What Bernie Sanders has accomplished
Pundits and mainstream media have largely ignored or discounted the Bernie Sanders campaign, happily declaring it over with every setback. And yet, even if well behind in delegates, Sanders keeps on trucking. Too little attention has been paid to what this exceptional campaign will have accomplished — win or lose.
Sanders has already shown us that politics can be done differently. He has collected more money from small individual contributions than anyone before. He is not beholden to big-money donors. He has reached people who have given up on traditional politics getting overwhelming support from young voters.
He has reframed the political debate, making the issues of inequality and power the centrepiece of his campaign, unapologetically and with no euphemisms. And he has found a way to talk about why they matter that is clearly resonating.
These are difficult issues that can seem abstract, remote but Sanders links them to people’s everyday concerns — unemployment and precarious work, health and safe drinking water, student and household debt, incarceration and access to justice. Sanders is helping people make the connection between their private troubles and public issues. He also draws on shared values that transcend left and right showing how extreme economic inequality undermines equality of opportunity; how the concentration of power undermines democracy; and how, together, they make impossible a just and sustainable economy and inclusive society.
Sanders hasn’t accepted the conventional terms of debate. He has not responded to anti-government rhetoric with a defence of government as it is. He is critical of corporate influence and of how government fails those who need it most. He has avoided the useless small government/big government debate — after all, nobody is arguing for bigger government for its own sake — but rather asks how to ensure that government serves the many rather than the powerful few. His platform defies political orthodoxy.
He has said an unqualified “no” to fracking and to fossil-fuel subsidies and “yes” to carbon taxes without the requisite promise of revenue neutrality. He has opposed the Trans-Pacific trade pact despite his president’s position. He has been clear that his ambitious proposals — on infrastructure, combating climate change, universal access to health care and education — will require new taxes, for example on financial transactions, and higher taxes, yes on the rich and corporations, but also on the middle class. He makes the case that, for the vast majority, the value of the public services they receive will far outweigh what they pay in higher taxes. Most of this was supposed to have been political suicide but just this week he won his 10th and 11th state primaries.
Put aside for a moment whether one agrees with every plank. Taken together and especially in the U.S. context, this platform explodes conventional thinking. Sanders is redefining what’s politically possible.
Of course it’s hard to defy conventional wisdom and challenge vested interests, but Sanders is giving us some clues about what it takes: Repetition. Steadfastness and fearlessness in the face of inevitable backlash. Don’t accept the prevailing political language, change it; rather than run from knee-jerk “accusations” of “socialist,” he has embraced the word, disarming or at least confounding his critics. Rather than rushing to find the so-called centre, he has sought to redefine it.
Most important, he has shown the need for democratic engagement. Sanders has mobilized diverse local and national movements, depending on them for grassroots organizing while helping them to link to one another and to the political process. He has tapped into a combination of anger and aspiration engaging the detached and disaffected. He has made his campaign about the movement, recognizing that it must grow and persist beyond this election, beyond this candidate. This, he argues, is essential, not only to win, but to change the conversation, defy the cynics and achieve real change.
For decades the political consensus could be captured as “we are all fiscal conservatives and free traders now.” The central issue was how to grow the economy, the answer invariably found in some mix of lower taxes, austerity and “trade deals” focused increasingly on protecting owners and investors. All politics lived more or less in that frame.
Since 2008, however, we have been watching this consensus unravel. In the interregnum, we have seen the spread of authoritarian and nativist parties in Europe and, now, the terrifying rise of Donald Trump in the U.S. We ought to be grateful that Sanders has put enriched democracy at the heart of his agenda, and has expanded the political imagination, opening up debates we need no less in Canada about how we might, together, build a more just, equal and sustainable future.