1 ENDING RACISM
On April 30, 2015, a clear spring day in Washington, DC, Bernie Sanders shuffled out of the Capitol Building to a waiting collection of microphones and a C-SPAN camera. Despite his twenty-five years as the only democratic socialist serving in Congress, the U.S. senator from Vermont was far from a household name. About a dozen reporters, and no other spectators, gathered around him.
“Let me just make a brief comment. Be happy to take a few questions, but we don’t have an endless amount of time; I’ve got to get back,” the always impatient Sanders grumbled before explaining why he was announcing an improbable run for the presidency.
The country was facing a set of interlocking crises the likes of which hadn’t been seen since the Great Depression. “For most Americans, their reality is that they’re working longer hours for lower wages,” Sanders said, explaining that people regularly approached him to ask why they were producing more than ever, yet struggling as the rich only got richer. “All over this country I’ve been talking to people,” Sanders said. “‘My kid can’t afford to go to college.’ ‘I’m having a hard time affording health care.’ How does that happen while at exactly the same time, ninety-nine percent of all new income generated in this country is going to the top one percent?”
These weren’t just familiar themes coming from Sanders. They flowed straight from a left-wing zeitgeist that had found its footing in the encampments of Occupy Wall Street in the fall of 2011, less than four years earlier. Amid the rubble of the Obama administration’s pivot to austerity in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, tent cities had sprung up around the country, organized around the principle of the 99 percent against the one percent.
Occupy was an effort to create the broadest possible “we” and set it against a definable “other” in the super rich. For decades, under the pressure of neoliberalism and the Reagan Revolution—which smashed unions, suppressed wages, and challenged the very idea of the collective pursuit of a better world—the left had splintered into ever more discrete factions, pushing single issues under the umbrella of the Democratic Party. Jesse Jackson, in 1984 and 1988, attempted to organize that energy into a “Rainbow Coalition,” coming shockingly close to seizing the 1988 Democratic nomination and inspiring Sanders, who, for the first time, caucused as a Democrat, leading the effort to deliver the almost all-white state of Vermont to Jackson.
Sanders, preparing for his 2016 presidential run, met with a team of progressive online fund-raisers, one of whom guessed the senator might be able to raise $25 million throughout his campaign, a sum Sanders and the rest of the team thought preposterous. Sanders nodded to that pessimism at his opening press conference. “One of the hesitancies I had in deciding whether to run or not was obviously dealing with money,” he said. “I’m not going to get money from the Koch brothers, and I’m not going to get money from billionaires. I’m going to have to raise my campaign contributions through BernieSanders.com—small, individual contributions.”
By the end of the day, his fund-raising team was floored. The no-frills C-SPAN affair had netted the campaign $1.5 million in the first twenty-four hours, exceeding their wildest expectations by several multiples. Something was happening out there.
Sanders started off polling at about 15 percent, but as the campaign went on, increasingly enthusiastic crowds followed him everywhere he went. People started to “feel the Bern”—a phrase conjured up by Occupy organizer Winnie Wong, who had converted her operation to draft Elizabeth Warren to run for president into “People for Bernie.”
By the fall of 2015, Hillary Clinton’s campaign staff were growing concerned about the momentum behind Sanders. His crowd sizes were exploding, his poll numbers were rising, and even if he didn’t yet represent a threat that might snatch away the nomination, a drawn-out fight, the campaign was concerned, would drag them down in the general election. In early October, Clinton agreed to appear on Saturday Night Live, and that weekend, her campaign’s top brass huddled to debate how to respond to the accusation made by Sanders that Clinton was too cozy with Wall Street. Another key question, which the campaign had grappled with in the previously unreported internal debate, was whether to come out publicly in favor of restoring what was known as Glass-Steagall, the Depression-era law that barred big commercial banks from gambling with their depositors’ money. The Bill Clinton administration had infamously repealed the law as part of a wave of Wall Street deregulation, and it was being apportioned considerable blame for the 2008 financial crisis that was still dragging down the economy. Some on the Hillary Clinton campaign raised policy objections, wondering about the unintended consequences of breaking up such large institutions. Others argued that the move would backfire because it would come off as patently inauthentic pandering. But the third objection was the deciding one: Voters who were motivated by Wall Street corruption were going to vote for Bernie Sanders no matter what. The persuadable voters who would decide the election, the Clinton campaign determined, were more likely to vote on cultural and social issues. How to go on offense with those issues was the question.
Still, a little bit of pandering was in order, so the campaign decided that Clinton would come out for strengthening the Volcker Rule, a milder reform than reinstating Glass-Steagall, and she did so later that week.
Coming into the Iowa caucuses in early 2016, Sanders had climbed his way into a tie in the statewide polls, and Clinton emerged from the messy caucuses, replete with contested coin tosses and rampant challenges, with a narrow 2-delegate victory.
New Hampshire, home turf for Sanders, was next, on February 9, and the Clinton team decided to try to weaponize Sanders’s enthusiastic young supporters against him—a bid to win over those voters Sanders’s team hoped would be swayed on cultural issues. Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook and communications director Brian Fallon appeared at a “Bloomberg Politics” breakfast with reporters and first laid out the charge, with Fallon jumping in to warn Sanders against “demeaning and insulting language.”
The problem, Fallon said, was Sanders’s supporters—but it was also Sanders’s fault for riling them up. “Distinct from the candidate and the campaign proper, there is a support base for Senator Sanders’s candidacy that has been shorthanded as the so-called Bernie Bros,” Fallon said. “Anyone who engages in social media in support of Hillary Clinton has encountered this element. It can be nasty. It can be vitriolic. And I think that the Sanders campaign needs to beware the extent to which, in an effort to mobilize and galvanize their supporters, they start to let the mentality, or the crudeness, seep into their own words and criticisms that they hurl at Secretary Clinton.”
Sanders himself, Fallon said, was egging those supporters on. “Senator Sanders is a very skilled and deft politician, despite efforts to hone and cultivate an image to the contrary. And he knows what he is doing when he does these little hip checks. He’s injecting something into a conversation and trying to inspire a three- or four-day conversation that he knows,” Fallon said, pausing to find the right words, “would be bothersome.”
It was the first entry into the official record, so to speak, of the term Bernie Bros. At the time, the head of the Department of Labor was Tom Perez, known as the administration’s most progressive cabinet secretary. The next year, he’d win a race—with Obama’s backing—to become chair of the Democratic National Committee. For now, he was dispatched to both New Hampshire and Nevada to get the lay of the land. The day after Fallon’s remarks, February 5, Perez reported to Clinton campaign chair John Podesta, that the Bernie Bro insight could be taken a step farther and wielded in the party’s internal culture war.
The Sanders message was resonating, Perez argued, particularly among young people, whose futures were collapsing in front of their faces. Republican operative Karl Rove had pioneered the strategy of turning a candidate’s greatest strength into his greatest weakness, and Perez proposed doing the same to Sanders. “I think Nevada is the firewall on a number of levels,” he wrote to Podesta in an email later obtained and published by WikiLeaks.
While Clinton couldn’t undermine Sanders’s message, she could transform who people understood to be the messengers—and the audience. Nevada was an opportunity, Perez said, for Clinton to do well in caucuses that included a significant number of minority voters—Black, Asian American, and Latino—of all ages, and that meant doing well with young minority voters. “When we do well there, then the narrative changes from ‘Bernie kicks ass among young voters’ to ‘Bernie does well only among young white liberals’—that is a different story and a perfect lead-in to South Carolina, where, once again, we can work to attract young voters of color,” he suggested.
Sanders’s strength was that he had people, lots of them, and they were passionate enough to volunteer, to contribute to the campaign, and to otherwise evangelize the political revolution. The goal, then, was to turn those people into a liability. Flagging the Bernie Bros as obnoxious, privileged young white men was the easiest way to do it. Sanders’s support among young people, by that time, cut across race and gender, but it wasn’t hard to find young, white, obnoxious men who backed him, to elevate them publicly, and then to condemn them and the Sanders campaign together.
In a riveting New Hampshire debate, Clinton took her first serious shot at fending off Sanders’s charge that she was the candidate of the moneyed elite and that the support her campaign had from big-money donors and the speaking fees she personally took from companies like Goldman Sachs might have some corrupting influence. “You will not find that I ever changed a view or a vote because of any donation that I ever received,” Clinton said. “So, I think it’s time to end the very artful smear that you and your campaign have been carrying out in recent weeks, and let’s talk about the issues.” She added: “… I really don’t think these kinds of attacks by insinuation are worthy of you. Enough is enough, if you’ve got something to say, say it.”
Sanders refused to call Clinton personally corrupt, but he laid the point out clearly. Drug companies could raise prices at will because they had bought power in Washington. Oil companies could block climate change legislation for the same reason. Also true with the banks, and so on. “There is a reason why these people are putting huge amounts of money into our political system and, in my view, it is undermining American democracy,” he responded.
In 2008, Hillary Clinton had pulled off a remarkable comeback against Barack Obama, winning the New Hampshire primary and giving life to her campaign. It wasn’t to be in 2016: Sanders carried the state by 22 points and, over the next day, had brought in a staggering six-million-dollar-plus haul.
All of a sudden, the Nevada caucuses mattered. For much of the campaign, Clinton had been dismissing Sanders as a “single-issue” candidate, but at a rally in Henderson, Nevada, on February 13, 2016, a week before the caucuses, she tightened her pitch. It wasn’t just that Sanders’s backers were problematic, Clinton warned voters, but his platform was, too—because it didn’t directly confront racism and sexism. “Not everything is about an economic theory,” she said, promising to be “the only candidate who’ll take on every barrier to progress.”
This led her into a call-and-response that would become central to her stump speech. “If we broke up the big banks tomorrow,” she asked, “and I will, if they deserve it, if they pose a systemic risk, I will—would that end racism?”
“No!” the crowd yelled back.
“Would that end sexism?”
“No!”
“Would that end discrimination against the LGBT community?”
“No!”
“Would that make people feel more welcoming to immigrants overnight?”
“No!”
Two months later, Rolling Stone described it as “the line that may have won Hillary Clinton the nomination.”
Sanders, of course, could have countered that, for instance, breaking up the big banks and enforcing civil rights laws against them would indeed be a blow to systemic racism—redlining, after all, had been enforced and implemented by the banks. The response would have been an example of what became known as the “race-class narrative,” an effort by progressive strategists to speak to people’s material concerns without overlooking—and, indeed, by fully incorporating a critique of—systemic racism. Or Sanders could have noted that unchecked concentrations of capital were a threat to democracy. Or that he had been supportive of trans rights as the mayor of Burlington in the 1980s and had been far ahead of his peers when it came to what were then called gay and lesbian rights.
But Clinton’s argument wasn’t one of substance, so it couldn’t be countered with substance. Sanders isn’t as progressive as you think he is, she was telling voters, and the proof was his single-minded focus on economic security and the battle against the one percent. It was a luxury—a privilege, even—to be able to focus merely on the millionaires and billionaires and not on the intersecting forms of oppression faced in unique ways by those in marginalized communities.
The Nevada contest was tight, and got heated in several precincts. Dolores Huerta, a longtime union organizer—known, not without a twinge of sexism, as “the female Cesar Chavez”—was at one caucus site. A vocal Clinton supporter, Huerta claimed in a Twitter post, “I offered to translate & Bernie supporters chanted English only! We fought too long & hard to be silenced. Si Se Puede!”
The claim was spread widely, and the bigoted behavior just as widely condemned. It turned out to be a lie. Videos showed nobody had chanted any such thing; rather, Raymond Buckley, the neutral precinct chair and a leading figure in the New Hampshire Democratic Party, who had traveled to Nevada to volunteer, had ruled that there would be no translation at the caucus site. But the viral story of bigotry from Bernie supporters had done immense damage.
Another allegation spread from a different precinct: that enraged Sanders supporters had thrown chairs amid a caucus melee. Video later surfaced of a Sanders supporter lifting a chair over his head in anger, but then putting it back down. There was no doubt the caucuses had gotten hot, but the chair-throwing rumor was untrue. Still, the twin stories were collectively too perfect to allow debunking to suppress them. Angry, entitled young white men throwing chairs and shouting down a widely respected, elderly Latina organizer? Sounds like Bernie Bros.
Meanwhile, the party machine went to work on behalf of Clinton. Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid, who had built the Nevada machine from the ground up, called the head of the Culinary Workers Union, directing them to endorse Clinton and to urge workers to caucus. Reid then called the casinos and ordered them to give their employees time off to caucus. The orders were followed, and Clinton wound up with a 5-point caucus victory. Sanders’s momentum had been blunted, but more important a narrative had been set: Bernie’s movement was beset by racism and misogyny, and good progressives must support Clinton.
Days later, Sanders was blown out in South Carolina, a defeat that put an exclamation mark on the white Bernie Bro narrative. Losing both states the way Sanders did was a mortal double blow, but the campaign took many more months to bleed out, with each day of the primary driving a wedge deeper in between the party’s increasingly bitter factions. The Clinton campaign, through a super PAC with which it coordinated directly, called Correct the Record, later admitted to spending at least a million dollars to get into bitter fights with Sanders supporters online, either through bots or paid accounts. When they announced this publicly in April, they said they had already “addressed more than 5,000 people that have personally attacked Hillary Clinton on Twitter.” For-profit scam artists based in eastern Europe would get in the game, too, joining Sanders or Clinton Facebook groups and posting what came to be called fake news. The articles were designed to look like official American news items. The Sanders campaign had begun seeing this particular brand of news starting in early 2016, and it became digital media director Hector Sigala’s job to grapple with it. “The first time that we kind of fell for it, for like two minutes, was this link from what seemed to be ABC News,” Sigala said. It turned out to be ABC.com.co, a fake site that has no affiliation with the real news network. It had “reported” that the pope himself had endorsed Sanders. According to the investigation later conducted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, an agency linked with the Russian government did much the same thing as Correct the Record and the eastern European scammers, but it used its fake troll accounts to stir anger between the party’s two factions.
As WikiLeaks would later reveal, the Clinton campaign worked directly with Washington-based nonprofit advocacy groups—which universally endorsed Clinton despite their younger staff generally supporting Sanders—to ghost-write op-eds explaining how the Sanders position on this or that issue was actually sexist or racist. To the extent that the campaign tactic moved the needle at all, it likely pushed moderate voters paying only marginal attention to the campaign toward Sanders, who spoke like a normal person, while Clinton began ascending into what her ally James Carville would later call “faculty lounge speak.” Anybody following the campaign closely, however, had no effort distinguishing which candidate among the two was more progressive. The giveaway was that one of them was openly calling himself a socialist. Former president Bill Clinton, surveying the landscape and the ham-handed efforts at identity politics, was bereft, lamenting to a longtime friend in the fall of 2016 that Hillary’s campaign “could not sell pussy on a troop train.”
The Clinton campaign’s deft deployment of identity politics to detonate the Sanders campaign set off a chain reaction that would blow the lid off the Democratic coalition in the years to come. But Clinton’s effort would not have met with such success had the conditions not been perfectly primed for it. The financial crisis of 2008, followed by the painfully slow recovery, hit Millennials especially hard. All of a sudden absent hope for a better world or a secure future, millions of people looked for purpose instead in their own moral purification. In a nation that had been founded by a radical sect of Puritans and engulfed by multiple Great Awakenings and lesser moral panics, this awakened sense of righteousness fit seamlessly into the national character. And real social progress was being made—thanks, in part, to the early petering out of the Obama administration.
Barack Obama—in no small part due to the prior machinations of his chief of staff Rahm Emanuel—was the first president in fifty years to be working with a Democratic majority more conservative than the White House. Both Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton had faced congressional majorities that were more liberal, and they needed to triangulate and browbeat progressives in order to implement their respective agendas. Emanuel, as the 2006 chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, assiduously recruited conservative candidates to challenge incumbent Republicans. The timing couldn’t have been worse. Democrats did take the House and Senate that cycle—though whether Emanuel’s strategy helped or hurt that effort is debatable—but not long after they were sworn in, cracks began showing in the bubble economy. Small-time subprime lenders, who had pumped out fraudulent loans disproportionately to Black homeowners, began going under. Big lenders followed, and in March 2008 Bear Stearns, a Wall Street giant, collapsed.
Copyright © 2023 by Ryan Grim
