Bernie Goes Home

After another shellacking at the polls on Tuesday (Illinois, Florida and Arizona), the Sanders campaign emailed its supporters yesterday with the news that Bernie was returning home to Vermont with his wife Jane. The message was, basically, it's over.

Socialist Equality Party presidential candidate Joseph Kishore, writing for the Trotskyist World Socialist Web Site, provides a withering assessment of "Bernieism" in "Bernie Sanders draws his campaign to an end: The political lessons":

The Sanders campaign in many respects mirrors those of previous “left” and “insurgent” Democratic Party candidates and political figures, including Jesse Jackson, Dennis Kucinich, Al Sharpton, Howard Dean and Barack Obama himself—the “transformative” candidate of “hope and change” whose election in 2008 supposedly inaugurated a sea-change in American politics. The results of these previous proposals to perform political alchemy on the Democratic Party are self-evident.

Not only in the United States, but around the world, working people have experienced the betrayals of organizations that claimed to represent an opposition to the capitalist ruling elite, and ended up doing their bidding. This includes Syriza in Greece, Jeremy Corbyn in Britain, Podemos in Spain, the Left Party in Germany, and similar “lefts” in France and many other countries.

Sanders, however, is seeking to carry out the job of channeling opposition into the Democratic Party under far more explosive conditions. Masses of workers and young people are moving to the left. The coronavirus pandemic will vastly accelerate the political radicalization that has already begun.

What Kishore says is true. But I don't think he is entirely fair to the Sanders campaign. The problem with Trotskyites is that all their theory begins with the fiction of a cohesive, class-conscious working class. And of course nothing could be further from the truth. There is no greater proof of the hacked, alienated nature of worker consciousness than Joe Biden's winter electoral juggernaut. Biden had no campaign presence in states that Bernie should have won but that ended up going to Biden. Biden beat Bernie in King County, Washington, the progressive population center of the state.

I agree with Kishore that the Democratic Party cannot be transformed; that was the guiding light for Nader's Green Party presidential runs. I believe that the Democratic Party needs to be destroyed.

Right now we are in the midst of a whirlwind. We don't know how long the virus is going to continue to spread. Governments are resorting to a soft form of martial law. We don't how bad the unemployment numbers are going to be and for how long mass unemployment will last.

My worry is that once we begin to emerge from the COVID-19 crisis there will be no greater worker demand for change than that exhibited by a Democratic electorate voting overwhelming for Joe Biden. In other words, another banker-led bailout and an even greater concentration of wealth.