Once again, Charles Pierce has risen to the occasion on the eve on the IA Caucuses. You will likely not read a better piece analyzing the Sanders phenomenon than this one. He notes the roots of this campaign in the 1988 Jesse Jackson campaign. Sanders (Burlington mayor at the time) and Jim Hightower (TX Ag Secretary at the time) were the only 2 white officeholders in the entire country to endorse Jackson’s campaign. Pierce traces this campaign through intervening developments from the last 28 years.
These 3 paragraphs go to the essence of what is at stake now:
The disappearance of the Jackson campaigns from the history of modern progressive politics is not an accident. By 1992, when Bill Clinton teed up Sister Souljah as a direct slap at Jackson, who was sitting not 10 feet away on the dais, the exile became complete. The Jackson campaigns—and the populist forces that were their energy—became something from which serious Democratic politicians were obliged to distance themselves. Race was soft-pedaled and class simply was not mentioned at all.
But there was a subversive, counter-establishment energy unleashed within the party that refused to be quelled. It manifested itself in the pushback against an increasingly extremist Republican party. It helped bail out Bill Clinton, who was no friend to it, when a runaway House of Representatives tried to impeach him. It arose in abandoned wrath in the aftermath of the 2000 presidential election, only to find that the Democratic establishment had failed and then bailed. After the attacks of 9/11, it found itself almost alone as a countervailing force in opposition to the Iraq debacle and to the human rights violations that became central to the "war" on terror. It found a voice on the Internet, and in independent political organizations. In 2004, it found a candidate in Howard Dean, whose campaign was more similar to the Jackson campaigns than any campaign that came afterwards. In 2006, after things in Iraq had gone so terribly wrong, it was the driving impetus that brought the Democrats control of both houses of Congress and a clutch of state legislatures and governorships. And, in 2008, enough of it got behind Barack Obama to make his improbable rise to the White House possible, and then to make it a reality.
This is what Bernie Sanders has tapped this time around, this old flow of counter-establishment energy that has been magnified by the frauds and crimes of the financial elites. It has been a continuous strain of activist politics, from Jesse Jackson to Bernie Sanders. The Clintons never have trusted it completely. Bill Clinton distanced himself from it in order to get elected and, in order to get re-elected, he signed bills that seemed to deny its existence at all. In 2008, it caught Hillary Rodham Clinton by surprise. Now, it seems to have tangled her up in a knot between the strategy that elected her husband, and one consonant with the mood of her party, and of a great portion of the country.
There is nothing I could possibly add to this profound eloquence, except to note that the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.