If the Democratic Party establishment cared as much about crushing the left in their own party as they did about beating the MAGA movement, Trump would not be returning to the White House. Instead, because of his landslide victory, he either has an overwhelming mandate for authoritarianism, fanatical puritanism, and nationalism, or has completely rebuked the Neoliberalism orthodoxy that has defined the Democratic Party for the past three decades.
The sort of good news is I believe it is more the latter than the former, though the Democratic Party establishment (which includes their media surrogates) do not, as a whole, perceive it this way. They were and are likely to remain committed to not learning any lessons from the past three presidential elections.
This tragic story in some respects begins in the 90s when the Democratic Party fully transformed from the party of New Deal-liberalism to Reagan and Thatcher-era neoliberalism.
But I’d like to focus on some more recent history. In 2015 when Bernie Sanders mounted a surprisingly left populist insurgency campaign in the Democratic primary race for their 2016 presidential nominee. He just might have won if the party-machine had not pulled every dirty trick it could to ensure Hilary Clinton’s victory.
Meanwhile, and ironically, given his authoritarianism, the Republican primary that year was more democratic than the Democratic one. They played fair and Trump won, easily—and in part, because he spoke, like Bernie, to the economic needs of those left behind by neoliberalism (though this was of course a grift on Trump’s part) and (also like Bernie) he rejected the neoconservative orthodoxy of endless wars of the Republican party that had become unpopular with the GOP base. Remember “low energy-Jeb (Bush)?” I hardly do either.
Fast-forward four years, to the 2019-2020 Democratic Primary. Democrat Party amnesia caused them to be shocked that after the first few primary races that a Bernie Sanders victory looked like an inevitably. The Democratic party establishment jumped into action again: convincing most other contenders to drop out and endorse Biden—putting all the party’s weight behind Biden despite him being a deeply flawed candidate already, clearly (for those who wished to see it) in cognitive decline. It was once again the Democratic establishment Goliath versus Bernie’s underdog, grassroots coalition. And again, he only narrowly lost.
Biden, compared at least, to Clinton, was, for a mainstream Democrat, fairly pro-labor. But he damaged what tepid support he had from progressives when his administration (that of course Kamala Harris was a part of) manufactured an end to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, which allowed him to end the official public health emergency and “wind-down” a safety-net of the likes not seen since the New Deal.
Once the emergency phase was over, among other blows to low income folks, was that millions of them were kicked off Medicaid, finding themselves rather abruptly without health insurance. But for a brief time—though not as progressive—the crisis caused Biden to act in a Bernie Sanders-esque (or Bernie-light) way, however temporarily. As The New Yorker put it (not the most progressive of publications): “Reality has endorsed Bernie Sanders.” The manufactured reality of a post-Covid America allowed the Biden administration to return to status quo neoliberal politics. He did however also reject neo-conservativism and pulled the U.S. out of Afghanistan—finally. But, of course, he squandered the credit that that gave him with anti-war progressives by providing unconditional military support to conduct the ongoing genocide in Gaza. More importantly, Arab and Muslim Americans likely to vote Democrat threatened, understandably, to withhold their vote.
Kamala Harris, throughout her campaign, gave every indication she would continue to fund genocide. This isn’t the main reason she lost (though it should be), but it was a factor. In fact, she not only pledged U.S. backing of Israel war criminality, but offered something worse. She embraced the support of neocons—most notably one of the most unpopular figures in recent American politics Dick Cheney. Bragging about his support, particularly in light of the election outcome, seems more like parody than electoral strategy. Harris campaigned with neocon (and daughter of Dick Cheney) Liz Cheney on several occasions. And Harris did not appear once at a rally with a Palestinian, nor was Bernie Sanders invited to speak at her rallies.
As a relevant side-note, Bernie, in an election where Dems lost much ground in congress, won his senate seat in a blow-out as did Palestinian-American progressive Rashid Tlaib (in easily holding on to her congressional seat)—who refused to endorse Harris because of the genocide in Gaza.
Harris’s clear intention to keep funding Israel’s genocide in Gaza, as well as declaring Iran (not Russia or China) to be the biggest security threat to United States, thrilled neocons. Prominent neocon media personality Bill Kristol tweeted (riffing off Richard Nixon) just before the election “we are all neocons now.” One major problem, strategically speaking, is there was no neocon constituency—as Trump already proved in 2016. Harris was pleasing only a bunch a warmongering politicians and media elites (and Zionists are not a formidable voting block—particularly as the majority residing of Zionist Jewish people live in blue states in any case—not to mention a not insignificant number of Jews, like me, are anti-Zionist).
This loss is definitely not entirely on Harris’s shoulder. Being selected, or rather installed, so late in the race, gave her little time to distance herself from Biden’s deeply unpopular presidency. The party that constantly tells you how concerned they are about democracy should have held an open primary and let the voters decide. But at least part of the reason they did not do this, I believe, was out of fear, should a more progressive Democrat seek the presidency, of losing their neoliberal stranglehold of the party As I said earlier, they cared more about retaining corporate-backed control of their party than beating Trump.
Thought experiment: it’s 2021. The Democratic party has not spent so much of its energy and money on ensuring Bernie Sander losses as it has before. They had a fair-ish primary instead and on January 20th Bernie is inaugurated as the 46th president of the United States. Like Biden he has sweeping powers because of the COVID-19 crisis. He also does not stand for his agenda being throated or watered down, as Biden did, by conservative Democratics Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema. Rather Sanders asserts pressure on them to vote for his agenda—he promises to put the full force of his presidency behind progressives primary challengers. They get in line. Americans soon have Medicare for all—Bernie Sander’s popular signature policy that every contending Democrat in the 2019-2020 primary race, including Harris, ran on some version of. The only one who didn’t: Joe Biden (Harris in this most recent presidential contest, also did not support Medicare for all). Thousands of COVID-19 deaths are prevented because of access to healthcare for everyone. Additionally, because Bernie, over the last couple of years, took the pandemic more seriously than probably any other elected official, he ensures the necessary spending to help the millions of Americans debilitated by Long-Covid. That seems almost certain given his “moon-shot” (for research and treatment) proposal. That would have earned him support from an overlooked constituency—Sick and disabled voters.
Nor would Bernie be scared of being called a socialist, he “fixes” prices to fight inflation (arguably the issue that hurt the Dems the most in this election). Something Biden didn’t do and Harris did not do a good enough job in laying out how she would stop “price gouging” nor that she was all that invested in the problem. In terms of the economy, Bernie’s rhetoric would sound more like Trump’s (without the racism, sexism, trans-phobia, and xenophobia, of course). Unlike Trump, Bernie would actually deliver.
And while Bernie was admittedly not as early as he should have been on this, he called for and put forth a bill for an arms embargo against Israel. Assuming he stops arming Israel, in this imagined scenario of his 2021-2019 presidency, Bernie turns out Arab and Muslim voters in record numbers in 2024. And as a pro-choice stalwart, he codifies Roe too. His policies, of course, do not win him the scarlet letter of a Dick Cheney endorsement. Neocons, not progressives, are the ones now with nowhere to go. I could go on, but spoiler: Bernie wins by a lot or little in the 2024 presidential election. Rather than the Democrats, it is the Republicans who must reckon with why they lost and the deflated MAGA reactionaries are top of the list.
Of course, it is easy for everything, as a leftist, to go my way in the Bernie Sanders presidency in my imagination, which certainly would be better than what would, in reality, be a flawed administration—up against the enormous powers of Wall Street, Big Oil, Big Pharma, etcetera—not to mention neoliberals and Republicans in congress, and a reactionary supreme court. But he would, like FDR, have the guts to fight back against the court too.
But a Bernie candidacy wasn’t necessary for Dems to win this election. Biden and Harris could have focused much more on the legitimate economic concerns of millions of Americans. Something that, as is the case with Bernie Sander’s principles, not at all in opposition to reproductive rights, trans rights, supporting and protecting immigrants, or protecting democracy.
Sanders brand of progressivism is also—given the Jewish senator’s views on Palestine demonstrate—not in opposition to refusing to fund genocide either. But economic populism and being truly anti-genocide are at odds with the corporative-incentivised ideology of the Democratic establishment. And ensuring this is the dominant ideology of the party is more important to them than what they largely ran on: reproductive rights and protecting democracy. In fact, they were willingly to gamble both away rather than even meet the left remotely half-way.
If I sound a bit (or a lot) smug, it’s because I am so very, very pissed at the Democrats for blowing a winnable election and terrified of a more emboldened Trump. Things did not have to turn out this way.
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Nick Seebruch, editor
