“Our campaign has been about building a movement,
which brings working people and young people into the political process to
create a government which represents all of us and not just a handful of
wealthy campaign contributors,” Bernie Sanders declared.
“We will continue to do everything we can to oppose
the drift,” Sanders continued, “which
currently exists toward an oligarchic form of society, where a handful of
billionaires exercise enormous power over our political, economic, and media
life.”
One of the biggest question for US election watchers, yet
being ignored due to the mass media’s obsession with Donald Trump, is whether
the basic instincts of President Hillary Clinton will see a major reversal of
the gains and promises of the Sanders insurgency – currently embedded in the
Democratic Party’s official election platform and espoused in Clinton’s public
speeches since the party’s July convention.
How might the Sanders impulse, insurgency, revolution, call
it what you will – backed by primary election victories in 22 states, winning 46%
of all Democratic non-pledged delegates, and over 13 million votes to Hillary’s
16 million (and Trump’s 13 million) – become politically embedded and
simultaneously in touch with its popular roots and energy, and actually make a
difference? How might its momentum deliver at least part of the political
revolution Sanders demanded?
And, even should Clinton continue to espouse the Sanders
programme, will congress go along and permit anti-Wall Street legislation, vote
for a much increased federal minimum wage, reject the Trans-Pacific Partnership
agreement, and abolish public university tuition fees for most students, among
other things? Will the Sanders movement affect the politics of congress?
The right to revolution may be enshrined in America’s
history, but will its political system of divided government act as a brake on
radical political change, adding to the likely inertia and foot-dragging of a
Clinton presidency won with massive Wall Street funding, now with even more
traditional conservative and GOP donors? The official national GOP might be
dying, with Donald Trump’s embrace of unabashed white ethno-nationalist
identity politics, but its ghost may yet haunt the next Democratic presidency
through its continuing grip on the levers of power in the House of
Representatives.
The
diverse range of Democratic party policy planks installed after Sanders’s
pressure may well be significant for their direct beneficiaries but, critics
complain, are all at the margin and can be withdrawn or much more likely eroded
over time. They are in the nature of concessions that might split the Sanders
movement.
Given
this situation, what would drive real and lasting change and how might it come
about? Where is the locomotive of political change and what is the mechanism by
which that change might be effected?
There is great pessimism about the political situation in
the United States, especially on the Left. Yet America’s political system is
flexible, capable of accommodating programmes as statist as the 1930s New Deal
and as reactionary as the Contract with America of the 1990s Newt Gingrich-led
GOP. Politics is a struggle, a constant system of flux, of forces locked in
conflict vying for power, to establish their agenda over that of others. What
we are witnessing today in the US elections is nothing short of revolutionary
in character. When has a major party female candidate defeated and incorporated
into her platform – the most radical in its history - an overtly socialist
agenda, and then been pitted against an extreme right-wing xenophobic and
misogynistic ‘Republican’ TV celebrity with no prior political experience who’s
rejecting the few tenets both main parties actually agree on – US globalism and
free trade? This is hardly politics as usual and the result of the November
presidential election, whichever way it goes, is unlikely seamlessly to return America
to normalcy.
There is a new normal and we should get used to it.
Let’s look at several continuing initiatives by Bernie
Sanders and his supporters to build on his momentous challenge to the Clinton machine.
The movement has sprouted a Sanders Institute to mobilise behind progressive
congressional candidates across America. According to Sanders, candidates may
get support in fund-raising and on the hustings even if they happen to be
progressives from the tea party. President Bill Clinton former labor secretary
Robert Reich has spoken of a new progressive party – the kinds of organisations
now in motion may well lead to such an outcome. The Sanders Institute’s aim is
to conduct political-ideological work on the key issues of power, wealth and
inequality that struck such a chord during his bid for the Democratic
nomination. Although he has not endorsed it, some of his supporters are also
actively aligning their work with the Green party which had previously asked
Sanders to run for the White House on their ticket. Its candidate, Jill Stein,
hovers around 5% in presidential election polls.
Brand New Congress is another key grouping on the Sanders
wing of the Democratic party. It’s a political action committee that aims to
identify and support hundreds of non-politician candidates for over 400
congressional seats with the aim of replacing the entire House by the mid-term
elections in 2018. Formed in April 2016, it has raised almost $100,000 in small
donations and is looking to the future – without Wall Street big money
politics. It complements the Sanders Institute’s plan to back 100 progressive
candidates in congressional and state and local elections in November 2016.
Sanders’s Our Revolution organisation aims to build on his
campaign and revitalise democracy, empower progressives to run for school board
elections, mayoral offices and take on big money politics. And Our Revolution
seeks to “elevate political consciousness”: take on the corporate media,
educate the public and improve public discourse and understanding.
It is instructive that more people in the corporate media
seem to pay attention to what Donald Trump’s post-defeat strategy might be than
to what Sanders’s post-convention strategy actually is. The corporate media may
not tell us what to think, but it remains spectacularly successful in telling
us what to think about.
And it’s not all about Sanders either: Senator Elizabeth
Warren continues work to hold the major financial institutions to account, with
Republican support from the likes of John McCain for a law to bring back the
Glass-Steagall Act – passed in the 1930s to protect the banking system and
ordinary savers, but abolished by President Clinton in the late 1990s.
And the Democracy for America organisation which backed
Sanders for the White House is endorsing progressives up and down the country
and ballot.
If Donald Trump’s non-conservative statist message, and
Hillary Clinton’s shift to the left, have shown us anything, it is that there
are big changes afoot in America’s political fabric. Even Wall St now agrees
that wages must rise, infrastructure needs investment and inequality has
reached extreme levels.
These are early days and no political outcome is certain.
There is much going on. But returning to normalcy is unlikely to cut it now or
after November.
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