People keep using that phrase (especially in comments to Bernie diaries.) I do not think it means what they think it means.
The expression as we hear it so often is only half of itself. The full phrase is “pie in the sky when you die,” and it forms the chorus of one of the great parody protest songs of all time, “The Preacher and the Slave,” written by labor balladeer Joe Hill, early in the last century. Story of the song and its lyrics can be found here. Fundamentalist, revivalist religion of the time (as in our time) tried to assuage working people’s frustration with the promise of justification in “the sweet by-and-by.” Leftists and labor organizers stood (and stand) up to that empty promise, insisting that our frustrations can and will be relieved by earthly struggle.
By definition, pie in the sky is something we’ll never have here on earth, because it’s the vague promise of a heavenly reward, after death, for our suffering while alive. Pie in the sky is not what’s promised by progressives. The progressive political message is that we can have what we really need here on earth, if we’re willing to fight for it.
Universal, single-payer health care is not pie in the sky. Free, universal early-childhood education and tuition-free public higher education are not unicorns and puppies. They’re goals worth striving and struggling for. As in the fight to replace the minimum wage with a living wage, we make great progress toward these goals when we articulate them and make a huge public noise about them.
Candidates for public office seldom take up these kinds of struggles. When one does, especially at the highest level, progressives can’t help but be inspired.
During a run for office candidates aren’t usually expected to have detailed proposals they’ll stick to, without variance, if elected. But they should be expected to have goals that correspond to the real needs of voters, even if those goals have been previously out of reach. It’s the job of all of us who are politically engaged, or even just socially engaged, to strive for the goals that will fulfill our needs. We strive with our votes, granting them or withholding them. We strive with our civil disobedience. We strive with our everyday discussions with our fellow citizens. We strive in all our interactions with our world.
Elections aren’t only about winning or losing, and politics isn’t only about power. Politics is about what we do with power. The discussion we should be having, as a nation, as citizens, as human beings, is what it’s really best to do. Not most expedient, or most readily doable, but BEST.
Supporters of Bernie Sanders see him as putting that discussion into motion on a national level, when no other political figure has been willing or able to do so. That’s a big fucking deal for us, and it’s hard to see how it could be otherwise for anyone who claims to have progressive goals in mind. The mockery and condescension from Democrats that met his candidacy from the beginning only serves to confirm decades-long progressive suspicions, that the party that demands our votes cares nothing for our interests, or even the best interests of this nation. Defending the presumptive nominee takes precedence over serious discussion of what we really must be doing, both in the name of justice and in the name of survival.
Today’s Democratic party and its loyalists begin to resemble the Preacher in the song. There’ll be pie, by and by, if you keep us in power, but we won’t even talk about the pie you need now, deserve now, and have earned with decades of labor, let alone join you in the struggle to provide it.
