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"Civility" Should Not Be a Priority for a Democracy Under Threat
Biden is simply hiding behind "civility" to conceal the fact that, all too often, he shared portions of the same anti-democratic agendas embraced by vile segregationists, by his "Republican friends," and by his Wall Street donors
Jul 07, 2019
As an abstract principle, civil discourse is regarded as a virtue. However, one should neither mistake a facade of respectability for civility nor be prepared to sacrifice core democratic principles to achieve civility.
It is extremely dangerous, either in the name of "civility" or "bipartisanship," to yield to those who seek nothing less than the destruction of democracy.
That point was driven home by Richard Evans in The Coming of the Third Reich when he explained how the Nazi Party, which lost the 1932 election, was able to seize and consolidate unchallenged power in 1933.
"It is in the nature of democratic institutions," Evans noted, "that they presuppose at least a minimal willingness to abide by the rules of democratic principles." But it is extremely dangerous, either in the name of "civility" or "bipartisanship," to yield to those who seek nothing less than the destruction of democracy--a point Evans drove home by quoting Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels's harsh reference to the "stupidity" of democracy. Goebbels proclaimed: "It will always remain one of democracy's best jokes that it provided its mortal enemies with the means by which it was destroyed."
Even when offered by a renowned historian, like Christopher R. Browning, a UNC professor emeritus, there is a reflexive tendency to immediately dismiss academic comparisons between the 1932 Nazi threat to the survival of Germany's Weimar Republic and the threat Donald J. Trump and his congressional Republican enablers currently pose to democratic governance, checks and balances, and to survival the rule of law in these United States.
The error in that dismissal lies in an exclusive focus on the end-product of Nazi rule, the Holocaust. Hence, the indignant, yet erroneous criticism of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) for her accurate description of recently erected immigrant detention facilities as "concentration camps." People lose sight of the fact that the Nazi concentration camps, which were initially erected in 1933 to house "enemies of the state," did not become "death camps" until after the 1939 outbreak of the Second World War.
The case could be made that the "grotesque and dehumanizing" conditions inside U.S. border detention facilities--not to mention the callous and cruel decision to rip children away from their parents' arms--are as abhorrent as the concentration camp conditions that existed during the first six years of Nazi rule. But the dire warnings provided by historians, like Evans and Browning, were not directed at concentration camp conditions. Instead, Browning, who described Mitch McConnell as a "gravedigger of democracy," laid out the reasons why the disciples of extreme wealth and political inequality--Donald Trump, 21st century Republicans and what Law professor Cass Sunstein referred to as the Supreme Court's "Radicals in Robes," are, in the words of the infamous Joseph Goebbels, "mortal enemies" of democracy.
At what may be our democracy's darkest hour, it is, thus, deeply disconcerting to be confronted with Joe Biden's assertion that if he replaced Trump, democracy's "mortal enemies" would experience an "epiphany" because his "Republican friends" realize that their enabling of executive lawlessness and corruption "isn't what they're supposed to be doing."
Biden's "Republican friends," who Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) recently described as "an existential threat to American principles and institutions," have worked tirelessly over the past several decades to resurrect the same system of Jim Crow at the polls that vile racist segregationists, like Sens. James O. Eastland (D-Miss.) and Herman Talmadge (D-Ga.), sought to preserve when they opposed the Civil and Voting Rights Acts in the 1960s.
Although conceding that Talmadge was "one of the meanest guys [he'd] every met," Biden proclaimed: "At least there was civility. We got things done."
One would like to believe Biden naively mistook the facade of respectability that Southern elites of that era--both Talmadge and Eastland were plantation owners--sought to cloak themselves in by joining all-White Citizens' Councils, as opposed to joining the terrorist KKK. The ugly reality, as noted by PBS, was that, under Eastland's leadership, the Mississippi White Citizen's Council "fostered a violent, reactionary climate where punishment against blacks was sanctioned."
Biden is simply hiding behind "civility" to conceal the fact that, all too often, he shared portions of the same anti-democratic agendas embraced by vile segregationists, by his "Republican friends," and by his Wall Street donors.
Examination of his "disastrous" legislative history, however, reveals Biden is simply hiding behind "civility" to conceal the fact that, all too often, he shared portions of the same anti-democratic agendas embraced by vile segregationists, by his "Republican friends," and by his Wall Street donors.
Biden claimed he took part in civil rights marches. He didn't. At the recent debate, Biden said, "I didn't oppose busing in America." In 1975, Biden described court-ordered busing as "asinine" and lamented that a constitutional amendment may be needed to end it. The former VP voted against two of President Jimmy Carter's African-American nominees, to the U.S. Department of Justice and for Solicitor General, because they supported busing to achieve school integration.
Biden cites civility as a means to get things done. It's the things he gets done that are the problem. He personally authored many of the major crime and "war on drugs" bills that led to mass incarceration, which now disparately impacts the poor and people of color.
At this moment, the gravest threat to the survival of our democracy arises from the symbiotic relationship between an ever-expanding economic and political inequality--an inequality so stark that President Carter lamented it has already given rise to "an oligarchy with unlimited political bribery."
Biden voted to strip away bankruptcy protections from the victims of the usurious credit card industry. He voted to repeal Glass-Steagall, the Depression-era law which prevented commercial banks from participating in Wall Street's oft-fraudulent speculations. That repeal played a major role in the 2008 financial meltdown. Biden then completed the coup de grace to Wall Street accountability by voting in favor of the massive Wall Street bailout.
If there had been any doubt that voting to nominate Joe Biden as the Democratic Party presidential nominee would be akin to helping dig our democracy's grave, those doubts were eliminated when, in responding to Bernie Sanders's direct challenge to extreme inequality and oligarchy, Biden assured his wealthy Wall Street donors that there would be no fundamental change to their obscenely lavish standards of living under a Biden presidency.
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Warren and Sanders Understand the Power of 'The Bad Guy'
For Sanders and Warren, it’s simple: The Bad Guy is the rich, the one percent, the oligarchy
May 23, 2019
Progressive activist Norman Solomon offers a succinct description of neoliberalism: an ideology that sees victims but never victimizers. Bad things just happen.They're the product of mysterious, unaccountable and ill-defined "market forces." Factories just close, endless wars just "erupt," the Nasdaq just crashes and our 401K and home equity just evaporate. No one specifically is responsible. And when someone is, around the margins, it's a handful of faceless Arabs off in a cave somewhere or, increasingly, anonymous "Russians." Our military and intelligence services are off fighting those Bad Guys. Trust us.
But intuitively we know this is inadequate. It's clear neither Islamic State group nor the Russians caused the opium crisis, the housing bubble, racist policing, the predatory gig economy, massive college loans, endless wars or a host of other social ills. It's human nature to seek out the causes of a crisis, name names and get a sense that, even if one accepts that terrorism and Putin are real and urgent threats, they're small-time compared to those making us poor, overworked, drug-addicted, indebted and war-fatigued. We have victims--this much is obvious. But where are the victimizers?
Two 2020 presidential candidates, Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, have gone to great lengths to lay out who these victimizers are and to establish The Bad Guy--the former, first in 2016; the latter with more specificity in 2020. It goes without saying that both Sanders and Warren have major flaws (namely on matters of foreign policy and imperialism) and this article will not litigate those. It will, instead, argue only that their biggest asset--and the thing most necessary for the Democrats in 2020--is that they clearly establish who The Bad Guy is and how the Democratic presidential nominee is going to work to take that opponent down.
For Sanders and Warren, it's simple: This Bad Guy is the rich, the one percent, the oligarchy--however one wants to put it. It's not an exact definition (and some on the left think this vagueness, when globalized, carries its own potential problems), but it's precise enough, and one that has been good enough for countless left-wing populist movements, reforms and revolutions for centuries.
Sanders' use of the "millionaires and billionaires" refrain is well known but, for the purposes of this article, let's focus on a recent video spot posted by Elizabeth Warren. The ad targets Appalachian voters with a simple message: The opium crisis that's affected all your lives didn't happen by accident. It was the product of deliberate corporate criminality. The spot isn't ideologically pristine (some have noted it veers into medication-shaming) but it's about as perfect a spot as a campaign can produce. It not only gives us a Bad Guy; it gives us a specific plan about how The Bad Guy will be taxed and, if needed, thrown in jail:
It explicitly says this "wasn't an accident." It names names, listing specific corporations. Warren looks directly into the camera. Viewers come away from this ad knowing exactly who The Bad Guy is.
In 2016, Trump understood the political power of The Bad Guy and, fully harnessing years of Fox News' brand of faux-class warfare, proffered a made-up one: a racist fever dream, a Soros-Black Lives Matter-Islamo conspiracy out to get the underdog-middle-class white man. Its face wasn't that of a wealthy bank or pharma exec but a (((globalist))) liberal donor, a masked Islamic State group fighter and the dreaded "liberal media." For most, this rang false (after all, Clinton did get more votes than Trump), and for many more this Bad Guy was just a stand-in for their long ingrained, immovable racism. But for some, a small, but potentially decisive percentage of voters, it offered a culprit responsible for the ills around them.
It's important, as I've noted time and again, that the much-heralded white working class is not Trump's base--however, the largest defection of voters from Obama to Trump did come from this demographic. The median, most consequential Trump backer is a golf-tanned white man with $1.3 million in the bank who owns a network of Toyota dealerships in Central Florida. But--the domain of poor whites is where Trump picked up a lot of "winnable" ground--and where the Democrats can rightfully reassert themselves.
Only instead of offering up a racist, Fox News-concocted Bad Guy, Warren and Sanders can offer voters a real one: the rich, cynical prescription drug pusher; the bank executive who foreclosed on your aunt's house; the retail overlord who docks your pay for taking bathroom breaks when you pick up shifts at Walmart.
In other words: the one percent. Some won't take to it; most probably won't. But the not irredeemably illiberal and racist Trump voter and nonvoter will, and this is a winnable demographic. This is not to say the poor whites need a Bad Guy any more than people of color--indeed people of color are overwhelmingly more economically populist than whites of all classes--only that Warren's ad shows it's possible to give them one without committing previous Democratic party sins of resorting to sleazy racist dog whistles.
As a point of reference, read this speech Hillary Clinton gave in Columbus, Ohio, weeks before the 2016 election. Contrast it with Warren's urgent, class-based messaging. Nowhere, other than naming Trump, does it feature a real Bad Guy. In fact, Clinton claims, the status quo is "great":
"We don't have to make America great. We've got to do what we can to make sure it remains great and it becomes greater because we keep broadening that circle of opportunity. And please, never forget America is great because America is good, and if we deviate, if we deviate from our fundamental values--and that's indeed the kind of campaign my opponent has run."
She would briefly mention corporate malfeasance, but only in terms of "fraud" or the occasional excess of a Wells Fargo. Even when attempting to calibrate populist messaging, the rich aren't presented by Clinton as an existential threat that must be combated and reined in, but rather as mostly good except for a few bad apples. Two weeks later, while campaigning in Florida, a state boasting the second worst level of inequality in the nation, Clinton told voters she "loved having the support of real billionaires, and they've been speaking up because ... Donald gives a bad name to billionaires." The result: a bloodless half measure that presents Trump as sullying the otherwise good name of capitalism. The Bad Guy for Clinton isn't the rigged system or Wall Street; it's an anomalous, Russia-installed one-off event that will come and go if you Just Vote Harder.
The Bad Guy must transcend all those specifics and must be seen in every outrage; every nickel-and-dime raise, every eviction, every friend lost to drugs, every cousin or niece returning from Iraq with PTSD.
But Trump himself can't be The Bad Guy, though he's most certainly their creation. The ills plaguing working communities predate Trump, so it can't just be one man to blame. And it can't be Republicans per se--though they are the most popular conduit for this one percent. No, it has to be something more static, more bipartisan, something all-encompassing. People know they hate their boss, and by extension their boss's boss. This Bad Guy--the one percent--is screwing them over regardless of who wins the Senate or occupies the White House. The Bad Guy must transcend all those specifics and must be seen in every outrage; every nickel-and-dime raise, every eviction, every friend lost to drugs, every cousin or niece returning from Iraq with PTSD.
Former Obama administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs and unabashed elitist busybody Cass Sunstein touched on the psychological importance of The Bad Guy in his 2007 essay, "On the Divergent American Reactions to Terrorism and Climate Change," albeit for more cynical ends. Describing what he coined "the Goldstein Effect"--borrowed from the use and misuse of Official State Enemy Emmanuel Goldstein in George Orwell's "1984"--Sunstein detailed the importance of putting a face to an enemy, highlighting Osama bin Laden releasing menacing videos during the Bush years as giving the necessary propaganda fuel to sustain the War on Terror.
Sunstein didn't see this as a problem--and indeed, he somewhat cravenly viewed it as a template to get people to care about global warming, but his overall point is sound: On a basic level, people need a face to a problem. The appeal of Warren and Sanders' Bad Guy is that it has the moral benefit of being proportionate and identifying a more salient threat than far-off terrorists fueling a perma-war and U.S. imperial objectives. The rich are indeed fleecing the working class; all Warren's and Sanders' campaign rhetoric is doing is pointing out who, exactly, is doing the fleecing.
There is, of course, a lot of campaign money in making sure there is no Bad Guy, and if there is, it is identifiable as "the Russians" or "Islamic terror." It's not a coincidence the campaigns drawing the biggest donors--those of Pete Buttigieg, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Beto O'Rourke, Joe Biden--speak in the empty language of neoliberalism, a worldview without a Victimizer, without The Bad Guy. They produce only fatuous calls for "unity," "ingenuity and creativity" and "hope." After all, why would one name The Bad Guy when The Bad Guy is funding your campaign?
Booker's early political career was astroturfed by Republican billionaire charter school boosters, his most famous moment: defending Bain Capital from the rare potshot that then-President Obama took at Wall Street. Buttigieg is a cheap Obama knock-off produced in a McKinsey & Co. laboratory who, like Obama, will vaguely acknowledge The Bad Guy but insists we can work alongside him. Biden is running to run, buoyed by name recognition and in many ways leaning into the fact that he's The Bad Guy's good friend, telling a Brookings audience earlier this month, "I don't think 500 billionaires are the reason we're in trouble. The folks at the top aren't bad guys." Shockingly, these very same Bad Guys--who he suspiciously insists are, in fact, not The Bad Guys--are rushing to back him.
There's been a lot of back-and-forth since 2016 about whether Trump won because of economic problems or white racism or some combination of both. Obviously, those heavily invested in the status quo--the corporate wing of the party and Clinton campaign alums--have tremendous incentive to support the theory that Trump's victory can simply be chalked up to the latter. (After all, if the problem can't be fixed, there's nothing to do about it, and the current Democratic elite is doing a swell job.) But professional Clinton critics and ideological leftists such as myself also have a stake in insisting it's more a product of the former. (If it's racism, full-stop, that propelled Trump to the White House, then left populism won't achieve anything, so why bother?) It probably comes down to a combination of both factors, and in many ways it's such a fluid dynamic it's impossible to know for sure. But that's the appeal of The Bad Guy: It doesn't matter.
Targeting the rich doesn't require pandering to racists or bleeding heart New York Times profiles of dispossessed neo-Nazis who are Simply Misunderstood--it requires a clear picture of who is leveling harm and what can be done to stop the perpetrators. Depressed African American turnout in Midwestern cities and a lack of enthusiasm across demographic groups indicate, with or without intractable white racism, a party in urgent need of moral focus. Warren and Sanders, with clear class critiques, can provide that focus and give people the opportunity to not just vote for or against someone, but to vote for someone who's against someone--in this case, the rich.
Whether Democrats want to admit it or not, people across the board are being victimized. The most urgent question of 2020 is this: Which party is going to define the victimizer?
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Neither Debs Nor Brandeis, Or Why It Is a Mistake Now to Exaggerate Differences on the Left
There is no reason to figure Sanders as Debs, in a century-long contest with Warren as Brandeis. Debs and Brandeis are long gone, and the parties they supported are long gone too.
Mar 18, 2019
Note: The piece below is a critical response to a recent piece published in Jacobin, the widely-read publication that bills itselfas "a leading voice of the American left, offering socialist perspectives on politics, economics, and culture. The print magazine is released quarterly and reaches over 30,000 subscribers, in addition to a web audience of 1,00,000 a month." I hoped to publish it in Jacobin , but its editors were not interested in the piece, which runs counter to their editorial perspective. So I sent it to Dissent, which bills itselfas " one of America's leading intellectual journals and a mainstay of the democratic left." Its editors were not interested in running a critique of a piece published in Jacobin. As a long-time editor myself, I have total respect and admiration for the above-mentioned editors, who do a fine job of piloting their journals and advancing the missions of those journals. At the same time, as someone who believes that real dialogue on the broad left is important, it is of some concern that each of these fine journals seems satisfied to proceed in relative disregard of the other. Fortunately, Public Seminar exists as a space for such dialogue across the broad liberal and democratic left. Such spaces are as important now as they have ever been.
In his recent Jacobin piece, "You Can Have Brandeis or You Can Have Debs," Shawn Gude insists that it is important to be clear about who is a socialist and who is not. He maintains that Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders "draw their lineage from distinct political traditions," and that "Warren's political tradition is the left edge of middle-class liberalism; Sanders hails from America's socialist tradition. Or, to put the distinction in more personal terms: Warren is Louis Brandeis, Sanders is Eugene Debs." His essay's subtitle accurately underscores the point: "Don't confuse the two."
Gude sees Warren as "a regulator at heart who believes that capitalism works well as long as fair competition exists," and sees Sanders as "a class-conscious tribune who sees capitalism as fundamentally unjust." He draws a convincing genealogy linking Warren to Brandeis, both legal scholars and activists concerned to regulate the abuses of corporate capitalism, and both liberals (and not radicals or socialists)."Brandeis" he argues, "put his ideals into action in 1910 when he helped settle a New York garment workers' strike. Brandeis, advancing his conception of 'industrial self-government,' assisted in setting up three boards with worker representation that handled labor-management disputes and oversaw labor conditions." Debs, on the other hand, was an anti-capitalist sought to create a "cooperative commonwealth" centered on labor solidarity, struggle, and empowerment. "Power had to be ripped from the employer class through voting and strikes and class unity. No amount of fair-minded bargaining, no amount of cool reasoning, could close the structural gulf between workers and capitalists."
The differences between Brandeis and Debs were surely real. Debs was a revolutionary socialist, an internationalist, and a critic of Wilsonianism and of WWI. Brandeis was a liberal nationalist and a supporter of Wilson and of WWI. The war, and the Bolshevik Revolution, brought these differences to a head; Debs was famously (notoriously, and unjustly) prosecuted by the Wilson Administration for violating the Espionage Act; and Brandeis, as a member of the Supreme Court, joined the unanimous decision, written by Oliver Wendell Holmes, upholding Debs's conviction and imprisonment. Gude's summary is not wrong: "Debs forged cross-border solidarity with democratic forces; Brandeis looked to the benevolent power of the emergent American state." But the general dichotomy he invokes is simplistic and exaggerated. For Brandeis, and the many liberals who supported the war, were also interested in cross-border solidarities, even if not Bolshevik ones (though in the early months of the Bolshevik Revolution, Wilson himself expressed support for the Bolsheviks, something noted even by Debs; this changed with Brest-Litovsk in 1918, though this is another story . . . ). And Debs, and the socialists who joined him in opposing the war (the Socialist party indeed split over this), were also interested in influencing, and perhaps even wielding, the power "of the emergent American state."
More generally, neither the positions represented by Brandeis and Debs, nor the traditions with which they were associated, and which Gude traces forward to Warren and Sanders, were as discrete and at odds as Gude suggests.
First, while it is true that Debs was a socialist and even something of a Marxist, Gude's observation that "he came to this view later in life" is a bit misleading. For as many commentators have noted -- most notably Nick Salvatore in his classic Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist -- while Debs was surely radicalized over time, his thinking was always suffused with a distinctively American version of civic republicanism. Debs, in short, was something of a Jeffersonian, something that many of the Hamiltonians of his time, such as Herbert Croly, noted and criticized. As Staughton Lynd pointed out years ago in his 1968 Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism, there is a tradition linking Jefferson and Paine, the abolitionists and radical republicans, and 20th Century forms of American radicalism (Croly well understood this tradition, and did not like it). And as Philippa Strum pointed out in her Louis Brandeis: Justice for the People, which Gude cites, Brandeis too was a Jeffersonian, though of a different sort. Debs and Brandeis, then, in spite of real differences, also shared a common ancestor.
Second, while there were clearly some very sharp differences between radicals and liberals during the period in which Debs and Brandeis lived, there were also very important overlaps and collaborations between these traditions, and the boundaries separating them were often very porous.
Indeed, when Debs was famously tried for violating a court injunction against the Homestead strike in 1895, his attorney was the liberal Clarence Darrow (upon his release from his later imprisonment in 1922 for anti-war activities, Debs sent Darrow a personal letter thanking him for his long-standing support and friendship). It was during this incarceration in Woodstock Prison that Debs claimed to have been introduced to Marxism; and it was upon his release, in November 1895, that Debs delivered one of his most famous speeches, "Liberty," a working class republican speech whose touchstone is the Declaration of Independence. And when Debs was convicted in 1918 for violating the Espionage Act of 1917, a wide range of liberals and socialists rallied to his defense, eventually forming the American Civil Liberties Union, a story told beautifully in Ernest Freeberg's Democracy's Prisoner: Eugene V. Debs, The Great War, and the Right to Dissent.
Regarding the porousness of boundaries, consider the case of John Dewey, the most important American liberal philosopher of the 20th Century, whose 1935 book, Liberalism and Social Action, was widely regarded as an important justification for New Deal reform. Dewey, an important contributor to The New Republic since its 1914 creation as the central organ of liberal Progressivism, was also a sympathizer of socialism and a collaborator with socialists. He was involved with the founding of some of the most important liberal organizations of his time, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (1909), the American Association of University Professors (1915), and the American Civil Liberties Union (1920). At the same time, he was a leader of a core organization that brought together the founders of those groups, people such as W.E.B. DuBois, Roger Baldwin, Clarence Darrow, Helen Keller, and Charlotte Perkins Gillman: the Intercollegiate SocialistSociety which, founded in 1905, in 1921 became the League for Industrial Democracy.
Alex Livingston expands on these overlaps in his fine Jacobin piece, "John Dewey's Experiments in Democratic Socialism," observing that: "In 1929, Dewey had become both president of the People's Lobby (formerly the Anti-Monopoly League) and national chairman of the League for Independent Political Action (LIPA). The two groups sought to unite liberals and socialists behind a common program of industrial democracy." During this time Dewey wrote consistently in favor of forming a new third party. He supported Norman Thomas for President in 1932 and 1936. At the same time, his writings during this period helped to inspire many self-styled Progressive liberals, such as A. A. Berle and Rexford Tugwell, to join FDR's administration and to justify New Deal reforms.
And this leads me to the third reason why Gude's opposition of Debs and Brandeis is exaggerated: because by the time of the New Deal there had evolved a productive synergy between Socialist demands and liberal reforms. Gude contrasts Debs's revolutionary activism with Brandeis who helped to settle the garment workers strike by "advancing his conception of 'industrial self-government,' assisted in setting up three boards with worker representation that handled labor-management disputes and oversaw labor conditions." This sounds a lot like the transformational reforms of labor law enacted by the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. The New Deal was surely not a socialist transformation. But it most definitely represented a significant social democratization of American life.
A recognition of this has been central to Bernie Sanders's "political revolution" at least since 2015, when he famously appealed to the example of FDR:
Against the ferocious opposition of the ruling class of his day, people he called economic royalists, Roosevelt implemented a series of programs that put millions of people back to work, took them out of poverty, and restored our faith in government. He redefined the relationship of the federal government to the people of our nation. He combatted cynicism, fear and despair. He reinvigorated democracy. He transformed the country, and that is what we have to do today. . . And, by the way, almost everything he proposed, almost every program, every idea, was called 'socialist.'
As Jedediah Purdy pointed out back then, by making this move, Sanders was exposing the relatively tame and non-revolutionary character of his "democratic socialism."
One can criticize Sanders's nods to liberalism here, as Purdy seemed to do, or one can embrace them, as I am inclined to do. What one cannot do is ignore that Sanders himself, the heir to Debs, considers himself also to be an heir to FDR. This cuts pretty hard against the dichotomy on which Gude rests his piece. And it calls into question the starkness of the choice that Gude insists we must make.
In the end, though, the real question at hand is less how we might interpret the past than how we might make the future. Gude is clear about this:
So why even try to slot Sanders and Warren into political traditions? Isn't this an esoteric exercise of the academic, the tic of the compulsive taxonomist? The short answer is that political figures and thinkers are more than the sum of their assorted policy positions. They have distinct, historically grounded worldviews that, once revealed, can both give us a better handle on their core beliefs and predict how they might act in shifting circumstances.
But if I am right, Sanders and Warren's views are less distinct, and less historically grounded, than Gude admits. On the one hand, the traditions of "socialism" and "liberalism," as truly historical traditions, are themselves contested and evolved; for this reason, it is futile to trace them back unproblematically to their separate origins. And on the other hand, as evolved traditions, "socialism" and "liberalism" have had more productive interactions, and overlaps, than any view of them as distinct can accommodate. In short, more separates Sanders from Debs, and Warren from Brandeis, than Gude allows. And less separates Sanders from Warren than Gude allows, something cast into even starker relief by their common opponent: Trump.
Gude insists on a choice: liberalism or socialism, Warren or Sanders, "hamstrung" idealism about reform, and a presumably "hard-headed" and decisive realism about the need to "rip power" from the capitalist class "through voting and strikes and class unity."
Interestingly, many liberals insist on the same choice, though their preferences are reversed. And so a few months ago Sean Wilentz insisted in Democracy Journal that "liberalism" and "socialism" have "completely different histories, and the differences matter." And a few weeks ago Cass Sunstein went even further, insisting that "Trump is right to warn Democrats about 'Socialism.'"
This is a false choice, or at least a misplaced one.
For it exaggerates differences, and accentuates antagonisms, at a time when the commonalities are much more important, for the sake of both socio-economic justice and the defense of democracy. Don't get me wrong. The differences are real. And debate about them is valuable. But they are debates between two candidates for a Democratic party nomination at a moment where losing (again) to Trump will be a monumental disaster. There is no reason to figure Sanders as Debs, in a century-long contest with Warren as Brandeis. Debs and Brandeis are long gone, and the parties they supported are long gone too. Let Sanders be Sanders, let Warren be Warren, let them debate and run against each other and then come together behind the primary winner.
I think the American left can only benefit from such an approach.
But there is more. Because there is more than the left at play in the coming primary season and even more in the general election.
This is why it is important to remember that the politics of a century ago included Debs, and Brandeis, but also W.E.B. DuBois, and Charlotte Perkins Gillman, and Alice Paul, and a range of other important figures on what we, now, can think of as a broad democratic left.
Today's Democratic primary field is also very wide. It includes Sanders and Warren, and also Kamala Harris, and Corey Booker, and Kirsten Gillibrand, and many others. The choice for democratic socialists, and readers of Jacobin, might be a choice between Sanders and Warren. For many other liberals and left liberals there are other legitimate choices, who represent -- in all meanings of "representation" -- things worth supporting. All of these individuals are now competing for the Democratic Presidential nomination to run against Trump and the Republicans. None of them are assured victory. The competition should be hard, and the debate honest and sharp.
At the same time, there will come a moment when there will be only one Democratic candidate. It will be important for this candidate to win in 2020. I too hope it will be Warren or Sanders. But come November 3, 2020, whoever it is, that candidate must win. And it seems to me that the heirs of Debs and Brandeis and DuBois and Paul and Dewey and FDR and King must do what they can -- what we can -- to make that happen.
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