21.04.2016

Don’t support Clinton

Sanders should build on what has been achieved by standing as an independent, urges Tom Munday

Oh, The Guardian must be pleased. After months of bettering all initial expectations, the Bernie Sanders campaign for the Democratic nomination may finally have run aground. The New York primary was always a must-win for the Vermont senator and, with its 250 or so delegates, one of the most significant prizes he needed to bag in order to keep his presidential hopes alive, but it was taken by Hillary Clinton by 58% to 42%.

Contrary to the smug assertions of the bourgeois press, Sanders’ game had, until this point, been almost impeccable. Not necessarily in the sense that he had been scoring goliath-felling victories, but rather that, so far, proceedings had been unfolding almost entirely in accordance with his campaign’s predictions (with some helpful upsets in his favour along the way).

Where capitalist cheerleaders had screamed that the septuagenarian should drop out after each Clinton win, the truth had been that the consistent accuracy of long-term polling trends (showing that Sanders was closing the gaps in each primary) meant that his campaign was pre-emptively prepared for every one of them. Clinton’s victories were consistently in states where she held unassailable leads (for fairly obvious reasons - they were the most conservative states) right up until the votes were cast. Taking the Super Tuesday result as indicative, you could easily see that, whilst Clinton took eight of the 12 primaries on offer, of the four where polling was inconclusive (ie, where Clinton was not already polling well ahead), Sanders had stormed to double-digit wins in three of them.

Although obviously Clinton’s wins by default still counted, the results pointed to an underlying dynamic that ultimately favoured Sanders - Clinton scoring big in conservative primaries, but struggling in ‘left’ and swing states. Undoubtedly too they realised that the absurdly drawn-out electoral process was playing into her hands - giving her the early veneer of success that she needed to avoid a full-on panic. The Sanders camp, on the other hand, always knew they had to sit quietly and wait for the ‘red states’ to be called before they could fully commit to the counteroffensive. Though New York, where Clinton had been a senator, was always going to be a gamble, it was one of the key places where that counteroffensive was going to have to bear fruit. Ultimately - and at 16% down, rather decisively - it has failed to do that.

The question that now presents itself is ‘Where next?’ True, Sanders can carry on - the actual delegate difference from New York was 31 and nationally is 241.¹ In spite of the outright lies which many pro-establishment outlets have now resorted to, victory is still within the bounds of mathematical possibility (although highly unlikely). There are around 1,646 delegates yet to be allocated, and the 540 votes of the wildly anti-democratic super-delegates (as yet officially uncast) would still be enough to sway it in Sanders’ favour - although that would, of course, necessitate them all going temporarily insane.

Alternatively Sanders can drop out now (or later) and run as an independent. This certainly would allow him the luxury of gambolling around the byzantine structures of the Democratic Party (structures often deliberately designed to hobble the ‘radicals’ and ‘outsiders’ of his kind). The downside, at least if you’re a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat, is that this will inevitably impact on the electoral chances of Clinton (who, lest we forget, has only been leading Trump by a fairly modest (considering the candidates) margin since the beginning of March - and the gap is now narrowing).² The benefit then of not being a Democrat is that you can now full-throatedly call for exactly this.

Critical support

Contrary to the assertion of various critics, we understand that supporting Sanders is a question of tactics, not principle. In our earliest piece on his meteoric rise we pointed out that the reason we should muster a little enthusiasm for the man was because he represented a potentially fundamental shift in US politics. For the first time in many decades a self-professed “socialist” was batting in the big leagues (and this week he has taken 42% of the Democrat vote in the metropolitan heart of global capitalism). By engaging with his campaign, communists would be able to put forward a programme for real socialism. The fact that Sanders was attempting to win the nomination of a bourgeois party does not rule out critical support. When it comes to tactics, whatever advances the cause of the working class is permissible.

We need not bother ourselves with the prospect of him actually winning the Democrat nomination (we are not the official Communist Party USA, which farcically ignored all the polling that was giving Sanders a much better chance against Trump,³ and called for their members to back Hillary to keep out a racist ... first Clinton, then us, comrades!). The thrill here was in the chase not the kill.⁴ The act of supporting Sanders, precisely becauseit gave the left such an opportunity to put forward its own ideas, was in itself a purposeful and worthy thing. It had nothing to do with some Machiavellian opportunism - there was no call to set aside disagreements, no facetious appeal to some common good that ought not be questioned.

It was/is simply a recognition of the fact that if Sanders was going to bring formerly banished words, phrases and ideas back into the daylight, then here was a politician at least creating the space for arguments of our type to be heard (and, for the CPUSAers out there, Hillary Clinton, who barely stopped short of calling Barack Obama a mega-softie for not dropping more bombs on Syria, is most assuredly going to move the spectrum to the right).⁵ Irrespective of his intentions, Sanders is helping to create a movement and making waves in American politics in a way that nobody else has in living memory.

Take this Twitter exchange:

Bhaskar Sunkara @sunraysunray): You know Bernie Sanders is a social democrat because we haven’t had a show trial for Jeff Weaver yet.

Jim Marchwinski
(@jjmjdesq):@sunraysunray
Democratic Socialist, asshole.⁶

For those of you out of the know, Sunkara is editor of Jacobin magazine. The guy has earned his leftwing chops - the joke proves it. And now the comrade has amassed such a following and recognition in the wake of the Sanders campaign that he has to deal with random stab-in-the-dark abuse from angry knuckle-draggers like Marchwinski. The difference illustrated here is that, where six to 12 months ago that abuse would have likely hammered him for being a pinko-soviet (or worse), it now comes from confused and disgruntled and (most importantly) freshly-minted lefts. While that is not much (and perhaps Marchwinski is not a great salesman for our movement), it certainly seems that a new dawn is upon us when grumpy, ill-informed mouth-breathers start getting angsty about the apparent besmirchment of their hero’s socialist credentials.

Sanders has brought more potential recruits into the American movement than ever before. And if sharing a spittle-flecked twitter-feed with an army of such people sounds unappealing, it is worth considering this serious point: there are a whole lot of Jim Marchwinskis out there amongst the working class - those recently politically activated workers now trying to find their feet and their identity, defending what they know passionately and aggressively. For those of us who follow the small section of the press which is pro-Sanders, we can see a parallel (and perhaps more intellectually reassuring) change occurring: voices which once described themselves as ‘very liberal’, or ‘extremely progressive’, or just ‘radical’, or even none-of-the-above, are coming round to embracing a new lexicon, where they begin to feel comfortable describing themselves as ‘socialist’. Maybe they hastily prefix it with ‘democratic’, so as not to sound like a filthy commie, but at the very least they no longer find their political vocabularies impaired by a toxicity of association (and it is no coincidence that so many of Sanders’ supporters were born immediately before or after 1989).

All this represents a small step, of course, but an eminently necessary one nonetheless - a fact that those comrades who think of our support as a betrayal are entirely incapable of appreciating. Those comrades seem to assume that class-consciousness will fall upon the workers like manna from heaven - that suddenly, in spite of years of being conditioned to see red and think gulags, something will twig and that’ll be it: the revolution will be in the bag by teatime. The real world ain’t so, comrades - there is a ladder to the top, and a lot of rungs to pass on the way up. One of those rungs is getting people to actually talk in our language, to be open and amenable to our ideas.

As much as you do not achieve this with that weird coyness of a Syriza or Podemos (ejecting our hard-won vocabulary and a pandering to a paranoid phobia about ‘dead Russians’), you equally do not do so by surrounding yourself in a tiny halo of Marxist purity. Make no mistake - Left Unity or Tusc can give me a room full of well-meaning, ex-Greens, but it is those Jim Marchwinskis - angry and confused and full of latent potential - those vast, presently unactivated (or recently activated) swathes of the working class, that in the end will win us the day. Sanders, for all his faults, has and is delivering such people in spades.

@Tommundaycs

Notes

1. www.democraticconventionwatch.com/diary/4795.

2. www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/us/general_election_trump_vs_clinton-5491.html.

3. www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/us/general_election_trump_vs_sanders-5565.html.

4. www.cpusa.org/taking-a-sober-look-at-the-2016-election.

5. www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/hillary-clinton-iran-foreign-policy_us_55f05c2ae4b002d5c07786b2.

6. https://twitter.com/jjmjdesq/status/722629835571376129.