Bernie must now focus overwhelmingly on explicating just one word
by Piyush Mathur
If Bernie’s nomination to the Democratic presidential candidacy would have been a miracle up until Iowa, then his not being nominated to the same would be a miracle after New Hampshire. While a range of polls reflect positively upon his candidacy—a prominent one being the Quinnipiac University’s national poll published on February 10—there is no bigger factor that appears to be working in his favour than the decline of Joe Biden. These types of changes, however, are ultimately short-run ups and downs; while they are captured well by opinion polls and other statistical surveys, one suspects that there is a far bigger, long-range drift that has been going his way.
This drift was set in motion by the storm that he had brought into the heart of the Democratic Party—and thus across the United States—through the last primaries. That Bernie had articulated something new, something system-wide, and something that anyway attracted nothing other than scorn and sabotage from his own party’s establishment, is ensconced deep inside the minds of most Democrats—be they Bernie supporters or not. It is this memory of what he was able to highlight nationally—and his gentlemanly manner of doing it—four years ago that the average Democratic voter finds, to date, unshakeable.
The Bernie drift thus includes in it its own recognition from the wider Democratic votership: a profound recognition, rather, of the activist and intellectual authenticity that underlies it. At any rate, the Democratic voter remains in awe of Bernie’s political chutzpah—and this awe has no choice but to thrive upon the party establishment’s continuing efforts to suppress and sideline him. Under these circumstances, and given where we are at within the Democratic race, only some peculiar accident could in fact prevent Bernie from getting the nomination; the drift that his storm set in motion through the last primaries is now a veritable momentum.
To the extent that Bernie is in cruise control within the Democratic primaries, he must focus already on the national scene. But when we look in that direction, then what we find is that neither Trump nor his own party’s establishment would necessarily be his biggest hurdle; his biggest hurdle won’t even be an idea or a set of ideas, per se. What truly would stand between Bernie and the White House here on out would be a linguistic entity—a word, to be precise—called socialism.
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, in order to kiss success, Bernie Sanders must now spend most of his time on explicating a word to which most eligible American voters have not paid much attention throughout their lives—but whose vague associations with Communism, the Cold War, the evil Soviet Union, and all things anti-Capitalism, anti-market, anti-faith, anti-individualism, anti-meritocracy, anti-transparency, and anti-private property, to name a few, unnerve them no end. Indeed, there is enough restlessness about that word inside the Democratic camp itself; and what underlies the perceived electability weakness of Bernie in relation to Trump is nothing if not the former’s self-advertisement as a (democratic) socialist.
Of course those who have been running the show within and outside the Democratic party fear Bernie’s ideas as much as his previous political accomplishments; but for the broader citizenry, this might not in fact be an “idea” battle exactly—not on the first order anyway—though we might easily fall into believing just that. Bernie’s perceived electability challenge is, at bottom, this: Would he succeed in unpacking a certain word with razor-sharp clarity, in explaining it concretely with respect to his own political agenda, and in blowing away the fog of fears that shrouds it in the American mind?
This last bit might in fact be the most important; and, to a great extent, it would entail for Bernie to tell fellow Americans what that word does not mean to him and to his campaign (and what it would definitely not mean to his administration-to-be). Now, one could spend a lot of time on explaining something and yet get nowhere in clarifying it—leave aside making it acceptable—to one’s audience. So, in addition to spending most of his time on explaining socialism—-his socialism—to the electorate, Bernie would also have to give this particular task his most mental, analytical, and emotional focus; in short, he would have to repeatedly explicate it for every next chunk of his immediate audience as much as to the United States as a whole.
And nor could he go around talking in generalities about socialism—no matter how sharply he lays them out: He would have to bring this word—and its derivatives—down to actionable items every single time he ventures to explicate and explain it; he would also have to make these items, qua socialistic centrepieces, poignantly relatable and desirable to the average American. What that also means is that Bernie cannot promote his actionable items without framing them explicitly as socialistic, either; if he takes that route, then he would risk promoting a chasm between his positive programme of executive and political action and this ideologically charged word that would be (as it already has been) used as a label against him by the Republicans as much as by his Democratic and quasi-Democratic detractors.
At any rate, the media would not leave Bernie with any choice in this matter; he has already been pushed into leaving no gap between his agenda and this word—and rightly so. He of course has not shied away from marketing his actionable items in socialistic terms anyway; after all, it is he who labelled himself a democratic socialist before any of his critics would begin to use one of those words as a label against him.
On the level of generalities, Bernie has pushed back against attempts at his ostracization qua socialist on two key fronts: one, by stressing the fact that he is not merely a socialist but a democratic socialist; and two, by looping Donald Trump himself—and by extension other ultra-rich—into a “socialistic” frame by underlining the extent of benefits he has personally received from US government agencies toward his businesses. Now, inasmuch Bernie’s attempts at stressing the democratic dimension of his socialism renders the latter word apparently less alarming to the American, it does not, in and of itself, distinguish Bernie (as the person being described through these two words) from Trump.
That’s because Trump could vocalize an equal claim of his own to that “democratic” dimension (for, after all, he is not running away from the electoral process or proclaiming to work outside the constitutional framework of the United States). And assuming that he is as much part of the United States democratic framework as Bernie, there would be nothing to prevent Trump from referring to himself as a democratic (free-market) capitalist (unlike, he may then loudly claim, Bernie). In contrast, Bernie, as noted earlier, has already attempted to frame Trump as a socialist of sorts.
Indeed, Bernie has suggested the prospect of two types of socialism. One of these, the detrimental type, has already been tried and remains in force in the US, benefiting the ultra-rich (such as Trump); the other type, which Bernie claims to have been advocating, now deserves a chance (which he aims to give it as President). Take a look at the following statement Bernie gave on "Fox News Sunday” earlier in February:
In many respects, we are a socialist society today. ... Donald Trump, before he was president, as a private businessperson, he received $800 million in tax breaks and subsidies to build luxury housing in New York. ... The difference between my socialism and Trump's socialism is I believe the government should help working families, not billionaires.
It is not difficult to imagine what the Republican camp would say in response to that: As free-market capitalists, we sure believe in helping out the private sector generate employment for our working families—instead of distributing handouts to those who might not even deserve them. In anticipation of that sort of a Republican stance, Bernie could surely and effectively attack the myth of the free market; but would he be willing to reject capitalism pointblank in the Presidential debates with Mr. Trump?
All in all, while Bernie needs an incremental, overwhelming focus on explicating and personalizing socialism—a word that most Americans feel apprehensive about—this process would very likely be forced to culminate into a negation of yet another word that most Americans have been raised to believe constitutes a part of their identity. We all know now what that word is: It is not another socialism; it is capitalism.
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Some background material:
Axios (February 9, 2020) ‘Sanders: There's a difference between "my socialism and Trump's socialism”’: https://www.axios.com/bernie-sanders-trump-socialism-7b800f30-024f-4c48-99ab-0b84d50d10d1.html
Quinnipiac University Poll (February 10, 2020) “Sanders takes top spot in Dem Primary” https://poll.qu.edu/images/polling/us/us02102020_uyid781.pdf/
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/latinos-gave-over-23m-2019-democrats-presidential-race-sanders-got-n1135001?cid=sm_npd_nn_fb_ma&fbclid=IwAR1QzobmG7MVVAgXQIzJGyn6ERO5pyPZkjo6_AfEmHsnIr76QhBDz7zxVpU
Dean, Sam (February 13, 2020) “Bernie Sanders dominates Democrats in donations from tech workers”: https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2020-02-13/sanders-fundraising-big-tech-amazon-google
Lopez, German (February 12, 2020) “Bernie Sanders lost among New Hampshire voters focused most on beating Trump”: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/2/12/21134723/new-hampshire-election-results-exit-polls-electability-bernie-sanders
Piyush Mathur is the author of Technological Forms and Ecological Communication: A Theoretical Heuristic (Lexington Books, 2017).