April or so. The overwhelming advantage — greater than 90% — held by Hillary Clinton in commitments from superdelegates was not realistically possible for Sanders to overcome by then. A running joke once the outcome became obvious was: “Here’s how Bernie can still win.” But in reality, he never had a chance. This time, despite elimination of voting by the superdelegates in the first round of voting, and despite the advantage of near-universal name recognition, high popularity (Bernie Sanders has been the most popular US Senator for several years now), and advantages over every other candidate in terms of the strength of his campaign organization as well as advantages over most of the other candidates in terms of fundraising, Bernie Sanders still did not, realistically speaking, have a chance to win the Democratic nomination.
Why, you may ask, do I say that? Even though Sanders was well behind Joe Biden in overall delegate count (1217 to 914) late in the race, it was mathematically possible for Bernie to catch up. Winning an outright majority would have been a very tall order, requiring him to win approximately 64% of the remaining 1678 delegates in order to gain a majority of the 3980 total delegates. But by winning 59% of the remaining delegates, he could have won a plurality. However, what would have happened then? One need only look back to 2016 to predict what would have happened: Superdelegates would have overwhelmingly backed Joe Biden. Additionally, most of the pledged delegates who had been won by other candidates — 81 by Elizabeth Warren, 55 by Michael Bloomberg, 26 by Pete Buttigieg, and seven by Amy Klobuchar — would also likely have gone to Biden. (Tulsi Gabbard also won two delegates, but it is hard to say who they would have gone to, given that she has been a Sanders ally but ultimately endorsed Biden once the race seemed to have been decided in Biden’s favor.) The bottom line is that the Democratic establishment, along with its backers in the corporate media, did not want Bernie Sanders to win the Democratic nomination and were willing to go to extraordinary lengths to prevent that from happening, even if it meant nominating a weaker candidate who was more likely to lose to Donald Trump. Some wealthy Democrat-backers even expressed a willingness to vote for Donald Trump if Sanders were the nominee. The Democratic establishment was also determined to stop reform-minded candidate Tulsi Gabbard, who made opposition to the US war machine the centerpiece of her campaign, from gaining traction.
It was blindingly obvious to those who cared to look that, as was the case in 2016, the 2020 primaries were in various ways rigged in favor of corporate-friendly candidates and against those who, to whatever extent, rebelled against the DNC consensus. It began with the constantly changing and inscrutable criteria the DNC set for eligibility for the Democratic Presidential debates — which are the exclusive province of the Democratic Party, a private corporation. For the initial two debates in June and July, candidates had to either poll at least 1% in three approved national or early primary state polls or collect donations from at least 65,000 unique donors. However, although candidate Mike Gravel, a retired Senator who famously read the Pentagon Papers into the Congressional Record during the Vietnam War and took a strongly progressive, anti-war stance, met the 65,000 donor qualification, he was nonetheless excluded from those debates by the DNC, with no explanation, resulting in him dropping out of the campaign after only three months in it. (Gravel’s campaign was intended as a vehicle to raise issues rather than a serious run for the Presidency, but that alone was evidently perceived as a threat by the DNC, given that Gravel’s platform was arguably the most radical of the Democratic candidates’.)
Requirements for candidates to qualify for subsequent debates were raised periodically — for instance, candidates needed to receive 130,000 unique donations AND at least 2% in four or more national or early state polls to qualify for the September and October debates. Though at least at first the requirements seemed reasonable, seemingly completely arbitrary decisions were made by the DNC about which polls to include as “qualifying” polls, as they would include one poll and exclude another poll from the same polling organization, or refuse to include polls sponsored by the highest-circulation newspapers in some of the early states. Gabbard seemed to suffer the worst from this arbitrariness, exceeding 2% in 26 polls prior to the September debate — but being excluded because only two of them were deemed “qualifying” polls.
Perhaps even more egregious was the decision to exclude her from the March 15 debate. Although the polling requirement of at least 10% in four “qualifying” polls was out of her reach, the DNC had also given candidates the opportunity to qualify by receiving at least one delegate in a primary, which Gabbard did by getting enough votes to win two delegates in American Samoa on March 3. Within days, the DNC changed the requirement under which she had qualified, requiring candidates to have received at least 20% of the delegates to qualify. As this would have disqualified all of the candidates besides Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden had they still been in the race, this change was clearly designed specifically to exclude Gabbard — the only remaining candidate besides Biden and Sanders by that time — from the debate, preventing her from having the opportunity to face only Sanders and Biden on what had previously been a very crowded debate stage (with there often having been 8–10 candidates onstage at once in previous debates).
Speaking of that, the strategy of the DNC seemed up until that point to have been to put up a large number of candidates favoring its agenda, in an apparent attempt to prevent Sanders from achieving a majority in polls or delegates and to see which candidate would “stick” in terms of public opinion. Despite barely campaigning, and seemingly having little going for him besides universal name recognition and his association with the highly popular Barack Obama, under whom he had served as Vice President, Biden was ultimately picked as “the one” despite disappointing showings in the first three primaries (Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada). But after Biden won the South Carolina primary by a surprising (and suspicious) amount, all of the other candidates except Gabbard and Elizabeth Warren, many of whose supporters had Sanders as their second choice, dropped out of the race and endorsed Biden just prior to the “Super Tuesday” (March 3) primaries. Warren remaining in the race, along with the momentum Biden gained from his South Carolina win and the plethora of endorsements he received prior to Super Tuesday, enabled Biden to eke out wins over Sanders in Massachusetts and Minnesota, and helped him stay closer than expected in California, the state with the most delegates at stake. There is speculation that former President Barack Obama encouraged candidates behind the scenes to drop out and endorse Biden.
In addition, as in 2016, the electoral process itself was heavily rigged to favor establishment candidates. Iowa, which had appeared to be destined to be an easy win for Sanders, was marred by a chaotic vote counting process in which an app that was supposed to total the votes mysteriously malfunctioned. Even the flagship of the Democratic establishment press, the New York Times, reported that the results were “riddled with inconsistencies and errors,” including mysterious “mistakes” in which votes cast for Bernie Sanders were (until caught by Sanders volunteers) given to candidates who barely even campaigned in Iowa. No results at all were reported on election night, and results trickled out gradually over the next week, with Pete Buttigieg mysteriously leading on “state delegate equivalents” even though Sanders was consistently ahead in the popular vote — though not by nearly as much as pre-primary polling had suggested. Buttigieg and the media declared Buttigieg the “winner” even though it is the popular vote that determines how many delegates are pledged to each candidate for the Democratic Convention. And in what was highly unlikely to be a coincidence, it turned out that the founder of the company that produced the malfunctioning app, Acronym, was married to a high-level official in Pete Buttigieg’s campaign. (In addition, several members of the team that designed the app also worked for Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016.) In several precincts where the popular vote was close between Sanders and Buttigieg (though in Sanders’ favor), delegates were awarded based on a coin flip, which in many cases appeared to have been rigged to favor Buttigieg. Comedian Jimmy Dore summed Iowa up well: “Apparently the Russians run the Iowa Democratic Party.”
In New Hampshire, the totals for precincts that used electronic voting machines (which are easily hackable) were widely discrepant from exit polling results, granting Pete Buttigieg 12% more votes than the exit polls suggested he had won, while tallies in precincts that used paper ballots matched the exit poll results closely. The final results for New Hampshire, like those for Iowa (which Bernie Sanders also won), were delayed by more than a week, robbing the Sanders campaign of momentum.
In Massachusetts, exit polls suggested that Sanders had won, but the vote totals (on electronic voting machines) gave the state to Biden. The discrepancy between the exit poll results and the voting results was 8.4%, more than double the poll’s margin of error. A large discrepancy also occurred in South Carolina, where Biden’s percentage of the vote was 8.3% higher than the percentage he received in the exit poll, a discrepancy likewise vastly in excess of the exit poll’s margin of error. The story was the same in Missouri, where not only did the discrepancy greatly exceed the exit poll’s margin of error, but for computerized vote totals, Sanders underperformed the exit poll by 11.4%, and Biden overperformed it by 9.3%.
The US Agency for International Development suggests that a discrepancy between exit polling results and voting results substantially in excess of the poll’s margin of error is grounds for suspicion of electoral fraud: “A discrepancy between the aggregated choices reported by voters [exit polls] and the official results may suggest, but not prove, that results have been tampered with.” The Organization of American States has sent election monitoring teams to countries with similarly poll-discrepant election results on hundreds of occasions. But no investigation of the US’s 2020 Democratic primaries is forthcoming, and little or no mention has been made of these irregularities in the corporate media — or, for that matter, by Bernie Sanders or his campaign staff. Instead, the media portrayed the sudden turnaround in Biden’s electoral fortunes as a rejection of Sanders’ policies — once again ignoring exit polling results, which showed strong support for Medicare For All and other reforms Sanders proposed, but questioning of his “electability,” likely because the media questioned his electability (and touted Biden’s).
Another form of electoral rigging in the 2020 primaries was attempts to suppress the vote in areas or among groups likely to be favorable to Bernie Sanders. According to the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), there was a “calculated effort to suppress the minority vote during [the March 3 primaries on] Super Tuesday” in 14 states. “Latinos have become the largest minority voting bloc in 2020, and our community is at the heart of the voting base in states like California and Texas. Yet, it is precisely in the largest minority communities around the country — specifically districts where the Latino vote makes the difference — that we are witnessing the biggest barriers for people to vote," said Domingo Garcia, the organization’s president. Sanders led Biden by substantial margins among Latino voters in both Texas and California. But Latino voters encountered malfunctioning voting machines, closed or relocated polling places, and lines that were several hours long. Unable to stay away from jobs or other responsibilities for hours and hours, many voters left without being able to cast their votes. The same paucity of polling locations and hours-long lines occurred in many parts of the country for college students, who also heavily favored Bernie Sanders. Older voters are much more likely to vote early or by mail than younger voters, so any long delays on election day are likely to tilt election results toward candidates favored by older voters.
Another way that voting may have been rigged was that voter registrations were mysteriously switched to “no party preference” despite the voters having intended to register as Democrats so that they could vote in closed Democratic primaries. As of yet, it is not known for sure whether this was used as a means of discriminating against Sanders voters, but that was demonstrably the case in 2016.
Finally, combining sociopathic willingness to put voters’ lives at risks with the intention of suppressing election day in-person voting, several states (the most significant being Florida, Illinois, Michigan, Arizona, and Wisconsin) insisted on holding their primaries as scheduled in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. Not surprisingly, many voters facing the dilemma of risking their health versus foregoing exercising their voting rights chose the latter option, and in-person voter turnout was down considerably. Not surprisingly, a number of cases of coronavirus have been traced to being at polling places on election day. A poll worker in Illinois died from coronavirus.
In a nutshell, the 2020 Democratic Party presidential primaries, like the 2016 primaries and many, many other US elections, were rigged from start to finish, likely costing Sanders and perhaps other candidates several percentage points in a number of states. The Democratic Party establishment pulled out all the stops to stop him or any other candidate who made any attempt to challenge the neoliberal status quo.The only chance Bernie Sanders or any other reform-minded candidate had to win was to win an outright majority of the vote, so that the superdelegates could not be introduced into the fray. For reasons that will become apparent later, it’s quite likely Sanders would have fallen well short of that goal even without the DNC’s rigging, but in any case it had a significant effect.
Spin Doctors
The media wing of the political establishment did its part to derail challenges to neoliberal orthodoxy, too. The corporate media smear campaign against Bernie Sanders was relentless, just as it was last time. He was dehumanized, falsely portrayed as having various unsavory personality characteristics, and even targeted by anti-Semitic attacks. Over and over again, moderators at the Presidential debates as well as TV commentators kept asking him: “How are you going to pay for it?” regarding his Medicare For All health care plan. They never asked how the overwhelming majority of industrialized countries that have some sort of national health insurance system manage to pay for their health insurance — or act like they’re aware that those countries spend half or less what the US does on health care and still manage to provide quality care to all of their citizens. But they kept asking him the same question over and over, no matter how many times he pointed out that countries with universal health insurance had far lower health care costs. And even though Sanders consistently polled the best of any of the candidates against Donald Trump in hypothetical general election matchups, he was portrayed by the media as “unelectable,” whereas Biden and some of the other candidates were portrayed as “electable.”
Primary opponent Elizabeth Warren implied that he was a sexist, suggesting that he had said that a woman couldn’t win the Presidential race during a private meeting in late 2018. The claim was almost universally deemed credible by the mainstream media, despite ample evidence that Sanders encouraged female candidates (including Warren herself in 2015) to run for President, and of course was well aware that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in 2016. A moderator of one of the debates even asked Sen. Warren, immediately after Bernie Sanders denied Warren’s allegation, “Senator Warren, what did you think when Senator Sanders told you a woman could not win the election?” It is hard to imagine the media being any more biased against anyone than they were against Bernie — but in reality, they probably were even more biased against Gabbard. They were certainly unable to ignore Sanders the way they did Gabbard, given his near-universal name recognition and powerful fundraising and campaign organization. But smear him they could and did.
Contrast this to the highly favorable treatment given to establishment candidates. Beto O’Rourke had his brief moment as an establishment favorite, characterized as a Kennedyesque figure and earning a cover page and fawning article in Vanity Fair. When Beto didn’t catch on, Pete Buttigieg started receiving highly favorable press. A Northwestern University study found that Buttigieg received by far the most favorable media coverage for a period of several months in mid-2019. Kamala Harris also got quite favorable coverage for a while, following her attack on Joe Biden for his record on racial issues. Following Harris’ slippage in the polls after her record as a not-so-progressive prosecutor was exposed by Tulsi Gabbard in the July debate, Elizabeth Warren became the media darling for a while. And all the while, although he did not typically get the most favorable coverage, Joe Biden got a pass from the corporate media for his halting, meandering, and at times incoherent responses to debate and interview questions. Little coverage was given to the accusations of sexual harassment and inappropriate touching from several women early last year, and the corporate media failed to mention the rape allegation against him by Tara Reade until finally, three weeks after it became public in late March, they decided to smear her and dismiss her claims.
The media smear campaign against Tulsi Gabbard was unlike any that I can recall against any other political figure other than perhaps Julian Assange. Gabbard committed a number of “sins” in the eyes of the Democratic political establishment that led to there being a target on her back. In 2016, she bucked the overwhelming tide of Democratic lawmakers who endorsed Hillary Clinton by endorsing and campaigning for Bernie Sanders instead, resigning her DNC vice chair position in the process and prompting Democratic establishment bigwigs to send her a threatening email. In January of 2017, she and former Congressman Dennis Kucinich, a fellow opponent of the warmongering foreign policy establishment, traveled to Syria to see firsthand the impact of the civil war on the Syrian people. Though they met with a broad spectrum of both ordinary people and politicians, including members of the Syrian opposition, they also met with President Bashar al-Assad (as have several other US politicians). She then committed another “sin” by questioning the Trump administration’s claims about alleged Syrian government gas attacks in 2017 and 2018, which were used as a justification for launching missile attacks against Syria. Her opposition to US foreign policy of backing regime change wars (efforts to militarily overthrow governments) generally became the central theme of her 2019–2020 campaign for President.
The attacks came early and often. Within only a day after announcing that she would run for President in an interview with Van Jones of CNN, despite a 7-year record of consistent support for GLBT rights in Congress, she was accused of being homophobic due to her past as a socially conservative teen and young adult. Despite her meeting with a diverse array of people in Syria, the media obsessively focused on the fact that she had met with Assad, and accused her of being an Assad supporter despite her calling him a “brutal dictator.” Gabbard, who was the first Hindu-American elected to Congress, was accused of belonging to a cult despite being a practitioner of mainstream Hinduism, a claim that the Hindu-American Foundation and Tulsi Gabbard alike characterized as religious bigotry. On the same day as her official campaign announcement, NBC News ran a story claiming that her campaign was being promoted by the Russian government, playing up the fact that Russian news outlets had covered her more than Bernie Sanders or Joe Biden — neither of whom had announced their campaign for President by that time.
Throughout the campaign — including in the same week by the New York Times, CNN, and Hillary Clinton — it was claimed that she was a “Russian asset.” Clinton further claimed that she was being “groomed” by either the Republican Party or the Russian government to run as a third-party candidate — something that, none of these sources noted, would have been a violation of “sore loser” rules that prohibit Democratic Presidential candidates from subsequently running third-party in the same election. Claims that she was either in league with Russia in some way or that she was a closet Republican were frequently repeated both in the corporate media and by grassroots supporters of other Democrats. As she remarked to Joy Behar when Behar attacked her in a similar way on The View (at 2:10 in the linked clip), such claims have nothing to do with who she is. She is a long-time officer in the National Guard as well as a member of Congressional committees; both of those roles require high-level security clearances. And her legislative record may well be the most progressive in all of Congress.
Overall, press coverage of her was both substantially more negative than every other candidate’s and substantially less frequent than coverage of any other candidate who was in the race the majority of the campaign. Gabbard was excluded from a CNN town hall in New Hampshire despite outpolling several other candidates who were invited, including one, Deval Patrick, who was polling at far less than 1%. Altogether, she was invited to appear in only one town hall, whereas other candidates were invited to between four and 11.
Whereas Sanders was exclusively smeared by the corporate media and establishment Democrats, Gabbard was also smeared by independent left-leaning journalists including Branko Marcetic from Jacobin, Anna Kasparian and Emma Vigeland from The Young Turks, Soumya Shankar from The Intercept, Jeet Heer and Ari Paul from The Nation, Michael Brooks, and Abby Martin. (Links are to rebuttal pieces; the original articles or videos can be reached from those links.) This took me by surprise, as despite her socially conservative views during her youth and her joining (as a medic) in the US regime change war in Iraq, she evolved into a strong opponent of US foreign policy and strong progressive on domestic policies by the time she became a Congresswoman representing Hawaii’s 2nd District in 2013. There appear to be a complex assortment of reasons why. One is that some on the left disagree with her anti-interventionist stance on Syria. Another is that they often (generally unwittingly) rely on sources of information with an axe to grind, such as wealthy regime change proponents, Sikh separatists, or anti-Hindu bigots, or have unexamined Hinduphobia of their own. Furthermore, much as more than a few on the left have bought into Russiagate or smears against Julian Assange because they have heard these claims so often in the media, sheer repetition of attacks on Tulsi Gabbard has subtly brainwashed them into otherizing her, of creating in them a visceral “ick” reaction to her. As Goebbels said, and social psychological research confirms, a lie repeated often enough comes to be regarded as true.
Finally, I couldn’t help noticing that many of the attacks came from supporters of Bernie Sanders, who conversely tended to adopt a wholly uncritical attitude toward Sanders. Abby Martin, for instance, in an interview with Michael Brooks that I did a video commentary on, glossed over his often hawkish foreign policy record completely, claiming that he had been consistently progressive throughout his 30 years in Congress and characterizing him as the “organizer in chief” and a proven leader of the American progressive movement (I cover these comments starting at 66:10). Like many fellow Sanders supporters who were harshly critical of Gabbard, she saw Gabbard — who risked her own political career to support Sanders in 2016, and surely would have supported Sanders again had he been in a position to win — as competition rather than a political ally, expressing bewilderment regarding why she was running: “I find it very strange that Tulsi Gabbard is running against Bernie Sanders. That to me is why I dislike her the most. Why is she running against Bernie? Why is Elizabeth Warren running against Bernie? If they cared about defeating Trump, they would not be running against Bernie Sanders.” Did Abby really not understand that Elizabeth Warren was part of the Democratic establishment’s efforts to defeat Sanders? Or that Gabbard’s lane in the Democratic field existed precisely because of Bernie Sanders’ severe shortcomings in foreign policy? As for the claim that he is the “organizer in chief” of progressive politics in America, I’m not sure how campaigning for Hillary Clinton (and now for Joe Biden) exemplifies progressive leadership.
In any case, to summarize, the corporate media have gone to great lengths to smear candidates who challenged the neoliberal status quo, and unfortunately some in the independent media have helped them, at least in the case of Tulsi Gabbard. There have also been considerable efforts by the corporate media to gaslight the public into believing that Bernie Sanders was unelectable, unfortunately with some success, and with the exception of Sanders, candidates who posed challenges to the neoliberal status quo were given far less mainstream media coverage than those who didn’t. Sanders had the name recognition, popular appeal, and organizational and fundraising capacity to potentially present a serious threat to win the nomination; Gabbard, lacking those resources, did not, and won no more than 3% of the official vote in any primary and only two delegates.
Why Did the Establishment Feel So Threatened?
As noted previously, the Democratic wing of the ruling class was willing to get behind an extraordinarily unappealing candidate, Joe Biden, relentlessly smear his most formidable opponents on the left (Bernie Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard), and rig the primary process to whatever extent was necessary to ward off any challenges from the left. Why did it go to such lengths to undermine the candidacies of Sanders, Gabbard, and to a lesser extent Andrew Yang, Marianne Williamson, and Mike Gravel? It is because to varying extents the views they articulated — for instance, Andrew Yang’s advocacy of a universal basic income (also supported by Gabbard), Bernie Sanders’ advocacy of Medicare For All (also supported by Gabbard and Gravel), Tulsi Gabbard’s advocacy for an end to regime change wars (also supported by Gravel), or all of these candidates’ support for electoral reforms such as ranked choice voting — held a mirror up to a profoundly unjust system and promoted reforms that could undermine vested interests’ profits and challenge the political corruption that upheld those interests.
Andrew Yang’s UBI proposal, while clearly opposed by much of the ruling class because it would enhance workers’ economic security, has also been supported by some, presumably because in the absence of any living wage legislation, the wages employers pay would in effect be subsidized by it. That and its compensation for job loss due to automation (Yang’s most often-stated rationale for it) would reduce social unrest. In short, it is not necessarily a proposal that challenges the dominance of any sector of the ruling class. Moreover, on other issues, he was generally a mainstream Democrat. Thus, he did not incur the wrath of the elites to the extent that Gabbard and Sanders did, and in fact he landed a gig as a political commentator for CNN shortly after his campaign ended. Marianne Williamson was more progressive than the mainstream candidates on domestic issues, and thus could conceivably have been seen as a threat, but her campaign never gained traction. Gravel, as previously noted, had the most left-wing positions of the Democratic candidates, but perhaps for that reason, his effort to gain entrance into the debates was smothered by the DNC, and he in short order ended his campaign and endorsed Gabbard and Sanders.
Judging from the colossal propaganda campaigns mounted against them, Sanders and Gabbard were perceived as greater threats to the status quo by the ruling elite than the others discussed above. Sanders had widespread name recognition and appeal, a pre-existing campaign organization, and proven fundraising capacity, as well as a reputation as someone who backed domestic reforms that were unappealing to corporate power. Gabbard had acquired a reputation as someone who repeatedly challenged the ruling class’ foreign policy consensus, challenging the wisdom and morality of both wars and covert operations dating back to the mid-20th century. The attacks on both began as soon as their campaigns did. And yet, these attacks stopped the moment their campaigns for President ended and they endorsed the frontrunner, Joe Biden. On the other hand, thoughtful criticisms of these candidates and the limitations of their campaigns, even from former supporters, have if anything increased. To better understand these campaigns and the reactions to them, it is worth looking at their policy positions, records, and campaigns in detail and comparing them. However, for the sake of brevity, I will only summarize this comparison here. I have written about it in more depth in another article, and compared them in detail in a 6-part video series as well.
Sanders vs. Gabbard: Summary of Policy Positions
Broadly speaking, both Sanders and Gabbard are very much on the liberal/progressive side of the spectrum in terms of domestic policy. To summarize, both support a living wage ($15), free college for most (Tulsi) or all (Bernie) people, Wall Street reforms such as reinstating the Glass-Steagall Act and breaking up the big banks, a universal taxpayer-funded health care system where care is free at the point of service (Medicare For All), legalization of marijuana, abolition of private prisons, comprehensive election and campaign finance reform (overturning Citizen’s United, eliminating gerrymandering, stopping voter suppression, making election day a holiday, etc.), both have 100% ratings on their voting records on LGBT rights, abortion rights, and other women’s rights, and both have introduced comprehensive climate change plans (Tulsi’s in the form of a bill in Congress, the Off Fossil Fuels Act, that was introduced 2 ½ years ago).
Gabbard, as mentioned previously, made opposition to important aspects of US foreign policy the centerpiece of her campaign; Sanders, on the other hand, has a very mixed record on foreign policy, for which he has frequently been criticized by the left. Gabbard has also been a stronger voice for civil liberties; for instance, she was the only member of Congress other than Rand Paul to speak out against Julian Assange’s arrest, and the only Democratic Presidential candidate other than Mike Gravel to call for freedom for (and the dropping of charges against) Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning and exoneration for Eric Snowden. Sanders, on the other hand, remained silent about Assange for a month and a half after his arrest, finally commenting to the effect that the Espionage Act shouldn’t be used to prosecute journalists when Assange was charged under it in late May last year, but still not mentioning Assange by name.
Full details on their policy positions and records can be found on their respective websites. In addition, I compare their views and records on health care, environmental issues, and foreign policy in the companion article to this one.
Conclusion: Impact and Implications of the 2020 Democratic Presidential Primaries
The aforementioned comparison of Bernie Sanders’ and Tulsi Gabbard’s political views and records is loosely based on the video series I did a few months ago. Below, I will present my overall assessment of the strengths, weaknesses, and contributions of these two campaigns and the significance of the Democratic establishment’s attacks on them, and discuss why the movement for a more peaceful, just, and ecologically sustainable society must be politically independent from the Democratic Party if it is to build power and achieve success. But first, let’s look at where we are as the primaries are winding down.
Presumptive Nominee?
At the time I started writing this section, on International Workers’ Day (May 1), the Democratic presidential primary appears to be essentially over, with Joe Biden the presumptive nominee. Virtually all of the other Democratic candidates, including Bernie Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard, as well as the vast majority of Democratic politicians in Congress, including “the Squad” and the Congressional Progressive Caucus, have endorsed Biden, as have most other elements of the Democratic political establishment. Biden leads by more than 300 delegates, and is within 500 of winning the majority of pledged delegates with fewer than 1400 remaining.
Much remains up in the air despite this. Because of the COVID-19 epidemic, most of the remaining primaries have been pushed back to June, and the Democrats’ nominating convention to August. More and more evidence is accumulating in support of the rape allegation against Joe Biden, and other allegations of sexual misconduct have been made. Biden continues to show signs of mild cognitive impairment at the very least, if not dementia. He was a major player or the chief architect in the implementation of many horrific policies that have caused great harm, including the war in Iraq, the 1994 Crime Bill that led to mass incarceration, legislation that benefited credit card companies and banks at the expense of working people, the Patriot Act, and much more. There has been much speculation about whether he will be replaced as the nominee — New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has been the subject of the most speculation (and, notably, the man in second place in the delegate race, Bernie Sanders, has been discussed very little in this regard). But the social psychologist in me says that there’s a good chance that, given how strongly they have committed themselves to making Biden the nominee, the Democratic establishment’s cognitive dissonance will get the better of them, and they will stay on this self-destructive path of selecting perhaps the weakest Democratic nominee in modern history to go up against Trump.
Sizing Up the Sanders and Gabbard Campaigns
Regarding the campaigns of Gabbard and Sanders, I think that overall the movement for peace and social justice in this country has benefited from both Sanders’ and Gabbard’s messages. They have both put important issues on the table nationally — they have both made important contributions to the political conversation about social injustices and needed social reforms, Bernie principally through his class-conscious approach to domestic politics, and Tulsi principally through her emphasis on the staggering financial and human costs of US military interventions abroad — including colossally skewed budget priorities that pinch pennies on even basic infrastructure needs at home while throwing well over half a trillion dollars a year into the black hole of military spending.
I previously mentioned Gabbard’s strong stance on behalf of civil liberties and truth-telling, which includes her outspoken opposition to Julian Assange’s arrest and support for Wikileaks, her introduction of legislation to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine, and her battle against unconstitutional spying on US citizens. She was also the lone member of Congress who expressed dissatisfaction with the impeachment process, calling it partisan and noting that it overlooked far more serious misconduct by Trump than merely pressuring the Ukrainian President to investigate Joe Biden. She also took a strong position on environmental issues, as did Sanders, although neither of them made that as much of a focus in their campaigns as I would have liked to see.
My assessment is similar regarding their positions and focus on electoral reform. Both called for a number of important changes such as ranked choice voting, abolition of the electoral college, same day voter registration, and abolition of superdelegates. However, I don’t think either focused on the problems with our electoral process enough, and they both implicitly encouraged people to retain considerable faith in the electoral system — and in electing Democrats (albeit not by itself) as a means of enacting major reforms.
Nevertheless, there is a significant difference between the two candidates in terms of their degree of willingness to go after the political establishment, especially their own party, and to take a stand that went against the majority in either party— and how that difference has played out. Gabbard went farther than Sanders in challenging problems with the electoral system. She introduced and promoted legislation calling for paper ballots or open-source, auditable voting machines, the Securing America’s Elections Act — legislation that Sanders ignored. Gabbard was also an outspoken critic of DNC election rigging, government interference in the electoral process, and corporate media coverage of the election; Sanders was not, for the most part. In addition, for a Democrat, Tulsi Gabbard has gone pretty hard after capitalist corruption and the imperialist war machine, including within her own party. Sanders, for his part, seldom went after his own party, famously denying that his “good friend” Joe Biden was corrupt and apologizing to Biden for an editorial by Sanders surrogate Zephyr Teachout documenting Biden’s corruption in detail. A particularly striking example of Gabbard’s greater willingness than Sanders to call out the corruption of her own party was a campaign appearance in April 2019, when she had this to say about the rot within her own party:
The most attacks I get are not from Republicans. They are from Democrats. They are from people in the mainstream media. They are from people in the foreign policy establishment . . . People who represent the interests of the military-industrial complex. . . . People will get into a lot of conversations about political tactics and “How do we win this race?” and “Who’s going to beat Donald Trump?” Bluntly, I might get in trouble for saying this. What does it matter if we beat Donald Trump if we end up with someone who will perpetuate the very same crony capitalist policies — corporate policies — and waging more of these costly wars?
This distinction between the two candidates was reflected in terms of differences in the vociferousness with which the ruling class attacked them. Although Bernie Sanders was certainly smeared in a major way by the corporate media, the attacks on him paled in comparison to the hit job on Tulsi Gabbard and the corporate media suppression of her campaign, which began the moment she informally announced her campaign in January 2019 and continued until the moment she announced she was ending her campaign and backing Joe Biden in March 2020 (after which, quite abruptly, the smears mostly ended, and she was actually praised by many in the Democratic establishment). Although undoubtedly there was an all-out effort to prevent Sanders from winning the nomination, the ruling class had no hope of suppressing the popularity of his campaign entirely. His name recognition, popularity, and strong campaign organization and fundraising capacity ensured that he would win a sizable percentage of the vote, no matter how many candidates the DNC threw into the race. Gabbard had none of these advantages, and went hard at the war machine (though, curiously, not at one of its most prominent purveyors, her opponent Joe Biden); thus, the DNC and allied corporate media attempted to squash her campaign from the outset (aided, unfortunately, by some in the independent media and among leftist activists) and prevent it from catching fire.
She fought back valiantly against these smears. When both the New York Times and CNN smeared her during the very week when they were moderating a Presidential debate, she called them out during the debate itself:
[The] New York Times and CNN have also smeared veterans like myself for calling for an end to this regime change war. Just two days ago, the New York Times put out an article saying that I’m a Russian asset and an Assad apologist and all these different smears. This morning a CNN commentator said on national television that I’m an asset of Russia. Completely despicable.
When Hillary Clinton amplified the corporate media attacks on her a couple of days later by smearing her as a “Russian asset” who was being “groomed” to be a third-party candidate, Gabbard fired back on Twitter:
Great! Thank you @HillaryClinton. You, the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long, have finally come out from behind the curtain. From the day I announced my candidacy, there has been a concerted campaign to destroy my reputation. We wondered who was behind it and why. Now we know — it was always you, through your proxies and powerful allies in the corporate media and war machine, afraid of the threat I pose. It’s now clear that this primary is between you and me. Don’t cowardly hide behind your proxies. Join the race directly.
Gabbard later sued Clinton for defamation, stating:
Despite my lifetime of service to our country, Hillary Clinton has essentially tried to portray me as a traitor to our country. If Hillary Clinton and her allies can successfully destroy my reputation — even though I’m a war veteran and a sitting member of Congress — then they can do it to anybody.
Unfortunately for Gabbard, the smear tactics worked to a significant extent. The level of sheer hatred for her and refusal to objectively examine her views and record on the part of even quite progressive denizens of social media was considerable.
As an aside, this was a rather ironic outcome, as one of the defining features of Gabbard’s campaign, and her character, was her spirit of Aloha — an attitude of respect and kindness toward others regardless of their background or political views. As a leftist, on one hand I have to say that the extent to which she believes in and embodies this attitude to some extent blunts the class character of her politics. From the perspective of the philosophy of Aloha, we’re all potentially one big happy family, and the power of love and kindness to overcome the attitudinal gulf that separates those with antithetical class interests is, arguably, overestimated (though, granted, Gabbard often emphasizes that Aloha does not mean weakness). But on the other hand, I have long thought that a major weakness of what passes for the left in this country is precisely a lack of this spirit of Aloha — solidarity, essentially — toward fellow members of the working class who differ in background and attitudes. Thus, despite what from my perspective are considerable political shortcomings of perhaps the most left-leaning member of our current federal legislature, her emphasis on the power and importance of love for our fellow human beings is a valuable contribution to political discourse.
In addition to mounting a successful smear campaign, the DNC was able to prevent Gabbard from appearing in all but one of the debates following her October takedown of the debate hosts, the corporate media kept her out of town halls despite her polling higher than candidates who were invited to them, and she was only rarely interviewed on corporate media outlets other than Fox, so she remained largely unknown among the general public. Thus, her shoestring-budget campaign that depended heavily on volunteers was hamstrung by low numbers of volunteers. And naturally, the DNC appears to have done what it could to rig the vote count in the state she chose to focus her campaign on, New Hampshire. Despite polling in the high single digits in that state leading up to the primary, she received only about 3% of the vote, with the total in parts of the state using electronic voting machines suspiciously lower than that. Gabbard surprised the DNC by doing well in American Samoa, garnering enough votes to gain two delegates and qualifying for the subsequent debate according to the DNC’s rules. This could not be allowed. In short order, the DNC changed the rules so that Gabbard was excluded from the debate.
Recognizing that her campaign, which was never allowed to have a realistic chance of winning, was by then no longer having a significant impact on public discourse — especially in light of the impossibility of in-person campaigning due to the coronavirus — Gabbard ended her campaign in mid-March, and surprised many by promptly endorsing Joe Biden. Like many who had supported much of her campaign’s message, I was angered by her decision to endorse someone whose politics were so antithetical to her own, and to boot was showing significant signs of cognitive decline as well as (at the time) having several credible sexual harassment allegations against him. However, a non-nefarious ulterior motive may have been at play. By endorsing the quintessential establishment candidate, Gabbard refuted once and for all Hillary Clinton’s defamatory allegations, greatly strengthening her defamation case. In the end, she made clear that the fact that she had both been an active member of the Democratic Party and elected official for nearly 20 years and been a soldier in the National Guard for almost that long indeed meant what it on its face appeared to mean — she was loyal to both her country and the Democratic Party. While it was a self-serving move in the sense that it was aimed at preserving her political career within the Democratic Party, her endorsement of Biden also provided one more piece of evidence definitively rebutting Hillary Clinton’s allegations, which could serve to discredit Clinton greatly, and that would not be a bad thing. I will have more to say later about the significance of her continuing loyalty to the Democratic Party despite her critiques.
As discussed earlier, Sanders was, at least rhetorically, the most progressive candidate with a sustained presence in the Democratic primaries other than Gabbard. He deserves credit for emphasizing the extent and injustice of economic inequality in this country, and calling out the corruption of “the billionaire class” that makes it very difficult to change this state of affairs. During one of the last debates of the primary, Sanders railed against “a corrupt political system bought by billionaires like Mr. Bloomberg” (one of his opponents in the race). Sanders also recognizes and to some extent emphasizes that the reforms he advocates cannot be brought about simply by getting himself or other progressive Democrats elected to high office, because vested interests with deep pockets stand in the way:
This is not about Bernie Sanders. You can have the best president in the history of the world but that person will not be able to address the problems that we face unless there is a mass movement, a political revolution in this country. Right now the only pieces of legislation that get to the floor of the House and Senate are sanctioned by big money, Wall Street, the pharmaceutical companies. The only way we win and transform America is when millions of people stand up as you’re doing today and say “Enough is enough.”
But again and again, he pulled his punches against the Democratic establishment, even going so far as to criticize his own campaign surrogate, Zephyr Teachout, for documenting Joe Biden’s long history of corruption — and saying that he wasn’t corrupt! We could see the writing on the wall in 2016, when after running a campaign in which he called out the Democratic establishment to a considerable extent (albeit within limits, such as avoiding foreign policy or Clinton’s “damn emails”), he mostly avoided any discussion of the fact that the primaries had been rigged against him, campaigned all across the country for Hillary Clinton, and then went on a “unity tour” with Clinton Democrat Tom Perez, who defeated Sanders ally Keith Ellison’s bid to replace Debbie Wasserman Schulz as chair of the DNC. (Wasserman Schulz was forced to resign because it was discovered that she was involved in an effort to rig the 2016 primaries on Clinton’s behalf — and was almost immediately appointed to a position in the Clinton campaign. Hmm.)
Sanders ran much of his primary campaign this time as if he were already running a general election campaign against Donald Trump, repeatedly claiming that Trump was “the most dangerous President in modern history,” focusing on Trump’s “racism, sexism, xenophobia, [alleged] homophobia, and religious bigotry.” Meanwhile, Sanders displayed his own xenophobia and implicit racism with his neo-McCarthyist rhetoric about Russia and his contrasting of “good” European “democratic socialist” governments like Sweden with the “bad” “authoritarian” governments of Cuba or Venezuela, where lots of brown people live. He even essentially Russiagated himself when the corporate media and security state accused Russia of helping his campaign (without his knowledge) by agreeing that these baseless claims were credible. And he was kept off the campaign trail for several crucial weeks by the Democratic Party’s futile obsession with impeaching Donald Trump over a phone call to Ukraine that he himself helped fuel.
Most crucially, he did not seem temperamentally suited to do what was necessary to put himself in a position to win a race where the media wasn’t going to do him any favors — “take the gloves off” and directly criticize his opponents’ policies and views or call them out for being “sold out” corporate Democrats. For instance, giving articulate answers to the ubiquitous “How are you going to pay for it?” questions about Medicare For All is all well and good, but he needed to turn the tables and ask his opponents who didn’t support it, “How is it justifiable to leave millions of people uninsured?” or “How is your plan to be so reliant on employer-based health insurance going to work when a major recession hits and many of them are losing their jobs?” At times it was hard to tell that his “good friend” Joe Biden — a characterization of Biden that he repeated over and over — was in fact his chief rival for the Democratic nomination. There were some policy issues, such as Biden’s support for the Iraq War and his calls for cuts in Social Security, where Sanders criticized Biden — though he never pointed out Biden’s leading role in pushing “weapons of mass destruction” lies and promoting the Iraq War. But there were many other issues where Sanders had little to say about Biden’s record. Biden wrote the 1994 Crime Bill that paved the way for the US’s unprecedented level of mass incarceration, but Sanders had little to say about it — perhaps because he voted for it. Several other candidates brought the issue up, but as far as I know, Bernie Sanders did not.
Sanders portrayed Biden as a decent guy who was just mistaken on certain issues, not as the corrupt, warmongering, and mendacious servant of the ruling class that his nearly 50-year political career makes clear that he is — nor did Sanders or any of Biden’s other opponents ever bring up the numerous sexual misconduct allegations against Biden. And despite the many cringeworthy moments during the campaign when Biden could not remember obvious facts such as the name of the President he served under or what office he was running for, could not remember where he was (confusing New Hampshire, an early state he was campaigning in, with Vermont, where he had not been in years), or exhibited major difficulty communicating clearly and coherently, Sanders dismissed any questioning of Biden’s mental fitness for the office of President as “personal attacks.” In fact, Sanders touted Biden’s electability, playing right into the corporate media’s own concerted effort to portray Biden as highly “electable.” He even said he would help Biden win against Trump if Biden were the nominee — while still his political opponent! As comedian and political commentator Jimmy Dore put it, touting Biden’s electability basically amounted to campaigning for Biden. Even members of Sanders’ own campaign staff criticized him for being so unwilling to really go after Biden. Sanders also never criticized the DNC’s election-rigging. Sanders also hired or appointed many corrupt Democratic establishment insiders to high-level positions in his campaign. This happened to an extent in 2016, but went further in 2020, when there were literally people from the quintessentially establishment (and pro-Hillary Clinton) Center for American Progress in the upper echelons of the campaign.
In short, while we may never know for sure how much of the Sanders campaign’s demise was due to the election-rigging along with the propaganda campaign against him, Sanders undermined his own campaign considerably, which cost him any chance he may have had to truly compete for the nomination.
In early April, Sanders ended his campaign and enthusiastically endorsed Biden, calling him “a very decent man.” He also essentially bullied those of his supporters who were resistant to supporting Biden, calling anyone who chose to “sit on their hands” and not vote for Biden “irresponsible.” Note the timing of this: mere weeks earlier, Tara Reade credibly alleged in an interview with Katie Halper on March 24 that this “very decent man,” Sanders’ “good friend,” had raped her in 1993. Sanders — like every other prominent Democrat — remained silent about the allegation until he was asked about it, in an interview with CBS This Morning on April 16. His response to a question about whether he agreed with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (who also remained silent until asked by a reporter) that it was legitimate and relevant to talk about the allegations was:
I think it’s relevant to talk about anything. And I think any woman who feels that she was assaulted has every right in the world to stand up and make her claims. . . . I think that she has the right to make her claims and get a public hearing, and the public will make their own conclusions about it. I just don’t know enough about it to comment further.
You tell me, readers, do you think maybe Bernie Sanders has a responsibility to know enough about a rape allegation against the man he had just called a “very decent man” a few days prior, when surely he had heard of the allegation by then, to comment on it? Sanders has had nothing further to say, as of three weeks after this interview, despite abundant corroborating evidence that has emerged since then, as well as additional allegations and of course the eight others from April 2019 that he’s never commented on. Of course, in the grand scheme of things, the abundant evidence of Biden’s horrible treatment of women is “just” the icing on the cake, the cake being the fact that he has been a key player in inflicting the most ruthless, violent, and destructive policies of any capitalist class in the world on Americans and foreigners alike for far longer than any other politician alive in America today. Of course, this is not to minimize what a piece of shit Joe Biden is for having serially harassed and groped women and girls for decades, and in the view of sexual violence expert Anthony Zenkus definitely raped Tara Reade, it is just to point out that any objective evaluation of his record by anyone who cared about justice would reach that conclusion even without knowing anything about his sexual misconduct. And this is who you call a “very decent man,” Bernie? This man who called arch-segregationist far-right Republican Strom Thurmond “one of my closest friends” and delivered a eulogy at his funeral, not to mention collaborated with him in pursuing segegationist policies, is your good friend? A man who destroyed the reputation of the truck driver involved in an accident that killed his wife and one of his sons by falsely claiming that the driver was drunk, when an investigation showed that not only was the truck driver not drunk, but his wife had run a stop sign, is who you think of as a “very decent man”? One of the most right-wing, war-happy Democratic politicians in the last half century is “a decent man” who you will happily campaign for — whereas you call your supporters who refuse to support someone like this “irresponsible”?
Democrats Remind Us Why They’re The Graveyard of Social Movements
Sanders, however, is not an exception to the rule among progressive Democrats. In the end, every left-leaning Democrat who ever runs for President — except for George McGovern, who won the nomination in 1972 — winds up backing the establishment candidate. Jesse Jackson did in 1984 and 1988, Dennis Kucinich did in 2004, Bernie Sanders not only endorsed, but vigorously campaigned, for Hillary Clinton in 2016, and every other Democrat who was in the race in 2020, including Sanders and Gabbard, has endorsed Joe Biden this time, not only ignoring the right-wing character of his record and the prior sexual harassment allegations, but maintaining radio silence about the rape allegation unless directly asked. And when asked, the response of almost every prominent Democratic politician has been to side with Biden. Senator Elizabeth Warren, a vocal opponent of Brett Kavanaugh, the Supreme Court judge who was accused of attempted rape during his Senate confirmation hearing as well as a persistent critic of billionaire Michael Bloomberg over his record of sexual harassment, said she believed Biden and continued to support him when asked about Reade’s allegation — implying, of course, that she disbelieved Tara Reade. Likewise, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who branded herself the “MeToo” candidate and led the charge to oust Senator Al Franken over sexual harassment allegations two years ago and was likewise a very vocal critic of Brett Kavanaugh, said she believed Biden and continued to support him. Senator Dianne Feinstein, another Senator who led the charge against the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh, weighed in with a typical rape apologist comment regarding Reade’s allegation: “Where has she been all these years?”
In short, not only has the candidate with the strongest anti-war reputation endorsed a warmonger, and not only has the candidate best-known as a champion of the 99% and of Medicare For All endorsed a champion of the 1% who said, in the middle of the current pandemic, that as President he would veto Medicare For All if it came across his desk, but #MeToo has been thrown under the bus by the entire party that supported it for the sake of political expediency. Literally not one prominent Democratic elected official in the entire country has, as of the time I write this, expressed support for Tara Reade, and only a handful spoke up when other allegations were made against him last year. The contrast with how sexual misconduct allegations against Donald Trump in 2016 and Brett Kavanaugh in 2018 were responded to by Democratic politicians could not be more stark. And given the extent to which many Democratic politicians have to a significant extent staked their reputations on support for women, there’s nothing quite like the current thorough commitment of the Democratic establishment to pushing Joe Biden’s nomination despite the allegations against him — not to mention their likewise sweeping the right-wing character of Biden’s political record under the rug — for illustrating what a political dead end working for change within the Democratic Party really is.
Granted, Sanders’ and Gabbard’s campaigns have positively impacted political discourse in some ways. I think Gabbard and Sanders generally have good intentions, and have been strong voices for justice on many issues. But we should not be afraid to be brutally honest about progressive/social democratic politicians’ shortcomings and, even more important, the shortcomings of the institution within which they operate, the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party as an institution is loyal first and foremost to the ruling class. And what that implies is that the Democratic Party cannot and will not hold powerful members like Joe Biden accountable for their harmful actions, whatever they may be. This applies to both the party as an institution and to every individual of note within it, whether they be Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Tulsi Gabbard, Kirsten Gillibrand, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — whoever they are, in the end they won’t do it, not without a large amount of public pressure to do the right thing.
Escaping the Graveyard
So, where does that leave us, grassroots fighters for a peaceful and just world, who are not leading members of the corrupt and malevolent institution known as the Democratic Party? “What is to be done?” as Lenin asked. Well, first of all, we need to do what we can ourselves to hold politicians who do great harm accountable for the harm they do, regardless of political party. We must loudly call out their actions, and make clear that we will not vote for them. Promising our votes to politicians who have made clear that they completely reject our principles signals that we don’t take our principles seriously. At the risk of sounding like a self-help guru, we need to recognize the power of saying “no.”
Even though third parties in the United States have rarely been very successful electorally, there is ample precedent for social movements having an impact by saying “No!” to candidates who support the harmful policies they oppose, including through supporting third parties. In the mid-1800s, activists in the abolitionist movement (those who had the right to vote) withheld their votes from any candidate who in any way supported slavery. As Keith Rosenthal and Alan Maas put it, “the abolition of slavery . . . was arguably the single-most significant social advance in U.S. history — and it was catalyzed in part by third-party initiatives.” The “reasonable,” “liberal” view at the time was that the Whig Party and its 1844 Presidential candidate, Henry Clay, constituted the “lesser evil” regarding the issue of slavery because they argued that whether or not slavery should be legal in newly admitted states should be left up to a vote in those states. Thus, liberals advocated a vote for Clay.
The predominant position among antislavery activists, on the other hand, was that slavery opponents should not vote at all. And, rather than voting for Clay, the rest voted for James Birney, the Presidential candidate of the abolitionist Liberty Party. Even though Clay supporters blamed Birney for Clay’s loss to fellow slavery supporter Andrew Jackson, we know the rest of the story: The abolitionist movement grew by leaps and bounds, the quasi-anti-slavery Republican Party was formed and the Whigs disappeared, and, unfortunately after a very bloody civil war, slavery was abolished in 1865. You know what didn’t contribute to abolishing slavery? Voting for Whigs.
There are many other historical examples of the power of saying “no,” such as when antiwar activists said “no” to LBJ in 1968, forcing Johnson out of the race and forcing the Democrats to rig their convention. Of course, it is
equally important in challenging injustices of any sort to explicitly and publicly refuse to acquiesce in them. The oppressive and cruel practice of binding women’s feet lasted for over a thousand years because it was just “the way things are.” It was only when Chinese opponents of foot-binding not only said “no” (very publicly) to imposing the practice on their own daughters, but also said “no” to any of their sons marrying into a family that supported foot-binding, that it ended — in only 30 years, about the same amount of time that it took American abolitionists who refused to accept slavery as a norm to end chattel slavery.
In the context of American electoral politics, failure to say “no” to the Democratic Party means living a lie; it means saying “the emperor has clothes” when he has none. That is the inevitable result of commitment to supporting the “lesser evil” it represents. I have seen so many ordinary people I know follow in the footsteps of their counterparts in the upper echelons of the Democratic Party and minimize or ignore the harmful policies and conduct of politicians they have committed themselves to voting for and supporting. Just yesterday, a friend insisted — one-upping an acquaintance I quoted who said Joe Biden was “a thousand times better than Trump” — that Biden was “ten thousand times better” than Trump. Commitment to “lesser evils,” whether their name is Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton or even Bernie Sanders, almost invariably warps people’s views. The only way to free our minds to be willing to take in the full truth about the Democratic Party’s inherent corruption and commitment to defending the ruling class at all costs is to free ourselves from any commitment to the Democratic Party or any of its political representatives. Working people must organize and build parties and other working class institutions of their own.
Breaking free of the capitalist parties is a necessary but not sufficient condition for winning the battle for social justice and, ultimately, a society organized around meeting human needs and not the pursuit of profits. We, the discontented masses in this country, must express our discontent with the status quo — say “no” to it — in ways that disrupt it. Historical examples of the power of disruption abound. The civil rights movement disrupted segregation in highly visible ways, such as black people sitting in at segregated lunch counters or refusing to sit in the back of segregated buses. Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison burned the US Constitution in public to express his revulsion at the institutionalized enslavement of human beings. Emmeline Pankhurst smashed the windows of Parliament and disrupted its proceedings to show that a system that would not allow women to vote was inherently unjust. Rioting gay and lesbian patrons battled police at the Stonewall Inn in New York to show that shunning people for being gay was unacceptable. Workers occupied factories throughout the Midwest during the Great Depression, shutting down production and forcing corporations and politicians to grant basic labor rights.
Disrupting “business as usual” is “rude, brazen, confrontational, and downright dangerous.” People will yell all sorts of insults, such as “go live in Russia,” when you do so. They may spit on you, pour drinks on your head (as happened at the lunch counter sit-ins), and physically attack you. Opinion polls may suggest that large numbers of people hate you. Cops may beat you up, teargas you, or throw you in jail on spurious charges. Even people who ought to be on your side, such as the black waitress who told the Greensboro sit-in protesters that they were making black people look bad, will disapprove of your “rude” and “counterproductive” behavior. But disruptive tactics work, for several reasons. First, disruption dramatizes the issue and forces attention to it. When the status quo is quietly accepted, or challenged in a less visible way such as a letter to the editor, its injustice can be ignored. In contrast, when the message of a disruption “goes viral,” it puts the issue on the table of public discussion, and can inspire other activists to replicate the feat — particularly if there are organizations on the ground, as was the case during the civil rights movement. Second, disruption — saying a firm “no” to an injustice despite risk of public opprobrium, harassment, or even violence — provides evidence of determination. Third, and relatedly, our influence on others is greater when we adhere to a position consistently — social psychological research even shows that a minority of people can often convince a majority that something that’s blue is really green — as long as they adhere to their position consistently. None of this “I won’t vote for a slaveowner, or a warmonger, or a rapist, unless I live in a swing state; then I’ll vote for him, because we must stop the greater evil.” Nope; “no means no!” Not in the house; not with a mouse; not on a boat; not with a goat; not in a “safe state”; not in a “swing state.” “I do not like slaveowners, warmongers, neoliberals, rapists, or green eggs and ham; I do not like them, Sam I am.” Finally, disruption obstructs “business as usual.” Shutting down factories disrupts production; shutting down highways or mass transit disrupts going to and from workplaces. In other words, it is an exercise of power.
And that is the crux of the matter. The powerful elites in our country and elsewhere in the world have their own interests, which are not ours. We can write all the letters to the editor or to our Congressperson we want; we can vote all we want for politicians who do not support the things we want, only support a pale imitation, or merely give lip service to them but won’t fight for them; but unless we build and exercise power of our own, we will not win. Frederick Douglass put it well: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will.” We cannot channel demands through voting for candidates in corrupt political parties, which makes them requests. It is in other venues, in the workplace and in the streets, as well as, to an extent, an organized “no” vote to the candidates of the two corporate parties, that the true potential for exercising power lies. As historian Howard Zinn put it, “It is not who is sitting in the White House that matters, but who is sitting in.”
Jeff Melton is a social psychologist, copy editor (oceaneditors.com), writer, and longtime activist on a plethora of social justice issues. If you like what you’re reading here, please consider supporting my work on Patreon so that I can do more of this. Even $1 will help!
