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A Democratic-Socialist Reflection on the 2024 Election
Bernie Sanders unforgettably demonstrated how much the right presidential primary candidate can alter the national political debate. We know the power and purpose of such a candidate, but can someone like him eventually win in this country?
Dec 06, 2024
Had Bernie Sanders won the 2016 Democratic nomination and gone on to defeat Donald Trump — as most polls suggested he had a better chance of doing than Hillary Clinton, the actual nominee — he would be now entering his lame duck period, and perhaps Donald Trump might not figure in the current discussion much at all. (Alternately, had the party poobahs not closed ranks behind Biden with lightning speed to deny Sanders the nomination in 2020, he might have just completed his campaign for a second term — which he clearly would have been fit to serve.)
Eight years on
Sanders did not succeed in bringing democratic socialism to the White House, of course, but he did deliver the message to quite a number of other households during the Democratic nomination debates. As a result, two presidential cycles on, democratic socialists have now run and won races all the way up to the U.S. House, and democratic socialism has now become a “thing” in American politics. Not a big thing, really, but most definitely a thing. Between the Republicans, right wing Democrats and the corporate newsmedia, it’s a thing that certainly draws more negative mention than positive — but given that its critique of American society pointedly includes Republicans, right wing Democrats and the corporations that own the news media, we could hardly expect it to be otherwise.
During this time, self described democratic socialists have been elected and they’ve been unelected. They’ve exerted influence beyond their numbers; and they’ve also struggled with the hurly burly of political life. Some have been blown away by big money; some have contributed to their own downfall. In other words, they’ve run the gamut of the electoral political world — if still largely at the margins. Any thoughts of a socialist wave following the first Sanders campaign or the election of the “Squad” soon bent to the more grueling reality of trying to eke out a new congressional seat or two per term — or defend those currently held, with efforts on the other levels of government playing out in similar fashion. But at the least we can say that the U.S. has joined the mainstream of modern world politics to the point where the socialist viewpoint generally figures in the mix — albeit in a modest way.
Lesser of two evils?
The 2024 race stood out from the presidential election norm both for the return of one president, Trump’s return being the first since Grover Cleveland’s in 1892 — also the only other time a president reoccupied the White House after having been previously voted out; and for the withdrawal of another president, Joe Biden’s exit from the campaign being the first since Lyndon Johnson’s in 1968. And, just like Hubert Humphrey in 68, Vice President Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee — without running in any primaries. Both of them inherited, and endorsed the policies of the administration in which they occupied the number two office, which included support of a war effort opposed by a significant number of otherwise generally Democratic-leaning voters.
In Johnson’s case, the withdrawal of his candidacy had everything to do with that opposition, and the shock of Minnesota Senator Gene McCarthy drawing 42 percent of the New Hampshire Democratic primary vote running as an anti-Vietnam War candidate. But when Humphrey won the Democratic nomination and the equally hawkish Richard Nixon took the Republican slot, the substantial number of war opponents felt themselves facing the prospect of choosing the lesser of two evils. The dismal choice presented in that race soured untold numbers of voters on the left who came to consider a choice between two evils to be the norm for presidential elections. Over time, the hostility faded, with most coming to judge the choice offered less harshly, now more one of picking the less inadequate of two inadequate programs — until now. The intensity of opposition to the Biden-Harris support of Israel’s war on Palestine has certainly not approached that shown toward the Johnson-Humphrey conduct of the American war against Vietnam. But for a substantial number of people who considered it criminal to continue supplying 2000 pound bombs to Israel’s relentless ongoing disproportionate obliteration of Gaza in retaliation for an atrocity that occurred on a day more than a year past, this was a “lesser of two evils” choice, to a degree unmatched since the bad old Humphrey-Nixon days.
And yet, while we don’t know how many opted not to vote for president at all, we do know that those who did vote almost all did make that choice. Even with a Democratic nominee preferring the campaign companionship of former third-ranking House Republican Liz Cheney to that of Democratic Representative Rashida Tlaib, a Palestinian democratic socialist, third party votes did not prove to be a factor. There was no blaming Jill Stein this time.
Democratic Socialists of America
Organizationally, the greatest beneficiary of the Sanders campaigns has been the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Ironically, while Bernie has been the nation’s twenty-first century avatar of socialism — generally understood to be a philosophy of collective action — he himself is not a joiner, being a member neither of the Democratic Party, whose presidential nomination he has twice sought; nor DSA, an organization he has long worked with. With about 6,000 members, the pre-Sanders campaign DSA was the largest socialist organization in an undernourished American left. In the minds of some long time members, their maintenance of the socialist tradition bore a certain similarity to the work of the medieval Irish monks who copied ancient manuscripts whose true value would only be appreciated in the future. But when the post-Sanders surge came, there DSA was — popping up in the Google search of every newly minted or newly energized socialist looking to meet people of like mind. Membership mushroomed to 100,000. Organizational inflation on that order that does not come without growing pains — the sort of problems that any organization covets, but problems nonetheless.
DSA’s very name reflects the troubled history of the socialist movement. In the minds of early socialists the term “democratic socialist” would have been one for Monty Python’s Department of Redundancy Department. The whole point of socialism, after all, was to create a society that was more democratic than the status quo, extending democratic rights past the political realm into that of economics, and the difference between socialism and communism was pretty much a matter that only scholars concerned themselves with. But with the devolution of the Russian Revolution into Stalinism, “communism,” the word generally associated with the Soviet Union, came to mean the opposite of democratic to much of the world. And in the U.S. in particular, “socialism” too seemed tainted, to the point where socialists felt the need to tag “democratic” onto it.
DSA was an organization, then, where people most definitely did not call themselves communists. It was not the place to go to find people talking about the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” “vanguard parties,” or other phrases reminiscent of the 1920s or 30s left. Among its members, the Russian and Chinese revolutions, while certainly considered interesting and significant — fascinating even, were not events to look to for guidance in contemporary American politics.
And then the expansion. A lot of previously unaffiliated socialists, pleasantly surprised — shocked even — to find the idea entering the public realm, decided it was time to join up and do something about it. The curious also came, eager to learn more of what the whole thing was all about, maybe suffering from imposter syndrome: “Do I really know enough to call myself a socialist?” And then there were the already socialists who would never have thought to join DSA in the pre-Sanders inflation era, some with politics that DSA’s name had been chosen to distinguish the organization from. The expanded DSA was a “big tent,” “multi-tendency” organization. Soon there was a Communist Caucus in DSA — along with a bunch of others. Whether the internal dissonance can be contained and managed long-run remains to be seen, but then what is politics but a continuous series of crises? It’s to the organization’s credit that it has held itself together thus far, but for the moment some hoping to grapple with the questions of twenty-first century socialism may encounter local chapter leadership still finding their guidance in reading the leaves in the tea room of the Russian Revolution. Initial stumbles in the organization’s immediate response to the Hamas attack in Israel prompted a spate of long-time member resignations — some with accompanying open letters — but the trickle did not turn into a torrent.
In the meantime, DSA, now slimmed down to 80-some-odd thousand members, has also struggled with the more immediate, public, and arguably more important question of working out a tenable relationship with those members holding elected political office. While the organization encourages members to seek office and benefits from their successes, it understandably does not want to be associated with public figures with markedly divergent politics. At the same time, office-holding members are answerable to their electorate, not DSA. In the light of some recent experiences on this front, Sanders’s non-joiner stance starts to look somewhat prescient. DSA’s long-term relevance will depend on its ability to carve out a meaningful role as a socialist organization that is not and does not aspire to being a political party.
2028 and beyond
Much of the post-election Democratic Party fretting has quite appropriately centered on the degree to which it has lost the presumption of being the party of the working class. One solution to the problem was succinctly, and improbably, formulated by the centrist New York Times columnist David Brooks: “Maybe the Democrats have to embrace a Bernie Sanders-style disruption — something that will make people like me feel uncomfortable.” By Jove, you’ve got it, Mr. Brooks: Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable! But Brooks goes on to fret, “Can the Democratic Party do this? Can the party of the universities, the affluent suburbs and the hipster urban cores do this?”
Can students, teachers, suburbanites and hipsters “embrace a Bernie Sanders-style disruption?” Well sure, quite a few have already done so — twice now. The roadblock clearly does not lie there. The real problem is those uncomfortable with the idea of a Democratic Party no longer aspiring to the impossible status of being both the party of the working class and the party of billionaire financiers. For a look into the void at the core of the Democratic Party we need only think back to that moment in February, 2020 when it began to look like the “Bernie Sanders-style disruption” just might pull it off and the party closed ranks, with candidates Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Michael Bloomberg, and Tom Steyer scurrying out of the race and endorsing Joe Biden in a matter of just six days. None of this underscored the party’s determination not to turn its back on the billionaires so clearly as the fact that at the time of his withdrawal Bloomberg was in the process of spending a billion bucks of his “own money” in pursuit of the nomination. Obama’s fingerprints were never found on these coordinated withdrawals but most observers draw the obvious conclusions. And we know that the prior nominee, executive whisperer Hillary Clinton, was certainly all in on the move. Herein lies our problem, Mr. Brooks.
But how? And who? The how is the easy question in the sense that Bernie Sanders unforgettably demonstrated how much the right presidential primary candidate can alter the national political debate — even when the Democratic Party establishment pulls out all the stops to block them; and even if succeeds in doing so. At the same time, the difficulty in winning and holding congressional seats shows that, while self evidently necessary in the long run, those campaigns do not have the same galvanizing potential. Who? At the moment, the only person whose career thus far suggests such potential is New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. But then a lot can happen in four years. And Donald Trump’s reelection portends four years of American politics bizarre beyond anything we’ve seen before.Keep ReadingShow Less
The World's Biggest Liar Is Back — and How to Defeat Him
Fact-checkers will be needed more urgently and consistently than ever to hold the president and his GOP allies to account each and every day.
Nov 27, 2024
During this year’s presidential election campaign, I was puzzled and increasingly troubled that the issue of truth-telling — and the spectacular lack of it from one candidate — wasn’t getting the sort of focus or emphasis in the news coverage it should have received. We heard or read about Donald Trump’s specific false statements just about every day (because they happened just about every day). But we didn’t often hear about the deeper questions those falsehoods raised and continue to raise: What will it mean to have a president of the United States who has no regard for the truth and often no idea what it is? What will it do to public life if a president’s words can’t be trusted, no matter what he’s talking about? What are the possible consequences if a president consistently ignores or distorts proven facts, and how much will those distortions shape his policy decisions and actions?
For obvious reasons those questions became more significant, not less, with Trump’s victory. His habitual disregard for the truth isn’t just an old story from a past presidency, but today’s and tomorrow’s news for the next four years. So, journalists, opinion-makers, and anyone else whose voice reaches the public need to keep raising the issue in the weeks leading up to Trump’s second inauguration and after he takes office. That means not just calling out individual falsehoods but connecting the dots, reminding us of his overall record and what it should tell us about the next phase of American public life. Neil Brown, president of the Poynter Institute and a co-founder of the fact-checking website PolitiFact, got it right in a fundraising email two days after the election when he reminded supporters that “facts are the foundation of our reality.” Checking facts, he went on, “is time-consuming but essential… There is no off switch on the dial of misinformation.”
For the most part, we have no way of knowing which of Trump’s false statements are conscious lies — when he’s saying something he knows isn’t true — and when he believes his own words because they fit into the made-up world he’s concocted in the insulated bubble of his mind. But that distinction hardly matters when it comes to what kind of president he’ll be. A chronic liar or chronically delusional, either one is a dangerous person to have in the White House for the next four years. That makes it essential to keep a spotlight not just on specific factual issues as they crop up in the news, but on the broader credibility question as well, tracking the misinformation Trump and his crew will almost certainly spew out and, where possible, countering its influence on policy decisions and official actions.
On Immigration, A Stunning Record of Untruths
Perhaps the most immediate and urgent need for that kind of fact-checking will be on immigration policy, where Donald Trump has consistently misrepresented essential facts for many years. The sheer volume of those falsehoods is breathtaking. A recent report from the Marshall Project, a nonprofit investigative news site, documented 12,000 false statements of his on that issue alone — no, that’s not a misprint, twelve thousand untrue statements! — during his years in the public arena. I searched but found no indication that Trump has ever backed down from any of them or acknowledged that anything he said on the subject was untrue. Corroborating that impression, Anna Flagg, one of the coauthors of the Marshall Project paper, wrote in response to an email inquiry that she is “personally not aware of Trump correcting any of these statements.”
Far from correcting such falsehoods, he has often repeated them even after they were thoroughly and conclusively debunked. One of many examples was his claim in a late September blog post that “13,000 convicted murderers entered our Country during [Kamala Harris’s] three and a half year period as Border Czar — Also currently in our Country because of her are 15,811 migrants convicted of rape and sexual assault.” Journalists quickly established that those numbers, listed on a chart prepared by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), were, in fact, a count of people who had entered the country over a more than 40-year time span, including Donald Trump’s four years as president. That airtight refutation didn’t stop him from repeating the same false allegation a month later, when he declared in an interview with the podcaster Joe Rogan that “other countries are allowed to empty their prisons into our country with murderers, we had 13,099 murderers dropped in our country over the last three years.”
Nor were those murderers able to “freely and openly roam our Country,” as Trump claimed in yet another post. The list of convicted murderers, a DHS spokesperson told CNN, included “many who are under the jurisdiction or currently incarcerated by federal, state or local law enforcement partners.” (Confusingly, the DHS chart lists all 13,099 as “undetained,” but that means only that they weren’t in the custody of the U.S. immigration agency, not that they weren’t in state or federal prisons.)
Another example came during Trump’s September 10th debate with Kamala Harris, when, speaking about Haitian immigrants in Ohio, he alleged that “in Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating — they’re eating the pets of the people that live there” — a story police and local officials had already declared to be untrue. Trump also regularly exaggerates the number of Haitians actually in Springfield, as when he told listeners to the Rogan podcast that “32,000 migrants that don’t speak the language” had been “dropped” there. The actual estimate is 10,000-12,000.
Reminding us of the facts when it comes to those and numerous other distortions is crucially important now that Trump will again be in a position not just to bluster about immigration but to execute policies that will affect huge numbers of men, women, and children. Starting now, fact-checkers should do everything they can to make Americans aware of the actual facts — such as the strong likelihood that the mass deportations he’s vowed to launch “on day one” of his presidency will upend the lives of many people who are not illegal immigrants but are in the U.S. legally (a category that includes almost all of the Haitians in Springfield that Trump wants sent “back to their country”).
In that effort, truth-tellers should also monitor statements by advisers who have their own records of incendiary anti-immigrant rhetoric — particularly, Tom Homan, Trump’s prospective “border czar,” and Stephen Miller, one of the principal architects of the sweeping ban on Muslim immigrants that Trump imposed early in his first term, who is slated to return to the White House as deputy chief of staff.
Other Places to Set the Record Straight
Along with spreading the truth about immigration, fact-checkers monitoring Trump and his team should do what they can to correct counterfactual statements on other important issues the new administration will be dealing with. Climate change is one example of a crucial issue where Trump has regularly minimized the risk, espoused policies (“drill, baby, drill”) that will increase the danger, and misrepresented scientific evidence (as in his assertion that “the ocean will rise 1/8 of an inch over the next 200 to 300 years,” a figure thousands of times less than the 10 to 12-inch rise over 30 years predicted by the U.S. government’s Interagency Task Force on Sea Level Change).
Fact-checking will also be highly relevant on a looming subject that has potentially significant implications not for government policy but for public trust in the American legal and judicial system: the end, permanent or temporary, of criminal proceedings against Donald Trump himself. Barring unforeseen surprises, it appears certain that the cases against him will either be dropped or put on indefinite hold, probably before he even takes office. When that happens, he will undoubtedly insist that he’s been completely exonerated, did nothing wrong, and was unjustly prosecuted for political reasons. Presumably, that claim will be challenged, but it’s another case where fact-checkers should be at work reminding the public of what he’s been accused of doing, detail by detail, and recalling what the evidence has shown us about Trump’s past actions and the true origins of those cases. (Some new material on the subject may be added to that record before inauguration day in a report special prosecutor Jack Smith is expected to submit to the Justice Department after he closes out the two federal cases against Trump that he’s overseen for the last two years. At this writing, it’s not 100% certain when or even if Smith’s report will be officially released, but it’s hard to imagine that any significant new information in it will be successfully suppressed.)
More broadly and looking further ahead, fact-checking — not just labeling particular statements false as they occur, but systematically keeping track of and reporting on the cumulative record of Trump’s misstatements — should be a top priority during the new administration. A possible model is the Washington Post’s project during Trump’s first presidency, when its staffers maintained a database of his untruths. The Post’s final tally was 30,573 false or misleading claims during his time in the White House — an average of 21 untruths a day for four years! If the Post and other publications do something similar this time around, I hope they will periodically publish their findings, both as front-page stories and perhaps a front-page box every week or two with the totals and notable examples during the preceding interval.
Don’t Just Challenge Trump
One more suggestion for journalists: while tracking Trump’s false statements in the coming weeks and months, don’t just seek comments from him or his mouthpieces, but follow up on factual questions with other Republican politicians. Whenever possible — at confirmation hearings, say (if Trump doesn’t succeed in bypassing that check-and-balance procedure) — reporters should press congressional Republicans to respond to his falsehoods and declare on the record what they believe is true. For example: “Senator, do you believe that 13,000 murderers from other countries were admitted to this country during the Biden administration and are now walking around free in American cities and towns?” And if the senator or representative dodges the question, as many undoubtedly will, follow it up: “Senator, are you aware that those murderers came over a period of 40 years, not just the last four, and that quite a few of them are in prison, not ‘walking around free’?” You get the idea.
If and when a Republican politician does actually acknowledge a Trump falsehood, the reporter shouldn’t let it go at that, but ask a further set of questions: “Have you told people who voted for you and your party that this story isn’t true and what the actual facts are? Do you and other members of your party have any obligation to act against the spread of such false beliefs so that what your supporters think will be based on verified facts and not the president’s false information?”
It’s almost impossible to believe that any ongoing fact-checking effort will change Trump’s style or make his public discourse any more truthful. Nor will it convince his diehard supporters, who will continue to trust his statements no matter what the evidence shows. But there must be people out there who voted for him but are still open-minded enough to be convinced by the actual facts. Presumably, more of those people will accept more of those facts when they hear them not from Trump’s opponents or the news media but from their side of the political divide, from Republican office holders or others they believe represent their views. So, it will be critical for fact-checkers to keep the pressure on elected officials and others who have some credibility with Trump’s constituents and challenge them to publicly correct the falsehoods that we can confidently expect will continue pouring out from his White House.
The record of that group up to now does not inspire much hope. With only a few honorable exceptions, Republican politicians’ loyalty to Trump has consistently outweighed any loyalty to the truth. But now, when his conscious and unconscious falsehoods are about to be combined with presidential powers and so will pose potentially unfathomable dangers for American public life, reversing the balance between those conflicting loyalties is more urgent than in the last eight years or perhaps ever in our history. Confronting lies and correcting untruths will be essential in meeting that threat — and I hope fact-checkers and truth tellers will rise to the challenge.
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From Taxing the Rich to Defending Unions, the Best Defense Against Trump Will Be Offense
The super rich who backed the Republican president-elect must think they have us exactly where they want us. Now is the best time to turn the tables.
Nov 15, 2024
With Donald Trump about to re-enter the White House and his sidekicks about to assume control over Congress, America’s progressives are once again shifting — to playing defense. But the best defense, as one old football adage suggests, almost always turns out to be a good offense.
In the coming Trump redux, can we progressives take that adage to heart? Dare we go on offense and maybe even snatch a victory or two? We certainly can — if we start pushing for what the vast majority of Americans so want to see: an America where the really rich don’t run the show.
How much our richest run that show has never been more obvious. Campaign spending figures help tell that story.
Back at the beginning of our 21st century, out-of-state contributions to House and Senate races, be they from political action committees or individuals, funneled about the same amount of cash to candidates as in-state donors. These PACs and individuals faced strict limits on how much they could contribute politically. PACs, for their part, could accept no more than $5,000 from individuals each year and give no more than $5,000 directly to a candidate in each election cycle.
Enter the Super PAC. In 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision essentially gave America’s wealthiest and the corporations they run free rein to spend as much as they want to boost the candidates they find most appealing. This green light for what became known as “Super PACs” gave America’s richest the legal capacity to cement in place a new and “improved” plutocracy.
Dare we go on offense and maybe even snatch a victory or two? We certainly can — if we start pushing for what the vast majority of Americans so want to see: an America where the really rich don’t run the show.
In the 2024 election cycle alone, former AFL-CIO political director Michael Podhorzer points out, Super PACs and related groups have spent seven times more on the candidates they support than those candidates have raised “from individuals in their own states.”
And that spending is coming overwhelmingly from the richest of America’s rich. In this year’s presidential race, according to the latest pre-election stats available, some 60 percent of all outlays on Donald Trump’s behalf were coming from the Super PAC universe, and 90 percent of that universe’s spending, Michael Podhorzer adds, was coming from the top donor 1 percent.
Just who from the ranks of our super rich are doing all this spending? We don’t exactly know for sure. Spending by outside contributors this election cycle, researchers from the campaign funding watchdog OpenSecrets reported on Election Day, hit an all-time record $4.5 billion, “with more than half of that spending coming from groups that do not fully disclose the source of their funding.”
America’s wealthiest “have always weighed in on politics,” as the business journal Forbes understatedly noted the day after Election Day, but their capacity to make a difference has significantly “ramped up.” These wealthy “can now make unlimited donations,” and those donations without limits have been making each election “more expensive than the last.”
And billionaires like things that way. Exulted crypto billionaire Tyler Winklevoss just after Trump’s triumph: “We are on the brink of a new American Renaissance.”
But billionaires today have an electoral influence that goes far beyond their hefty campaign contributions. In today’s social media environment, these rich can speak directly to potential voters. Between October 1 and Election Day, a Forbes analysis shows, America’s 200 richest billionaires posted over 2,000 comments on this year’s elections. Those comments gained over 10 billion reads.
And where did we end up, after all this billionaire spending and speaking out? We ended up with an exasperated electorate. Voter turnout in 2024, the political scientist Peter Dreier points out, ended up down more than 16 million votes, with Trump pulling over 2 million fewer ballots than in 2020 and Kamala Harris collecting over 14 million fewer than Joe Biden pocketed in 2020.
That turnout for the Democrats, Dreier argues, reflects the continuing weakness of America’s labor movement, despite the isolated labor organizing triumphs of recent years. Back in the mid-20th century, unions represented over a third of all U.S. private-sector workers. Last year, only 6 percent of private sector workers carried union cards.
If today’s union membership rate stood at a mere 20 percent of all workers, Dreier contends, “Harris would have won” because unions would have been able to reach more working people directly — including those “who might be gun owners or evangelical Christians” — “about why to vote” for pro-worker candidates.
Three generations ago, in mid-20th century America, high unionization rates kept in place World War II’s high federal tax rates on the nation’s highest incomes, rates that would run over 90 percent on top-bracket income throughout the 1950s. That twofer of a strong labor movement and high taxes on our nation’s richest would go on to nurture a political climate open to greater equality in every sphere.
Today’s richest, by contrast, pay taxes at rates that amount to a tiny fraction of what they pocket, and vast swatches of the American economy have essentially no union presence at all. Trump and his deep-pocketed pals can flourish and thrive in this environment. The task for the rest of us: to change it.
Can we win that fight? We can. Just look at the numbers.
Earlier this year, polling found that 71 percent of all likely voters — and even 53 percent of self-described Republicans — think billionaires should be paying more in taxes. Over two-thirds of the American people, Gallup reports, see themselves as union supporters. Even more Americans — 80 percent — favor higher taxes on corporations with CEOs who make over 50 times what their workers make. Top CEOs today averagehundreds of times what their workers earn.
Our super rich are now celebrating what they see as a glorious future. Let’s put them on the defensive.
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