.
This news saddened me as, in my view, Bernie Sanders was the most prominent candidate to actually recognize and address the systemic problems threatening our society, our democracy, and the environment.
We’re left now with a candidate (and likely nominee, barring some unforeseen circumstance) whose record demonstrates entrenchment in the current political/economic system, a system that in many ways has brought us to where we are today. Personally, I have zero enthusiasm for Joe Biden, and seriously doubt he will prevail over Donald Trump in November. If he does, I’ll celebrate for an exact split-second because I know the real problem is and never was Trump but rather our corrupt political and economic system. Trump is a symptom of this problem, not the problem itself. In Bernie we had someone who would not only have eradicated the symptom, but was willing to get to the root problem and begin the type of fundamental healing required for sustained flourishing. This, in turn, would have gone a long way in preventing the type of “symptom” represented by Trump and his neo-fascist agenda from returning.
I doubt, though, that this problem/system is going to be significantly altered under Biden. He has said as much. It's a system that's profoundly dysfunctional for the majority of people, and those who, like Biden, have actively worked to create and maintain this dysfunction are rarely predisposed, incentivized, or equipped to correct it in any meaningful way. I hope I'm wrong. I hope Biden will reach out to Bernie and other progressive figures, such as Elizabeth Warren, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Marianne Williamson and Robert Reich, for insight, advice, and guidance. I also hope they reach out to him. My sense at this time, however, is that our work as progressives to enact genuine progressive change is going to begin the day Biden is declared president-elect, if that is what eventuates.
Following is a compilation of excerpts from recent commentaries about Bernie's suspension of his campaign. This compilation includes the insights and perspectives of Marianne Williamson, Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, John Nichols, Astra Taylor, David Benec, Osita Nwanevu and others. These progressive perspectives are accompanied by “The Struggle Continues,” a 3-minute video released last Wednesday by the Bernie 2020 campaign.
There was anger, but it was most often the anger of people who have realized that their medical bankruptcy, their workplace abuse, their uninsured illness, didn’t have to be that way. It was the anger that comes when shame turns to determination and solidarity, as happened again and again when Sanders opened his rallies to unscripted, unplanned testimony from people who narrated their suffering.
There was “us-versus-them” politics, but one of the lessons of Sanders’s campaign is that politics does not begin in consensus-seeking. It begins in determining where you want a common life to go, which implies knowing who is standing in the way. Denunciations of “the billionaire class” and “a racist criminal justice system” are not mellifluous, but democracy and justice don’t start in pretending that everything is fine and we are all on board. Criticizing the Sanders campaign for being intemperate evinced at best a naivete about politics, at worst a kind of class bias that prizes soft-toned niceness over the often-invisible lives that this country desolates.
Thank you, Jedediah.
And thank you, Bernie.
Deepest gratitude, Bernie. You articulated a vision for a much better America and we'll keep working to make it happen. For those who've supported you, it will take a few days to process this. But we'll rise up with passion and renewed dedication, always with your name on our hearts.
Today, I was saddened to learn that Bernie Sanders brought his presidential campaign to a close. My dismay is not over the end of the campaign, but much deeper. Senator Sanders was the only candidate capable of dealing with the scope of our current problems. No other candidate connected the issues of health, environment, wages, democracy, equality, and citizenship together with proposals to truly improve the lives and the future of every person on Earth. Our desperate need for the Senator's vision is increasingly blatant as we struggle with #COVID19 and the inequalities our responses are exposing.
This struggle for a better society inspired a tremendous movement. The campaign received over 10 million individual donations at an average of $18. In every contest, the campaign notched clear victories among voters under the age of 50 in every demographic group. What those numbers mean will be hotly debated for many years. My belief is that this illustrates a divide that puts our nation and our lives at risk. As long as those who suffer the most from inequalities created by those in power, remain locked out of the democratic process, we will slip further into inequality and put more of our neighbors' lives at risk.
This is a tough moment that shows the strength of those who fight against popular reform. This is not the end. Grassroots action is cumulative. Every step forward makes the next step possible. To cross the finish line, we have to continue the fight for every small step, and never give ground. Fight for someone you don't know and build the movement by lifting up the voices of those around.
Thank you, Bernie, for igniting and leading an everlasting movement of solidarity with the working class and promoting a radical policy agenda advancing the collective wellbeing of people over corporate profits. We are forever grateful for your prophetically zealous – often solitary – anger exercised to safeguard working people’s dignity, affirm healthcare and access to higher education as human rights, challenge the exploitative oppression of capitalism, deride a foreign policy that perpetuates death and colonialism, and definitively confront the devastating implications of climate change for our planet.
Voters did not advance this agenda. However, an entire generation remains invigorated and strengthened by the incontrovertible fact that socialism is now welcomed as a viable political reality – not a delusion, fantasy, or blasphemous threat to the American way of life. Political dissent is celebrated as an extension of patriotism, rather than a negation of national pride. The revolutionary strength of Bernie’s campaign remains its nature as a grassroots movement that derives veracity by building political power with poor and working people – voices most often ignored in City Hall, Annapolis, and Washington D.C.
There will be ample time to assess the myriad flaws of Bernie’s campaign. Doing so is imperative to building a meaningful socialist movement in the United States. Tonight, we mourn the lost opportunity to face the living embodiment of white supremacy and unbridled capitalist individualism with a towering, compassionate vision of collective human possibility and global solidarity.
#NotMeUs isn't just a slogan but a stirring call to action that should rouse our spirits and transcend the hopes placed on any one person. May our tears water our dreams for a better world.
I would like to express my huge gratitude to Bernie Sanders, to his entire family, and to the many people who worked for the campaign just so tirelessly and opened up the window of what was possible politically in this country. It was an incredibly tough campaign. And I trust that Bernie is making the right decision in this moment as the leader of that campaign and also as a U.S. senator. I know that he’s not going to just go relax. . . . He intends to fight for people, as he has always done, in this critical moment, in terms of what kind of relief, rescue, and reimagining that we do in the midst of this pandemic. He is staying on the ballot. He is still building power in order to pressure the Democratic Party and Joe Biden to run the most progressive campaign that they can. So, you know, I feel so much gratitude for Senator Sanders.
More than anything else, I think what the campaign did is help us find each other. And by “us,” I mean that huge “us” of the “Not me. Us.” campaign [slogan]. And he did this not just in this campaign, but in 2016, where he really broke the spell of the Reagan era; that spell that has lasted for four decades [and] that told people that this system that was funneling so much wealth upwards and spreading insecurity, precariousness, poverty and pollution for everybody else. . . . What the neoliberal era told us was that we were the ones who were crazy, we were a tiny minority of fringe people, and that we should just accept it. And what the Sanders campaign did in 2016 is tell us that we had been lied to, that, in fact, there were so many millions of us who saw that this world was fundamentally upside down. And all of the incredible organizing, including digital organizing but also in-person organizing, wove this amazing web, and we were able to find each other and find that we were many and they were few. And so, I don’t think we can ever thank Bernie Sanders and the campaign enough for that.
. . . The fact is, there is power right now, and [it's] from the working people who are holding [not only] this country together, but the world together – the healthcare workers, the janitors, the caretakers, the delivery workers, the people who are picking our food, under very unsafe conditions. And we are seeing a wave of job action from these workers, who understand themselves to be so essential despite decades of having their labor belittled by those in power. And that was one of the great strengths of the Sanders campaign, that he always recognized the power of those essential workers. It’s why he was supported overwhelmingly by Amazon workers, by grocery store workers and, of course, by nurses and by teachers. And so, this is a time for us to be organizing and taking leadership from those workers.
I have to say that one of my great, great regrets from having been involved in this campaign is watching my friends in the progressive movement who didn’t support [him], in part because they weren’t able to take leadership from working people who recognized Sanders as their champion from the very beginning, and they felt that those workers didn’t understand their own best interests, and so they wanted them to support somebody else. And this is a moment where if we say that we have so much gratitude for these frontline workers, let’s trust them politically, too, and let’s do everything we can to augment their political power. Let’s demand that of our trade unions. Let’s demand that of ourselves. Let’s support them tangibly. But let’s also take leadership from them, which is something that Bernie Sanders always did, and it is one of the things that I love most about him.
– Naomi Klein
Excerpted from “Naomi Klein: Sanders “Broke the Spell”
of Neoliberalism as Trump Pushes Coronavirus Capitalism”
Democracy Now!
April 9, 2020
Excerpted from “Naomi Klein: Sanders “Broke the Spell”
of Neoliberalism as Trump Pushes Coronavirus Capitalism”
Democracy Now!
April 9, 2020
When Bernie Sanders began his first presidential run in 2015, he announced his campaign to little fanfare, on a patch of grass outside the Capitol. “This country today, in my view, has more serious crises than any time since the Great Depression,” Sanders said to a small group of reporters. Back then, his campaign was written off as a long shot by a gruff independent from Vermont who might, at most, push Hillary Cilnton left on a few issues.
Today, Sanders suspended his second presidential campaign after a primary season that always favored Joe Biden, but saw, for a brief moment, a socialist Jewish candidate as the frontrunner. “Few would deny that over the past five years, our movement has won the ideological struggle,” Sanders said during a farewell address to his supporters, made via a livestream from his home in Burlington, Vermont. He explained that he was dropping out because his campaign didn’t have a clear path to victory.
Only five years have passed between those two moments, yet it would be hard to deny how much not only the Democratic Party, but the country as a whole has changed in that time because of Sanders. After stubbornly warning the political and media elite again and again about how the system is failing average people, Sanders is now speaking in isolation as a pandemic ravages our world. Even the idea of reporters gathered around him, outside on a DC lawn, already seems like a relic from a different era.
But, as Sanders pointed out, our country was going through a crisis long before coronavirus hit. This is true on the macro level – rising sea levels, crushing student debt, unaffordable health care, massive incarceration rates – but the Sanders’ campaign’s strength was always in showing the ways this translated into personal crises in peoples’ daily lives. As BuzzFeed reported in December, Sanders’ strategy was often just to turn the microphone over to everyday Americans. “His suggestion, by asking you to speak up about your private anxieties, many of them financial, is that you and the millions of people in the proverbial audience will begin to see your struggles not as personal failings, but systemic ones,” reporter Ruby Cramer wrote.
Sanders’ message has changed the country in tangible ways. A bill to raise the minimum wage to $15 passed the House, and a majority of voters now support Medicare for All, things that would have seemed unfathomable five years ago. A wave of progressive candidates, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar, who entered the House after the 2018 midterms, were inspired to run in part by Sanders, and were elected on campaigns to abolish ICE and cancel student debt. The 2020 Democratic primary started with many of his most progressive policies in full view, proof that he had pushed the party’s agenda left. In the wake of Sanders’ 2016 campaign and Donald Trump’s election, young activists created a slew of new organizations, while once-small groups like the Democratic Socialists of America gained in prominence. One new organization, the Sunrise Movement, helped push climate change closer to the center of political debate than ever before.
Yet his loss also shows how far there is still to go. Sanders and his campaign were far from perfect. The ideological change that he brought to the national stage has, for a number of reasons both internal and external, not translated electorally. There will be post-mortems and recriminations, and the good faith ones will be necessary.
Democracy means that people choose how we will live together, rather than accept the hierarchies and boundaries we are born into as fate. It means making that shared choice in a way that honors everyone’s equal value and tries to give each person equal political power. By that simple standard, the United States is not much of a democracy. In 2016 and 2020, one campaign tried to make democracy more real, and in doing so became a movement and a generational watershed for people who have come to understand how an unequal and undemocratic country is killing them and laying waste to what they love. Such a thing doesn’t end when a campaign stops, but what it becomes is uncertain.
Bernie Sanders’s departure from a Democratic primary race that is shuddering from the impact of COVID-19 marks the end, for the moment, of the greatest wave of social-democratic energy and socialist imagination in the United States for about a century. It comes, too, just as events are once again vindicating his calls for universal health care, economic security, and worker power, as a pandemic tears through the communities of the most vulnerable, precarious, and powerless Americans.
It was astonishing to hear the Sanders campaign described, as it routinely was in the mainstream press, as angry, bellicose, even a Trumpism for the Left. To be anywhere near the campaign – to know any of the people going door to door and making regular small donations – was to understand that it was idealistic in spirit, hopeful in tone, generous in its sense of possibility. It modeled what you might call patriotism for adults, disillusioned patriotism without exceptionalist bullshit.
Sanders talked about the United States as a normal country with terrible problems, where people exploit one another, fear of poverty and illness stalk seemingly stable lives, and mass incarceration undercuts freedom and democracy. But his campaign made sense only if you also believed that the United States remained a place decent in possibility, not because of some providential promise, not because of the Declaration of Independence or Abraham Lincoln, but because democratic majorities have the power to change their shared lives. It is hard to imagine an attitude more patriotic (as distinct from nationalist) than believing that your fellow citizens can hear the truth about their country and then vote for fundamental change.
There was anger, but it was most often the anger of people who have realized that their medical bankruptcy, their workplace abuse, their uninsured illness, didn’t have to be that way. It was the anger that comes when shame turns to determination and solidarity, as happened again and again when Sanders opened his rallies to unscripted, unplanned testimony from people who narrated their suffering.
There was “us-versus-them” politics, but one of the lessons of Sanders’s campaign is that politics does not begin in consensus-seeking. It begins in determining where you want a common life to go, which implies knowing who is standing in the way. Denunciations of “the billionaire class” and “a racist criminal justice system” are not mellifluous, but democracy and justice don’t start in pretending that everything is fine and we are all on board. Criticizing the Sanders campaign for being intemperate evinced at best a naivete about politics, at worst a kind of class bias that prizes soft-toned niceness over the often-invisible lives that this country desolates.
– Jedediah Britton-Purdy
Excerpted from “Bernie Sanders’s Campaign
Was Trying to Save American Democracy”
Jacobin
April 9, 2020
Excerpted from “Bernie Sanders’s Campaign
Was Trying to Save American Democracy”
Jacobin
April 9, 2020
Champagne corks will be popping in the Trump Empire, for good reason. Whatever happens come November, the exit of Senator Bernie Sanders from the US presidential race will be a relief. The fractured republic can be reassured that the Democrats have not moved on, stuck, as it were, in the glades of vengeful melancholia and supposedly safe bets. Divisions will not be healed; suspicions will continue to foster. A bitter society, ravished by pandemic, will cast an eye to incumbency.
On Wednesday, Sanders delivered the news to his supporters. “If I believed we had a feasible path to the nomination, I would certainly continue.” The decision to end his campaign had been “very difficult and painful” but it had “transformed American consciousness as to what kind of nation we can become and have taken this country a major step in the never-ending struggle for economic justice, social justice, racial justice and environmental justice.” It was the appeal to ideas that mattered, and the continuation of the movement he had inspired.
With each Democratic candidate being culled from the initial smorgasbord, and the machinery of the Democratic National Committee doing its usual bit of mischief, the chances for Sanders netting the nomination were always slim. He started well in New Hampshire; roared to victory in Nevada. Then came defeat in South Carolina, where the black vote eluded him. Joe Biden’s victories on Super Tuesday in 10 of 14 states was crushing. A week after, and failing to convince Michigan Democrats, he had a sobering admission to make. While he consistently did well in claiming the votes of the young and making inroads among Latinos, he was “losing the debate over electability.” The restrictions placed on the campaign by COVID-19 sealed matters.
The honours for the Democratic presidential nomination, however that will be finalised, fall to Joe Biden, who has distinguished himself in crisis by largely absenting himself. The enfeebled Biden is already weighed down by a resume thickened by allegations of wandering hands (dismissed by Biden supporters as “politically motivated” or “pro-Putin”), patchy choices on matters touching on race and foreign policy, and an evident slide into cognitive decline. The campaign strategy, one seriously chewed over since mid-last year, is simple: manufactured silence and minimised presence. Doing so minimises room for imbecilic error and any needless expenditure of energy. So far, and with stunning effect, it has worked, aided by that trusty steed, circumstance.
. . . [T]he departure of Sanders leaves his followers talking about a movement beyond the man. Feel the Bern was more than just an emotional binge, cresting on a body of ideas packed with social justice and equality. “It’s common now to say the Sanders campaign failed,” observed Noam Chomsky on Democracy Now Radio. “I think that’s a mistake. I think it was an extraordinary success, completely shifting the arena of debate and discussion.” True, to a point. But as with 2016, that discussion is something that has passed the Establishment fogeys by. “In the end,” as Andrew Marantz penned in the New Yorker, “he did change the culture of America, but not quickly enough.”
– Binoy Kampmark
Excerpted from “A Victory for the Fogeys:
Bernie Sanders Drops Out”
The Aim
April 8, 2020
Excerpted from “A Victory for the Fogeys:
Bernie Sanders Drops Out”
The Aim
April 8, 2020
This is a sad ending to a primary season that began with a diversity of candidates and a range of fresh, progressive ideas that I found hopeful and exciting. It is ending with a public mood much more obsessed with survival and normalcy than deep, structural change.
I certainly support Joe Biden, especially considering the alternative. I hope that he will draw on the ideas and gifts of his former opponents. The primaries have established that when it comes to forming a government the Democrats have a deep bench. I am worried, however, that Biden is too beholden to corporate interests to address climate change with the level of economic reform necessary to save the environment. COVID-19 is a symptom of environmental stress. If we do not act now, we can expect this level of emergency and worse to become the new normal.
Biden has to win. And then we all have to push the Biden administration beyond the milquetoast of the candidate’s agenda.
– McAuley Hentges
via Facebook
April 10, 2020
via Facebook
April 10, 2020
Biden’s path to victory in 2020 comes from reassembling the Obama coalition. But most of the young people who were inspired by “Yes We Can” haven’t felt the same way about Biden’s message of going back in time to the Obama era. Voters under 35 have lived through two global recessions, a failed war of choice in Iraq, mass incarceration and deportation, inaction in the face of the climate crisis, and a gun violence epidemic. We’ve seen a Republican Party that’s increasingly open to white nationalism, plutocracy, and authoritarianism, and a Democratic Party that hasn’t quite figured out how to respond.
The idea of returning to normal doesn’t make sense to us, because the political status quo has never worked particularly well during our lifetimes. For millions of young people, our path to a safe and secure middle-class life is far more out of reach than it was for our parents or grandparents. And now, according to latest research, a majority of voters under 45 has lost their job, been placed on leave, or had hours cut because of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Young leaders know how important it is to defeat Trump. But young people also want to see a Democratic nominee fighting for solutions to the massive social problems that have kept our generation from enjoying secure, stable middle-class lives.
During this time of crisis, if Biden is going to tap into the well of hope that drove Obama’s success, we need him to root himself in the New Deal and Great Society traditions of the Democratic Party and champion the bold ideas that have galvanized generations before us and inspire our generation today.
Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson didn’t start out as leaders aligned with social movements calling for dramatic changes in their time. But they were pressured enough to finally feel the ground of history moving beneath their feet and eventually met the test of leadership the historical moment demanded. Biden should meet the moment.
– Waleed Shahid
Excerpted from “Joe Biden,
Here’s How to Earn Our Support”
The Nation
April 10, 2020
Excerpted from “Joe Biden,
Here’s How to Earn Our Support”
The Nation
April 10, 2020
Above: Former Vice President Joe Biden, left, and Sen. Bernie Sanders at the sixth Democratic primary debate of the 2020 presidential campaign season in Los Angeles, California – December 19, 2019. (Photo: Robyn Beck/AFP via Getty Images)
If Trump is reelected, it’s a indescribable disaster. It means that the policies of the past four years, which have been extremely destructive to the American population, to the world, will be continued and probably accelerated. . . . What this means for the environment or the threat of nuclear war, which no one is talking about but is extremely serious, is indescribable.
Suppose Biden is elected. I would anticipate it would be essentially a continuation of Obama – nothing very great, but at least not totally destructive, and opportunities for an organized public to change what is being done, to impose pressures.
It’s common to say now that the Sanders campaign failed. I think that’s a mistake. I think it was an extraordinary success, completely shifted the arena of debate and discussion. Issues that were unthinkable a couple years ago are now right in the middle of attention.
The worst crime he committed, in the eyes of the establishment, is not the policy he’s proposing; it’s the fact that he was able to inspire popular movements, which had already been developing – Occupy, Black Lives Matter, many others – and turn them into an activist movement, which doesn’t just show up every couple years to push a leader and then go home, but applies constant pressure, constant activism and so on. That could affect a Biden administration.
– Noam Chomsky
Excerpted from “Noam Chomsky: Bernie Sanders Campaign Didn’t Fail.
It Energized Millions and Shifted U.S. Politics”
Democracy Now!
April 9, 2020
Excerpted from “Noam Chomsky: Bernie Sanders Campaign Didn’t Fail.
It Energized Millions and Shifted U.S. Politics”
Democracy Now!
April 9, 2020
[T]he Democratic Party occasionally halfheartedly tries to pass policy that would put them on the center-right of most European countries. But it is also a gravy train of jobs and influence for people who never have to actually try to pass the things they say they support or face any consequences for screwing up. Sanders was an existential threat to that comfortable arrangement. Of course he couldn't get any elite support.
. . . [R]ank-and-file Democrats largely agreed with Sanders' platform. But their overwhelming priority was trying to divine who was likeliest to defeat Trump, and the party elite and the mainstream media, especially trusted nominally liberal outlets like NPR and MSNBC, blared forth a constant message that Sanders was an unelectable radical, and Biden the safe choice. Democrats trust their leaders and the mainstream media, and they believed the message.
. . . So long as the Democratic establishment and its allied media maintain an iron grip over the party's voters, they will continue to exercise veto power over its presidential nominees.
– Ryan Cooper
Excerpted from “Bernie Sanders Didn't Lose
Because His Ideas Were Unpopular”
The Week
April 8, 2020
Excerpted from “Bernie Sanders Didn't Lose
Because His Ideas Were Unpopular”
The Week
April 8, 2020
Bernie Sanders has transformed American politics. In his message yesterday to supporters, in which he announced the suspension of his 2020 Democratic presidential campaign, he argued that a “new vision for America is what our campaign has been about and what, in fact, we have accomplished.” The senator explained that: “Few would deny that over the course of the past five years, our movement has won the ideological struggle. In so-called red states and blue states and purple states, a majority of the American people now understand that we must raise the minimum wage to at least $15 an hour, that we must guarantee health care as a right to all of our people, that we must transform our energy system away from fossil fuel, and that higher education must be available to all, regardless of income.”
Many ideological battles have already been won – and others are likely to be won in the months and years to come, as policy makers wrestle with the reality that ideas once considered radical are now necessary responses to the coronavirus pandemic and the economic chaos it has spawned. But the greatest accomplishment of the Sanders campaign has less to do with moving good ideas out of the “radical” category and into the mainstream and more to do with inspiring the people who will carry those ideas forward. I am not alone in this faith. Just last week, when we spoke at length about the campaign he was then “assessing,” Sanders told me that “the future of this country does not rest with people who are 75 or 80 years of age. It rests with the young people. In terms of ideology, we are winning young people overwhelmingly. Overwhelmingly. I’m not just talking about my campaign. I’m talking about where the young people of this country are coming from. They are coming from a very, very different place, a very deep, different place than is the Democratic establishment.”
Inspiring the next generation of radical campaigners – whether they identify as democratic socialists, as Sanders does, or simply as advocates for transformative change – matters now. And it will matter for decades to come.
I’m pretty sure historians will look back kindly on Sanders. He is the rare honest public servant, and one who ran a campaign centering human dignity. While self-branded as 'radical,' in reality his proposals were merely aligned with European social democracy. But given decades of anti-government propaganda and neoliberal economic doctrine, that alignment alone was transformative. Sanders has done more than anyone else to popularize policies including universal healthcare, a living wage, student debt cancellation coupled with free college, a wealth tax, workplace democracy and a Green New Deal. This has put the Left on stronger footing than it has ever been in my lifetime, even if we are not yet where we want to be.
. . . It’s tempting to give up on electoral politics, but that would be the wrong move and would play into the hands of those (Republican and Democrat) eager to see the Left disengage. The Left needs to continue its quest for political power, building on the example of bold fighters like Senator Sanders, Congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, as well as local politicians such as Durham, North Carolina’s Jillian Johnson and Seattle’s Kshama Sawant. In the coming months we can still get behind inspiring candidates like Nikil Saval who is running for state legislature in Pennsylvania, Cori Bush who is running for the U.S. House of Representatives in Missouri, Jabari Brisport for New York’s state senate and Sandy Nurse for city council in New York City. We need these folks to win now more than ever.
Beating Donald Trump is, of course, imperative. But that doesn’t mean we need to treat Joe Biden with kid gloves. He must make concessions to the Left and earn our votes. An emerging coalition of young movement leaders are already making demands on the Biden campaign, insisting that he adopt a range of progressive policy positions that matter to the younger generation. Their initiative deserves support.
– Astra Taylor
Excerpted from “Bernie Sanders’ Exit Is An
Indictment of Our Broken System – Not His Campaign”
In These Times
April 9, 2020
Excerpted from “Bernie Sanders’ Exit Is An
Indictment of Our Broken System – Not His Campaign”
In These Times
April 9, 2020
On Wednesday, Sen. Bernie Sanders announced he was suspending his 2020 presidential campaign. The announcement came after a series of primary losses to former Vice President Joe Biden, who is now the presumed Democratic Party nominee. However, in Sanders' resignation, he also said he would remain on the ballot in states that still have primaries. This left many wondering, if Sanders is still on the ballot, what does this mean for Biden's nomination?
Sanders made it clear that he viewed Biden as the party’s nominee, but that doesn’t mean that Biden is automatically the official Democratic candidate. He still has to receive the party’s nomination, which happens at the Democratic National Convention in July. If Biden secures 1,991 pledged delegates at the DNC, which now seems likely, he will be the official nominee.
But by remaining on the ballot, voters can still choose Sanders in their state’s primary, which will allow him to continue to gather delegates. Currently, Sanders has 924 delegates to Biden’s 1,225. Staying on the ballot and acquiring more delegates heading into the DNC is something Sanders believes will give him the ability to influence the 2020 Democratic platform.
"I will stay on the ballot and all remaining states and continue to gather delegates, while Vice President Biden will be the nominee," Sanders said in a speech Wednesday. "We must continue working to assemble as many delegates as possible at the Democratic Convention, where we will be able to exert significant influence over the party platform and other functions. Then together, standing united, we will go forward to defeat Donald Trump – the most dangerous president in modern American history – and we will fight to elect strong progressives, at every level of government."
Delegates won by candidates who have dropped out are encouraged to vote for the person endorsed by the former candidate they represent, but they do not have to and are technically free agents. Former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg won 26 delegates before dropping out of the race in March, while Sen. Amy Klobuchar won 7 and Sen. Elizabeth Warren won 81 (Buttigieg and Klobuchar have endorsed Biden; Warren did not endorse).
Although Biden is the "presumed" party nominee, he won't become the official nominee until the DNC commences. Given that Sanders dropped out of the race, it's unlikely that Biden will be challenged in any other capacity, including the very real possibility of a brokered convention that many believed may happen if no candidate received enough delegates. Sanders suspended his campaign because he did not see “a viable path to the nomination,” though his influence over the Democratic party remains strong.
– Britni De La Cretaz
“What It Means For Joe Biden If Bernie Sanders
Remains on the 2020 Ballot”
Refinery 29
April 8, 2020
“What It Means For Joe Biden If Bernie Sanders
Remains on the 2020 Ballot”
Refinery 29
April 8, 2020
Much will be written, in the weeks, months, and years ahead, about how much Sanders was able to achieve in the road’s final stretch. Many will argue that socialism has been significantly destigmatized across an important share of the American electorate. We will hear reminders that a $15 minimum wage, free college, and other ideas deemed radical and unrealistic just a few short years ago, are now central to mainstream policy conversation. Some will point out that self-styled moderates and figures in the Democratic establishment, even while rejecting Sanders’s Medicare for All plan, have been pushed by the discourse surrounding it into support for dramatically expanding public health insurance in America through schemes that resemble the universal health care regimes in place across Europe. And so on.
. . . The last Democratic president urged his party to embrace the audacity of hope. For him, hope was an airy thing: a feeling rooted in the faith that our future can be built on reason and goodwill alone. But offering real hope to the American people is a material project. Hope depends upon the deconstruction of an economic system that leaves too many Americans wondering if they have the resources and capacity to make it through today and a privileged few free to build themselves a better tomorrow. Sanders has carried many to this realization, but a new generation of progressives enraged and heartbroken by the last administration and the last 20 years of American life have also carried him, and it is impossible to imagine his campaign would have been as successful without the support of activists and organizers who will fight on long after this election ends.
Nevertheless, for all of his accomplishments and victories, Sanders did ultimately come up short. His efforts were undergirded by a familiar theory: the notion that the working class, the politically disaffected, and the reliably left-wing could be galvanized by a progressive agenda in such great numbers that they would sweep away the existing political order. But the barriers to participation for Americans at the margins of politics are significant and not entirely structural. Most people, even in the best of times, want to vote for a candidate they believe can succeed. For the majority of the Democratic electorate – justifiably preoccupied with the task of defeating President Trump in November – that candidate was Joe Biden, and his campaign was backed by a coalition of voters that included not only suburbanites but a broad swath of working-class Democrats.
Biden’s victory has been credited mostly to granular missteps from the Sanders campaign and the last-minute moderate rally around Biden after his victory in South Carolina. But the reality is that progressive electoral victories have been rare for generations. Sanders’s campaigns have offered evidence that the challenge for the left now isn’t winning broad support for its policy program – much of Sanders’s platform was popular among the general electorate, and among Democratic voters, the fight over the substance of proposals like Medicare for All has essentially been won. But the model for progressive electoral success is plainly broken somewhere, and solutions probably lie in questions of political affect – in making wary voters believe progressivism is truly viable at the ballot box and within our sclerotic political institutions.
There’s a temptation to believe progressives will inherit the Democratic Party naturally in due time. Sanders, after all, performed well not only with the youngest Democrats but also a significant share of voters around middle age, while the heart of Biden’s coalition was older voters who aren’t too long for this world. But as demographically inevitable as progressive ascendancy might seem, the country and the world can’t wait for the Democratic Party to ease itself into reality. We have perilously little time to get a handle on the climate crisis before it becomes a civilization-upending catastrophe, and the Republican Party has spent the last decade erecting an impregnable wall around our institutions that is nearly complete.
We are entirely out of somedays and eventuallys. Progressives need to find the missing pieces to the electoral puzzle now. But no matter whether Sanders won or lost, progress was always going to rest upon our ability to come together, press our demands, and fight for people we don’t know at our workplaces and in the streets. “Not me. Us.” Those words are his legacy and the way forward.
– Osita Nwanevu
Excerpted from “Don’t Mourn Bernie Sanders Candidacy. Organize”
The New Republic
April 8, 2020
Excerpted from “Don’t Mourn Bernie Sanders Candidacy. Organize”
The New Republic
April 8, 2020
UPDATE: Just hours after I posted this compilation, Bernie Sanders officially endorsed Joe Biden as president so as to defeat Donald Trump. The two also pledged to work together, with Bernie noting, “I have been very pleased that your staff and my staff have been working together over the last several weeks [to come] up with a number of task forces. These are task forces that will look at some of the most important issues facing this country,” among them the economy, education, immigration, criminal justice, climate change, and health care.
“I think that your endorsement means a great deal, it means a great deal to me,” Biden told Bernie. “I think people are going to be surprised that we are apart on some issues but we’re awfully close on a whole bunch of others. If I am the nominee, which it looks like now you just made me, I’m going to need you, not just to campaign, but to govern.”
In short, Joe Biden's deference to Bernie, his commitment to work with him, and his pledge to not simply go back to “business as usual” if elected, gives me hope.
Following is today's live-stream meeting between Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders.
Related Off-site Links:
Suspending the Campaign, Not the Movement: Sanders Pulls Out of 2020 Race But Will Stay on Ballot – Democracy Now! (April 9, 2020).
Bernie Sanders Suspends Presidential Campaign – BBC News (April 9, 2020).
From AOC to Biden: Politicians React to Bernie Sanders Ending His Bid for President – Sarah Midkiff (Refinery 29, April 8, 2020).
“He Needs to Earn Our Trust”: Progressive Groups Begin Push for Biden to Keep Wall Street Out of the White House – Brian Schwartz (CNBC News, April 9, 2020).
Bernie's Campaign Is Over: But Retreat Is Not the Same As Surrender – Norman Solomon (Salon, April 10, 2020).
Thank You, Bernie Sanders. Screw You, New York Times – Laura Flanders (Common Dreams, April 10, 2020).
How Biden Can Earn the Progressive Vote – Ronald W. Dixon (Medium, April 12, 2020).
I Would Endorse and Even Campaign for Joe Biden if He Did These Five Things – Shaun King (The North Star, April 13, 2020).
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Warns Biden That Just Throwing Progressives a “Couple of Bones” Will Not Be Enough – Eoin Higgins (Common Dreams, April 13, 2020).
Biden Quietly Working with Sanders’ Campaign to Avoid “Never Biden” Movement – Emily Jacobs (New York Post, April 13, 2020).
I Literally Wrote the Case Against Joe Biden. But I’ve Got Some Free Advice for Him – Branko Marcetic (Jacobin, April 13, 2020).
New Poll Shows Trump Beating Biden, Losing to Sanders – Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti (The Hill, April 13, 2020).
UPDATES: Joe Biden Needs to Do a Lot More if He Wants to Win Over Sanders Voters – Nathan Robinson (The Guardian, April 14, 2020).
The Media Had a Formula for Reporting Sexual Misconduct. Then Joe Biden Was Accused – Branko Marcetic (Jacobin, April 14, 2020).
Bernie Sanders Foreign Policy Advisors Invited to Biden Camp – Matthew Petti (The National Interest, April 14, 2020).
Sanders to Supporters: Refusing to Back Biden is “Irresponsible” – Ursula Perano (Axios, April 14, 2020).
Don’t Blame Progressives: Trump’s 2020 Win Will Be on Centrists – Ted Rall (LA Progressive, May 20, 2020).
For The Wild Reed's coverage of Bernie Sanders' 2020 presidential campaign, see the following chronologically-ordered posts:
• The Case for Bernie Sanders
• Thoughts on the Eve of the Iowa Caucuses
• Bernie Sanders and the Corporate Media
• Thoughts on the “Sanders Surge”
• “It's Time to Take a Stand”: Marianne Williamson Endorses Bernie Sanders for President
• Bernie Sanders’ “Revolution” is Ultimately One of Values – the Values of Justice, Hope, and Love
• Marianne Williamson on the Contest Being Played Out by Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders
• Progressive Perspectives on Big Tuesday and Beyond
• “Let Us All Unite!”
• Something to Think About – March 23, 2020
• Deep Gratitude
See also:
• Hope, History, and Bernie Sanders
• Carrying It On
• Moderates, Radicals, and MLK
Opening image: Ringo Chiu/AFP via Getty Images.
I don't disagree with much in this, but I'd rather have Bernie in the Senate sending bills for Biden to sign than the alternative. It may not be perfect, but it's a small step in the right direction.
ReplyDeleteOne thing that Republicans are better at than us liberals is taking advantage of setbacks. They obviously want Republicans in office, but they play the long game and don't let Democratic presidents keep them from their goals. We need to do the same, and take advantage of this opportunity to make a small step towards a progressive future. Biden will only be a good president if we force him to be, and the potential is there even if his heart isn't with us.