Back in 2016 I initially thought Hillary Clinton was the wrong person for my party to have nominated for president. After the disaster of that election I continued to think so for a time. But as the significance of Clinton’s popular vote victory began to dawn, something else occurred to me. Clinton had actually won the election of 2016. Her loss in the electoral college was a fluke. This understanding of the 2016 election outcome has the advantage over other understandings in that it conforms to Occam’s razor, which tells me that the simplist explanation of a phenomenon is the best.
To those among my friends who would like to see the hand of God in the momentary triumph of Trumpism, I can only say that their belief involves a gratuitous assertion I deny gratuitously. As for reasonable explanations of the Trump victory (i. e. politics of resentment, misogyny, racism, etc.), all of which have some claim to being true, I’m thinking today that all of them have followed Lewis Carroll’s white rabbit in overthinking something we should rather understand to have proceeded from the flaw in our constitutional system that has left us vulnerable to oligarchy at a time when the economics of oligarchy are already in place.
Bernie Sanders and the movement he has assembled are both a consequence of and a possible solution to the many cultural, social and political problems that have arisen in the wake of our present slide into the abyss of inequality. But I am more attracted to some of Sanders’ younger supporters than I am to Sanders, himself. I believe the country’s future lies with Sanders supporters who, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, found themselves able to praise Elizabeth Warren after her withdrawal from the presidential race. I’m not so sure about Sanders supporters like one who tweeted this attack on Warren’s SNL performance: “I’m actually disgusted that while the people are fighting for the soul of this country she is dancing and rehearsing fodder for the masses, , , ,” I cast my vote in yesterday’s Missouri Primary without being able meaningfully to vote for Warren, the candidate of my choice, a choice I believe I am as qualified to have made as my disgusted fellow citizen who by extension stigmatizes me as a person who is not fighting for the soul of my country.
One of the things that seems to characterize the Sanders campaign is humorlessness. I’m constantly thinking, “Lighten up!” If we lose the ability to “dance and rehearse,” to laugh at ourselves, the wowser’s have won. And I’m thinking of Nafisi’s reading group in Lolita in Tehran, who come to Nafisi’s house in the hijabs they are forced to wear, but beneath them dress in vivid colors that match their independent spirits, the poetry of their inner lives, the beauty of their souls regardless of what grief and despair their lives entail. And I’m thinking that a certain joylessness is characteristic of authoritarian politics. To the extent that we on the left lose the ability to have a good time, to take pleasure in the world around us and in things that are lovely, we have become what we deplore in the politics of the right. We have conceded the whole territory of life and the world to the enemy, which is not “dancing and rehearsing” but the despair that would forbid it.
Still, it’s perhaps a sign of the times that the Sanders campaign has developed a degree of toxicity that can be observed in the tweetstorm occasioned by Sanders’ SNL appearance and Ocasio-Cortez’ praise of her. On another front, today I note a whole series of memes alleging that Joe Biden announced on the Lawrence O’Donnell show night before last he would veto a bill authorizing medicare for all if it came to his desk as president. That Biden did nothing of the sort can easily be displayed, but few I suspect, will take the trouble to review video of the show in question. Russian trolls aside, distortion by recontextualization, though hardly new to politics, has had a new birth in the Trump era. It’s even defended by its perpetrators, as in the case of a doctored video tweeted by White House director of social media, Dan Scavino, and retweeted by Trump, that purports to show Biden urging Americans to re-elect Trump.
I’m amused, too, by fact checkers’ use of epithets like “partly false” for distortions such as these. I’m used to old-fashioned distinctions between truth and falsehood (i. e. a statement cannot be true and false at the same time). There’s really no such animal as a “partly false” statement. The distinction between truth and falsehood admits no relativity. But lying by distortion is an equal opportunity occupation these days. Many of the attacks on Barack Obama that came to be associated with Republicans, for instance, were first introduced by the Clinton Campaign in the run-up to the Democratic Convention of 2008. Now, I’m hearing from CommonDreams that “progressives” (i. e. Sanders voters) are appalled at a list of potential Biden appointees published recently by Axios. One can discount consternation expressed over usual suspects, Bloomberg and Dimon, but more interesting is a comment by Sarah Jones to the effect that “the highest expectation anyone should have for a Biden presidency is that he’d be a caretaker president.”
I submit the same had best be true of a Sanders presidency. Both Biden and Sanders are old, as I am now, Sanders the elder of the two. “There is a fundamental instability in a gerontocracy,” writes Sarah Kendzior in her most recent piece for the Globe and Mail. “November will bring a reckoning” she says. It’s inconceivable to me that the first stages of that reckoning involve any other than a rebuilding of the country’s distressed institutions. I am convinced that reform must wait upon that rebuilding. Still, rebuilding will require that Sanders or Biden form “a broad coalition of younger colleagues” in order to confront “the structural rot that allowed Mr. Trump to triumph in the first place,” as Kendzior puts it. “Mr. Biden is better at coalition-building and Mr. Sanders is better at identifying root problems,” she says further. “They will both need to embrace each other’s skills to move forward.” Kendzior’s remarks avoid ageism, though just barely. Her final sentence sets one generation against the other in a manner that is becoming typical.
One cannot blame young people for being disillusioned about the future in this era of climate catastrophe and ceaseless corruption. To capture their votes, Democrats must make a compelling case about how they will protect that future – even though their presidential nominee will not live to see it.
Today I am reading comments on Facebook to the effect that Biden is a ‘poor, demented, old man.’
That being said, neither Sanders nor Biden should aim to serve more than one term. Beyond rebuilding, the fundamental task of that term should be to groom a cadre of successors. It is perhaps just to claim that Biden’s resurgence as a candidate means that a substantial number of Americans think of him as safe. I think, given the fact that both Sanders and Biden are soon to be eighty, as I am now plus a couple of years, their ideological differences should be viewed as matters of political style as much as reflections of the views of their respective supporters. The great need for structural reform will not go away if Biden is elected, and American style capitalism will not go away if Sanders is elected. This country is inconceivable without the wealth-generating engine at its heart, as problematic as that has been for America’s past, as problematic as it will be for the future of our planet. Today, as I watch more election returns, it seems evident the electorate all around the country are turning out in record numbers to vote for Joe Biden. I very much hope this presages a blue wave that will sweep Trump and the Republicans out of office in November. It will be tempting for the pundit class to overthink a Biden victory, if it occurs. What I think is that the electorate could just as easily have coalesced around Sanders.
Assuming that a Democrat president is elected in the fall and is given a Democrat congress to work with, the job of government next year will be the same whether the president is Bernie Sanders or Joe Biden. It is a pure accident that Biden is emerging as the victor, just as it was a fluke that gave us Donald Trump and robbed us of our first female president. Next year’s president, assuming it is not Donald Trump, must assemble a brain trust like the one assembled by Franklin Roosevelt and begin the hard work of rebuilding what Trump and the Republicans have destroyed. The Sanders movement has done the country the great service of moving our political discourse to the left. We can now talk about health care as a human right. We can now consider reigning in the multinational corporations, the big banks and hedge funds, the telecom giants, big data, big pharma, etc. We can at the very least return to the Kyoto accords. Beyond these things it will be the task of next year’s politics, as Sarah Kendzior says, to empower a new generation of Americans to lead our nation. They are already there in the persons of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Beto O’Rourke, Kamala Harris, Pete Butttigieg, etc. It isn’t necessary that they agree, but it will be their task to determine whether humanity and the planet survive.
I’ve just read “To Live and Love with a Dying World: A conversation between Tim DeChristopher and Wendell Berry” in the current issue of Orion. DeChristopher is a West Virginian and Berry is a Kentuckian. Both are keenly opposed to mountaintop removal, which is more or less where they begin to talk. But the subject of their talk soon turns out to be that despair that comes from conviction that it is too late to save our planet, or human life as we know it: that is, the despair that seems to follow upon thoughtful approaches to the Anthropocene. The difference between the two men is only partly a difference between youth and age, and it almost parallels that between Sanders and Biden: Sanders being like DeChristopher, seeking a movement, working out his dreams on the unfolding canvas of American vista; Biden, the specialist in retail politics, seeking always the smile, the handshake, working the ropelines, a bit like Berry, a specialist in localism and economies of scale.
Their disagreements are sharp, but they find at least partial agreement as they come to the end of their talk. DeChristopher can’t quite sign on to Berry’s thought that the world is still a good world, but he does find it in him to say:
That’s why the despair is not paralyzing. Knowing that it’s too late to prevent collapse, knowing that we’re not going to stop the catastrophic end, knowing that we’re going to die—it doesn’t mean that we stop. It means that we live in this moment as fully as we can.
Berry, typically, goes further:
That’s my argument in favor of this world, against the determinists. I depend on what I know of human goodness, but also on the flowers and the butterflies and the birds. The otters and the swallows—a lot of their life is just spent having a hell of a good time. The animals, so far as I can understand them, have a great deal to say in favor of life. It’s a good world, still.
I smile a bit at this and think of Elizabeth Warren dancing on SNL a few nights ago and making ‘pinkie promises’ with little girls as she bravely ran for president, because “that’s what girls do.”