Whether Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren has the best unpassable plans doesn’t matter. Which one has a better strategy for building the left’s power does. EricLevitz writes
Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images This is a column about Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and why you should or should not prefer the former over the latter. But before digging into that question, I’d like call your attention to something that is too often ignored in the “Bernie vs. Warren” debate: The American left’s bark is louder than its bite.
Thus far, the 2020 primary has further undermined the notion that Democratic voters will overwhelmingly support radical change if only the left can get the Establishment’s thumbs off the scale. Joe Biden owes his front-runner status less to his party’s high-dollar donors than its high-propensity voters. Few Democratic pooh-bahs went into 2019 favoring Uncle Joe.
Given how far the left is from possessing the power it will need to turn its wildest “green dreams” into reality, however, the most worthwhile Bernie-versus-Warren arguments may concern tactics, not policy. Whether Sanders’s approach to expropriating the billionaire class is preferable to Warren’s isn’t a question that’s likely to be of much practical consequence in the medium-term future.
Marcetic’s essay is based on a New York Times story from last month that reported that, in an apparent bid to ingratiate herself with superdelegates, Warren had told influential Democratic brokers that she wanted to build power within the party and wouldn’t be assembling her own independent grassroots army. Sanders’s supporters responded to this news with indignation, as it appeared to heighten the contradictions between his and her theories of change.
This distinction, too, is nonexistent: In May, a Sanders-campaign aide told BuzzFeed News, “We’re taking superdelegates and superdelegates strategy seriously, hence having a team dedicated to delegates who can prepare for multiple convention scenarios. We will be reaching out to them over the course of the campaign. When the senator wins the nomination, he’s eager to work with them to support and unite all the party in the general and beyond.
It is not clear to me that Sanders is personally committed to the latter theory of change . But many of his most enthusiastic, socialist supporters are; Jacobin’s editors, and many members of the DSA, proselytize an electoral strategy of building an independent socialist party that competes on the Democratic ballot line when necessary.
The left’s weakness makes it trivially easy to demonstrate how someone else’s approach to creating radical change will prove inadequate. It is much harder to make a persuasive case for one’s own. Sanders supporters are right that nothing less than a political revolution can make Medicare for All and a Green New Deal realities. But the evidence that Bernie is capable of fomenting such a revolution is limited.
To be sure, many of Sanders’s socialist supporters see their project as a generational one. And the incremental benefits of maximizing the left’s clout in the Democratic Party today may pale next to the radical possibilities that militancy could open up tomorrow.
Like Marcetic’s piece, Kilpatrick and Sunkara’s draws strong conclusions from limited evidence. The authors observe that Sanders’s support among Democratic-primary voters is markedly less white and more working-class than Warren’s. In fact, many surveys have suggested that Warren owes her viability to overwhelming support among professional-class white liberals — or, as Kilpatrick and Sunkara describe them, “Patagonia Democrats.
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