In the waning days of 1938, Marjory Courtenay-Latimer, the curator of a small museum in E. London, South Africa, stopped by the docks to wish the captain of the trawler Narine a Merry Christmas — and got an eyeful of the monster he’d dragged out of the ocean that day. It was five-foot long and ugly as sin, but Marjory (who was probably a little eccentric) thought it was beautiful. Imagine her astonishment at discovering it was a creature believed to have been extinct for 70-million years — a coelacanth.
The story comes to mind by way of analogy as I reflect on the inspiring reappearance on the national stage of another “species” long-thought extinct: the old-style New Deal Democrat. Bernie Sanders is an authentic left-wing populist — the fighting kind, with fire in his belly, conviction in his heart, and a stubborn disinclination to back down in the face of entrenched wealth and power. This relic from another day has been dragged by events from the backwater state of Vermont to lead a people’s revolution against the corporate establishment, and though he’s not much to look at, a lot of us think he’s beautiful.
And for good reason. Sanders, who’s wrangled with the established order throughout his long political career, understands that we can’t set this country right without a revolution that puts people (the natural-born kind) at the heart of the political order. So it’s no surprise that he recognized the Occupy movement as the beginnings of just such a revolution — but one in need of focus and direction; the occupiers were mired in the necessary business of resolving the contradictions between their battered world views and the reality that the “Land of Opportunity” had somehow morphed into something that was leaving 99% of us behind — so they were a little short of anything that might be called a “platform.” But Sanders, a democratic socialist with decades of experience in the political trenches, is well-versed in the issues and knows how to wage a campaign; when he declared his candidacy in the spring of 2015, the revolution that’d been idling at the curb since Zuccotti Park put it in gear, dumped the clutch, and took off.
Both the mainstream media and the political establishment, meanwhile, persist in framing the senator’s call for political revolution as nothing more than slick campaign sloganeering. Immediately following his convincing win in Oregon, urgent new pleas arose for Sanders to either drop out of the race or start saying nice things about Clinton — the argument being that the delegate math makes his campaign a lost cause, so continuing with nasty shit like talking about issues only serves to weaken Clinton and keep her from “pivoting” to her general election rebranding. But Sanders has no intention of throwing in the towel, and — in terms of his own objectives — is already pivoting: at this point, he’s running as much for a progressive platform as for the nomination — and he knows the more delegates he has going into the convention, the greater his leverage, win or lose. With dogged determination and sheer force of will, Sanders is literally building political capital ahead of the Democratic convention.
And after all, what kind of revolutionary would just pack his bags and go home on account of some delegate math?
For my money, this is the senator’s great contribution to the progressive cause: demonstrating that it’s essential to speak truth to power, but not sufficient; if we want change, we have to fight for it — and progressives, who’d rather make love than war, generally have to be shown how. We need to be shown the value of thinking big, of consolidating the power of our numbers by participating, of soldiering on in the face of treachery, ridicule, and condemnation — and Sanders is providing one kick-ass tutorial.
The senator’s efforts have also demonstrated conclusively that the so-called cynics have been right all along: the “world’s oldest democracy” is, in fact, a sham democracy — a simulation. The nominees of both parties are typically selected by establishment insiders, and the outcomes of the elections themselves are “engineered,” when necessary, for the desired result — by way of the Supreme Court (Bush v. Gore), the hacking of voting machines (Ohio, 2004), or the mainstream media: it comes to light that the major networks plan to call the primary race for the Clintons on June 7 — early in the day, in order to suppress the Sanders vote in California, where polls will still be open.
For her part, Clinton (along with other establishment Democrats) is now saying nice things about Sanders — and even making concessions — in the hope of corralling his supporters and “unifying” the party (and, of course, securing the majority of the Big Enchilada’s 475 delegates).
But as the charade continues, so too does the revolution — which may be reaching critical mass with increasing numbers of progressives seeing this election as only the opening skirmish in a larger struggle. In the last thirty years the political pendulum has swung so far to the right through the lavishly funded efforts of large banks and corporations that the 2016 election, for those who’ll still vote for the lesser of two evils, is shaping up to be a good-cop/bad-cop choice between the soft fascism of the Clintons and the hard fascism of Trump. Fortunately, the determined efforts of a real live New Deal Democrat — a goddamn political coelacanth — have rallied the forces of progressivism and given that pendulum a good hard push in the opposite direction.
With any luck, the momentum will be with the people as 2016 passes into history.