This was originally posted on HermannView and has been reprinted here.
Progressive after progressive has supported the candidacy of Senator Bernie Sanders for President, acting like he is a savior who will “rescue” us from the brutal corporate masters who rule over the United States. As readers may or may not know, I have tried my best to criticize such progressive “heroes” even if it annoys fellow progressives, including articles on Senator Elizabeth Warren, who has a similar voting record to Bernie Sanders. [1] This article aims to criticize Bernie Sanders, and not hold him up in high regard as some on the Left have from time to time.
Any supporter of Sanders can point to his “progressive” credentials of opposing the Iraq War of 2003, and supporting universal (single-payer) healthcare, among others. Some have come to question this progressivism, with a person even arguing to a panel discussion at Left Forum that Sanders was an imperialist and Zionist. [2] Some may say that such talk is absurd and that it can’t be true in the slightest as Sanders, vying for the nomination of the capitalist Democratic Party is fighting the “billionaire class,” unlike Hillary Clinton. The record tells a different story.
In March of this year, when politicians in both capitalist parties were freaked out about the prospect that the DHS, which claims to keep Americans safe but instead violates their rights and spies on them as part of the expansive “anti-terror” bureaucracy that was “justified” after 9/11 would not be funded, Sanders not only claimed that the DHS keeps Americans safe (which is false) but that it is needed because of terrorists “around the world”[3]:
https://twitter.com/burkelyh/status/607766805503975424
This is not much of a surprise considering that Sanders, an interview onYahoo! News said that surveillance of “potential terrorists” is ok. But, if the government is determining who are terrorists, then I’m not sure how much this will solve since they could consider a large number of people “potential terrorists” and continue surveillance. If I remember right, people such as Glenn Greenwald have taken this position as well, saying that surveillance of “bad people” or “potential terrorists” is ok. Anyone who has a critical eye should be wary of such statements In the same interview, Sanders refuses to criticize Hillary Clinton even after prodding by the interviewer again and again. To be honest, I think that even if Sanders did win the Democratic nomination then the Democratic Party elites/bosses would reject him due to his anti-Wall Street rhetoric and pick Clinton instead. But, I highly doubt he will win.
Moving on, as I noted in my storify about Sanders, he believes in the bad cop/good cop dichotomy, which implies that there are “bad apples” in the police forces of the US, but NOT that it is rotten to the core. This viewpoint falls in line with police reformism as he supports body cameras, somethingwhich I’ve said is not only made by one company, named Pro-Vision Video Systems, but it is would “increase police power,” lead to the profit of the company that makes them, and it “could easily be a reformist effort to pacify the population so they don’t engage in uprisings like those in Baltimore, [and] Ferguson.” Sanders also believes that the job of police isn’t easy. While one could accept it as true, it disregards the brutality and terror that is built into the structure of the police itself, which means that the police either need to be fundamentally reformed or totally reformed…and not replaced with even an worse idea: private security forces.
Using his own statements, Sanders claims that he is “not for sale” but he favors the Israeli bombing of Gaza and Israel in general. As Philip Weiss of Mondoweiss noted, Sanders not only supported Israel in a resolution in July of last year to “support Israel in its attack” and act like Hamas was the “big bad enemy” but he infamously got angry that summer at “pro-Palestinian constituents…that he told them to “shut up”” at a Vermont town hall. Additionally Weiss notes that Sanders, while he has mildly criticized Israeli conduct and bucked the imperial Israeli lobby from time to time, he “cleaves to a very conventional mainstream view of the conflict” which casts Hamas as the one to blame, Arab countries as bad actors and the Palestinian leadership in not involved. At the town hall meeting last summer, he claimed that Israel is defending against “7th century religious fundamentalism” of ISIS, while saying that there needs to be a situation where “Israel has a right to exist in security” and claims that he has been working on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for “the last 50 years.” Weiss also writes that Sanders is an “old Jewish guy for whom the establishment of Israel was a glorious response to the helplessness of the European Jewish story” and that not only did Israel plau an “important role in his political progress and in his moving from the city to Vermont as a young man” but he may have been “shaped by the ideals ofLabor Zionism.”
Some could dismiss this and say that his support of the DHS, body cameras, the bad cop/good cop dichotomy and Israel bombing Palestinians in a manner that seems genocidal is only a few issues. But there is more. I am reminded ofthe email interview I did of Marina Brown of the small democratic socialist party, the Liberty Union party in Vermont, last summer. Here’s part of what she said which shadows his recent decision to run for the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party:
“Bernie Sanders votes a little more conservatively than the most liberal of the Democrats. I oppose him because he operates as a Democratic politician. He supported Barack Obama, a politician who has spearheaded multiple wars and interventions in literally dozens of countries. We oppose war. There has to be a better way. In standing with Democratic politicians in their wars of aggression he shares in their guilt…Sanders has supported basing the F-35 warplanes in Burlington…Sanders supported the creation of a new position in the US of Director of National Intelligence…The FISA warrants that Sanders voted for are nothing more than rubber stamps by the most corrupt judges…Sanders has supported forcing states to do standardized testing on students…I assume he [Sanders] runs as an Independent because it appeals best to his voters.”
Before I move onto my wariness of Sanders running as a Democrat, I am reminded of what President Obama said jokingly at the White House Correspondents Dinner earlier this year: “Bernie Sanders might run. I like Bernie. Bernie’s an interesting guy. Apparently some folks want to see a pot-smoking socialist in the White House. We could get a third Obama term after all. It could happen.” While some may say this means nothing, in my mind the fact that Obama would say this concerns me. Perhaps this is because Sanderssupports the war against ISIS not with US “ground troops” but with Saudi forces fighting as US proxies (along with other countries). He has alsoapplauded Obama for fighting ISIS which he calls a “fanatical and brutal organization which is a danger to the region and the world” and supported the airstrikes which began the “second” Iraq War. [4] He also supported the confirmation of Loretta Lynch, an attorney General, who made harsh statements in opposition of marijuana legalization and xxx, along with falling in line with the argument that Iran is “building a nuclear weapon” (also seehere). As Gareth Porter told moderate right-leaning publication, The American Conservative in 2014, “at no time has the Iranian government ever intended to develop nuclear weapons.” There are probably more aspects I could add here, but I think it is time to move on.
Sanders, who has argued that the the US is “not a moral society,” as you know is running for the presidential nomination of Democratic Party. Some on the Left have criticized this move, saying that [5]:
- Sanders not only won’t beat Clinton but “is this election’s Democratic sheepdog…[a] candidate…to give left activists and voters a reason, however illusory, to believe there’s a place of influence for them inside the Democratic party…the Bernie Sanders show ends, as the left-leaning warm-up act for Hillary Clinton…Bernie’s candidacy is a blast toward the past, an invitation to herd and be herded like sheep back into the Democratic fold…as he warms up the crowd for Hillary. Bernie is a sheepdog” (Bruce Dixon of Black Agenda Report)
- Sanders “for many…offers an alternative [to Clinton]…[but] by steering liberal and left supporters into a Democratic Party whose policies and politics he claims to disagree with, Sanders…is acting as the opposite of an “alternative”…but if Sanders really wanted to participate in mobilizing millions to resist the status quo in US politics, he had options other than launching himself into the circus of a Democratic presidential campaign…he could have set a very different example, with a far greater chance of success, if he ran for governor in Vermont against the Democratic Party’s incumbent, Peter Shumlin…Sanders…could have run for governor as an independent and easily defeated both the Democratic and Republican nominees…Sanders refused to consider an independent presidential campaign…because he didn’t want to compete for votes with the Democrats’ eventual nominee…Hillary Clinton certainly doesn’t regard Sanders as a threat…You can expect that Clinton will agree with Sanders during the campaign…Sanders will follow the well-trodden path of other liberals like Kucinich…Sanders’s retreat is based on a liberal strategy of attempting to transform the Democratic Party from within that has failed for generations…Since he made his arrangement with the Democrats, Sanders has uncritically supported them in Vermont elections…Nationally, Sanders supported Obama in both of the last two elections…With his slide into becoming a Democrat in everything but name, Sanders became less and less radical on a host of issues…Sanders has similarly moderate positions on many social issues….Sanders voted in favor of George W. Bush’s original Authorization for Use of Military Force resolution.” (Ashley Smith in Socialist Worker reprinted in Jacobin)
- Sanders’s “supporters today have even less ambition than 1968’s McCarthy supporters, who were challenging the central plank of the foreign policy agenda of a sitting president…Sanders, for his part, won’t even use the rhetoric — he has ruled out running outside the Democratic Party…For those who want to build a stronger left in the US, there is no substitute for the work…of building social movements and struggles at the grassroots and of organizing a political alternative independent of the Democratic Party.” (Lance Selfa in Jacobin, originally published in Socialist Worker)
Beyond these three criticisms, there is my own, which I mentioned earlier and will continue here. If Sanders was a real socialist, then he would NOT run inside of the capitalist Democratic Party. Yes, there have been those socialists and radicals from time to time, ranging from Cornel West to Noam Chomsky, who have supported voting for the “lesser evil” (Democrats), but I refuse to give this argument any merit. It’s not even worth discussing a choice for a lesser evil, it should be rejected outright. Some may say that voting for the Democrats is necessary to beat the “evil” Republicans, but the Democrats are not only evil, but they are almost more evil because they act like they care about the working class and middle class, whatever that means anymore, when in reality they do not, serving corporate masters from here to there. Others may say that “third parties” don’t have a chance against the two parties and that Sanders would have lost if he had run as an independent. This is true, and maybe it is time to focus on electoral contests on the state and local level where those of alternative third parties can win rather than on the national level. Sanders in my view is a bit of chicken for not running against the Democrats in any way or form, just like Colonel Sandurz in Spaceballs. But, perhaps this is too optimistic and naive.
Beyond this, it seems clear to me that Sanders is not a socialist. Paul Streetwrites in CounterPunch that Sanders looking to Scandinavia is deceptive as a “model” for his socialist because he does not call to “drastically slash the Pentagon System and introduce a great social and environmental peace dividend.” Street also writes that even though Sanders has many progressive goals, he does not reference “the nation’s savage racial disparities” and there is nothing pushing for a cut in the military budget instead being, at the “the end of the day is on board with the American military project,” and a believer in militarism in a deep sense as those such as David Swanson have noted. I would go further and say that Sanders isn’t a socialist because I’ve never heard him in support of economic democracy apart from supporting some co-ops, or how the capitalist system needs to go. Instead, Sanders seems to go down the road of Naomi Klein, who to her credit has criticized capitalism’s connection to climate change, who criticizes deregulated capitalism, but not regulated capitalism. This should trouble anyone who is aware of the inherent problems of the capitalist system.
That’s not all. Sanders’s campaign tweeted that in this day and age, “virtually no piece of legislation can get passed unless it has the okay from Wall Street and corporate America.” It is funny that they would say that because some of Sanders’s views would be favorable to corporate and Wall Street interests like the support of Israel’s occupation of Palestine, militarism in general (opposing only “bad” wars), supporting the DHS, supporting the bombing of ISIS, and so on. Hey, lets also not forget that Sanders recently voted for an extension of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), which is harshly neoliberal [6] and so on. It is interesting that Sanders voted in favor of this even though he has voted against similar “trade” deals like NAFTA and the TPP in the past.
There is more. Sanders has argued that college should be tuition-free to create a strong economy, “the best educated work force in the world,” to “rebuild our middle class” and to be “competitive in the global economy,” along with expanding programs like Pell Grants. This may sound nice, but it only applies to public colleges and universities, not to private ones. Additionally, even if tuition were made free through a financial transaction tax (a small tax on financial transactions like derivatives), what about room and board or cost of textbooks? That doesn’t seem to be what Sanders is concerned about. At the same time, Sanders’s arguments for such free education almost sound neoliberal, with two of them (the competitiveness and strong economy ones) sounding like a corporate CEO, and not focused on social justice. This way of framing the issue I would say is problematic in a number of ways.
Sanders has argued that there needs to be a “political revolution” and a mass movement, saying his run for the presidency is not about himself. Seriously. Sanders said that “the issue of wealth and income inequality is the great moral issue of our time” but also that his run for president is “not about Bernie Sanders” because “you can have the best president in the history of the world but that person will not be able to address the problems that we face unless there is a mass movement, a political revolution in this country” and that “the only way we win and transform America is when millions of people stand up as you’re doing today and say. ‘Enough is enough. This country belongs to all of us and not a handful of billionaires.’” That doesn’t seem to be a controversial statement and something similar has been said by Chris Hedges in the past. But, if he is to be true to his word, then why isn’t he out in the streets and participating in movement building so that such a “political revolution” he speaks of can be built. Because one candidate running for political office is not a revolution, but rather it is a group of people coming together fighting for a cause or a set of causes, who may or may not have political demands, and if it is truly revolutionary, then it is radical. Sanders can speak about a “political revolution” all he wants, but to me, it is just more rhetoric so he can sound populist and garner votes.
I could move on and criticize the supposed story of Bernie Sanders as mayor of Burlington, Vermont, but for now, this seems like a good start to a more informed criticism. In the end, I have a quote from Eugene Debs, a portrait of whom Sanders has on his wall, who was a dedicated socialist, said in 1904:
“The Republican and Democratic parties, or, to be more exact, the Republican-Democratic party, represent the capitalist class in the class struggle. They are the political wings of the capitalist system and such differences as arise between them relate to spoils and not to principles.”
Notes
[1] For articles I’ve written that have been critical of Warren, see “The deception of Sen. Warren’s “populism”“, “Does Elizabeth Warren really care about the average American?“, “Elizabeth Warren is a fraud“, “Elizabeth Warren is not a savior“, “An update about the capitalist reformer Elizabeth Warren“, and “The truth about Elizabeth Warren”
[2] This tweet is part of what I tweeted at this year’s Left Forum and was at the panel titled “U.S. Wars of Aggression & Islamic Jihad: What is the Bigger Danger and How Should the Antiwar Movement Respond?”
[3] According to a February press release, Sanders argued that “we need the Homeland Security Department to be strong and vigilant.” This should concern anyone who cares about surveillance or intrusions by the federal government.
[4] This is only true if one considers that the US was at war against Iraq from 1990 to 2003, with bombing between the invasion in 1990 and the invasion in 2003, and then a continued war until 2011, but then restarted in 2014 with the bombing officially to “counter” ISIS.
[5] Also see Howie Hawkins’s wonderful article, ‘Bernie Sanders is no Eugene Debs‘ which some have criticized, but is interesting nonetheless.
[5] The international trade administration says AGOA offers “tangible incentives for African countries to continue their efforts to open their economies and build free markets” and is in the words of US News and World Report, while AGOA is broadly ineffective, was designed to open “the U.S. market to African products.” As Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Policy and Economic Research wrote in 1998, AGOA “continues in the NAFTA tradition…provid[ing]…new, unlimited access to the U.S. market– most immediately for textiles and apparel…it requires the countries of sub-Saharan Africa to open their markets to imports and foreign investment…[and it] strengthens the hand of transnational corporations, while simultaneously restricting the ability of host countries to tax them.” Public Citizen said something similar, noting that AGOA was “pushed in 1999 by a coalition of U.S.-based oil and other multinational corporations.”
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