Bernie Sanders ran a good campaign during the 2016 primaries that resulted in him posing a serious challenge to the party establishment’s preferred candidate Hillary Clinton. But there were problems, particularly with Sanders’s lack of explicit attention to the specific issues facing minorities and women and the poor. It is not that he does not care about those issues. Those have dominated his thinking from his days as a high school student activist. But he is an old-style socialist who sees discrimination in any form as an outgrowth of mercenary capitalism that seeks to pit marginalized and exploited groups against one another in order to keep them divided and unable to join forces on the things they agree on, because if they do, that would challenge big business and the oligarchy.
In this way of thinking, instituting a democratic socialist political and economic system will go a long way towards ameliorating many of those problems. Hence his relentless focus on talking about the 1% and the need to wrest control of government from the billionaire class. While that may well be true, that kind of economics-based analysis is insufficient to really rally the troops. One also needs to directly and explicitly address the immediate issues that are at the forefront of people’s minds, such as police brutality, gender inequality in the workplace, and LGBT rights. Discussions of these have to be elevated to prominence. While Sanders did get wide support among minorities and other marginalized groups, he may have been able to do better.
Ryan Grim writes that this time around, the Sanders campaign has stumbled on a groundbreaking organizing movement, including having volunteers from the Sanders campaign actively joining in workers movements and picket lines.
It’s common for a politician to make a brief appearance on a picket line to show solidarity with a cause, but it’s practically unheard for a campaign to divert its own volunteers away from the mission of electing its candidate. This act of activism flows directly from the bottom-up approach taken by the 2020 Sanders campaign, which is not just in stark contrast to every other presidential campaign: It’s also a sharp reversal from the approach taken by the leadership of the 2016 Sanders campaign.
For all its revolutionary sensibility, the 2016 campaign was organized around a traditional strategic approach: Raise money to put ads on television and fund a field operation in key early states.
But outside of the watch of the campaign’s top brass, a collection of activists working in the bowels of the campaign tested out a variety of experimental approaches to organizing, eventually producing a breakthrough that has been copied by organizers in Spain and the U.K.; helped elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Congress; and is now guiding Sanders’s 2020 campaign. Sanders built this movement, however, largely by accident.
Grim goes on to describe how this came about and the group of diverse young people who were behind this development, how they butted heads with the more traditional-minded campaign leadership like Jeff Weaver (and that also includes Jane Sanders) who disagreed with their grassroots efforts, and what they are doing now
Today, Rojas is the executive director of Justice Democrats, where Shahid is the communications director. Chakrabarti is Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff, and Trent is her spokesperson. Exley co-founded New Consensus, the policy muscle behind the Green New Deal. Bond took the distributed organizing model, along with Sanders aide Zack Malitz, to Texas, running Beto O’Rourke’s groundbreaking field program during his 2018 Senate campaign. She and Malitz stayed on for his presidential run but were pushed out by former Obama operatives.
Sandberg, meanwhile, spent time in Spain and the U.K., training Podemos and Momentum, the leftist movements in each, on the art of the barnstorm. Weaver, rather than running the campaign, is a senior adviser, and he and Sandberg have reconciled. She’s now the national organizing director for the 2020 Sanders campaign.
One of the things that Sanders has achieved is changing the nature of political campaigns from just targeting presidential campaigns (like Barack Obama and the Clintons did) to also building more permanent structures that can be used to achieve change over a long time and also be applied to down-ballot races, all the way to local elections. These movements are also breeding grounds to train a new generation of political activists.
Whether Sanders becomes president or not, that may be his most lasting legacy.
“One of the things that Sanders has achieved is changing the nature of political campaigns from just targeting presidential campaigns (like Barack Obama and the Clintons did) to also building more permanent structures that can be used to achieve change over a long time and also be applied to down-ballot races, all the way to local elections. These movements are also breeding grounds to train a new generation of political activists.”
I’m not from the US, maybe here in Europe things are different, but isn’t that one of the primary activities of a political party?
@1, absolutely not. Once Obama gained presidency he quit activism and became right of center. He probably always was. Most overrated president in my lifetime.
Don’t know how that turned out for Spain, but the upshot of that effort here in the UK is that the Labour party were humiliated in the elections here last week. Absolutely annihilated, in large part as a result of lifelong voters for party Momentum backs abandoning them in huge numbers and either making for parties with ACTUAL progressive policies (e.g. Greens, Lib Dems) or worse, going to the right and voting for Nigel Farage’s Brexit party.
The damage done by Momentum in supporting definitely the worst Labour “leader” since Michael Foot is hard to calculate. (Foot was the author of the Labour Party manifesto in 1983, also known as “the longest suicide note in history”. Corbyn is, I think, even worse than that, but due to his talent for ambiguity hasn’t had the balls to say anything definite enough about anything to be the target of such satire.) Momentum’s “achievement” has been to make young people like Corbyn. But as anyone can tell you, young people don’t vote, and Momentum haven’t actually managed to change that to any useful extent. Meanwhile, they’ve driven the core vote into the hands of literal Nazis.
So yeah, Sandberg, thanks for “changing politics”. Now could you possibly fuck off back to the US and not come back?
(Disclosure: I have voted Labour (Corbyn’s party, Momentum’s party) in every single election I’ve had a vote in, local, national and European. Until last week. Last week I went Lib Dem, on the basis of their clear and unambiguous policy of “Bollocks to Brexit”. I may never vote Labour again. I know I’m not the only one in this position.)
@Robert #1
I suspect there are a lot of people at the lower levels of government who run to change things for the better, but that it is extremely rare at the higher levels.
@Robert79, #1:
Okay, let’s break this down:
1 “building more permanent structures”
Yep. All political parties do that.
2 “that can be used to achieve change over a long time”
Nope. Many if not most political parties are designed to maintain the status quo within a range of acceptable values. Think of a human body which maintains body temperature close to a stable value, but not precisely pegged there. While sleeping the temp might be allowed to drop. During minor infections the body temp might be increased. But your body won’t ever TRY to make your temp 50° or 0°. If it ever ends up in those states, it’s not because the body wanted it there. “Change over a long time” is simply not what most political parties want.
3 “[that can] also be applied to down-ballot races, all the way to local elections”
Yes and no. There are many national political parties which don’t function at the local level. In the United states, because our non-parliamentary system means the only way to ensure a functioning majority is to have only a single party control 51% of the seats, there are powerful forces that will discourage the emergence of a third party, and when a third party arises will act to quickly kill one of the previous two major parties. The system only works as the powerful people intend if you limit it to 2 parties.
But many local elections happen entirely in one-party contexts and at least some others happen in truly multi-party contexts. For various reasons, the people seeking the presidency don’t want to be involved in local politics in these areas because they would have to favor some people in their own voting bloc at the expense of some other people who are also in their own voting bloc. National Local developmental interdependencies only exist where the local campaigns are also two party (and ONLY two party) elections. in some circumstances then, this will happen. But it certainly won’t happen in all local elections or even in all states. Rhode Island, for instance, is notorious for having state politics that are truly disconnected from national politics because it is both dominated by Democrats and heavily conservative-Catholic. Thus you have great institutional barriers (money, labor unions and labor politics, traditional voting habits of individuals that are hard to change) to the flourishing of Republican candidates, but you also have a great desire on the part of significant swathes of the electorate for anti-abortion candidates.
Thus despite the national Dem party being pro-choice, the Rhode Island state Dems are not (they try very hard to straddle the fence with both pro-choice and anti-choice candidates finding success).
it’s complicated, and there’s a partial truth here that the national Presidential campaign has an interest in local GOTV efforts, but it’s not an accurate picture of what happens nationally to say that the national Dems build up the local party.
4 “These movements are also breeding grounds to train a new generation of political activists.”
This is generally true, but you have to understand that the “political activists” that they train are trained to be pro-party activists, not pro-change activists. Pro-change activists exist, but they aren’t trained to be that by presidential campaigns.