In today's Daily Beast, Jay Michaelson makes the liberal argument for Clinton and her superior electability against what he takes to be Sanders' absolute unelectability. Given the implications of a GOP victory, he warns, good liberal Democrats need to be prudent and support Clinton as the electable moderate. Should Sanders win the nomination, Michaelson argues, this elderly Jewish socialist who happens to also be a foreign policy dove is doomed to total failure in the general election. The implication is that he would have been the party's worst choice since George McGovern. Too much hangs in the balance -- from the Supreme Court, to LGBTQ and abortion rights, to the future of a rapidly warming earth -- for Liberals to indulge in the fantasy of electing a candidate who is so far outside the mainstream of political acceptability as to be unelectable. More damming still, Michaelson suggests that this fantasy is itself an expression of irresponsible white, upper middle class, liberal privilege that permits Bernie supporters to savor the dream while airbrushing out of the picture the downside risk and honesty about who will bear the greatest share of the burden when their fantasy comes crashing into electoral reality.
So how ought Sanders' supporters to respond? First, they might point out that Bernie has been underestimated all along, and is still a long shot to win the primary contest for the nomination. If he fails to win the nomination, of course, they expect to vote for Hillary, as the lesser of two evils, or as the greater good, relative to whomever the GOP selects. On the other hand, should Bernie win the nomination, they will say that this will itself indicate that he has become acceptable to the mainstream and that his chances of winning the presidency would be much stronger than Michaelson (and many others) imagines. If Bernie wins the nomination, they would argue, he might well be able to go on and win the general election as well. They might also take note of the fact that in many ways Hillary Clinton is a very flawed candidate, with a real lot of baggage and very high negatives, who may prove to be unelectable herself.
But Michaelson's best argument for prudence, moderation, and Hillary, is the magnitude of the downside risk -- on a wide range of issues -- if a Republican comes to be elected, a victory which he believes is much more likely if Sanders were to become the Democratic nominee.
This is an old argument that has been used repeatedly against any and all who have supported fielding a candidate from the Left. Since 1976, the result has been a long series of Democratic candidates (and presidents) who are just barely to the left of a "center" which keeps shifting further and further to the right. Such Democratic centrists have, in effect, bestowed the Democratic Party's imprimatur upon the reigning neo-liberalism in economics, the shrinking of the so-called welfare state, and the ever increasing level of income inequality. Another consequence of this argument, which is heard time and again in every election cycle, is that the effort to form a real left wing, grassroots movement for significant (and even radical) change is prevented from reaching critical mass, which in turn guts popular resistance to the continued rightward and oligarchical drift in American politics and policy. Consequently, Democratic presidents come to power, again and again, without a grassroots left-leaning social movement behind them which could provide them with political leverage that is required if they are ever to manage to bring the Right to heel and to enact the significant changes to the increasingly oligarchical order which they claim to want.
The main plank of the pro-Hillary argument turns on fear of the dark consequences that are predicted as sure to follow a Republican victory. I think that Sanders' supporters must insist, however paradoxically, that this fear is overstated. Not that it wouldn't be bad, but it is unlikely to be quite as bad as Michaelson would have us fear. There are checks and balances, after all, and the ship of state turns around only very slowly, which is why one presidential term seldom makes as much difference as one hopes or fears. One needs to say this because otherwise it becomes hard to resist Michaelson's argument which is, effectively, not to let the unachievable ideal become the enemy or the achievable good, especially when everything we believe in hangs in the balance.
The point is that to bring about the "change we can believe in" more is required than keeping the GOP out of the White House and making sure that a moderate Democrat is sitting in the Oval Office. This may prevent the worst from happening but experience makes clear that it is not enough to bring about the realization of our hopes for changing the course on which this country is heading. Real change will not come about until there exists a broader grassroots movement for change. The Sanders candidacy for the nomination is about creating that movement as much as it is about securing the nomination. Should Sanders win the nomination, the general election campaign will take this effort to build a national movement to the next level. If this movement is successful in placing Sanders in the White House, without changing the balance of power in the Congress, then the battle lines will be drawn for 2018, and possibly for 2020 as well, as Sanders leads an epic fight against GOP control of Congress and for the American future. But with a national grassroots movement for change behind him, there are good odds that he (and we) could win that fight and then start to achieve those legislative victories that will be the real instruments for achieving the changes that Sanders' supporters, and most Democrats, want to see.
Alternatively, if Sanders wins the nomination but loses the contest with the GOP, which is the scenario that Michaelson worries about most, then it will be the role of the movement that Sanders has inspired to be, yes, that Tea Party of the Left, and to fight the efforts of the GOP to move America even further to the Right, while it continues to build a grassroots movement for real change in 50 states and in thousands of counties, from sea to shining sea.
This said, it should be reiterated that Sanders supporters do believe that if Sanders can win the nomination, he may well be able to win the general election as well, as today's long-shot morphs into tomorrow's plausible scenario. But this being said, it is not inconceivable that Bernie's candidacy might end up going the way of George McGovern's -- a fate which might similarly befall Hillary's candidacy as well, for other but equally evident reasons. (Indeed neither Hillary or Bernie are without significant "negatives" from the standpoint of the folks who handicap these races.) But Sanders supporters, who support Bernie while allowing that Hillary is perhaps somewhat more electable, do need to address Michaelson's challenge, if only to dispel the doubts of voters who share his skepticism about Sanders' electability, which must be allayed if they are to draw such voters into the Sanders' camp. And here, I think, Sanders' supporters need to take the view that the they are more concerned about changing the direction this country is heading than they are in securing the White House for another Democrat whose term will amount to little more than a holding action in the face of a hostile Congress and corporate antagonism. Better to lose the White House in the short run if doing so is a stepping stone on the way to bringing about the fundamental political realignment that the future well-being of the nation's poor and middle class requires. In this regard, the far Left needs to show as much courage as has been shown in the last 50 years by GOP true believers who have been willing, time and again, to accept the short-term loss of power for the sake of achieving long-term and fundamental gains.
In short, when it comes to considering the implications of a possible electoral defeat next November, it must be acknowledged that such a loss may turn out to be an unfortunate necessity along the path to building a strong, national movement for significant change, a movement that is required not as a vehicle for securing Democratic control of the White House but for bringing about real and substantive change in this country.
And yet, to restate an earlier point, there is good reason to think that if Sanders can win the nomination, the sea-change in attitudes that would have been required to bring this about might well be enough to help propel him to a victory in the general election next November. (And of course the path to this victory might be eased somewhat if the GOP proceeds to nominate a fatally flawed candidate of its own, as it shows every sign of doing.)
And in a rejoinder to Michaelson's parting suggestion that supporters of Bernie Sanders are blinded by the miasma of their white liberal privilege, I would argue that it could be as (or more) convincingly maintained that many of those upper middle class white Democrats who espouse Clinton's candidacy evince a smug satisfaction with a status quo in which those in the top quarter of American households are doing very well economically, as are their children who still have relatively unlimited individual prospects as part of tomorrow's managerial class, and who are quite content with the lifestyle and social liberalism -- and economic neoliberalism -- of the Democratic mainstream.
This said, I see little point of venturing down this path of denying the self-awareness of those who choose to back another horse in this race. It is a road that surely leads to ill will between those who should be allies, as it attacks the identities and unconscious biases of one's opponents rather than their arguments. But it bears pointing out that this is a game that can be played by both sides and one which will ultimately redound to the detriment of all.
