The Road to Victory

I am putting this essay out before polls close on this mini-Super Tuesday. And while I’m hoping Bernie will ‘do’ this thing, I’m thinking he probably will not catch Biden.

I know that there are some progressives out there who will be wanting to fall on their swords if Biden bests our man, but I would caution against such behavior. Whether Bernie wins or loses the nomination, the real battle has yet to begin.

And no, I am not speaking of the race against Trump.

I am speaking of the Democratic Party Program. I am speaking of the DP’s election materials and its election strategy. Fundamentally, I am talking about how we, in the US, understand political change.

HRC won the nomination in 2016. Personally, I considered that an unfortunate event — particularly given the undemocratic tendencies the Primary had brought to the fore. Trump did not win because HRC was the nominee. The Democrats lost because they did not play to their own strengths.

Let us remember the compromise that avoided a split at the Philadelphia Convention: Sanders backed Clinton and, in exchange, Clinton’s delegates backed Sanders’ program, which thus became the Program of the Democratic Party.

What did that Program contain? A Federal Minimum Wage of $15/hr. An expansion of Union rights. A national jobs program. Free college tuition and student debt relief. An expansion of Medicare. It was an historic program. And my own experience knocking on the doors of thousands of white contractors in the Philadelphia suburbs — bricklayers, carpenters, general contractors, electricians, even cops — showed me that a campaign focused on that Program was a winning campaign.

It is not that people in this and other demographics detested HRC any less. It’s that they recognized that the Program met many of their needs. And they could not help but acknowledge that, yes, we had a better chance of winning those things by voting for the person who ‘officially’ backed them than by voting for the guy who was running against her.

There was only one, very unfortunate, flaw with my approach: I was alone in advocating for it. That is not to say that there weren’t other smart people out there doing what I was doing, but we were not running our campaigns, we were band-aiding them. The literature we were given (I was working for Working America), the training techniques our coworkers underwent, the media ads — everything emphasized HRC’s ‘trustworthiness’ and her winning personality, which were the last thing many, many people wanted to see. People wanted change, they wanted real, concrete, novel proposals to deal with the unprecedented crisis that is this country. They ‘wanted’ the Program. But that Program — the Program we could have mobilized people around — was nowhere to be seen.

Partly, this situation was a reflection of the political culture of this country, where elections are not about programs and principles but faces and sympathies: we are not used to an appeal based on societal needs and social forces.

Part of it, though, was the revulsion a large swath of the DP leadership felt toward those proposals.

Why? What is it about these proposals that they detested so much that they were willing to risk a Trump victory rather than fully mobilize the ‘masses’?

That is it in a nutshell: they fear that the masses, once mobilized, once united, will get serious about ‘reform’. The reforms Sanders is talking about will hurt, for Corporate America. They’ll have to pay a lot more taxes — maybe as much as they paid under that arch-Republican, Dwight Eisenhower. They’ll have to deal with strict Federal standards and regulations. They’ll have to accept that their work forces have RIGHTS — rights those workers’ll be able to back up with their newly won, Federally-backed unions. And maybe, just maybe, they’ll want to go further. Maybe folks’ll even get the idea tbat life would be better without capitalism at all.

This is where the Clintonite strategy comes from — ‘Clintonite’ because it was developed under Bill Clinton and has been applied ever since. The cardinal rules of this strategy are three: 1. throw the working classes under the bus because, after all, who else are you going to vote for? 2. throw Black folk under the bus because, after all, who are you going to vote for and 3. eek out a margin of victory by bringing over enough Republican voters to move the needle your way.

If those of you who follow CNN and NPR have wondered why these two news outlets have spent the last four years obsessing over Russia, this is it: they are hoping to make a ‘democratic’ pitch to moderate Republicans. Such a pitch would allow them (and the DP) to avoid talking about the broken economics of this country (and I am sure I am not the only one who has wondered at NPR’s recent efforts to woo Republican viewers).

Sure, I understand that ‘Old Joe’ is out there talking about how much he is going to do for workers but LOOK AT HIS PROGRAM.

‘Well,’ some of you will say, ‘at least he’s the best candidate to beat Trump.’

I wish I could say that. Good polling shows that that is not the case. Past experience shows that, without a strong anti-Corporate program, the Democrats will not get enough votes to push past decades of GOP gerrymandering.

But what if he does it? What if we all push hard and Ole Joe gets in?

Trump, as we know, is a symptom of a broken society. If the society is not fixed, the Trumps will not go away. They will get stronger. The less seriously the Democrats take the structural brokenness of this country, the angrier, more disillusioned and desperate people will get.

‘But we’ve fixed things other times,’ someone will say. ‘There was the New Deal. There was Eisenhower. There was Civil Rights.’

Civil Rights ended because Black folk tried the Impermissible: under King’s leadership, the Black community tried to forge an alliance with the white working class to go beyond political rights and to fight for deep-seated economic change.

All the alliances of the past — including, to an extent, the New Deal, but especially following McCarthyism — were rooted in the idea that foreign countries, run by colonialist regimes, would be an endless supply of raw materials and cheap labor. Capital would gaurantee the ‘middle class’ lifestyle; the working class would gaurantee the muscle to make the system work. In the 1950s, when folks overseas got the ‘wrong’ idea, we set ’em straight.

We all can see that that doesn’t really work anymore. We’ve been in Afghanistan nearly two decades, with nothing to show for it but mountains of dead. On our Southern border, the refugees of decades of ‘successful’ policies in Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua are daily news makers. Our little fight with China has the entire Midwest on permanent government subsidies.

This is where it gets sticky for the super-rich. There is no good strategy of social alliances to be had. There is no money for a new ‘New Deal’. Their best strategy right now is to buy time, to stave off the Bernies of our society, until a better idea comes along. This is why, after a full-court press only a few months ago of ‘anyone but Biden,’ NPR and CNN have come full circle to ‘stop Sanders.’

Finally, to those who say, ‘I told you so — to hell with the Democrats,’ I say: not so fast. There is no social alliance that works on the Corporate Democrats’ terms but there is a viable option on the Sanders front: the Labor-Black Alliance.

Within this country’s Black communities, it is the new guard that supports Sanders. As we all saw in Nevada, whole sections of leadership in Labor are out of touch with conditions on the ground. These social realities will not go away simply because Joe Biden, to the relief of Corporate America, wins the Democratic nomination. They will go away if a hunk of the Sanders front self-destructs his coalition.

The important thing now is what has always been important: to push a new way of living politics. The Sanders campaign, even in its support for Biden’s candidacy, must break new ground, and it must do so as a group, as an organization. At the Convention, the Program must be front and center. After, the message that must be front and center, in every piece of campaign literature, with every door knock, is that the terrain of struggle is more favorable with Biden in office than with Trump. The Presidential campaign becomes the next terrain to build the Alternative, from the inside out.

Neither the Trumpites nor the Clintonites must be allowed to forget: the Sanders campaign are water-carriers for no one.

To paraphrase what Denzell Washington’s character said to his commander in ‘Glory,’ we may be in the same war, fighting the same enemy, but we are not fighting for the same thing.