Scandalize his Name: The Red-baiting of Bernie Sanders

Recent weeks have given witness to a decided growth of the Anyone-But-Bernie (ABB) syndrome-- the promotion by top Democrats of any candidate remaining in the Democratic primary race whose first name is not “Bernie.” 

Perhaps the most obvious examples were the outrages of the recent Iowa caucuses. Apart from the $800,000 anti-Bernie ad campaign by an operative of AIPAC and pro-Israel zealots, the brazen attempt to undermine Sanders’s victory and promote a new ABB champion stands out. With Biden faltering, though still polling top numbers in Iowa, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) through its Iowa surrogates, manipulated the results to dump Biden and install a younger, glitzier opponent to the grumpy, stoop-shouldered Sanders. Out of nowhere, the energetic, but hollow small-town mayor, Pete Buttigieg, was boosted into the primary lead by hook and by crook.

The anti-Sanders crowd thought that the media would press the bogus Iowa “victory” into an unstoppable wave for Mayor Pete. But that wave broke on the shoals of the Sanders victory in New Hampshire, sending the ABBers into a panic.

Of course they still have the many-times-a-billionaire Michael (now just “Mike”) Bloomberg as a backstop. While he has shamelessly reached third place in the polls by spending more in nine weeks than all the other Democratic candidates combined and even more than the entire Republican National Committee did for Donald Trump in 2016, he comes with much baggage. 

Even the most cynical voter has to reflect upon the affront to the flimsiest concept of democracy that permits the naked, crass purchase of the US Presidency. But that hasn’t stopped Bloomberg from hiring thousands, creating a shortfall of political operatives for the other candidates, from purchasing high-profile endorsements, from asking wealthy donors to refrain from supporting other candidates, and from generously paying thousands on social media to spread his message. His “meddling” in the US electoral process makes all other accusations of meddling, including foreign meddling, appear ludicrous.

But as my comrade Joe Jamison so perceptively points out, this is only one of many ambushes that the Democratic Party elites have prepared for the Sanders campaign. Apart from DNC dirty tricks (as seen in Iowa, also with the stacking of the Convention Rules Committee, and with changing the debate rules to accommodate Bloomberg), the DNC is attempting to narrow the field to the most promising “moderate” or “centrist” candidate to oppose Sanders.

Should Sanders get by these hurdles and the second-ballot Superdelegates, there is the donor strike and the “cutting” by Party loyalists that handed the 1972 election to Nixon and away from McGovern. Even a loss to Trump is worth keeping Sanders from the White House with his modest social democratic program. 

Perhaps the most insidious tool that the corporate Democrats, their Republican counterparts, their compromised collaborators, the monopoly media, and other ossified institutions wield is the tried-and-true practice of red-baiting. 

In the post-war history of the US, every step, every motion toward even a modicum of social justice, has been met with the cry of “Communism!”. Even many dedicated anti-Communists have felt the sting of red-baiting when they stepped out of line from the capitalist consensus.

So it comes as no surprise that celebratory commentator, Chris Matthews, slung mud at Sanders in a recent public meltdown, suggesting that he and other capitalist apologists would meet their demise should Red-Bernie be elected.

Top-dollar political consultant, James Carville, also recently called Bernie a Communist, as has candidate, Amy Klobuchar, on different occasions.

And a fulminating MSNBC “personality,” Chuck Todd, came up with a different wrinkle, denouncing young Sanders supporters as “brown shirts” (he may have been influenced by the hopefully short-lived, scurrilous alarm of a “red-brown alliance”).

What does a targeted red-baiting campaign, like the one directed at Bernie Sanders, mean?

✱ In the first place, it means desperation. Like its dialectical counterpart, false patriotism, it can be said that “it is the last refuge of scoundrels.” When hard pressed and owning no argument, scream “Communism!”

✱ It is a sign of ideological bankruptcy. Bernie brings class issues into the Democratic Party conversation that might come at a cost to some capitalist interests. Medicare for All, for example, when properly understood, would drive private insurance out of healthcare delivery. This is not consistent with the political program adopted by the Democratic Party since its surrender to the conservative Democratic Leadership Council in the 1980s, a program that stresses private, market solutions that keep profits and concentrated wealth largely intact. This ideological surrender to capital was ably captured by the ludicrous slogan: “a rising tide lifts all boats.” Since such thinking is largely in disrepute, the only recourse is to yell “Red!”

✱ It is a sign of compromised values. While many workers see the Sanders movement as friendly to minorities, the working class, and the poor, all too many of organized labor’s leaders fear the prospects of class confrontation, of class struggle. They see Sanders's campaign as threatening their cozy relations with corporate bosses and Democratic Party elected officials. Red-baiting is the crucial tool in driving a wedge between militant unionists and those more easily alarmed by false threats.

✱ It is a sign of fear of a Democratic Party realignment. Since the loss of the South to the Republican Party in the late 1960s and 1970s, the Democratic Party needed new alliances. Assuming that labor and minorities could be neglected because they could only cash their political capital within the Democratic Party in the existing two-party system, party elites began a long courtship of middle and upper strata urban and suburban liberals. To entice their votes and their dollars, the Democratic Party embraced fiscal conservatism and social liberalism. New Deal-style public programs were replaced with private agencies receiving public funding (so-called public-private partnerships); “efficiency” and budget austerity were the new watch words; and encouragement and tolerance of diversity in civil society replaced compensatory programs directed to raise oppressed minorities. From the 1970s on, the Democrats offered little resistance to the depressed, eroding living standards of working people, the oppressed, and the poor. Red-baiting distracts voters from these disruptive facts. 

For the party bosses who supervised this shift, the prospects of a new, energized, progressive campaign behind Sanders is a nightmare. A campaign that places issues relevant to the vast majority of working people, that promises to regulate corporations, that might shift the existing extremely one-sided balance in power, and that could redistribute some income and wealth is completely out of step with the existing Democratic Party alignment. Painting Sanders’s program red is the hysterical response to that danger.

✱ It is a sign of the crisis of the two-party system. For some time, the two existing, corporate-dominated parties have been stretched to the limits, attempting to contain divergent, rebellious factions. The Republican Party faced a hard-right, uncompromising insurgency dubbed “the Tea Party” that questions the leadership’s commitment to fighting for its vision of conservative values. The rise of Trump has further challenged party unity with its distinctive anti-globalist, national self-interest agenda. 

In recent years, the dominance of corporate Democrats has been challenged by a youth-driven, progressive faction seeking relief from the human devastation left in the wake of declining social services, enforced austerity, and a deep economic collapse. This rising has coalesced around the candidacy of Bernie Sanders, a self-described “democratic socialist.” 

How the Democratic leaders manage this insurgency will determine the future of the Democratic Party. Can the insurgents be contained? At what cost? Or will they lead many workers and minorities somewhere else?

For the short term, red-baiting is seen as a way to cauterize this threat. 

But suppressing the insurgency may well lead to an even greater militancy. Most young people have shed the knee-jerk anti-Communism of the Cold War; the fear of socialism is receding, as many are exposed to the inequalities and injustices of capitalism and search for radical alternatives.  

Democratic Party leaders may well smother the Sanders campaign. They have smothered other insurgent campaigns in the past. But the movement behind this campaign is another matter. While it may dissipate out of frustration with the likely treachery of a thoroughly corporatized Democratic Party, it may, on the other hand, emerge in a new, independent, and even more radical direction.

We should do all we can to see that the latter happens.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

Election Follies

Intercept reports via Extra! that CBS CEO Les Moonves is ecstatic over the revenues flowing into entertainment coffers from the primary campaigns (I've never seen anything like this, and this is going to be a very good year for us.”). Moonves, the entertainment mogul, understands better than most the triumph of entertainment over substance, posture over issues; CBS and the other mega-corporations peddle reality television and tabloid news. So it's not surprising to see him hail the current electoral season's antics as special (“Man, who would have expected the ride we're all having right now? ...Who would have thought that this circus would have come to town?”). For Moonves and his ilk the more inanity and sensationalism, the more money flows into corporate coffers (“You know, we love having all 16 Republican candidates throwing crap at each other. It's great. The more they spend, the better it is for us...”).

But lost to many in the explosion of vulgarity and outrageousness is the strong and strengthening connection between the dominance of money-- big money-- and the increasing irrelevance of bourgeois democracy. Every election cycle ups the ante-- from millions to billions-- in competitions contested around increasingly marginal issues and massive doses of insincerity. Bourgeois democracy is to genuine people's democracy as “reality” television shows Survivor and Duck Dynasty are to the reality of working peoples' lives. The campaigns are driven not by political import, but by competitive entertainment value.

Of course the losers in this charade are working people, the poor, and minorities. Their representatives and institutions are dominated by liberals largely content with a slightly more humane, less nasty capitalism, though, sadly, elected liberals seldom deliver even that for them.

The capitulation to this bankrupt ideology of the traditional support system for working class and poor people-- unions, religious institutions, the Democratic Party, ethnic organizations, etc.-- explains, in no small part, the desperate turn to Trump. Tepid, aloof liberalism breeds desperate options like the outlandish Trump when conditions deteriorate sharply and no radical options appear available.

The always sharp Doug Henwood offers the “...proof that Democrats, especially liberal Democrats, are the cheapest dates around-- throw them a few rhetorical bones, regardless of your record, and they'll be yours to take home and bed.” (from his new book, My Turn, as quoted in the NYRB, 4-7-16)

No candidates promote this cynical behavior more consistently than the Clintons and their “New” Democrat acolytes.

That the Democratic Party selection process has been fixed against party insurgency since the overturn of the McGovern party reforms and the McGovern defeat of 1972 should be obvious to everyone. Nonetheless, the party's operatives and loyalist zombies will answer that the system forgoes undesirable electoral landslides like the one occurring in 1972. What they don't say is that McGovern lost overwhelmingly because these same party stalwarts failed to campaign for McGovern and mounted a stealth campaign to give away the election rather than support a leftward swing. In fact, the system is designed to stifle any inner-party rising like the one currently mounted by Bernie Sanders.

The fact that the other party felt no similar need to stack the deck accounts for the current anti-Trump hysteria in the Republican Party.

Consider the deck-stacking that makes a Sanders' victory just short of impossible: 719 super delegates loom over the process, a group made up largely of reliably centrist party hacks ready and willing to block insurgencies. Should the hacks stand as a bloc, they make it possible for a preferred candidate to win roughly 40% of the contested delegates and still gain the nomination.

The Democratic Party establishment strengthens the super delegate bloc by favoring proportional apportionment in the primaries over winner-take-all. Without the possibility of taking all of the votes in a large state, an insurgent candidate loses the opportunity to counter the super delegate bloc with a boost from delegate-rich states. While proportional representation formally appears more democratic, it actually and paradoxically denies fair representation in the face of a loaded, undemocratic bloc of delegates. The road becomes much steeper.

The party fixers organize the primaries so that the generally more conservative states speak early and often in the primary season, favoring the perception of a more conservative electorate and forestalling any momentum gained by a left insurgent. Demonstrating this advantage, the party elite's favorite Hillary Clinton enjoyed early victories in Southern states that the Democratic Party has no chance of winning in a general election, but leaving the mistaken impression that she was more “electable.”

Amazingly, Democratic Party zealots and apologists deny that their party's primaries are structurally fixed, that they are effectively undemocratic.

But the voters seem to sense this fact: Pew Research Center telephone polls show that the election has drawn the highest political interest of the last five Presidential campaigns (85%). But the same respondents show the second lowest confidence (36%) in the primary system of elections dating back to 1996.

Sanders supporters, recognizing the stacked deck presented by the super delegate system, have been contacting the super delegates to sway their votes or, at least, convince them to stay neutral until the convention. The party hacks (largely staffers and elected officials) have reacted with indignation, as reported by The Wall Street Journal. How dare rank-and-file Democrats reach out directly to their party's leadership!

But counting on the gullibility of voters is not limited to Democratic Party operatives. Nobel laureate economist and darling of liberals and the soft left, Paul Krugman, added his magisterial voice to the stop-Bernie crowd. In a recent NYT column (4-8-16), he addresses a key tenet of Sanders' campaign: “Let's consider bank reform. The easy slogan is 'Break up the Banks'... But were big banks at the heart of the financial crisis and would breaking them up protect us from future crises?”

For most people, the answer would be a decided “yes.” But astonishingly, Krugman disagrees.

“Many analysts concluded years ago that the answers to both questions are no. Predatory lending was largely carried out by smaller, non-Wall Street institutions like Countrywide Financial; the crisis itself was centered not on big banks but on ‘shadow banks’ like Lehman Brothers that weren't necessarily that big. And the financial reform that Barack Obama signed in 2010 addressed these problems.”

Seldom will a reader encounter four sentences with more hair-splitting, nit-picking spin and deflection than in Krugman's disputation. Furthermore, it would be difficult to find a more misleading and flimsy apology for the big banks.

Rather than address the Krugman claims in detail, it is enough to attend to the AP news story (4-11-16) following only days after the NYT column. Writer Eric Tucker records the $5 billion settlement by Goldman Sachs against charges made by the Federal government. The settlement “holds Goldman Sachs accountable for its serious misconduct in falsely assuring investors that securities it sold were backed by sound mortgages, when it knew that they were full of mortgages that were likely to fail.” Tucker notes that JP Morgan Chase settled similar charges for $13 billion, Bank of America $16.6 billion, Citibank $7 billion, and Morgan Stanley $3.2 billion. Tucker wisely attributes these negotiated settlements to big bank activity “kicking off the recession in late 2007...” Krugman preferred to blame the dead-- two banks that were “executed” for their bad behavior.

But that's where you are taken when you shill for Hillary Clinton.

As the electoral season winds down and moves inexorably towards a stage managed, more elite-satisfying finale, it might be a good moment to reflect upon the future. How do we turn these regular exercises into real contests? How do we escape the two-party trap with its relentless rightward drift? How do we inject class and race into the superficialities of the bourgeois political process? How do we create a political force that can contest on behalf of working people and their allies without surrendering independence to a ruling class party? How do we break the two-party monopoly?

If we continue to ignore these questions, we will find the left even further marginalized watching an unfolding “drama” with a predictable outcome.

Zoltan Zigedy

zoltanzigedy@gmail.com