At the risk of burying the lede, I want to say that I have not been writing about the primaries, and mostly stay out of the pie fights. But today I was reminded of something that I wanted to share here, for what its worth.
Bernie Sanders is one of the most transformational candidates of our time. And no matter what happens in Iowa, things will never be the same. It never occurred to me that this could happen until suddenly there it was. It is the kind of thing that once you see it, you don’t stop seeking it, and it changes you. I think this is happening all over the country.
I should have known something was up. A friend of mine, who is a progressive, labor, and Democratic Party activist told me early in the campaign season that he was seeing more enthusiasm in liberal/left political circles for Bernie than for any candidate he had ever seen — including Elizabeth Warren, Barack Obama, and Robert Reich (who once ran in the Dem primaries for governor in MA). I found that hard to believe. But even if true, could it really spread beyond that bastion of college town liberalism, Amherst, MA?
Bernie Sanders is a 74 year old, Jewish, democratic socialist from Vermont. His parents emigrated from Eastern Europe almost a hundred years ago, and his father’s family was later killed in the Holocaust. And yet despite, or perhaps because of this background, he has seemingly come out of nowhere to be rightfully seen as a legitimate contender for president of the United States.
The reasons for his unexpected success have been the subject of much speculation, but one reason I have not seen discussed is a profound need in the electorate for what Eric Schneiderman once called “transformational politics.” Then-New York State Senator, now Attorney General Schneiderman outlined the distinction between what he called transformational and “transactional” politics in an influential essay in The Nation in 2008:
I respectfully suggest that if we want to move beyond short- term efforts to slow down the bone-crushing machinery of the contemporary conservative movement and begin to build a meaningful movement of our own, we need to expand the job descriptions of our elected officials. To do this, we must consider the two distinct aspects of our work: transactional politics and transformational politics.
Transactional politics is pretty straightforward. What’s the best deal I can get on a gun-control or immigration-reform bill during this year’s legislative session? What do I have to do to elect a good progressive ally in November? Transactional politics requires us to be pragmatic about current realities and the state of public opinion. It’s all about getting the best result possible given the circumstances here and now.
Transformational politics is the work we do today to ensure that the deal we can get on gun control or immigration reform in a year–or five years, or twenty years–will be better than the deal we can get today. Transformational politics requires us to challenge the way people think about issues, opening their minds to better possibilities. It requires us to root out the assumptions about politics or economics or human nature that prevent us from embracing policies that will make our lives better. Transformational politics has been a critical element of American political life since Lincoln was advocating his “oft expressed belief that a leader should endeavor to transform, yet heed, public opinion.” [Emphasis added]
As Schneiderman makes clear, transformational and transactional politics are not mutually exclusive. People generally recognize that both are needed, and I think this year that no candidate has a monopoly on either one. But I also think what has happened is that Bernie Sanders stepped up with a dynamic mix of the transformational and the transactional that speaks so powerfully to the needs of many that he has taken everyone by surprise — seemingly including himself. Clearly his transformational political instincts are at least as strong as his commitment to his principles. And this goes a long way to helping understand how he has so unexpectedly connected with the electorate. A transformational leader knows where people need to go and tries to take them there.
It is sometimes said about democracy that we get the leaders that we deserve. But I think that sometimes we are afforded the opportunity to elect the leader that we need. And that this is one of those times.