The New York Review of Books - USA (2020-04-09)

8 The New York Review

December 1972 after he got one per-
cent of the vote in the Vermont gu-
bernatorial election, we can glimpse
Sanders watching himself with a self-
critical eye:

Spoke to the students of St Antho-

ny’s high school in Bennington—

and did terribly.... Spoke right

off the top of my head, didn’t put

two coherent sentences together,

and made very little allowance for

the fact that I was speaking be-

fore 17 year olds.... It bothered

me very much that I was unable

to convey my feelings to them....

Appeared on “You Can Quote

Me” and did horrendously. It was

just one of those times that I never

got started and I was on the de-

fensive throughout. I was kind of

in a trance and never really woke

up. I can’t figure out why and it was

probably the most important half

hour of the campaign.... I felt dis-

g u sted w it h mysel f when we lef t t he

studio—I didn’t handle myself well

at all.

On the other hand, watching himself
on a prerecorded TV debate, “I was
surprised to see how much more effec-
tive I was when I talked slowly.”
In a rare recent glance back at the
ineptitude of his early attempts at be-
coming a politician, Sanders recalls, in
Outsider in the White House, a scene
during his first campaign, a special
Senate election when he made his
debut on radio:

I was so nervous that my knees

shook, literally bouncing uncon-

trollably against the table. The

sound engineer frantically waved

his arms at me through the glass

partition between the studio and

the control room. The sound of

the shaking table was being picked

up by the microphone. A strange

thumping noise traversed the air-

waves as the Liberty Union candi-

date for the US Senate began his

political career. And the few calls

that came in expressed no doubt

that this career was to be short-

lived. “Who is this guy?” one of

the listeners asked.

That question has persisted over
the subsequent decades, but so has the
strange thumping noise made by the
hearts of those who realized belatedly
that they had underestimated Sanders.
Because he seemed politically wild,
it was easy to miss his rigorous self-
control and how potent it could prove
to be. In What Happened, Hillary Clin-
ton’s memoir of the 2016 presidential
campaign, she sums up both the be-
wilderment this guy provoked and the
transformation of the incompetent am-
ateur into a formidable political force:

I admit I didn’t expect Bernie

to catch on as much as he did.

Nothing in my experience in

American politics suggested a

Socialist from Vermont could

mount a credible campaign for the

White House. But Bernie proved

to be a disciplined and effective

politician.

Sanders has disciplined himself into
a position of national credibility, work-
ing relentlessly through the levels of

government from mayor to congress-

man to senator to a realistic shot at the

presidency. His long march from the

margins has moved slowly and steadily

in one direction only: toward the center

of power. So of course he announced his

intention to run for president from the

precincts of the Capitol—he wanted to

show how far toward the center he had

already penetrated. He wanted voters

to see him already up to his waist in the

mainstream.

At the same time, he needed to

shift the mainstream toward his own

thematic positions. One side of this

double shift is evidenced in Where We

Go from Here, by a conspicuous ab-

sence: Sanders mentions “socialism”

just twice—once in relation to “social-

ist Jeremy Corbyn” and once in name-

checking “Alexandria Ocasio- Cortez,

a member of the Democratic Socialists

of America.” When writing of himself,

he now refers instead to “a growing

progressive movement” and a “progres-

sive agenda.” This is not a disavowal of

socialism, but it does reflect the reality

that Sanders’s imagined model for a fu-

ture America is not Cuba. It is staidly

social democratic Denmark. However

subtly, Sanders has been engaged in

a final act of self- reinvention: making

himself the heir less of Eugene Debs

than of the Roosevelts.

The other side of this endeavor is

that, while Trump has expanded the

limits of personal behavior in high of-

fice, Sanders has reset the boundaries

between the sensible and the crazy in

public policy. He has made the out-

landish respectable. Some form of free

college tuition—a signature Sanders

policy—is now almost a consensus po-

sition among Democrats. The latest

Kaiser Family Foundation tracking poll

on attitudes to health care policy shows

that about half (52 percent) of the gen-

eral public now favor another central

part of Sanders’s platform, a Medicare

for All system in which all Americans

would get their insurance from a sin-

gle government- run plan. It would be

wrong to credit Sanders with changing

attitudes from scratch: in 2008–

46 percent of the public already sup-

ported Medicare for All. But Sanders

normalized the idea within mainstream

political discourse in his 2016 campaign

and in turn gave it a greater purchase

on public opinion.

His ambition, however, is not sim-

ply to shift opinion. It is to destroy his

own status as an outsider by taking

first the Democratic nomination and

then the presidency. That final project

seems to have foundered on the diffi-

culty of finding answers to three large

questions.

The first is whether being “not

crazy” is enough. To take health care

as an example, Sanders has indeed

done a great deal to make Medicare

for All a not- crazy idea. But there is

a huge gap between getting people to

accept an idea in the abstract and con-

vincing them that it will actually func-

tion in their own lives. The same polls

that show Medicare for All becoming

a mainstream notion also show that 67

percent of people who support it think

(wrongly) that they would be able to

keep their current health insurance

coverage if it were implemented.

Indeed, precisely as an idea like his

becomes more normal, it acquires the

awkward complexity of reality. There

is, as Cole Porter reminds us, a strange

change from major to minor, from the

macroeconomics of a radically new

health system to the microeconomics of

a family’s perception of its own imme-

diate welfare. Sanders has won on the

major but is highly vulnerable in the

minor keys. It is easier for him to take

on health insurance companies that

propagandize about “socialized medi-

cine” than it is to explain to firefighters

in New York or catering workers in Ne-

vada why they need not fear the loss of

their existing and hard- won health care

plans. Sanders, and whoever may be his

political heirs, still have a long way to

go in filling this gap.

The second question his movement

must face is whether populism can

work without paranoia. Sanders is in

many ways an heir to the American

populist tradition of agitation by farm-

ers and laborers against the perceived

descent of the republic into an oligar-

chy of corporate and banking interests.

(It’s worth recalling that Sanders won

statewide office in Vermont in part by

casting himself as the champion of the

state’s family- scale dairy farmers—he

grafted agrarian protest onto his urban

radicalism.) But Trump has rechan-

neled that energy—rhetorically though

certainly not in reality—and given it

the toxic potency of paranoia. He has

fused, for his supporters, anti- elitism

with rage against immigrants. If he

had been able to face Trump in a gen-

eral election, Sanders would have been

offering a version of anti- elitism shorn

of nativist rage.

It is notable that, on his journey to-

ward the mainstream, one of the things

Sanders has had to ditch is his own

former skepticism about immigration.

He opposed the Kennedy- McCain im-

migration reform bill of 2007 and con-

sistently suggested that the motivation

behind guest worker programs was es-

sentially to “replace American workers

with cheap labor from abroad” in order

to boost corporate profits. Whether

this is right or wrong, it chimed with

a larger protectionist story that San-

ders could tell. But he can’t tell that

story anymore. On the one hand, as his

movement has become more diverse,

Sanders could not offer anything that

looks like hostility to immigration.

On the other, Trump has stolen those

clothes and made them much more

gaudily offensive.

Finally, there is the “lesser of two

evils” question. In his diary of the 1972

campaign, Sanders wrote of the diffi-

culty of “telling people that they should

vote for what they believed in and not

for what they considered to be the lesser

of two evils.” As a candidate from out-

side the two- party system, Sanders

had to persuade progressives and left-

wingers that it was more important to

vote for a genuine radical like himself

t ha n it wa s to pr ior it i z e t he defeat of t he

Republican candidate and vote for an

“electable” Democrat. To his dismay,

he found that most such voters “liked

what I was saying but... wouldn’t vote

for me because they ‘didn’t want to

waste their vote’ and they wanted to

beat [the Republican Luther] Hackett.”

Delete “Hackett” and insert “Trump”

and the same dilemma exists in 2020:

many progressives would vote for Joe

Biden if they felt he offered a stronger

guarantee of Trump’s eviction from the

White House.

And if we take the career of Bernie

Sanders as a guide for those perplexed

by this often excruciating calculation,

what does it tell us? Only that there

is no straight answer. Sanders’s entire

career rests on his ability to establish

in the minds of enough people that

a “vote for what they believed in”

was not a wasted vote. If he had not

been able to generate the faith that

he could in fact win, and would not

merely be the spoiler who delivered

power to Republicans, he would not

have become mayor of Burlington,

let alone a viable candidate for the

presidency.

Yet at decisive times Sanders himself

has voted for “the lesser of two evils.”

He spent much of his career railing

against the Democrats as captives of

the oligarchy—but since his election to

Congress, he has supported the Demo-

cratic nominees in presidential elec-

tions. In 1996 Bill Clinton was running

for reelection. Sanders disliked him

and was strongly hostile to his politics

of ideological triangulation. Sanders

was asked to endorse the Green Party

candidate Ralph Nader, whom he con-

sidered “a personal friend and an ex-

emplary progressive.” He and Nader

agreed on almost everything. But

Sanders didn’t endorse Nader. Albeit

“without enthusiasm,” he made public

his intention to vote for Bill Clinton

instead. He did it for the most obvious

reason: Clinton could beat the Repub-

lican candidate, Bob Dole, and Nader

couldn’t. Sanders cares about winning

and knows as well as anyone that, when

the cost of defeat is so high, the choices

about how best to avoid it must be made

ruthlessly. Q

—March 12, 2020

CORN CROWFOOT,

CORN BUTTERCUP

Ranunculus, little frog, grenouillette,

Mars blisters above neap flood and neck,

mustard-nasal, the rheum and runny river,

adenoidal, tongue-sore, the decoct & decant,

the goats, the pigs, also cows turn their backs,

worms compelled to flee the earth—the toxic

hop, the spirit-inflammation, the fiery.

—Sylvia Legris