Loving Bernie, Voting for Hillary
I vigorously endorse both Bernie and Hillary. I love both of them, and I love their supporters. But it’s time to vote. I was genuinely undecided until the argument here clicked for me this weekend. And as angry as the AP “calling” this for Hillary makes me, tomorrow morning I will deliver my ballot with the arrow next to Hillary Rodham Clinton filled in.
First off, I have a mountain of gratitude for Bernie and for my friends and everyone else who has worked so hard on his campaign. Bernie and his campaign have done more to challenge the forces of capital and enlarge the sense of possibility in American politics than any other campaign of my lifetime. I’m tempted to vote for him simply out of that gratitude. And this, and this. And this:
body[data-twttr-rendered="true"] {background-color: transparent;}.twitter-tweet {margin: auto !important;}Look at all this contraband that #Bernie supporters tried to smuggle into the rally.pic.twitter.com/L6TM3TALUP
— @ekai
And so many other things.
However, along the way of being completely awesome about so many things, he has also repeatedly tapped into and amplified a strain of virulent antipartisanship in his supporters. If you agree the goal is building a progressive movement with strong outside and inside game, you’re probably also dreading the fallout from this miscalculation that we’re going to be cleaning up for years. This is not a remotely “esoteric” question, as Bernie recently put it. It goes to a fundamental strategic question for enacting long-term change. It is possible to build strong connections between movements and electoral and governing institutions while defending core principles. The successful execution of this strategy has been one of the linchpins of conservative dominance. I get why people are frustrated with the Democratic Party: it’s been complicit in all sorts of horribleness over the past twenty years. But rebuilding it — along with building networks and organizations and experiments outside the electoral realm— is the only path forward, and it’s not going to fix itself.
Clinton hasn’t been much better on this score. Her efforts at party building have been largely limited to utilizing state parties as a fundraising passthrough, which is perfectly legal but does essentially nothing for long-term and local organizing efforts.
And, as Bill Scher recently documented so clearly, many of Clinton’s political reflexes are going to be misaligned for this moment. Big wins and losses are what shape the strategic vision of politicians and activists. Her biggest loss was the 1993 health care reform effort. Unfortunately the lesson she took away from that was not that we need a stronger progressive movement and stronger party to build change. It was that change only comes from appeasing conservative hegemony and working at the margins.
This approach is, unfortunately, uniquely ill-suited to the current set of big challenges. Conservatives and the GOP have had eight years to develop answers on climate change, the changes to the economy coming from automation and globalization, on militarization and on wealth inequality. Instead, they’re putting up Racist Reality TV Show Guy.
Despite this, I see a path forward where a Clinton presidency becomes a very good thing for this country. I have no doubt there’s a degree of sexism in public perceptions of her. The supposed opportunism that people decry in her could just as easily be cast as Obama-esque pragmatic flexibility, and it is exactly that pragmatic flexibility that is the opening for the progressive movement. While it’s going to be hard to knock the guy running hard for Con Man in Chief off the number one spot this cycle, Hillary Clinton could be the second best recruiter for the movement available this season. Not because she’s going to be a movement leader — that’s a job she hasn’t auditioned for and clearly doesn’t want — but precisely due to her squishiness on solutions to the biggest problems we’re facing.
For a counterexample, look at the recent history of how grassroots and electoral energies have waxed and waned. Dean and then Kerry’s losses in 2004, painful as they were, were both terrific, medium-term boosters for the grassroots. We got Dean in as chair, the 50 strategy was happening. This wasn’t the only factor that led to Obama managing to edge out Hillary in ’08, but it certainly was a factor.
But once Obama got in, a lot of activists relaxed. At least a little bit. Tim Kaine became chair, then DWS, and no one really cared too much because hey, Obama is President! I think my story is uncommon: I worked so hard in 2008 that when I finally finished my last round of knock and drag four minutes before the polls closed and stumbled over to our election night party, I was so tired I could barely talk or remain upright. I’d basically been working every minute of every day for the previous three months. I kept working at electoral politics professionally for the next couple of years, but when my political startup crashed, I wandered off and did other things. Fine, one of those things was to write a political novel that will be out soon, but things just didn’t seem as dire, so when I moved from Santa Barbara to the Bay Area, I didn’t stay involved locally. (I’m working on fixing this!) And at the institutional level, although I went to some early organizing meetings for OFA, when it was clear it was going to just be an appendage of the White House, that drained a lot of the interest around it.
The problem then was that while Obama sounded plenty progressive he’s had relatively few moments of substantial progressivism. This was in some small part due to his approach, but in very large part due to utterly unprecedented obstruction he faced. Some of this was racially charged and some of it was ideological, but the GOP has in recent years been fusing racial animus and ideology to the point that it’s hard to pull the two apart. But with Obama there at the top saying the right things, local organizing simply hasn’t seemed as urgent.
The exact same situation could easily arise with Bernie. He could get in, Congress will still be screwed up, and he would have no choice but to work at the margins. He would sound good, and we’d be happy he was in there saying nice things, and a few good things would happen, but ultimately I’m not sure that’s more likely to lead to the Big Shift. So imagine this instead.
Hillary’s not going to be a movement leader. She’s part of the oligarchy, and oligarchs gonna oligarch. But think about what she’s really like, at her best. As us Bay Area type hippies like to say, what’s her higher self like. Think about the entire arc of her career, the dimensions of her character. Her heart and her aspirations are in the right place, even if the conditioned response of her career means she’s going to have accommodationist impulses that will be frustrating to watch at times.
But if we make it possible for her to do the right things, she’s going to do the right things. The opportunity is there. The argument for the logical necessity of a vibrant progressive movement has never been stronger. Eight years of President Hillary Clinton would require it. Oligarchs gonna oligarch, but movements gonna move.
Change over the next eight years, should she be elected, is going to be a lot of work. And of course, please don’t take any of this to suggest we can get ahead of ourselves and look past this election. Even though things seem to be going well this week, getting her past Con Man Donald is going to involve piloting this thing through a really disturbing amount of unknown unknowns.
Really, it was never going to be easy. Any sense that it was is illusion. And it was never going to come from the top. No one was ever going to do this for us. New Bernie supporters who just registered for the first time, this may be sobering news for you. There is no calvary. You’re it. No one is going to do it for you. Us fogies who have been at it since the early 2000s (or longer) can confirm this. And I won’t speak for the rest of my middle aged activist cohort but I for one am for damn sure glad you’re here.
We’ll know in a couple weeks what the rough contours of this race look like. If Mr. Lack of Impulse Control’s numbers come up, which who knows, they might, we need to settle in a for a long fight for the top of the ticket. But if they keep dropping and Hillary’s numbers rise as her supporters consolidate… this decision is going to be made way above my pay grade, but I hope we see a real effort mounted to try and take back not just the Senate but the Congress too.
