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The Bern SupremacyDoes the future of the Democratic Party belong to Sanders?

John B. Judis

November 19, 2015

“What is happening is that people in Nevada, people all over America, are fighting and de-

manding a political revolution,” Bernie Sanders thundered into the cold night air earlier

this month at a soccer field in North Las Vegas, where several thousand people had

gathered to hear him speak. “People from all walks of life are coming together, and this is

what they are saying: They are saying in a unified voice, ‘Enough is enough.’ And what they

are saying is that our great country and our government belongs to all of us and not just to

a handful of billionaires.” The crowd responded with roars of, “Bernie, Bernie.”

Who would have thought a year ago that a candidate calling for “revolution”—a word

Democrats have, for obvious political reasons, assiduously avoided for a long time—might

emerge as the main alternative to Hillary Clinton? Or that Clinton, to ward off this candid-

ate’s challenge, would be mimicking his hard-left stands on trade, campaign-finance re-

form, and the Keystone pipeline?

Bernie Sanders is a grumpy 74-year-old “democratic socialist” whose jeremiads don’t play

well on television, where he seems to be yelling at the monitor; his political experience con-

sists of representing a very small, rural state in Congress and serving as mayor of a mini-

city of 42,000; before this campaign, he was not well known outside Vermont. For these

reasons, among many others, he is probably not going to win the nomination. But the fact

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that he is playing such a central role in the primaries—attracting legions of small donors,

huge crowds, and a healthy minority of Democratic votes—is itself noteworthy. In every

previous election of the past generation or two, a candidate with this persona and rhetoric

would have found himself automatically confined to the political foyer, while people like

Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden or even Martin O’Malley occupied the main stage. Something

very different has happened this election cycle—and the question is whether it’s indicative

of any developing, long-term trends in the electorate. Is Sanders, who came of age politic-

ally in the tumultuous 1960s, just a momentarily trendy anachronism, or could he prove to

be a harbinger of a revived American Left?

TO BE GIN TO answer this question requires a clear understanding of several things:

what exactly Sanders stands for, who his followers are, and which elements of his message

they are drawn to.

Sanders’s political trajectory is similar to my own. He got radicalized in the early 1960s at

the University of Chicago; I was at Berkeley. We were both socialists who steered clear of

violent crazies like the Weathermen or the Marxist-Leninist acolytes of Stalin, Mao, or Fi-

del. At the University of Chicago, Sanders joined the Young People’s Socialist League, the

youth arm of Eugene Debs and Norman Thomas’s Socialist Party. Rejecting the Soviet

model, it defined socialism as an extension of democracy from the political to the economic

sphere through public ownership of the means of production.

After graduating from Chicago in 1964, Sanders went to Israel for a year to live on a kib-

butz—Israel at that time was a lodestar for many socialists—and following several fruitless

years back in his hometown of New York, he set out in 1968 for Vermont. Sanders did not

think of himself as a “hippie,” but he was deeply influenced by the counterculture of the

1960s. In Vermont, he joined several thousand other migrants of the new Left, including

famed anarchist and fellow New Yorker Murray Bookchin. Sanders championed home

birth and condemned compulsory schooling; he advocated free love and the legalization of

marijuana; he dabbled in Reichian psychology; and he railed against commercial television

which, “like heroin and alcohol,” Sanders argued, “serves the function of an escapist mech-

anism which allows people to ‘space out’ and avoid the pain and conflict of their lives.”

He joined the Liberty Union Party in 1971, a year after it was formed, and became its first

candidate for governor. He focused his campaign on Washington, not Vermont, leading his

Democratic opponent to suggest that he might have been more suited to be a congressional

candidate. In a debate with his Republican and Democratic adversaries, he asked the mod-

erator to inquire “why they don’t talk about the war in Vietnam, why they don’t talk about

the fact that some people in this country have billions of dollars when others have nothing,

why we have a grossly inequitable tax structure.”

Sanders’s objective was to radicalize the state’s electorate. “I even mentioned that horrible

word ‘socialism’—and nobody in the audience fainted,” he recounted in a campaign diary

he published in the alternative newspaper Seven Days. In his subsequent campaigns for

the Liberty Union Party, in interviews and articles he wrote, and in a worshipful document-

ary he produced in 1978 on Debs, Sanders made clear that his ultimate objective was

democratic ownership and control of the means of production.

Even when he was mayor of Burlington in the 1980s and was preoccupied with controver-

sies over lakefront development, Sanders continued to be wedded to a Marxian view of so-

cialism. He told The Baltimore Sun in 1981 that he would like to nationalize the banks, but

that “I don’t have the power to nationalize the banks in Burlington.” He told a professor

who wrote a dissertation in 1988 on his mayoralty that he supported a society “where hu-

man beings can own the means of production and work together rather than having to

work as semi-slaves to other people who can hire and fire.”

Sanders championed home birth andcondemned compulsory schooling; he advocatedfree love and the legalization of marijuana; hedabbled in Reichian psychology; and he railedagainst commercial television.

But Sanders, like me and others who had been socialists, began to moderate over time. We

came to understand that the economics of Marx and Debs were not feasible and that, for

the foreseeable future, capitalism, in some form, was here to stay. You can see the soften-

ing of Sanders’s socialism in interviews he gave after he was elected to Congress in 1990.

“To me socialism doesn’t mean state ownership of everything, by any means,” he told the

Associated Press. “It means creating a nation, and a world, in which all human beings have

a decent standard of living.” In 1991, he told the Los Angeles Times: “All that socialism

means to me, to be very frank with you, is democracy with a small ‘d.’ Our goal is to create

a society where you don’t have such a gross inequality in terms of wealth and power, and to

provide more political equality for working people and poor people.”

By the time he was elected to the Senate in 2006, Sanders appeared to have abandoned al-

together the older concept of socialism. He now equated socialism with what was happen-

ing in Scandinavian countries. “I’m a democratic socialist,” he told The Washington Post.

“In Norway, parents get a paid year to care for infants. Finland and Sweden have national

health care, free college, affordable housing, and a higher standard of living. ”And in the

first presidential debate this fall, Sanders cited Denmark as an example of a socialist coun-

try. The younger Sanders (and any self-respecting socialist of the 1960s) would have re-

garded these words as apostasy. Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland were liberal cap-

italist countries: Their social-democratic parties had managed to enact reforms that

bettered citizens’ lives but they still had to heed a capitalist class that owned the country’s

industries and banks.

In Sanders’s speech Thursday at Georgetown University—which was intended to clarify

what he means by socialism—he cited New Deal reforms and his own proposals for free tu-

ition at public colleges, Medicare for all, and a $15 minimum wage as examples of “demo-

cratic socialism.” These may be commendable goals for the country, but they are part of an

effort to humanize rather than abolish capitalism. Indeed, when asked by Stephen Colbert

this past September about being a socialist, Sanders replied, “I prefer the term, actually, to

be a ‘progressive.’ ” This puts him very much in a tradition that has coursed through Amer-

ican politics for more than a century—from Teddy Roosevelt to the New Deal to Ralph

Nader. Progressives want to subordinate the imperatives of the market and of private busi-

ness to the public interest, and to remove the special influence of business from the politic-

al arena. They want to achieve liberty and equality. They do not seek to eliminate capital-

ism but, through regulation and very selective nationalization, to reduce the inequities of

wealth and power that a market system creates.

The last two Democratic presidents both endorsed a version of progressivism in their cam-

paigns—Bill Clinton’s 1992 manifesto, Putting People First, was coauthored by Derek

Shearer, a veteran like Sanders of the new Left—but once in office, they were forced under

pressure from Republicans and business interests to abandon early initiatives. Clinton

ended up deregulating banking and much of telecommunications; Barack Obama largely

let the big banks off the hook for the financial crisis and deferred to insurance and drug

companies in fashioning his health care plan. Sanders is promising a return to a purer pro-

gressivism—one where Wall Street will no longer have a say and where ending political and

economic inequality will be a central government concern.

BUT WHO ARE the voters flocking to this message? Sanders often uses the term “work-

ing people” to refer to the constituency he wants to lead. It’s a term that conjures guys in

overalls; yet the bulk of the people at the rallies I attended were college students, recent

college graduates, or white-collar professionals who have the types of jobs that require a

college or even a post-graduate degree.

At the Sanders rally in Las Vegas, I interviewed about 30 people and also circulated around

the crowd. I did talk to a janitor from Las Vegas’s militant culinary union and to a retired

auto mechanic from Idaho who had moved to Las Vegas, but the rest of the people I en-

countered were students, teachers, scientists, civil servants, and social workers. At a

Sanders rally at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, I found a similar crowd, with

government consultants, IT administrators, and engineers also thrown into the mix.

These Sanders supporters are part of a stratum of the American labor force that the census

designates as “professionals.” They most often work for a wage or salary. They produce

ideas and sophisticated services rather than physical goods. They work in hospitals and

clinics, schools and colleges, and, above all, offices. Unlike routine service workers, they

make decent or even very good money. In White Collar, which appeared in 1951, C. Wright

Mills labeled this group “the new middle class.” The French sociologist Serge Mallet called

them the “new working class.” At the socialist journal I helped edit in the early 1970s, we

called them “educated labor” and part of a new “diversified proletariat.”

The ranks of professionals grew steadily during the 20th century. In the Labor Depart-

ment’s Monthly Labor Review, Daniel Hecker and Ian Wyatt estimated that this group,

which they identified as “professional and technical” workers, went from 4 percent of the

labor force in 1920 to 23 percent in 2000. The biggest jump came during the economic

boom of the 1960s—which was also when this group began turning leftward.

Professionals were once the most conservative and Republican of occupational groupings,

even more so than managers and executives. In 1956, according to the American National

Election Studies, professionals backed Dwight Eisenhower by 69 percent to 31 percent; in

1960, they voted for Richard Nixon by 62 percent to 38 percent. But during the 1960s, they

began to move toward the Democratic Party and toward more liberal or progressive posi-

tions. In the extensive surveys he conducted for his 1976 book The Radical Center, sociolo-

gist Donald Warren divided the electorate into “low-income,” “average middies” (those

with middle income, but no education beyond high school), “high-education middies,” and

“affluents.” Warren found the group that most consistently backed George McGovern in

1972 were “high-education middies.” Moreover, in the four elections from 1988 to 2000,

professionals favored Democrats by an average of 52 percent to 40 percent. In 2012,

Barack Obama won 56 percent of this vote, compared with 40 percent for Mitt Romney.

The new Left and progressive movements of the last 50 years have usually drawn their

members, or at least their leaders, from this new middle class. That has included the civil

rights, antiwar, public interest, environmental, and feminist movements—and, most re-

cently, Internet-based groups such as MoveOn.org, which was founded by two Bay Area

software developers.

Many of the new Left groups of the 1960s did advocate some form of socialism; but those

that survived, and the groups that arose afterward, have embraced American progressiv-

ism. For these groups—and for the professionals who form the core of Sanders’s base—so-

cialism has become a vague irrelevancy. When I asked people at the rallies what they

thought of Sanders being a socialist, many of the students said it didn’t matter to them; a

social worker pointed to the Scandinavian countries as a good example of socialism; others

defined socialism in broad, almost meaningless terms. An IT person at the rally in Fairfax

summed up “democratic socialism” this way: “ ‘Democratic’ means it is a democracy. We

care for each other; that’s the ‘socialism’ part.” A water specialist for a Nevada agency said

of socialism: “I think of community. Looking out for everybody, not just voting for yourself,

but for your country.”

What did stir them, and provoked cries of “Bernie, Bernie,” were Sanders’s denunciation of

the “billionaire class” and his promises, in their words, to “rein in capitalism,” “send kids

through college for free,” and “get the money out of politics.” They understand what he

means when he says that, in order to end the drift toward economic and political inequal-

ity, a “political revolution” is necessary. They know he doesn’t mean a violent overthrow of

the government, but rather, as he said recently in South Carolina, that “millions of people

have to stand up and get involved in the political process in a way we have not in many,

many years.” When I asked a George Mason biology student at the rally in Fairfax what

Sanders thought a political revolution could accomplish, she said: “He is really serious

about the fact that our society and our economic system are upside down. Revolution is

turning it all around.”

WHY HAVE “high-education middies” moved so decisively to the left over the last 50

years? Part of it can be explained via the theory of post-materialism developed by the polit-

ical scientist Ronald Inglehart. In the wake of the 1960s revolt, he argued that rising

prosperity after World War II had brought new nonmaterial issues such as the environ-

ment, the quality of consumer goods, and race and gender roles to the forefront in place of

more immediate economic concerns. Colleges, especially those that catered to upscale stu-

dents, became incubators of this post-materialist politics.

But there was another factor that explained why professionals turned leftward. The older

professionals, epitomized by the dentist or doctor, saw themselves as entrepreneurs and

identified with Republican support for the free market. They took pride in their autonomy

and in their product: Teachers wanted to teach; physicians and nurses to heal; engineers to

make things that worked. But just as happened to the crafts workers of the late 19th cen-

tury who went on to form the American Federation of Labor, professionals began undergo-

ing a process that Marxists call proletarianization. They lost their independence and

autonomy, they increasingly worked for a salary, and their work became subject to the im-

peratives of administrators and executives. In response, some of them joined or formed

unions; but, more generally, they became critical of the new economy and of those who ran

it. Unlike an older generation of professionals, they didn’t regard capitalism and the free

market as holy writ.

Over the years, the left-wing and liberal movements that these professionals have spawned

have had their ups and downs. With the end of the Vietnam War, and the collapse of the

militant African-American movement, much of the energy passed out of the new Left.

Many of the public-interest, feminist, civil rights, and environmental groups endured but

largely as Washington-based letterhead organizations that collected direct-mail contribu-

tions to fund their lobbying.

During the past two decades, however, the progressive Left has again begun to stir. The

contributing factors have been varied—opposition to the Iraq war; the increasing power

(especially at the state level) of an ever-more-conservative GOP; a growing sense, in the

wake of the Great Recession, that conspicuous consumption, political corruption, and un-

der-regulated capitalism were all out of control. Yet another factor was economic pressure

on a new generation of high-education middies—pressure that has made them justifiably

anxious about their future. According to the Economic Policy Institute, the real inflation-

adjusted wages of young college graduates are 2.5 percent lower this year than in 2000.

Student-loan debt, too, has emerged as a major concern, increasing by 84 percent from

2008 to 2014.

Sanders’s campaign speaks directly to all these concerns. His prophetic persona, wonder-

fully profiled by Margaret Talbot in The New Yorker, stands in sharp contrast to most oth-

er candidates. (Interestingly, the Sanders supporters I spoke to described his appeal—he’s

“free of special interests,” he’s “consistent,” he “tells us what he really believes”—with virtu-

ally the same words many Trump supporters use to praise their candidate.) But the essence

of Sanders’s success probably does not lie in his style. Instead, it lies with a segment of

voters who, for the past 50 years, have found it difficult to romanticize pure capitalism.

That doesn’t mean they are socialists, but it does mean they want capitalism to be strictly

regulated in the public interest. And Bernie is speaking their language.

FOLLOW ING THE 2016 campaign, Sanders himself may fade from the scene. He is an

aging figure, and while he has abandoned his earlier view of socialism, he still has not fully

adapted his newer version of democratic socialism to American political traditions. Many

Americans, for instance, are not likely to warm to the example of Scandinavian countries,

with their very high taxes and centralized governments.

But his campaign may nonetheless represent a watershed in the development of a new pro-

gressive politics. The group from which Sanders has drawn his support—professionals and

technical workers; essentially, the high-education middies—is continuing to grow. Accord-

ing to economist David Autor, even during the recession, from 2007 to 2012, the number

of professionals and technicians grew about 5 percent, while the number of production,

sales, and (routine) office and administrative workers shrunk. Unlike many manufacturing

and low-level service jobs, the jobs of professionals and technicians are not easily subject to

automation. On the contrary, these are often the people who use computers to achieve

automation.

And there is no sign that the pressures that have moved theses voters to the left will abate.

They will continue to be subject to wage and autonomy pressures from administrators,

managers, and executives. Even doctors are now becoming employees of hospital chains.

The social and economic distance between them and the billionaire class will continue to

grow. And while a new recession does not appear imminent, there is also little sign of the

kind of buoyant recovery that the United States experienced in the 1990s.

The result of these changes over the next few election cycles could be a more assertive Left

in the Democratic Party—which could, in turn, result in increased polarization and even, in

reaction, a further turn of the country to the right. But as the ranks of these voters swell,

they could also help to create a more progressive country over the long term. If that hap-

pens, then historians may, decades from now, regard Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign as a

harbinger of what became a substantial challenge to the powers that be. 

The print version of this piece went to press before Bernie Sanders’s speech at Geor­

getown. The online version has been updated in the wake of that speech.

www.nationaljournal.com

The Big Mystery in Iowa: Donald Trump’sGround Game

Even the experts don’t know if he has one – or whether it even matters

S.V. Dáte@SVDATE

January 28, 2016

MARSHALLTOWN, Iowa—Donald Trump’s hopes of turning reality TV into reality could

well be in the hands of Barb Matney.

She’s 57, a lifelong resident of this central Iowa town, and a supporter of Trump’s presiden-

tial bid who recently signed up on his website to volunteer for his campaign. Last

Sunday evening, eight days before 2016 voting starts with the Iowa caucuses, she finally

heard back.

“They called me the other night and said I’d be a precinct captain,” she said as she stood in

snow flurries waiting to enter a Trump rally. The job entails calling other potential Trump

supporters in Marshall County to remind them to turn out Monday night at 7 p.m. Of

course, to do that she needs names and phone numbers—which, as of earlier this week, she

still had not received.

“I’ve asked for a list, and there’s only a few days left, so I hope it’s soon,” she said.

And therein lies the central mystery of the developer-turned-reality-TV-star’s unorthodox

campaign: Is precinct captain Matney’s inability to get basic campaign data the exception?

Or the rule? And, with a candidate who has relied on his ability to hijack “earned media”

coverage with outrageous remarks, does it even matter? Even the experts admit they don’t

know.

“Anyone who is being honest with you will tell you that they have no earthly idea of what’s

going to happen caucus night,” said Matt Strawn, a former chairman of the Iowa Republic-

an Party.

The Trump campaign declined to share details of its turnout operation with National

Journal, and the Iowa office staff similarly denied access to its work. But visits to other

campaign offices suggest that Trump’s get-out-the-vote-effort pales compared to some of

his rivals.

On a recent evening just a week out from caucus night, the Cruz Iowa headquarters

hummed with activity. Dozens of volunteers sat at folding tables filling a large room in a

suburban office park. Each table was topped with a pair of black office telephones. A sign

on a wall stated a goal of 15,000 calls per day, and the volunteers made one call after an-

other, appearing to read a script printed on a piece of paper.

A few miles away, at the Jeb Bush Iowa headquarters, a dozen volunteers also made phone

calls, but in an even more sophisticated fashion. Each had an open laptop running a voter-

database program, displaying detailed information about the person on the other end of

the line, including what was said during previous calls and in-person contacts. The Bush

campaign’s daily goal: 12,000 calls from the Des Moines headquarters and a Cedar Rapids

field office.

Also in the neighborhood, in yet another office park, was the Trump Iowa headquarters,

where it was less clear what activity was taking place. A Trump staffer declined to give Na­

tional Journal access to anything beyond the entryway. In the course of an hour, not a

single staff member or volunteer entered or exited the building.

The next day, at a nearby call center hired by Trump for phone-banking, only eight volun-

teers had signed in by midday—by which time other campaigns would have twice or three

times as many people working the phones.

How much difference this activity—or inactivity—will make is unclear. Many voters don’t

appreciate getting unsolicited phone calls.

A Trump rally attendee wearing a Vietnam veterans patch and a no-Hillary T-shirt who

would give only his first name (Frank) said he had received calls from the campaigns of

Mike Huckabee, Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, and Ted Cruz. “They get an earful of profanity

and I slam the phone down,” he said.

“Many, many calls. I grew weary of the calls,” complained Tom Flynn, a 70-year-old lawyer

attending a Rubio rally in Des Moines. He said he occasionally picks up for pollsters, but

never for individual campaigns. “Those are the ones I absolutely haven’t taken.”

Another Rubio rally-goer, 48-year-old stay-at-home mother Karen Janssen, wondered why

the Republicans haven’t done much door-to-door canvassing, which she says the Demo-

cratic campaigns are actively doing. “Exactly two people have come to my door,” she said.

One was for Sen. Rand Paul; the other was a Democrat looking for the home’s previous oc-

cupant.

Indeed, the conventional wisdom in Iowa has been that the only path to victory was “re-

tail.” This requires candidates to spend hundreds and hundreds of hours meeting voters

face to face, shaking hands, and answering any and all manner of questions, while simul-

taneously creating a vast network of workers to identify likely supporters and get them to

the polls.

But with Trump ignoring that conventional wisdom, almost exclusively staging large rallies

and leading the polls thanks to his celebrity, other campaigns have responded by sinking

precious money and staff time elsewhere, particularly New Hampshire, which votes

just eight days later.

“The upshot is you can do well in Iowa, but the downside of losing the momentum in New

Hampshire is probably too great a risk,” said one Republican strategist.

Meanwhile, at least some voters appreciated Trump’s visits, even if they weren’t “retail”

events. Brian Thomes said Trump’s recent rally in Muscatine, where Thomes works in a

sports lighting factory, was a big deal for the community. “I think him showing up here will

help him,” Thomes said as he filled up his gas tank. “I really think he’s going to take Iowa.”