When the news came in on Wednesday night that Bernie Sanders had dropped from the Democratic primary, I was part of an active email thread with 56 people I hadn’t met. The subject line read ‘Bernie GOTV—We can still Win Y’all!!’. The Sanders campaign didn’t know about it—this was the self-directed initiative of a loose network of activists and organisers, intent on finding new ways to reach voters amid an international pandemic. In the thread, these volunteers coordinated phone banks, literature drops, social media pushes, and canvass signs hanging over motorways. The most recent email, sent Tuesday, advertised a volunteer phone bank for Thursday. It never happened.
In late February, as expected, Joe Biden swept South Carolina. Then, to everyone’s surprise, candidate after candidate dropped out of the race, fell into line, and endorsed him. It was almost as if they had each received a phone call from some powerful background figure. By Super Tuesday, days later, the moderate candidates had consolidated behind Biden, but Elizabeth Warren, whose policies most resembled Sanders’, remained in the race. She did not win a state, but her presence may have cost Sanders more than one, including Maine, Texas, and her own, Massachusetts. When she dropped out three days later, she refused to endorse any candidate—even the candidate with whom she shared nearly identical policies. Since that moment the outlook for Bernie Sanders became progressively bleak. The need for social isolation stripped the campaign of its primary tools: door knocking and rallies. Eventually, the Democratic primary was eclipsed by pandemic, and the most successful progressive electoral movement in American history came to an end.
If by now you are unfamiliar with Teddy Roosevelt’s speech at the Sorbonne, ‘Citizenship in a Republic’, it must only be because you’ve made yourself invisible to the far-reaching hands of American culture. That speech, I want you to believe, has made its way into the collective brain of America, and, like a parasitic worm, dictates the behaviour of its host. You remember the key moment:
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
It’s a rite of passage for Americans to quote this passage in public. They simply cannot resist. It’s how the parasite transmits itself. Kennedy quoted it. Nixon quoted it in both his victory speech and his resignation speech(!). Lebron James put the words on his shoes. And Obama quoted it in his endorsement of Hillary Clinton, in 2016, right before she lost.
Americans cannot help but reproduce The Man In The Arena because they find within it the internal energy of American self-understanding. Here is the self-narrative of America laid bare: an ethos of striving. Here victory is divorced from outcome. Here, human value finds itself yoked to human effort. The American is liberated from those Old World structures, hierarchy and fealty, and is instead returned her dignity at the price of her industriousness.
Underlying The Man In The Arena is an egoism that applauds the individual for having thought herself worthy of the arena at all. There can be no space for concepts like shame or arrogance when the undergirding narrative of your culture claims that only those at the centre of the stadium are deserving. For Australians trying not to grow too fast in the poppy field, the American ethos can be close to offensive. But it’s worth remembering: this is the loser’s speech. It is designed to make people feel better.
So, when an ageing outsider socialist, at the cusp of overturning the American political order, is crushed by the coordinated effort of the establishment, it is tempting for Australian and American progressives alike to take comfort in Teddy Roosevelt. Volunteers who knocked on doors during blizzards, or who made interstate phone calls, or who donated what little they had, deserve some consolation. They deserve to feel that they failed while daring greatly, that their place will never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
The trouble is that, all the while, Biden’s healthcare plan will kill 125,000 people over 10 years, relative to universal healthcare. And according to a study published in The Lancet, not deploying Medicare For All would take ‘more than 68,000 lives’, relative to maintaining the status quo. These estimates, I might add, do not consider the possibility of a pandemic event.
In a considered reflection for Commonweal Magazine in the days after Super Tuesday, Sam Adler-Bell put the Sanders loss in the context of a long history:
The left, of which I am doomed to remain a perpetual partisan, has an intimate relationship with defeat. Defeat is our mother: our sustainer and our burden. ‘The history of socialism,’ writes historian Enzo Traverso, ‘is a constellation of defeats nourished for almost two centuries.’ The affective life of the left is defined by nostalgia, belatedness, memory, and mourning. We cherish a serial history of might-have-beens: if the Communards had stormed Versailles, if the work of Radical Reconstruction had been completed, if the Soviet Union had exorcised its totalitarian demons, if the Spanish Republic had survived the civil war, if the Prague Spring had been allowed to flourish, if Allende had survived the coup, if Mitterand had resisted the call of rigueur, if workers had seized power during this or that general strike, if Bernie had won the primary in 2016, if if if…
The danger, Adler-Bell reminds leftists, is settling for the virtuous defeat: in ‘accepting that we, like those before us, will be vanquished and remembered fondly for our attempt’. In the virtuous defeat, blame always falls externally: it is the world that failed us, not we that failed the world. Eventually, the world disappoints so frequently that losing becomes identified with righteousness. It becomes a habit, then an identity. For these figures, losing is almost core to who they are. They are unwilling to change their tactics, unwilling to learn from their mistakes.
The good news, I claim, is that the tent has grown much larger than those Adler-Bell has in mind, and even the exhausted, beaten, beautiful losers have become tired of defeat. This is dim hope on the eve of environmental collapse. And yet the fact remains. For many, consolations like The Man In The Arena will no longer do: the sea is rising.
In Hegemony: How To, a guide for movement building, Jonathan Smucker puts it this way:
I take no solace in the prospect of history listing me among the righteous few who denounced the captain of a ship that sank. We must set our aspirations higher. If we want to save the ship, we must conspire to take the helm.
The difference between the Sanders campaigns and the failed mutinies of the past is that the recent mutineers were set on giving the crew a new way of understanding their voyage. In fact, they had begun to succeed. For the first time in decades, the mainstream ideology of American society has company, even competition. It is now possible to say things like ‘all Americans have a right to healthcare’ on national television and be invited back the next week. It is now possible to bear the title ‘socialist’ on a Fox News televised Town Hall and receive loud applause. It is now possible to be firmly anti-war and be a leading contender in the Democratic primary. This is the legacy of the Sanders movement: a readjustment of the political landscape; an erosion of the legitimacy of neo-liberalism; a renewal of the politically possible. No candidate in 50 years has been so successful at reshaping the realm of political discourse. The helm has not been taken, but the crew are muttering amongst themselves.
This matters. For those interested in preventing 68,000 American deaths per year, or in averting another Australian bushfire season, or in ending ceaseless war, what is needed is power. And for a democratic, progressive movement to win power, the hegemonic ideology of that society must change. Here Mao was wrong and Polanyi was right. Political power may occasionally grow out of the barrel of a gun, but its ultimate source is opinion.
The goal of politics is the changing of The Common Sense. The common sense is the dominant ideology. It is the hegemony. It’s the set of acceptable opinions; the limits of a society’s ideas; the views that you can share at a dinner party and expect everyone to nod along to. It is the array of shibboleths and keywords and thought-terminating platitudes that make up the bedrock of communal thought. It may be too late for our environment, but, thanks to Bernie Sanders, the common sense in the United States has finally begun to change. There is a long way to go. The helm has not been taken. But rather than beautiful losers, I remember the indomitable optimism of 56 strangers organising during a pandemic: ‘We can still Win, Ya’ll’.
