The 2016 Bernie Sanders presidential campaign made its mark with laser-like focus on the mounting wealth and power inequities of twenty-first century America.  At the same time, as Sanders notes in his new book, “Where We Go from Here,” he was “criticized for not speaking enough on foreign policy.”  And the truth is he probably would have come in for sharper criticism, were it not for the fact that most of his supporters on the left held their tongues because they were otherwise generally flat out thrilled with his campaign, despite this perceived shortcoming.  Thrilled that a self-described democratic socialist had succeeded in talking plain talk to the American people about taking control of our institutions back from the billionaires and corporate elite whose wealth and power grows seemingly by the day. But if this new book is any indication, should Sanders opt to run again in 2020, he could well distinguish himself from the rest of the primary pack more clearly with his foreign policy ideas that than his economic proposals, given that so many of those have already been adopted by other potential contenders.

Given the newly found interest in causes brought to the fore by the Sanders campaign – single payer health insurance, a $15 dollar-an-hour minimum wage, tuition-free public higher education, etc. – now demonstrated by others who would also wish to be president, it seems clear that while Sanders did not win the 2016 nomination, his campaign did win the debate – hands down.  But even this substantial shift on these major issues may ultimately not prove to be the campaign’s most dramatic impact upon the American political scene.  By now many, if not most Americans realize that we are the only advanced industrialized nation without some form of a universal health care system, but fewer appreciate the fact that historically the U.S. has also been an outlier in its absence of a broad-based socialist movement, to the point where some political scientists have characterized it as a permanent feature of “American exceptionalism.”  

That is, it seemed a permanent feature until the Sanders campaign introduced “democratic socialism” to mainstream political discussion.
And going beyond even that, nothing demonstrated the viability of the “political revolution” Sanders advocated more clearly than the simple fact that he effectively advocated a government free from corporate domination in a campaign free from corporate fundraising. With its more than two million individual donors making over eight million donations averaging $27, the 2016 Sanders campaign achieved the previously unthinkable.  His campaign didn’t just advocate change – it was the change “we’ve been waiting for … the change that we seek,” to a degree far beyond what Barack Obama ever attempted.  It turned out that you could actually play in the big arena, without the big guys’ money.

“… these wars have significantly impacted Europe, which has seen the rise of right-wing extremist movements in response to the mass migration of refugees into those countries.”

There’s no mistaking the fact that “Where We Go from Here” is the sort of book that prospective presidential candidates produce to keep their names out there and hopefully advance their positions in the discussion.  Sanders writes that “On domestic policy … there are major differences between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party.  On foreign policy, not so much.  In fact, a number of observers have correctly pointed out that, to a very great degree, we have a ‘one-party foreign policy.’” To stake his claim to being the one to change that, the book contains the entirety of his September 21, 2017 foreign policy address at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, a speech one writer described as bringing “regime change to the liberal interventionism of the Democratic establishment.”  Harkening back to the campaign debate when he called Henry Kissinger “a terrible secretary of state” and “a war criminal” (after Hillary Clinton had cited him as “a friend and mentor”), and then proceeded to a level of truth telling unprecedented in that arena when he talked about the U.S.-orchestrated overthrows of the democratically elected governments of Iran’s Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953 and Guatemala’s Jacobo Arbenz in 1954, the Fulton speech went on to argue that the U.S.-supported installation of “the Shah, a brutal dictator … led to the Islamic Revolution, the rise of the Ayatollah Khomeni, the taking of hostages at the U.S embassy, and our current hostile relationship with Iran.”

Given the general truism that Americans seldom remember the damage our government has done to other nations while the populations of those countries will never forget – the mere suggestion that there might be a rational explanation for Iranian hostility towards us qualifies as a bold step outside the narrow confines of our “one-party foreign policy.”  But then the book goes much deeper, noting that in addition to the fact that the “war on terror in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and Yemen has cost the United States thousands of lives and trillions of dollars.  These wars have caused massive destabilization in the region, the deaths of many hundreds of thousands of people there, and the displacement of millions who were driven from their homelands.  Further, these wars have significantly impacted Europe, which has seen the rise of right-wing extremist movements in response to the mass migration of refugees into those countries.”

The idea that our mendacious Iraq invasion fiasco, our failed seventeen-year Afghanistan War, or our ally Saudi Arabia’s intervention in Yemen (utilizing American-made military equipment and guidance systems) might have something to do with the mysterious rise of Europe’s “right wing populism” is utterly beyond the pale of the usual narrow range of American foreign policy discussion. As Sanders writes, despite its being “a despotic autocracy controlled by an extremely wealthy family that treats women as third-class citizens, jails dissidents, ruthlessly exploits the foreign labor that keeps its economy going, and has exported the extremist Islamic doctrine of Wahabism around the world,” there is “almost no debate as to why we have installed Saudi Arabia as the ‘good guy’” in the Middle East “ while Iran is the ‘bad guy’ … the position of the 2016 Democratic candidate for president, Hillary Clinton” and of “the Republican president, Donald Trump.”

As Sanders sums it up: “the global war on terror has been a disaster for the American people and for American leadership.  Ongoing U.S. national security strategy essentially allowed a few thousand violent extremists to dictate policy for the most powerful nation on earth.  It responds to terrorists by giving them exactly what they want.”  Should Sanders go again in 2020 it seems unlikely there will be too many other candidates competing with him to be the first to deliver that message.

“One of my goals over the last several years has been to help create a fifty-state Democratic Party.  It is beyond comprehension that Democrats have essentially conceded half the states in this country to Republicans.”

On another front, if you’re one of those wondering how it is that the longest-serving independent in U.S. congressional history came to mount one of the greatest grassroots efforts ever seen, in pursuit of the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party, and then returned to independent status, you’ll find some background here. Many readers may still be a bit unclear on the concept afterwards, but the book does give a thorough run through of this unique aspect of a unique career, beginning in 1971 with the first of Sanders’s four statewide runs as a candidate of the Liberty Union Party – during which he never received better than 6 percent of the vote.  His breakthrough was his 1981 upset election as mayor of Burlington, Vermont’s largest city, which he achieved as an independent, a status he would maintain throughout his subsequent career – with the exception of the presidential run.  In 1986, he returned to statewide races – and to losing, first for governor and then for the state’s lone U.S. House seat, a defeat he would reverse in 1990, when he became the first independent elected to the body in forty years.  After sixteen years, he won a U.S. Senate seat.  He writes that in Vermont, running as an independent “is what I have always done, and what Vermonters expect me to do, and what I will always do.  Meanwhile, in Washington, I have been a member of the Democratic Caucus in the House for the sixteen years that I served there and a member of the Democratic Caucus in the Senate for the last twelve years.”  At the same time, he explains that he has supported numerous Vermont Democratic candidates and state Democrats have supported him. And there’s more: “to complicate matters further, we have the strongest progressive third party in the country, the Vermont Progressive Party” and he has “done my best to see that Democrats and Progressives work together as closely as possible and do not act in a way that benefits Republicans.”  So far as his own campaigns go, “For my last two Senate races, I have run in the Democratic primary, won it, and respectfully declined the nomination, and appeared on the ballot as an Independent.”

There will likely be some non-Vermont Democrats – and a few Vermonters as well, no doubt – who’ll have a hard time accepting this “mixed marriage” sort of relationship, though. Past Hillary Clinton supporters known to complain, “he’s not even a Democrat” are likely to gag over statements like, “One of my goals over the last several years has been to help create a fifty-state Democratic Party.  It is beyond comprehension that Democrats have essentially conceded half the states in this country to Republicans.”  But, as Sanders tells us, the doubters do not include “Chuck Schumer, Democratic Senate leader,” who, after the 2016 election, “asked me to be part of the ten-member Senate Democratic Leadership team … My position is chairman of outreach.”  The New York Senator was undoubtedly influenced by Sanders’s participation in 39 Clinton rallies in 13 states during her race against Donald Trump.  For his part, Sanders says, “During the presidential campaign, I received more than 13 million votes, and it was more than appropriate that those supporters, and the policies they believe in, had a strong voice at the highest level of the Democratic Party.”  To back that up he lists the sixteen red states he has visited since the 2016 election.  (The sixteen blue states he visited in that period are not enumerated.)

Prominent among the issues sets the book addresses are those concerning the situation of black America, and civil rights in general. Given the fact that Vermont’s African-American population percentage ranks fourth-lowest among the states, Sanders understandably entered the 2016 campaign with a low national profile on these issues.  And given that he faced a candidate married to a man occasionally referred to as “America’s first black president” – before the real thing came along -– it was not surprising that he initially trailed way behind her in the black vote, a deficit her campaign attempted to parlay into a perception that he didn’t care about “black issues” and the suggestion that liberal voters who did care about such things shouldn’t care about him.  Although this effort might charitably be construed as campaign staff simply doing their job of trying to win the nomination for their candidate, it had to be a particularly galling experience for Sanders, given that he had been arrested for participating in a Chicago civil rights demonstration in 1963 – when Clinton was still a Young Republican.  (He did at least have the satisfaction of reaching near-parity among younger black voters by the end of the primary season.)

Here again, Sanders’s efforts did not cease on the day of the last 2016 primary; he describes sharing the stage with both Rev. William Barber II, organizer of North Carolina’s “Moral Monday” rallies, and with recently elected Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, who, one writer has noted, has reminded his prosecutors that “The annual cost of incarceration …  was currently more per year than the beginning salaries of teachers, police officers, firefighters, social workers, addiction counselors, and even prosecutors in his office.” And these days, if you still go to book stores, you might even notice a Sanders blurb on NFL star Michael Bennett’s new memoir and call to action, “Things That Make White People Uncomfortable.”

Could anything turn out different if Sanders were to run again? Certainly the big money interests would absolutely flip out if he should win and will presumably spare no effort to prevent him from taking up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.  And this time around, they will not be caught by surprise by the fact that a considerable portion of the hoi polloi relish the idea of stripping them of their disproportionate wealth and political power.  Their efforts to blunt such threats to their status are already evident.

One thing that has turned in Sanders’s favor, however, is the downgrading of the role of superdelegates.  In 2016, he writes, “The DNC, in its wisdom, had designated 716 political insiders as superdelegates – delegates to the national convention who could support any candidate they wanted, regardless of how the people of their state had voted in their primaries or caucuses.

“In other words, the Dem leadership had created the absurd and undemocratic situation that allowed 30 percent of the votes needed for the Democratic nomination to come from the party elite.  In 2016, this grossly unfair situation became very apparent when Secretary Clinton received the support of some 500 superdelegates before the first popular vote was cast in the Iowa caucuses.”

The close observer of the race may point out that Clinton actually won a majority of the elected delegates, but the fact that she won 95 percent of the superdelegates – and had so many of them in hand so early– was a major component in her campaign’s ability to create a sense of the inevitability of her nomination.  Her supporters’ sense of entitlement ran so deep that former Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank published an article calling for Sanders to drop his candidacy in the interest of allowing Clinton, whose right to the nomination was unquestioned, to get about the business of confronting the Republicans – and this was mid-2015!  That messy internal democracy stuff needed to jettisoned in the interest of voters unifying around the candidate who had already been chosen for them.

While the Sanders campaign upset the apple cart on that type of thinking, the fact remains that Clinton did ultimately pull the nomination out, with no small boost from the national news media that did a far better job in reporting her overwhelming early delegate lead than in explaining the source and meaning of that lead.  Elected delegates?  Superdelegates?  Whatever – a lead was a lead, as far as much of the media pack was concerned.  While superdelegate Frank’s reasoning may now look quite absurd, there’s no denying that his underlying argument – that criticism of the “inevitable” nominee was a form of disloyalty that could only help the Republicans – played a significant role in Clinton’s ultimately successful quest for the nomination.

Due to a subsequent unprecedented degree of grassroots engagement in the inner workings of the Democratic Party, however, next time around superdelegates will not be allowed to vote unless there is a second ballot – something that hasn’t happened since 1952, before binding primaries and caucuses became the norm.

Although Sanders lost in 2016, he altered the American political scene more profoundly than all but a few winning candidates ever have.  But as his new book makes clear, even that would likely be reduced to a footnote, if he were to actually win in 2020.

…