After forcing decades of grinding austerity on people, Treasury secretaries and finance ministers and chancellors of the exchequer suddenly found trillions of dollars to rescue the banks; people witnessed their governments printing vast sums of money. They had given up so much—pensions, wages, decent schools—when in fact, contrary to what Margaret Thatcher claimed, there were alternatives. All of a sudden it turned out that governments can do all kinds of things to interfere in the market, and have seemingly unlimited resources with which to help you out if only you are rich enough. At that moment, everyone on earth saw that they had been lied to.
The implications of this unmasking are still reverberating. The anger that is roiling electorates, on both the right and left sides of the political spectrum, is not only about what’s been lost. It’s also about the injustice of it all, knowing that the wrenching losses of our era are not being shared, that the Davos class were never really looking after those at the bottom of the mountain.
Which means that defeating the rising pseudo-populist Right is not just a matter of electoral strategy, not just about finding the right candidates. It’s about being willing to engage in a battle of ideas—during and, more importantly, between elections—that will take on the corrosive, and deeply bipartisan, wealth-worshiping worldview that created the backlash in the first place.
Unless progressives learn to speak to the legitimate rage at the grotesque levels of inequality that exist right now, the Right is going to keep winning. There is no superhero enlightened billionaire coming to save us from the villains in power. Not Oprah, not Zuckerberg, and not Elon Musk.
We’re going to have to save ourselves, by coming together as never before. And in 2016 we caught a glimpse of that potential.
CHAPTER SEVEN
LEARN TO LOVE ECONOMIC POPULISM
Bernie Sanders is the only candidate for US president I have ever openly backed. I’ve never felt entirely comfortable with candidate endorsements. I made an exception in 2016 because, for the first time in my voting life, there was a candidate inside the Democratic Party primaries who was speaking directly to the triple crises of neoliberalism, economic inequality, and climate change. The fact that his campaign caught fire in that context, where he could not be smeared as a spoiler or vote-splitter (though many tried anyway), is what made his campaign different. Bernie was not a protest candidate; once he pulled off an early upset by winning New Hampshire, the game was on. It was suddenly clear that, contrary to all received wisdom (including my own), Sanders had a shot at beating Hillary Clinton and becoming the presidential candidate for the Democratic Party. In the end, he carried more than twenty states, with 13 million votes. For a self-described democratic socialist, that represents a seismic shift in the political map.
Many national polls showed that Sanders had a better chance of beating Trump than Clinton did (though that might have changed had he won the primary and faced a full right-wing onslaught). Bernie was incredibly well suited to this moment of popular outrage and rejection of establishment politics. He was able to speak directly to the indignation over legalized political corruption, but from a progressive perspective—with genuine warmth and without personal malice. That’s rare. He championed policies that would have reined in the banks and made education affordable again. He railed against the injustice that the bankers had never been held accountable. And, after a lifetime in politics, he was untainted by corruption scandals. That’s even more rare. Precisely because Bernie is about as far as you can get from the polished world of celebrity reality TV, it would have been hard to find a better foil for Trump and the excesses of the Mar-a-Lago set.
During the campaign, one of the early images that went viral was of Sanders on a plane, white hair disheveled, crammed into an economy-class middle seat. Running that kind of candidate against a man in a private jet with big gold letters on the side would have been the campaign of the century. And it’s clear that people are still drawn to the contrast: two months into Trump’s term, a Fox News poll found that Sanders had the highest net favorability rating of any politician in the country.
The reason it’s worth going over these facts is that when a candidate like that presents him or herself, and when that candidate proves that, with the right backing and support, they could conceivably win, it’s worth understanding what stood in the way—so that the mistakes aren’t repeated. Because in 2016, there was—almost—a transformative option on the ballot, and there could actually be one next time.
Fear of the Unruly Masses (and Unruly Tresses?)
This is not an argument about whether or not people should have voted for Hillary against Trump. This is about whether there could have been a candidate on the ballot not just more capable of beating Trump but more capable at getting at some of the underlying forces that supercharged Trump’s rise. For me, the tragedy of Trump is not only that the United States is now led by a man who represents the worst of all that the culture is capable of, all of it bundled into one human being. It’s that the country was within reach of the best and most hopeful political possibility to emerge in my lifetime, imperfect as Sanders is, and just as the climate clock was about to strike midnight.
So why couldn’t he connect with enough voters to go over the top?
I get that staunch neoliberals in the Democratic Party didn’t want Sanders. He’s a threat to that whole model, and his economic populism caused deep discomfort in many high places. So I won’t spend time here rehashing how the Democratic National Committee sabotaged Bernie’s campaign, exchanging information and strategy with the Clinton camp to serve that purpose. But his campaign was also forcefully attacked by people who are progressive. Some looked in the eye of a candidate who was promising to materially and seriously improve the lives of working people across the country, and turn climate change into a generational mission, and chose to back Clinton, the candidate of an untenable status quo, instead.
The hostility of so many powerful US liberals to Bernie Sanders—and the determination to hold him back when he was on a winning streak—was both troubling and revealing. Because we so often hear that while they personally support bolder policies to fight inequality, those policies aren’t worth championing because the American public is too conservative, too pro-capitalist, and would never support them. So they back establishment candidates in the name of pragmatism—choosing the person with the best chance of winning against Republicans.
Yet Bernie showed that positions previously dismissed as too radical for anything but the fringe Left—such as universal public health care and breaking up the banks and forgiving student debt and free college tuition and keeping fossil fuels in the ground and getting to 100 percent renewable energy—were wildly popular in the most capitalist country on earth, supported by millions of people. He showed that transformational change was not a pipe dream after all. On the other hand, what was considered the “safe” choice—Hillary Clinton—turned out to be a very dangerous choice.
Whose Revolution?