Despite the outcome in Iowa apparently giving Hillary Clinton a very slim lead, there is certainly no reason for us supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders to be disappointed. Tonight was a victory for him.
Look where he started. Look how far he has come despite a few stumbles and fumbles. Look at his momentum going forward. And look at the well-oiled machine he was up against. To be honest, he has surprised even his most avid backers. Of course, tonight’s contest was just the first of many. And the odds are still against him, something we’ve known since the get-go.
But whatever happens in this contest going forward, even if he were to win in New Hampshire and lose every state thereafter (which is unlikely), Sanders has already breathed new life into the progressive agenda, called forth a can-do spirit for our struggle against the domination of the 1%, and presented a vision of a future America not ruled by naysayers and numbskulls.
As Sanders has said all along, this campaign is not just about him or just about gaining the presidency. Win or lose the nomination, the campaign is about building a movement, or rather building an alliance of the different movements we’ve seen slowly arising over the past 15 years.
Sanders has done more to inspire us in that direction than even most of his strongest backers thought he could achieve a year ago. His legacy, win or lose, is us. It’s what we do with what he’s kindled. That’s true whether he wins the nomination and the presidency or only gets 10 minutes to speak to the crowd at the Democratic Convention in Philadelphia six months from now.
Bringing his cross-generational vision to fruition—however long it takes—is our task, whether we just turned 18 or are pushing 75. We won’t get there whining about how the odds are stacked against us. They definitely are. But that shouldn’t stop us any more than our predecessors were stopped when the odds were stacked against them. As Frederick Douglass once famously said, "If there is no struggle, there is no progress."
In the streets and in the voting booths, it is by focused and relentless struggle that we can bring about the changes our nation desperately needs in spite of the obstacles—the sexists, the racists, the homophobes, the warmongers, the plutocrats, and their marionettes in Congress. We should adopt the message of the Galaxy Quest folks: Never give up. Never surrender.
Sticking to it requires that we take seriously what Sanders has repeated throughout the first seven months of his campaign.
Theo Anderson recently wrote at the democratic socialist publication In These Times: “What makes Sanders a radical, and what constitutes the essence of his revolution, isn’t his commitment to certain spending priorities or a particular economic plan—it’s his fierce commitment to democracy.”
Indeed.
Some readers are probably already typing that what I have written here is just blinkered loser spin. Well, everybody is entitled to their opinion, of course. But instead of just checking out the very close results in Iowa, people should be looking at the bigger picture, and by that I don’t mean the horse race.
In Chicago last September, a time when the espousers of conventional wisdom were still laughing about his candidacy, as if he were a curmudgeon uncle blabbering over dinner about his 150th invention that would never be commercially viable, Sanders told the audience:
“Change never takes place from the top down. It always takes place from the bottom up. It takes place when people by the millions, sometimes over decades and sometimes over centuries, determine that the status quo—the world that they see in front of them—is not the world that should be, and they come together. And sometimes they get arrested. … And sometimes they die in the struggle.”
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Saul Alinsky, the community organizer who wrote Rules for Radicals in 1971, approached things differently than Sanders is doing. But for both, political struggle is, at its most essential, not about the transfer of authority from one wing of the powers-that-be to another, but rather about the distribution of power throughout society.
Anderson again:
For those with power, the dilemma is that sharing it with the people can provoke unpleasant questions about what constitutes the common good. One convenient solution is to use power to change the subject. Alinsky was a radical because he—like Sanders—never allowed anyone to change the subject.
He focused relentlessly on the question of power—how it is gained and distributed—and he made concrete demands at the micro level, working for reform brick by brick and block by block. He kept his distance from electoral politics in the belief that formal political ties and ideological commitments would only hinder his pragmatic approach to organizing. But he grudgingly allowed that there was no choice but to work within the political system.
“We will start with the system because there is no other place to start from except political lunacy,” he wrote in Rules for Radicals. “It is most important for those of us who want revolutionary change to understand that revolution must be preceded by reformation.”
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For me, as a radical democrat—small and capital "d"—politics has always been about far more than elections and legislation. Political parties are only a means to ends, one of which is implementing reforms that originate and are fought over, sometimes for decades, outside the political parties, outside the electoral process. Politicians too are means to ends. They aren’t messiahs. Bernie Sanders has never pretended to be.
My old friend Bob Borosage, a wise fellow who I first met in 1990 soon after his work with the presidential campaign of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, wrote earlier today:
[W]hat Sanders has already won is very real. He’s put forth a bold, populist agenda. He’s challenged the grip of big money on our politics. And he’s shown that his message can electrify the young and attract working people.
In this, Sanders has already begun to shake the establishment, evidenced by increasingly vitriolic attacks on him and his ideas. Sanders is putting the powers that be on notice. This rigged system doesn’t work for the vast majority of Americans. And the complacent politics of the establishment center offer no way out. The elites of both parties better figure out how to cut Americans a better deal—or Americans will demand a new dealer.
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As I wrote at the outset, it is we who are Sanders’ legacy, whether he gets the nomination or not. That’s the case in dealing with climate change, punishing racist police violence, extending full legal equality to gays, reforming the mess of our criminal-injustice system, eliminating student debt, and corralling the 1%ers who have gifted us with the worst income and wealth inequality since J.P. Morgan was running roughshod over the 99%.
“Street politics” will determine whether some of those issues (and others) gain traction. But victory can’t be won without also gaining power at the ballot box, without putting likeminded people on school boards and city councils, in state legislatures and Congress. Achieving those gains means organizing from the bottom-up, precinct by precinct, county by county, year-round, every year, over the long haul. We must build for the day when the candidacy of a Bernie Sanders—for any post, national or local—will not be an anomaly.