Portsmouth, N.H.
It only takes about five minutes at a Bernie Sanders rally to understand why a big chunk of the Democratic party has fallen in love with him.
On Sunday afternoon, about a thousand people packed into a gym at Green Bay Community College, out east on the New Hampshire seacoast. They’re mostly 20-somethings, with a few of the olds sprinkled here and there. And unlike the Trump (defiant), Clinton (determined), or Kasich crowds (confused), the Sanders people are joyous. They’re not shopping for a candidate or even rallying for his support. They’re in communion.
Sanders speaks for 53 minutes. The first twelve minutes of his speech have nothing to do with politics. Instead, he opens with a mini-lecture on the dialectic of history: suffrage, segregation, Jim Crow, gay marriage. Once he launches into the political portion of his remarks, the speech has a shape, with themes that flow from one into another: American corporate oligarchy, the hollowing out of the middle class, making state colleges free, universal healthcare, taxing the rich and corporations, overturning Citizens United, the differences between himself and Hillary Clinton. Unlike Clinton, whose stump speech is a trainwreck into a dumpster fire, Bernie has a well-crafted vehicle. And he delivers it like a combination of a beloved Marxist college professor and a zui quan master.
All of which is to say that it immediately clear why so many Democrats have signed up with Sanders. The Clinton campaign is offering eight years of trench warfare. Everything is about “fighting.” Sure, she’s promising to fight the “bad” half of America; those evil, nasty Republicans. But her entire pitch is like a recruiting poster for World War I: Vote for me and we’ll take this country back one hedgerow at a time, whatever the cost! It’s hard to get excited for the political equivalent of the Somme.
Sanders is offering the vision of turning America into Scandinavia. Such a revolution won’t really require much of a fight, though, because once The People become engaged, they’ll easily impose their will on the handful of corporate oligarchs who dominate affairs as of now. In Sanders’ view, outside of the very, very elites, we’re all basically brothers and sisters. And no matter how conservative you might be, the truth is that Scandinavia is lovely. Who among us wouldn’t want paid maternity leave and shorter work weeks and locally sourced dairy products?
Now, this vision is a mirage of course. As wonderful as the Scandinavian countries are, America couldn’t become Scandinavian if it wanted to. We’re too big, too diverse, with too many military responsibilities. The trouble with the Scandinavian system isn’t that it doesn’t work. It’s that it doesn’t scale.
But that distinction is lost on Sanders’ supporters and no one in a Democratic primary would dare to make that case to them for all sorts of reasons. (For instance, it suggests that “diversity” is not, always and everywhere, an advantage.)
A few more thoughts on Sanders and his movement, in no particular order:
* For Sanders, the real enemies in America aren’t “Republicans,” but the entrenched corporate elites. It’s therefore vaguely surprising that when he does try to paint Republicans as enemies, his depiction of them is bizarre. “My Republican colleagues,” he says, “go around the country talking about ‘welfare abuse,’ ‘welfare cheats.'” Instead, Sanders says, the real problem is corporate welfare.
I have not heard a single presidential candidate this cycle talk about welfare abuse. Instead, most of the Republicans, when they talk about welfare, talk about ending “corporate welfare,” just as Sanders does.
* At times, it’s striking how little daylight there is between Sanders and the GOP candidates in terms of macro worldview. For instance, the single biggest reaction to his speech is when he tells the following story: Tonight in New Hampshire, he says, some kid will get arrested for marijuana possession. He’ll go to jail and it will ruin his life. Contrast that, he says, with Goldman Sachs, which recently paid a $5 billion fine for its role in the credit-default swap scheme which, Sanders says, caused the financial crisis of 2008 and the Great Recession. None of those executives, he says, will ever face a single day of jail time.
Yet this view of the world is, more or less, endorsed by most of the major Republican candidates. Bush, Rubio, Cruz, and Christie have all spoken movingly about how drug abuse need to be treated as a medical problem and low-level, non-violent offenders diverted out of the criminal system so that simple possession does not ruin their lives.
Furthermore, the Sanders worldview places blame for the housing collapse and recession not on George W. Bush (as Clinton does) but on Wall Street. Most of the Republicans would agree with that.
And finally, Sanders sees the behavior of firms such as Goldman as deleterious and in need of regulation. Here, his prescriptions differ from the Republicans. But the general diagnosis does not. What’s striking is that the passage from Sanders’s speech that his crowd loves the most could be delivered, almost word-for-word, by most of the Republican candidates.
* For all the hand-wringing about the “fascist” impulses of Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders is the only political candidate I’ve ever seen to make a public example out of a private family with no large interest in politics and suggest that they are an enemy of the Republic. He holds out the Walton family, repeatedly, as being villainous. I suppose we know who will be first up against the wall.
* One of the big questions of 2016 will be, if Trump and Sanders are not the nominees, will their supporters come home for the general election?
It’s not clear which group will be the harder sell. You could see Trump supporters being won over by Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio, if they promise to build a beautiful, classy wall. It’s harder to see the Sanders people coming home because Clinton has already made all of the promises. If she could give them a vision and joy, she would. But that seems quite beyond her capacity.
