Bernie Sanders, most successful socialist in U.S. history: 2 book reviews

[North Star]

(All praise goes to Tim Horras for putting me onto Bernie Sanders by sending me a PDF of the chapter dealing with Vermont from Eric Leif Davin's book, Radicals in Power.)

Bernard Sanders is easily the most successful left-of-Democrat politician and socialist officeholder in American history. He was elected mayor in Burlington, a one-party (D) town in the middle of the Reagan counter-revolution, was re-elected mayor 4 times, went on to become the state's only representative in the House for 8 terms, and now resides in that worthless house of horrors known as the U.S Senate. He is so dominant politically that he often wins the Democratic Party nomination vote outright without any effort or campaigning on his part and when he does, declines their endorsement to continue running as an independent.

When the Democratic Party gives up on getting rid of you, an open socialist, you've won. Whatever Sanders' flaws are (more on that below), surely we can learn something from his achievements.

This is an especially pressing task given that American socialists (with Socialist Alternative's Kshama Sawant and Ty Moore in the vanguard) have finally re-discovered one of the most essential tactics for winning a mass working-class following in a bourgeois-democratic context: running for and winning office independent of the two parties. (The case of radical mayor Chokwe Lumumbu is also one we should try to learn from even though he ran as a Democrat after defeating an establishment candidate in the primary.)

Written by the man himself, you won't a lot of critical/analytical self-reflection in Outsider in the House. Like Malcolm X, Sanders is not a writer nor a theoretician but a speaker and the book is written in a readily accessible conversational style. However, the structure of the book can be challenging since he jumps from discussing his 1998 re-election race to reminiscing about his time campaigning and governing in Burlington in the 1980s. Thanks to Tim's generosity, I was able to survive this bit of political whiplash, having been a bit grounded beforehand in the ins and outs of his struggles at city hall after studying the chapter on Sanders from Radicals in Power.

Outsider in the House covers a lot of ground. Sanders discusses how he was able to squeak to victory by a margin of 10 votes in Burlington after winning unlikely endorsements from the policeman's union (among others), confronted a unanimously hostile city council that blocked all of his appointments and prevented him from even hiring a secretary in his first year, how he helped unseat some of those hostiles in the next round of elections, how he used semi-dual power organs (task forces, similar in some ways to the communal councils under Hugo Chavez in Venezuela) independent of city government to generate ideas/grassroots support on issues like women's rights and the environment, how he began winning traditionally Republican districts, how voter turnout after his election spiked sharply from ~50% to ~70%-80%.

And that's just the 1980s.

As a legislator, Sanders exercises a lot less power. Even so, he helped start the Progressive Caucus in the House which battled both Newt Gingrich's Contract on America/government shutdown in 1995 and Bill Clinton's tendency to govern as a Republican. He made some unlikely legislative alliances with certain Republicans and against certain progressive Democrats to save family farms from being destroyed by corporate agribusinesses. After Outsider in the House was written, Sanders won a Senate seat, making him the first socialist to make it that far up in the American political system.

To me, what's striking about the part of the book dealing with his time in Congress is the extent to which his socialism or radicalism is almost indistinguishable from New Deal-style liberalism, both at the level of rhetoric and at the level of policy. Instead of "middle class" sometimes he'll refer to "working people" but usually he sticks with the obfuscatory "middle class". In policy terms, he's tied for #1 "most liberal" Senator with a few others according to the right-wing National Journal.

I attribute the policy part of this not to some rightist deviation by Sanders but to the inherently conservative, change-resistant structure of the federal government, something Tim alluded to in his piece on prospects for new parties on the American scene, a structure that underpins the ongoing strength of the Republican Party at the federal level despite its failure to garner a majority vote for its presidential candidate in every election since 1988 (except for 2004). A lone socialist in a Congress of 535 representatives cannot be nearly as bold or radical and at the same time effectively advance the interests of the 99% as a socialist elected to a position within the executive branch -- mayor, governor, president. In Congress, you can either vote 'yes' or 'no' on legislation and there are very few (if any socialist or radical) bills introduced at the federal level; this is why Sanders will generally score 100% on the liberal end of a liberal-conservative scorecard and it reflects the two-party monopoly rather than Sanders' personal opportunism. Executives in the American system have far more power and therefore far more leeway as to how far left or right they can go, but even there, there are limits, as Greg Guma skillfully demonstrates in his The People's Republic of Burlington: Vermont and the Sanders Revolution written in 1989 before Sanders got into Congress.

Two notable themes of Guma's book that are absent from Sanders' are: 1) the limits and constraints of elected office and 2) the tension between radicalism and pragmatism inherent in the Sanders project which expressed itself as a tension between the local activist/radical community and the Sanders administration.

1.) Limits: Sanders campaigned hard against his predecessor's plan to increase property taxes by 65% but after he won he was forced to choose between a.) sticking with total opposition to any/all property tax increases (it's a regressive tax because it does not discriminate between who can and cannot pay; the little old lady living on a Social Security check must pay just as a very wealthy businessman) and push through draconian budget cuts and screw the city's unions badly or b.) push through a property tax increase to soften the blow of austerity to the unions. He opted for the second of those choices.

Sanders campaigned on scrapping property tax altogether in favor of something progressive but discovered that doing so was impossible given state law. Legally, cities are creatures of the states (and states are creatures of the federal government) and so the taxing power and political autonomy of local governments is generally very limited. Sanders tried to get a tax on the hospitality industry (hotels, restaurants) as a way of shifting the tax burden off of working people and small businesses and onto corporations and well-off individuals/institutions. His initiative was defeated by a majority vote in a referendum after the industry campaigned hard against the idea and successfully scared people into voting against their own interests.

So while local offices are ripe for the picking by reds as the lowest hanging fruit, they are also fairly constrained in terms of  how much radical change they can enact.

2.) Tensions: As time wore on, Sanders' relationship with the broad left/activist community sometimes became strained over certain issues when the latter tended towards 'ideal' positions and Sanders remained more 'pragmatic' (although characterizing it that way can be misleading in that it makes those with principled positions seem hopelessly abstract and useful while excusing those in power for making reactionary political choices).

This tendency became most pronounced with an activist campaign to shutdown a GE weapons plant by doing civil disobedience and with fights over how to develop Burlington's (beautiful) waterfront. In the first case, author Greg Guma is very critical of Sanders for not supporting the peace movement's effort to close the plant. In the second case, Guma gives voice to the Green Party activists who oppose any and all economic development but remains sensitive to the reality that, as mayor, Sanders has an obligation as a progressive to increase the city's employment and tax bases lest funding evaporate for social programs and other measures that benefit working people. Eventually Sanders 'betrays' the Green fundamentalists by adopting a development plan that is a compromise with commercial developers (at first the Greens wanted zero development since that would 'hurt the environment' but then demanded total community control over what would happen with the water front).

Having visited Burlington in the late 1990s, I have to say the waterfront was beautiful and not at all a gentrified/rich-only space, so I tend to think Sanders did the right thing here. The original plan was to make it a space exclusively for the wealthy.

Sanders' Party-Building Fail? An Overall Assessment

The task of revolutionaries is not to bemoan the always-difficult objective conditions that confront them and use those conditions as an excuse for why they have accomplished nothing that benefited working and oppressed people but to transform those conditions and facilitate forward motion, however small, miniscule, or 'unsatisfactory' from the standpoint of social revolution. As the late president Chavez put it:

"I believe it’s better to die in battle, rather than hold aloft a very revolutionary and very pure banner, and do nothing … That position often strikes me as very convenient, a good excuse … Try and make your revolution, go into combat, advance a little, even if it’s only a millimetre in the right direction, instead of dreaming about utopias."

Judged by this yardstick over the past three decades, Sanders has been far more effective as a revolutionary than the entirety of the so-called revolutionary left in this country.

Can we fault Sanders for failing to build a third party, for being a nearly one-man operation with no identifiable party label or brand?

After much thought, I believe the answer to this question is 'no.'

"When I rise it will be with the ranks not from the ranks," said Eugene Debs. Sanders rose not with the ranks but from the ranks. He was a trailblazer, a nearly one-man operation that took on the neoliberal tide of the 1980s and
advanced neosocialism. Successfully. Over and over again. The overall tide was against him and so he by himself he was unable to reverse it; had he worked in tandem with actually existing left coalitions/party formations of that time, he would have tailed their growing conservatism and defeatism. He wisely chose to stay above the fray avoid any type of party-building project after abortive experiences with the dysfunctional Liberty Union and other formations that had no roots in an actually existing class or mass-based movement; these roots in material reality are the only way to avoid the kind of endless and abstract 'programmatic' discussions that kill any type of forward momentum in formations like Left Unity in Britain.

Add to the non-movement of class/social forces in Burlington the fact that Sanders himself is not much of an organization man or a true team player; his trust in his own judgment and safeguarding of his political autonomy have turned out to be winning bets, although at times his lack of formal accountability to left/progressive organizations rubbed certain progressives the wrong way. In addition to to Sanders' idiosyncrasies is the fact that Vermont has a system of open primaries; for a tiny, budding party formation, this could easily have led to sabotage by the larger, established parties since registered Democrats/Republicans could vote for third-party candidates in third-party primaries and Sanders could have been defeated for his party's mayoral nomination by a concerted Democratic/Republican effort.

Instead of traditional party-building, what Sanders did was blaze a trail for other progressives -- those with stronger team-player skills and collaborative instincts and methods -- to follow. Those who followed Sanders were the real party-builders. Peter Clavelle, a progressive member of Sanders' administration and founding member of the most successful third party in the U.S. today, the Vermont Progressive Party (VPP), succeeded Sanders as mayor of Burlington. The activist networks that developed around and through VPP over the course of the 1990s are a big reason why Vermont today is the only state in this country without charter schools and on the verge of enacting its own single-payer health care program.

Without Sanders daring to win and daring to govern in 1980s Burlington, state politics would have shifted rightward as they did in the other 49 states rather than leftward. Of course Sanders didn't do it alone -- far from it. But the impact he made as an individual socialist and what he has done for working people in this country cannot be understated.

Hopefully the lessons of the Sanders experience will prove to be relevant once we have some reds on city council in either Minneapolis, Seattle, or both. :)

- Binh

[Tim Horras]

This is great, Binh. I'm assuming you're submitting it to North Star? Hopefully minus the much-appreciated but fawning thank-yous to yours truly lol Also, would you mind sending it out to the Philly Socialists theory list as well? 

Vermont offers an important set of historical (and contemporary) lessons, especially in light of the Socialist Alternative campaigns in Minneapolis and Seattle. 

Your essay gives us a deeper picture of the political situation in Vermont, something that has been lacking in serious study by any left-leaning academics (with one or two obvious exceptions). I especially appreciated your laying out the "trailblazer" vs "party-builder" dynamic of Sanders vs the Progressive Party. This schema has the ring of truth to it. 

Marta Harnecker advises us, "Changing the existing situation does not mean that we do not have to take as our starting point the existing situation. In order to change something we must start from the existing state of affairs. Therefore, we must acknowledge the present reality and the correlation of forces that exists at this time, not in order to adapt ourselves to the situation opportunistically, but in order to change that correlation of forces."

Let's get out there and change that correlation of forces!

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