1. A short history of feeling the Bern.
I’m fairly certain the first time I voted for President, I voted for Al Gore, though I might equally have voted for Ralph Nader — I don’t remember. It didn’t really matter; Gore took LA County by something like 50 points, and California as a whole by nearly 12. I, and every single person I knew, could have voted for Bart Simpson and it wouldn’t have made a whit of difference. This is one of the great frustrations about being an American voter, of course. In a country this enormous, it’s hard enough to convince yourself that your vote matters. (Mostly because it actually doesn’t, really. People are reduced to absurdist tautologies like, “You can’t complain if you don’t vote!” to keep themselves motivated.) When you live in the places I’ve lived — Portland, Los Angeles, the Bay Area, Brooklyn, Minneapolis, even small-town Bend — it feels doubly that way. I’ve never lived in a Congressional district in which the outcome wasn’t a foregone conclusion. In 2000, my Representative was Maxine Waters. She received almost 87% of the votes in my district, including mine. I’ve never lived in a state that was competitive in a Presidential election year — the closest I came was Minnesota in 2012. Obama won it by 7 points and more than 225,000 votes.
In 2004, I volunteered for the Dean campaign. I look back on that experience — which was mostly disorganized and ridiculous — as a harbinger of much of what was to come. Dean’s campaign was driven largely by opposition to the Iraq War, which was the great, unrepresented policy position in the election that year; Democrats were so cowed by GW Bush’s ability to manipulate the public with the memory of 9/11 that it seemed like they’d never seriously considered mounting a candidate who opposed it. Ultimately, they opted for John Kerry, largely because many party doyens believed his military record would inure him to attacks suggesting he was weak; this didn’t work. Kerry lost a winnable election. Dean never got close to the nomination.
By now, you’ve heard about Dean’s revolutionary use of the internet, the way he built a donor base of small, committed activists who would give him 20, 50, 100 bucks at a time. That was a huge deal. But I think it misses a big part of what was really happening: I, like many of the dreaded Orange Hats who tottered around Iowa and New Hampshire knocking on doors and generally (it turned out) annoying people with our zeal for our candidate, was very young then. Not yet twenty-four years old. I think, in fact, our youth was a big part of what annoyed people. I get annoyed when kids on the street brace me about political causes. Because of this fact — kids with clipboards are annoying — I think a lot of people misunderstood what was going on. We were dismissed as dilettantes, lefty college kids who would one day come to Jesus and moderate on everything. But that wasn’t it at all. I am right on the cusp of two generations, GenX and the Millenial generation, neither of which I really fit in with. I was born during the waning months of the hapless Carter administration. What people didn’t see about me, and people like me, was that we were the crest of a wave of very liberal young people who were raised in an increasingly diverse world and taught at every turn that acceptance of difference was perhaps the paramount value for existence in America. Our parents, without realizing it, were indoctrinating us with values that a lot of them didn’t quite agree with.
The Dean collapse was inevitable, and looking back with 20/20 hindsight, I think he probably would have been beaten fairly handily in a general election. What I hadn’t realized yet — what I think a lot of people may never realize — is that you don’t win elections by condescending to the electorate. Even if you genuinely believe that your ideas are much better than those of other camps (and I still believe that Dean was probably closest to the right guy to actually lead the country), no amount of explaining yourself to them is going to change their minds. You can’t lecture your way into office, no matter how much it seems like you probably should be able to. Genuine political change happens slowly. But what Dean did is put an idea out in the world. It entered the conversation. And instead of being the subject of a lecture, it stewed in the morass of American culture.
2. A quick lesson in the difference between us and them.
My memories of my childhood, like many people’s, are fragmentary, but one of my most vivid ones is of a day when I was nine. There was a little neighborhood store not far from our house, and my mom had taken me there to do some shopping. They had a big stack of newspapers that they kept on a stand next to the front door. On the cover, a bunch of people were tearing hunks out of a giant concrete structure. When we got to the meat counter, my mom and the butcher had a lot to say to one another. I didn’t quite get it, but it piqued my interest — my best friend’s stepmom was from West Germany, and this news was about West Germany.
This is the fall of the Berlin Wall, as I imagine you’ve already guessed. Over the next few years the Soviet Union collapsed — I still remember seeing the tanks on the news when the Soviet hardliners tried to take down Gorbachev — and Germany reunified. Yugoslavia literally Balkanized. We talked a lot in class about how if you bought a globe it might be out-dated by the time you got it home. (These were the days when you actually went to a store to buy things like globes. Weird, right?) I sort of half-understood it, but I found it all very interesting. And then it was (at least for us here in the USA) all over. Communism blew away like leaves in a warm autumn wind, leaving behind only detritus like Cuba and North Korea. (Yes, I’m aware that those two countries are not really comparable. This is about “Communism” more than it is about actual Communism.) By the time I was old enough follow electoral politics closely, the Cold War was a dead letter. Over. Done. We had won.
Keep in mind, then, that people my age are probably the very youngest people who have any memory of these events at all. My younger brothers don’t remember the Berlin Wall. There are people who are old enough to vote now who were born in Bill Clinton’s second term — who aren’t old enough to remember 9/11. Communism is a fact of history to those people. You can no more frighten them with the spectre of Soviet aggression then you can convince them that Nazism poses an existential threat to Western democracies these days.* Hell, the first time I registered to vote, I think I listed my party as communist, with a small c. That was basically a lark, as far as I was concerned. It certainly struck no fear in my heart.
* NB that I believe we would all do well to be a little more worried about creeping fascism in our politics, here and abroad.
For generations, the vague association of socialism with Communism has so tainted the discourse that the mere word “socialist” is held to be a deadly epithet in many circles. We’ve all heard it used as a weapon against Barack Obama — “He’s a socialist!” is a common refrain among the President’s opponents. But, notwithstanding the fact that it’s obviously not true, most of the people who grew up in a post-Soviet world respond to that accusation with this question: So the fuck what? Freed of the bugaboo of the USSR, the way in which American politicians got economic ideas all wrapped up with political and military ones, there’s a whole generation of people who can evaluate socialism for what it is, for how it has worked in other completely free countries. And a lot of them seem to think, Hey, not a bad idea. Irrespective of whether they’re right or not, these people can vote. And it would be a mistake to dismiss them as kids who will come to Jesus — a lot of them are adults, with jobs, families, and well-worn political beliefs, ones which don’t appear to be changing.
3. Are the kids all right?
After the Iowa Caucuses this week, a lot of people noticed a striking fact: though Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton came in at something close to a tie — it appears that Clinton is going to win by a razor-thin margin — there was a startling, age-related breakdown in who their voters were: Sanders won 84% of voters under 30, 58% of voters between 30 and 44; Clinton won 58% of voters between 45 and 64; and 69% of the senior citizen vote. Because older people tend to vote more than younger people, this was just enough to carry her over the top. But the difference is notable.
Explanations were many. On Slate’s Political Gabfest, David Plotz — who is generally a fairly reliable political realist, the kind of non-doctrinaire liberal who can see trends and admit when they’re going wrong for his side — ascribed the split to the idea that, more or less, college kids like to go where the excitement is, and Bernie Sanders is running a much more exciting, fun campaign than Hillary Clinton is. There may be a small degree of truth in this. But it’s also hugely reductive and — I think — largely incorrect. Jemelle Bouie, riding shotgun on that particular Gabfest, immediately pushed back, pointing out correctly that young people weren’t just voting the momentum, but voting for a candidate who was promising things they wanted: a stronger social safety net, the possibility of debt forgiveness, highly liberal stances on social policy. I’d go a step further, actually, and say that all Sanders really has is his cornucopia of leftist positions on these things; Sanders himself is a deeply uncompelling candidate, a haranguer, a grouch, a notoriously rigid asshole whose rhetorical style is not unlike that of many an eccentric grandpa the nation over. He’s not the kook that the Clinton camp would like you to think he is, but he’s not going to win you over with his personality, either. (This is one of several key differences between Sanders and Obama that I think render Sanders a non-starter as a general election candidate, but that’s not really what I feel like getting into here.)
There’s a lot of anxiety among Democratic mandarins right now, who were surprised by Sanders’ rise, even if it hasn’t been quite as meteoric as his backers would have you believe. This is a version of what happened to HRC eight years ago, when Barack Obama rode a wave of youth and minority support to a stunning upset victory in Iowa and, ultimately, the election. The question is: does this speak to Sanders’ greatness as a candidate (as it clearly did with Obama), or some fundamental weakness in Hillary Clinton? That’s the question I keep seeing asked, over and over again, with the concern being that it’s about some weakness in Hillary Clinton that will cause her to collapse in the general election. (The mirror image of this is that Sanders supporters assert that he is so great that he will win a general election, despite the fact that a huge majority of the electorate simply doesn’t agree with him on hardly anything.) But I think it frames things all wrong.
In reality, what’s going on is that wave that Obama rode into office is still pounding the beach, boom, boom, boom, as more Millenials become eligible to vote, and as they reach the age at which people become more likely to take part in the political process. If you’ll permit me to over-extend this metaphor, what it seems to me is happening is that Sanders is a far less gifted surfer than Obama, but he’s riding a better board.
Barack Obama, despite what the right might have you believe, is not really all that liberal, or at least he hasn’t governed as though he is. His healthcare plan is a gross hybrid of warmed-over Republican ideas from 20 years ago, not some socialist plot to force grandma to commit suicide. He tacked gently into a pro-gay-marriage stance when it was clear something close to a majority of the country was already there. His judicial appointments are liberal but not crazily so. He favors free trade.** These are not the stances of a leftist. But he’s an incredibly gifted politician. He had the advantage of having clean hands on the biggest issue of the 2008 primaries, the Iraq War. He’s magnetic. If you vibe with his message, something about him pulls at your heart, every time he’s onstage or onscreen.
** So do I, just so we can get that out there.
I think a lot of people misread his youth support, in a way that was not unlike how Plotz misread Sanders’ youth support in Iowa this week. Because Obama is so undeniably cool — and he is, handsome, thin, athletic, as comfortable with rap artists as foreign dignitaries — some people thought that this was why young people were coming out to vote for him. Clinton’s campaign has been careful not to get out-cooled this time around, doing things like enlisting the support of young female celebrities to appeal to younger voters. (Not very hard to be the coolest, when your opponents are [as my friend Isaac has put it] someone’s grouchy zayde and the villain from season 4 of The Wire.)
But Obama is far more than that. He’s not just an inspirational figure, but an aspirational one. The kids who came out and voted for him could see their generation in him. He’s the son of an immigrant, a mixed-race kid raised by his white grandparents far from Washington, a guy who, through wit and skill and luck, rose to the very top of American society. He was not just a very American story (whatever Donald Trump might tell you), but an exceptionally 21st century American story. Nevermind that most of it took place in the 20th century. Millenials could see themselves in him, or what they wanted to be.
And. Little though he turned out to be a leftist, he was the most liberal practical alternative in 2008. Had that not been true, would that youth vote have materialized for him in the way that it did? I put it to you that Sanders’ ability to capture a large chunk of the electorate, at least in the white and liberal parts of the country, is evidence that the answer is no. Sanders lacks all of Obama’s magnetism, his institutional support, his media mastery, his oratorical skill, and his personal narrative. That’s reflected, I think, in the turnout numbers in Iowa, which are slightly down from 2008. But he has a message that far better fits the audience. (One could — I have — call it pandering). It’s not a message that fits every audience in the Democratic Party. But it fits the young (white) people who vote for him, who have turned out to be far more liberal, far less afraid of socialism, and far more consistent in their views than anybody seemed to expect.
4. Some tentative predictions.
Is this going to be enough to win Sanders the nomination? I gravely doubt it. Boomers still vote more than their kids. People of color have been slow to come around on Bernie, and though I can’t presume to speak for them, I share some skepticism about whether a guy who is maniacally fixated on income inequality really sees the ways in which racism in this country is about much more than money. There are still a lot — a lot — of moderates in the Democratic Party, but almost none of them have voted yet; this is part of being a big tent party in an age when your opposition seems hell-bent on driving everybody out who isn’t a white dude over the age of 40. And here’s the thing: though Clinton is stiff and seems old, Democrats on the whole still really like her. She does have the advantage of being the first woman ever to make a serious bid for the Presidency. This isn’t nothing. In fact, it’s a very great deal. Though Sanders might represent the future of liberalism in America, at the moment he’s still a factional candidate. It’s just a growing faction.
If he does win the nomination, will he win? A lot of my friends are serious Sanders supporters, and I see a lot of them asserting that, not only can Bernie win, he’s the only one who can win, as though the passion they and their friends feel is somehow going to metastasize into the culture at large. (This is the “political revolution” the Sanders camp keeps talking about.) They will cite, chapter and verse, nonsense head-to-head polls that show Sanders doing better than Clinton against Cruz or Trump. (See here for a cold dose of reality about those polls.) All they know is, if Clinton is the nominee, they’re going to stay home / vote Green / move to Canada. They’re so blind with their love of his message, a message no one else has bothered to enunciate on this stage before, that they can’t see how hopeless it is.
Because it is. Hopeless. Sanders is not the first, nor will he be the last, candidate to believe that he can turn out a huge swathe of voters who don’t usually vote but almost certainly agree with him. Hell, he’s not the only guy in this election promising to do that — there’s a billionaire from New York on the other side whose whole deal is appealing to disenfranchised working class white people who feel left out. The thing is that it doesn’t happen. I’m not sure those people exist. It’s true that there a lot of people who don’t vote in this country. It’s not a given that those people are natural Sanders voters. I suspect that just as many are natural Trump voters. He’s the one who has staked out political territory that has truly never been explored in this country.
Sanders would be the farthest-left candidate since . . . at least McGovern, I imagine. And McGovern ran in a country that was far more comfortable with government spending and taxation and a lot of the things that Bernie stands for. What happened to McGovern? He got destroyed. He got destroyed as Mondale did after him and Goldwater did before him. He got destroyed as candidates rightly do when they stand outside the mainstream, hoping that through some form of transubstantiation the mere enunciation of their ideas will turn enemies into allies. Sanders is, as of this moment, way out to the left of the electorate. His destruction would be as inevitable as McGovern’s was.
Not to say that Bernie’s wasting his time, at least in the long run. One thing he’s done is alert the Democratic Party to the fact that they don’t just get to have the young voters who have won them the last two elections; people (me included) have been talking about the demographic bomb that’s going off in this country without quite accounting for the fact those young, diverse, liberal people aren’t just going to automatically vote for the Democrat in every election. They might stay home. They might, given an alternative more compelling than Bernie, defect en masse to a third party, the way some people did when Ross Perot showed up. One way or another, they’ll have to be reckoned with.
I suspect — though I don’t know for sure, obviously — that the Democratic Party of the future is the Democratic Party of Bernie Sanders, much more than it is the one of Hillary Clinton. Parties tend to act rationally. They end up where they are because they’re trying to get people to vote for them; someday soon, a person with Barack Obama’s charisma but Bernie Sanders’ ideas is going to show up, and show you can win with those skills and ideas. Just not yet.
5. An addendum.
I’ve seen hand-wringing from all over the left that the Hillary-Bernie primary is getting too nasty, that HRC’s people are crapping on Bernie’s people too much and she’s going to lose them forever and hand the country over to Ted Cruz or Donald Trump or (more likely) Marco Rubio. And I suppose that’s not totally out of the realm of possibility. But it seems to me that this is pretty standard fare for primaries. Things got very nasty between Clinton’s supporters and Obama’s supporters as that campaign dragged on and on and on. Far nastier than they are now. The internecine battles of 2008 split not only along generational lines, but along gender lines, race lines, and none of those weapons stayed in the scabbard. A lot of Democrats tried to blame concern trolls and Republican spies for some of the uglier things that got said in that primary, but I suspect that’s mostly a way of resolving the cognitive dissonance. Which is the key. Somehow, everybody ended up back on the same team.
The Clinton camp clearly thought that the secret to securing the nomination was to avoid getting sucker-punched by a more charismatic candidate again. They headed off Liz Warren at the pass. John Hickenlooper stayed home. Deval Patrick, too. A lot of people were bemoaning the lack of a deep Democratic bench of the sort the Republicans appeared to have. (I think it’s become clear that that turned out to be more of a clown car than a bench.) But the bench wasn’t shallow; it just wasn’t getting in the game. HRC’s people weren’t too worried about Bernie. After all, he’s even older than she is. How could he ignite the base?
They’ve got a fight on their hands, now. It’s a fight they’re almost certain to win, but it’s a fight. And I think it’s probably a good thing they have one. Last time around, though she lost, Hillary appeared to learn a lot over the course of the primary. Early on she was stiff, emotionless, seemed a little surprised that anybody would ever give Barack Obama the time of day. By the end, she’d found another gear, one that incorporated both her pugilistic instincts and the fact that, at the end of the day, people wanted to see some humanity out of her, to understand that she was a woman as well as a politician. It’s been eight years since she ran for office, and it was clear early on in this campaign that she was rusty. Bernie’s challenge is doing a number of things, some of them more important than this, but part of what it’s doing is giving Clinton the kind of jolt that she needed, so that rust is less likely to be apparent come the dog days of summer, when she has to go toe-to-toe with the furious Trump, the oleaginous Cruz, or the slick Rubio.
So good on ya, Bernie. Keep fighting. And to his supporters, I'd say: try to have faith that in the long run, your side will win the war.
