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In 1962, the college-age Bernie Sanders was
arrested by the Chicago police, protesting racism. He continued his activism
throughout the 1960s. He was also an antiwar activist.
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In 1972, before Roe v Wade, he took a pro-choice stand.
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In 1987, when he was the mayor of Burlington,
Vermont, Bernie Sanders was explaining the dangers of climate change and
environmental degradation to schoolchildren.
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Throughout the 1990s, Bernie Sanders, as a member
of the US House of Representatives, was a reliable ally of the Congressional
Black Caucus, sometimes the only light-skinned Representative who stood with
them.
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In 1995 he defended gay and lesbian service
members on the House floor.
Yet Bernie could not be a national political leader for many
years; there was no faction in either major party he could lead. There has been
no Democratic left since the loss of the Presidency to Reagan in 1980. Since
that time, elections have been increasingly dominated by wealthy donors and
candidates who cater to them. The abandonment of anti-fascist media law and regulation
under Reagan, the general commercialization of news, and the emergence of the major
right-wing propaganda network Fox News made it impossible to be a major leftist
leader within either major party. It took the crash of 2008 and the failed
response to it to create the conditions that put Sanders in a position to lead
a major Democratic faction.
But Sanders ran against Hillary
Clinton in 2016, and many women are convinced he cost her the election. On top
of which he is a light-skinned secular Jewish man and is therefore held to a
far higher standard than a white Anglo-Saxon protestant. I remember with loathing
how Sanders was painted as racist and sexist despite his long history as
anything but, while Hillary Clinton, with a history of racist language and support
for racist policies in the 1990s and a wobbly position on abortion, was given a
pass, apparently because she was a good Methodist woman.
It remains true that the largest
plurality of voters vote on representation. This is not a simple matter of voting
for someone like themselves. A majority of white women, for instance, find
Donald Trump representative of them. (I can only wonder why he doesn’t remind
them of every harasser and rapist.) This is an impediment to the choice of good
leaders. Instead, we get people who can persuade the public that they represent
the public – affinity scams on the broadest scale. William Clinton “felt their
pain” until he was in office, then delivered more pain.
And sometimes, usually desperate
times, a great leader slips through the haze of self-regard. We get a Washington,
a Lincoln, an FDR. But there are no guarantees. Sanders’ time, I think, has passed. He would, I think, have made a great Senate majority leader, if the Democratic Party had not been so conservative in his time. If elected to the Presidency, Sanders would turn 80 in office and I doubt he could survive the stresses of the office. But there seems
no-one of comparable stature among the Democratic hopefuls, though I think well of
Elizabeth Warren. Would that we could learn to embrace our best in their times!
