Bernie Sanders and his enemies to the left

Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) historic socialist identity has been seen as anomalous and exotic by the media and worn as a badge of radical daring by his supporters. Yet the historic American socialist movement, however limited its political influence, played a vital role in the debates that shaped American liberalism throughout the 20^th century.

The Socialist Party, in its Progressive Era heyday, offered a vital small-d democratic alternative to Roosevelt’s corporatism and Wilson’s war regime. Even after imploding in the 1930s, the party’s sainted leader Norman Thomas was still revered by many leading Cold War liberals who had been his youthful partisans as “America’s conscience” – referring far less to any economic program than Thomas’ well-earned reputation as a devout civil libertarian and anti-Communist. So it is only natural that a stalwart and (even by historic standards) unusually successful democratic socialist politician such as Bernie Sanders should play a starring role as such a debate is beginning anew.

{mosads}Most consequential of all was the longtime party stalwart and godfather of the civil rights movement, A. Philip Randolph. Indeed, Bernie Sanders arrived in Vermont in 1964, just a short time after graduating from the University of Chicago, where he led the fight to integrate campus housing several years before Martin Luther King led the civil rights movement north. At Chicago, he was in the orbit of the Young People’s Socialist League, and in the wilds of Vermont preserved the more radical strain of the original egalitarian idealism of the civil rights movement, typified by the legion of fellow Freedom Riders from his native Brooklyn, untainted by black power or the Vietcong.

Yet somehow it is those ghosts, long thought dead and buried forever, that have re-emerged in the so-called “Black Lives Matter” movement and assaulted the political tradition represented and given new life by Bernie Sanders. A recent issue of The Nation led with an editorial fully endorsing the disruption of Sanders’ campaign events, while the young, white Malcolm Harris of The New Inquiry insists that “black power” must be at the center of any true left while saluting said “left” for shouting down Sanders. It was left to Jonathan Chait, polarizing scourge of “the new p.c.” to state the obvious: “perhaps shutting down a political speech is, normatively, wrong.”

A. Philip Randolph, along with such protégés as James Farmer and Bayard Rustin, were implacable opponents of both black nationalism and the Communist Party. Indeed, the party’s periodic campaigns against “white chauvinism” within its own ranks, invoked as a positive example by Malcolm Harris, bear a disturbing resemblance to the Twitter wars over “white privilege.” If reinvented hipster Marxism should seem like an outlier, the same critique of Sanders’ egalitarian paradigm is frequently aired by such mainstream liberal blogs as Vox and The New Republic. Nothing would have appalled the elders of the civil rights movement more than their sneering at the desire to unite the underprivileged classes across racial lines. 

It is highly poignant that this reproach from the distant past should be confronting American liberalism now, with Hillary Clinton representing the apotheosis of the organizing principles of post-Cold War liberalism: deference to the financial elite, an activist foreign policy as default, all the while waging a culture war offensive and largely writing off the white working class as a result. Relying so heavily on gender tokenism in her appeal, Clinton is, in other words, exactly the candidate the contemporary liberal pundit class deserves. But a funny thing has happened on her way to the White House: suddenly, her party and the country are much more concerned with tackling economic inequality, criminal justice reform, climate change, and avoiding new wars in the Middle East.

Indeed, the most extraordinary thing about the current moment is that a liberal left emphasizing economic issues and striving to speak to the whole country would not have to accommodate itself to social conservatism as it would have a generation ago; certainly not in an era when there are safe majorities in favor of same-sex marriage and ending the drug war as part of a larger program of criminal justice reform. And yet it is also marked by a liberal pundit class that casts every domestic policy challenge as of a piece with the most violent years of the civil rights struggle, and praising as our leading public intellectual the retrograde black nationalist Ta-Nehisi Coates, who openly condemns the legacy of the civil rights movement that inspired Bernie Sanders to become a long-distance runner for social justice.

It would be a tragedy of epic proportions if the culture war of the last four decades were to only make way for a politics of explicit racial balkanization. The late Tony Judt wrote that “the choice we face in the next generation is not capitalism versus communism, or the end of history versus the return of history, but the politics of social cohesion based around collective purposes versus the erosion of society by the politics of fear.” That choice may never be more explicitly made than in the coming election.

Ross is the author of The Socialist Party of America: A Complete History, published in 2015 by Potomac Books, an imprint of the University of Nebraska Press.