Jim Urquhart / Reuters
In 2008, Hillary Clinton — on her way to losing the Democratic
nomination — won nine of the final 25 nominating contests. In 2016, she
may well — despite being treated as the likely winner of this
year’s Democratic primary by the mainstream media — win only seven or
eight of the final 25 state primaries and caucuses.
If you’re wondering how Clinton could perform worse in the second
half of the election cycle in 2016 than she did in 2008 and still be in a
position to win, there’s a good explanation for it that goes beyond the
fact that the neck-and-neck Democratic primary race we’ve had for over
two months started with a brief but solid run for Clinton. In 2008, both
Democratic candidates were sanctioned by Party elders, so
super-delegates were free to pick whoever they thought was the stronger
candidate without fear of reprisal. In 2016, super-delegates are
expected to go with Clinton even if the insurgent Sanders has clearly
shown himself, by mid-June, to be the stronger general-election
candidate in terms of both head-to-head match-ups with Trump,
favorability ratings among independent voters, and performance in the
second half of the nominating season.
Super-delegates
will fall into line — the thinking goes — not because Clinton is a
strong general-election bet, or liked by many people, or a real
spokeswoman for the ideology of the Party base, or able to win
independents, or nearly the same candidate in May that she was in
February, or capable of winning over her current Democratic opposition
the way Obama did after the primary in 2008, but because Democrats in
Washington have made clear that any super-delegates who back the
now-stronger horse in Philadelphia this July — Sanders — will be
ostracized from the Party. Fear, then, is what could make Clinton the
Democratic nominee even if (a) super-delegates are officially charged
with voting for the strongest general-election candidate, and (b)
Clinton goes on a historic losing streak in the back half of the primary
season election calendar.
But all that’s
horse-race nonsense, and won’t matter very much to political historians
looking back at this period in American history from the vantage point
of, say, 2116.
They won’t care that in 2008 Hillary Clinton won Kentucky by 36
points over then-Senator Obama, but in 2016 only managed to beat a
74-year-old independent socialist with no super-PAC and exponentially
less name recognition by 0.4 percent — despite her making 11 trips to
the state, having a much larger advertising budget, and daily receiving
on-the-stump aid from a popular former President who won Kentucky twice.
We used to say that Hillary Clinton, for all her flaws, handily wins closed Democratic primaries.
Well, we can’t say that anymore.
But it doesn’t really matter in the long run.
And it won’t
matter in 2116 that Democratic Party elders and particularly former
Goldwater-Girl Clinton are so enamored by the idea of a Nixonian
strongman that they fundamentally misunderstand the relation of Bernie
Sanders to Sandersism. They believe he can direct the movement he lent
his name to in the same way Clinton believes progressive Democrats will
fall into line no matter how much she disrespects them, but they’re
wrong. And Clinton is wrong to think she doesn’t owe Sanders and his
political allies the same visibility and authority in her prospective
Administration that she had in Barack Obama’s; she’s also wrong to think
that the benefit of rules-fixing at the state Democratic convention in
Nevada is worth the November votes it’s going to cost her — especially
given her huge delegate lead, which allows her to be a magnanimous
rule-follower.
But all that’s only relevant to the Clinton-Sanders and Clinton-Trump horse-races.
Is it a
“horse-race” issue that the DNC is publicly representing itself as a
“neutral” arbiter in the Democratic primary, and publicly stating that
super-delegates don’t vote until July, but according to NBC is in fact
“colluding” with the Clinton campaign “behind the scenes” to begin —
with millions of votes yet to be cast — the transition of the DNC from
an independent operation to one run by Hillary Clinton? No, for the fact
that there’s “nothing neutral” about the DNC right now (as David
Chalian of CNN put it last night) merely tells you something about the
ethics of the Democratic Party in 2016.
After all, this is a Party that has, in 2016, given Debbie Wasserman Schultz a job.
But not only
isn’t this an article about horse races, it’s also not about 2016. It’s
certainly not about the fact that Hillary Clinton is doing everything
she needs to be doing right now to lose the fall general campaign — even
as she sets up Bernie Sanders to be the eventual fall-guy for her own
failures.
No — this article is about the future.
Conservative
Republicans have largely been successful in pulling their party to the
right since 1996; the GOP as it is today is almost unrecognizable from
the days of George H.W. Bush, who in 2016 terms would be a Democrat.
While conservatives suffered some setbacks over the last few years —
owing to their leaders choosing, over and over, to ignore them or even
slap them in the face publicly — the 2016 GOP primary has shown us that a
party’s “base”, apropos of its name, always get the last laugh. Why?
Because it’s what any political party is ultimately founded upon.
Since 1996,
progressive Democrats have had their butts handed to them repeatedly by
their leaders. The Democratic Party as it is today is almost
unrecognizable from the days of Michael Dukakis. Bill Clinton turned out
to be a “New Democrat,” in other words a triangulating neoliberal
corporatist. Al Gore waited until far too late in his 2000 campaign to
unveil his “progressive warrior” persona. Howard Dean was cut off at the
knees by the media in 2004, when somehow everyone who reported on “The
Scream” neglected to mention that it was only the media’s turning off of
all off-stage mics that made Dean’s speech seem out-of-place
in-context. Barack Obama has been a terrific President whose
administration has been, nevertheless, not nearly as progressive as the
two campaigns he waged to get into the White House led progressives to
expect. When the Democrats did everything in their power to anoint
Hillary Clinton before a single American had voted — giving her a
350-superdelegate lead, more than $100 million in super-PAC money, a
laughably disingenuous “debate schedule,” and much more — it was
presumed that progressives would take a right cross to the chin with the
same good grace they always had.
Keeping
progressives complacent has been particularly easy for the “New
Democrat” philosophy Bill and Hillary Clinton used to take over the
Democratic Party because it has, too, the complicity of the corporate
media — in much the same way Republican conservatives succeeded because
of their absolute dominance of American radio.
Despite being
told not to do so by the DNC itself, the mainstream media began tallying
superdelegates back in 2015, which ensured that Clinton would not face a
real challenger from within the Democratic Party. Until it realized
there was real money to be made in cable-sponsored “town halls”, the
mainstream media remained largely silent on the laughably sparse debate
schedule the DNC had created as a sort of “red carpet” for Clinton. The
media gave Sanders only a fraction of the coverage enjoyed by Clinton.
It stacked its permanent on-air “panels” with Clinton supporters, while
relegating Sanders surrogates to, at most, brief interviews. And it
perpetuated a single master narrative to the point it became a
self-fulfilling prophecy: the idea that if a 74-year-old independent
socialist from an all-white state couldn’t immediately, even
instantaneously, win a majority of the black and Latino vote nationwide,
it meant his “appeal” was limited to well-to-do Caucasian hipsters.
That Sanders has doubled his support among blacks and Latinos over the
last three months is, in this day-to-day “horse-race” perspective the
media and the media alone promulgates, meaningless.
The problem is, “-isms” don’t operate at the level of a year; they unfold over decades.
Sandersism isn’t about 2016; it’s about 2024, 2044, and even — in terms of what it means for the future of this country — 2116.
The point being
this: the ideological revolution within the Democratic Party has
already happened, and Sandersism won. The only question now is how long
Democrats and the country will have to wait to see its gains in
real-time. A Clinton presidency would forestall those gains somewhat
less than a Trump presidency would, but the fact remains that either a
Clinton or a Trump administration would merely delay the inevitable “New
New Deal” America has richly earned and will ultimately receive.
It’s not just
me saying this, nor is it merely Sanders supporters. No less a staunch
Clinton ally than David Axelrod said on CNN two weeks ago that not only
is the “debate over” regarding the ideological future of the Democratic
Party, it was actually over a long time ago.
And Bernie Sanders won it.
It was over
when a 74-year-old independent socialist with no super-PAC or name
recognition went from 4 percent in the polls at the beginning of 2015 to
— within 13 months — a statistical dead heat with the most powerful
political machine in the history of American democracy. Let’s be clear:
the Clintons aren’t merely the most politically successful
husband-and-wife team in American history; they’re not merely the scions
of a family that has, for a quarter-century, been the most politically
influential in the Democratic Party; they literally remade the party into their own image more than two decades ago. The Democratic Party today is
Clintonism. And when Bernie Sanders declared what was ostensibly a
fringe candidacy last spring, he was in no uncertain terms — not even
the Clintons doubted it — declaring war on the Democratic Party as the
Clintons had made it. He was, in short, declaring a return to the
politics of FDR and the Democratic Party of the New Deal.
Contemporary
journalists are tasked with seeing beyond the ends of their noses, but
rarely do; they’re encouraged in this dereliction of duty by politicians
like the Clintons for whom a perpetual focus on the day-to-day
horse-race is good for business — specifically, the business of keeping
one of the two major American political parties exactly as it already
is. (Which, as noted, is exactly how they made it.) As long as reporters
focus exclusively on the horse-race, it’s easy to count delegates
properly — though actually, the media struggles to do even this — and
see that Sanders remains unlikely to be the lead horse after the current
lap is run. It’s equally easy to see that saying Clinton has “won”
obscures not just how bad a politician she is; not just how poor a
campaign she has run; not just how disliked she is by the
general-election electorate; not just how needlessly close a
general-election race her nomination would ensure; but also, and more
importantly, how irrelevant her political persona — which she has shed
by degrees this election cycle anyway — will be to the future of her
Party and the nation.
An obsession
with the horse-race — with what happens in 2016, irrespective of what
will happen in 2020, 2024, and for decades after that — is the only
thing that allows Hillary Clinton to declare victory in the Democratic
nominating process. Any longer view, particularly one that considers
that Clintonism and Sandersism didn’t start 2015 at the same starting
line — indeed, didn’t even start in the same stadium — will
acknowledge that Sanders finishing the 2016 election season with between
46 percent and 48 percent of the pledged delegates means Sandersism has
defeated Clintonism.
The Democrats ignore this at their peril.
But make no mistake, they will
ignore it — they already are, and with a particularly unpalatable
smugness — and so they must therefore, going forward, be considered as
existentially imperiled as the Republican Party is right now.
The Democratic
Party’s perverse obsession with closed primaries has left them with a
likely nominee distinctly unpopular with the independent voters who
decide national elections. The Party’s reliance on superdelegates
ensured a noncompetitive field of Democratic competitors (Chafee, Webb,
and O’Malley) and stacked the deck against a legitimate “movement”
insurgent from the ranks of the nation’s progressive-but-independent
politicians — an insurgent with the sort of excitement behind him that
could drive turnout in a GOTV-oriented “base” election. Clinton’s
continued refusal to release her Wall Street transcripts, and the
Party’s broader recalcitrance in the face of working-class suffering,
isn’t an instance of Clinton or the Party standing up for itself in the
face of unreasonable expectations — rather, it’s a failure to honor the
generation coming up, which needs to believe that its politicians mean
what they say and really do care about the things they say they do.
Clinton didn’t owe Sanders supporters transcripts of all her prepared
remarks on substantive economic and foreign policy, she owed that
transparency to her Party and to the nation whose votes she seeks. But
the Party’s esoteric fundraising schemes and infrastructure made it
impossible for it to stand up to one of its best rainmakers —
ironically, in part because the Party has done nothing to get money out
of politics via meaningful campaign finance reform. Finally, the Party’s
reliance on a set rather than variable primary schedule means that
certain states and votes are every four years privileged over others;
concerns about the undue influence of Southern voters on this year’s
primary had nothing to do with racial demographics and everything to do
with the signal sent when a Party lets its most moderate voters (white
and black alike) have the biggest say in its nominating process.
Clintonism
supports all of the above structural flaws only because they, in turn,
support the election of Clintons to national office.
And that, in a
nutshell, is Clintonism: a feedback loop whose motive engine is money
and influence and the continued political success of Clintons. In the
90s it was geared toward Bill; in the aughts and tens, Hillary; and we
can expect that the same forces will soon be brought to bear for
Chelsea, if she desires it. Meanwhile, life has gotten worse for those
Americans who don’t attend Clinton Thanksgiving in Chappaqua or help pay
for the house in which it is held.
As a broader,
more abstract philosophy, however, Clintonism is by no means restricted
to the Clintons. All of its most cynical, Nixonian manifestations are
iterable, meaning they can be used by any two-bit local, state, or
national politician willing to put politics in the way of people — and
vanity in the place of principle.
In Sandersism,
universal healthcare is a human right that cannot be subjected to the
realpolitik of incremental legislation. In this view, Obamacare must of
course be maintained until the very moment we switch to a single-payer
system, but it is the obligation of every person concerned with human
rights to militate for such a system to the exclusion of others. In
Sandersism, a college education is a public good all Americans are
entitled to, meaning that whatever funding priorities must be rearranged
to make this possible must be rearranged. “We can’t do it” is no more a
reply to the Sandersist view of higher education than would be a
similar statement with respect to other basic American rights. In
Sandersism, climate change supplants terrorism as the top threat to
national security, without degrading any of the current anti-terrorism
efforts that respect human rights and appropriately assess the scope
(and primary drivers) of our terror risk. In Sandersism, a living wage
for all Americans is a human right, not something for politicians to
log-roll endlessly about. A Sandersist’s first offer to her negotiating
partner on the subject of a living wage is $15, and her second offer is
$15, and her third offer is $15, and every offer thereafter is $15 — for
saying $10 or $12 is akin to saying that minorities can sometimes be discriminated against without the immediate and utter disapproval of American law.
In Sandersism
you negotiate with any and all parties of good faith up until the moment
doing so requires sacrificing a principle. If, under those conditions,
not enough parties of good faith remain, you spend all your time and
resources writing executive orders and working for an end to
gerrymandering and the defeat of all bad-faith politicians in local,
state, and national primaries and generals. In Sandersism politics is an
arena where ideas, not bank accounts or special interests, are
contested; every American is given every possible opportunity to vote;
corporate practices that maim or kill living humans are outlawed; those
few economic practices that can terminally endanger basic economic
justice are adequately regulated; and we spend as much money making sure
our criminal justice system and law enforcement apparatuses are
actually just as we do ensuring our military is capable and
appropriately fearsome. Sandersism is a “we” and an “us” movement that
transcends the artificial divisions of the party era and the atomization
of persons and communities. A Sandersist spends the minimum amount of
time running for office and the maximum amount of time doing the
difficult work of governing — and in both roles places transparency
ahead of political exigency ten times out of ten.
Sandersism is
already the philosophy of a majority of Democrats under 45, which means
by 2024 it will almost certainly be the philosophy of a majority of
Democrats under 55.
And any
movement with those demographic internals is already a current and
future cultural dominant for the purposes of political planning and
action.
That Sanders
defeats Trump by more than Clinton in every battleground state and
nationally only underscores that Clintonism no longer is a winning
formula for a national election. That Sanders likely won’t get to carry
the flag for Sandersism this fall — and Clinton will lose unless she
carries that flag clearly and proudly — is merely another irony in what
has been a veritable landslide of ironies this election season. Clinton
saying “I don’t know if he is a Democrat” will certainly be at
the top of that irony-pile, now that it’s clear that the Party’s
platform will largely be Sandersist.
The Democrats
under Hillary Clinton are now a “zombie party”; everyone but their
leaders can see that they have the same thing coming to them in (say)
2024 that the Republicans had coming to them in 2016 because of the many
slaps in the face they gave their own base in the aughts. Any
presidency Clinton has now can be no more than the end of something very
old and tired, not the beginning of anything new.
And the best
part is, Clinton is telegraphing her own defeat to the media every
single day — they’re just not picking up the signal.
Sanders has
pulled Clinton to the left on every issue of consequence. Now Clinton
opposes all or nearly all of the recent international trade deals;
supports a $15 minimum wage; wants a single-payer healthcare option for
all Americans over 50; is willing to ban fracking as part of the
Democratic Party platform (per reports); opposes the death penalty in
all but vanishingly rare circumstances; is committed to breaking up
too-big-to-fail banks; and so on. What’s even more astonishing is that
not only has Clinton stolen most of Sanders’ campaign agenda, she’s also
stolen many of his best lines. Reporters frequently note that Clinton’s
best-received speeches easily could have been delivered (and, indeed,
previously had been, to much larger crowds) by Sanders.
It doesn’t even
matter that Clinton’s embrace of Sanders’ progressivism is obviously
entirely fake, and will disappear into thin air should she ever get into
the White House. Sandersists know this, and nothing that happens at the
Democratic National Convention will convince them otherwise. Clinton
aides smugly telling reporters that Clinton will concede almost
everything to Sanders with respect to the Party’s platform because “the
platform doesn’t matter” and “voters don’t care about the platform” are,
finally, speaking only to themselves — taking a victory lap during
which their zombie appendages fall off one by one.
For the fact
remains that, should Clinton win the nomination, she will have done so
using Sandersism as her chief philosophical mainstay and bulwark. The
fact remains that any support she now has with voters under 45 — which
is to say, barely any — was gained on the explicit presumption that she
could deliver on a Sandersist legislative agenda in Washington. Should
she do as she definitely plans to do — drop everything she’s adopted
from Sanders should she get into the White House — she’ll face another
legitimate progressive challenger in 2020, and should she defeat that
challenger by again remaking herself as someone totally other than who
she is, if indeed she is anyone at all, in 2024 progressives will
finally seal the deal and take their party back.
In other words,
every action Clintonism takes in the next eight years will be part of a
retreating action in the face of Sandersism. The Democratic Party as
the Clintons remade it in the 1990s is dead, and the most Clinton can do
is steer her little ghost-ship a few more miles until it finally wrecks
itself on an offshore sandbar.
Clinton may win the battle in 2016, but only political neophytes — and a few Washington Post columnists, I suppose — fail to see that she’s already lost the war.
Seth
Abramson is the Series Editor for Best American Experimental Writing
(Wesleyan University) and the author, most recently, of DATA (BlazeVOX, 2016).
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