The Identity Front Against the 1%

Bernie Sanders and Ilhan Omar at Williams Arena, U of M Campus, 11/3/2019

Bernie Sanders brought his presidential campaign to Minneapolis on Sunday after receiving the endorsement of Ihan Omar, the local Congressional representative.  This so-called ‘odd couple’ clasped hands and raised them high after Omar’s introduction of Sanders.  As Sanders pointed out later, both were immigrants or the child of immigrants from impoverished minority backgrounds, events which shaped their lives.

 

Sanders, Omar at U of Minnesota, Williams Arena

The crowd, estimated by the press at 10,000, was mostly young and light-skinned.  The main first tier was full, as was the basket-ball floor, which had a standing-room only crowd.  Somali-Americans did not come out in force.  Local rapper Brother Ali and the New Power Generation of Prince fame warmed up the crowd musically, especially with a rendition of Bob Marley’s “Stand Up For Your Rights.”  A local organizer of students at the U spoke first, condemning the servitude of debt brought on by over-priced colleges and massive student loans.  Sanders’ national Co-Chair Nina Turner spoke next in a fiery speech, highlighting the need for an all-encompassing ‘movement’ for universal goals.  Keith Ellison, now attorney general for Minnesota after leaving national politics, commented on Sanders and Ellison walking picket-lines together.  He started the chant for “Not me, us!” which was theme of the rally.  He endorsed Sanders in 2016.

Then Ilhan Omar spoke.  At rallies like this, political speeches express many generalities punctuated by crowd cheering, so that without a deeper understanding, speeches ‘can’ sound the same.  So nuance is important.  In that context Omar made some very left-wing statements that surprised me.  She said that “workers all over the world have the same interests.”  She said the real need is to build “a mass movement of the working class.”  She decried ‘Western imperialism’ and got huge crowd support for that comment.  As a Marxist who lived through the radical movements of the 1970s, this all sounded a bit familiar! 

I might quote from “Ballad of a Thin Man” by Bob Dylan:  “Somethin’s happenin’ here and you don’t know what it is, do you Mr. Jones?”

At the same time, her comments about ‘genocide’ were garbled and, given her bland ‘present’ vote on Armenian genocide, contradictory. 

Sanders came on next with his wife, who he introduced as the next ‘First Lady.’  After making continued genuflections to Prince, Paul Wellstone and Omar’s time in a refugee camp in Kenya, he spoke repeatedly of uniting every ‘identity’ in a joint struggle to defeat the 1%.  Then he launched into the rest of his 40 minute speech hitting every single favorite left and liberal theme in existence.  This included the partly transitional ideas of the ‘Green New Deal,’ ‘Medicare for All’ and ‘Free College,’ through ending the incarceration state and the inequitable legal system, supporting labor, down to legalizing marijuana, ending cash bail and supporting abortion rights through his picks to the Supreme Court.  Hey, even gentrification got a mention!  Like everyone else, he heavily emphasized moving from ‘single-issueism’ and multiple ‘movements,’ as the main slogan of the rally was ‘Not me, us!”

Huge military spending was only mentioned once.  Endless wars were not mentioned.  “America” was repeatedly invoked, even to the point where he almost said that he would “make America great again.”  This gave a sheen of social-patriotism to the event, though his unstated international positions are to the left of nearly all the other Democratic Party rabble – ah, contenders - except perhaps Gabbard. So we’ll never know if the crowd would have given him ’cheer lines’ for anti-militarist foreign policy positions.  I think they would have. 

Sanders and the rest of the speakers repeatedly emphasized that only ‘movements’ change things.  And indeed they are right.  The question is, what kind of unitary movement brings significant change, not just the same ‘nibbling around the edges,’ as Sanders himself put it?  There was no mention of a mass 3^rd Party or a labor or populist party.  There wasn't even a mention of democratic-socialist organizations within the Democratic Party like DSA or the Working Families Party” or even Our Revolution.  In other words, how do you actually cohere various single-issue movements into one?  The implication is that this is done by supporting the Sanders campaign.  That is the real message.  He has said he would be ‘the organizer in chief’ not the ‘commander in chief’ if elected, so it would continue after the election. 

The problem with that is that Sanders will endorse whatever Democrat wins at the brokered Convention, as he’s already proved.  ‘That’ will hobble any movement he’s generated, even if ‘Sanders-lite’ Warren gets on the ticket.  In the unlikely event that Sanders wins at the Convention - with the whole capitalist establishment against him! – only support by millions of workers would guarantee that as president he is not totally blocked, impeached or killed. 

So Sanders and his legislative supporters ‘become’ the movement on an actual organizational basis.  The ‘left’ of the Democratic Party becomes the organizing center.  For Sanders, this has taken the form of the Our Revolution (OR) group within the Democrats, which has brought even garden-variety Democrats under its wing in the Minneapolis-St. Paul and Duluth metro areas.  OR does not have a solid political program or a real class angle and is submerged in ‘process’ issues.  Yet the leadership of the Democratic Party is extremely hostile to Sanders anyway, so their place in the party is tenuous.  Right now the leadership is maneuvering against AOC, Tlaib and Omar, as well as many others, trying to find the right centrist politician to run against left dissidents. 

What is not understood by Sanders is that the Democratic Party is run by a wing of the same ‘billionaires and multi-millionaires’ that Sanders thunders against.  This control has only hardened over the past 40 years.  Labor unions have been turned into handmaids by the corporatists that run the party.  While his ‘Trojan Horse’ strategy seems reasonable given the extreme conservatism of U.S. politics, it has failed time and time again in the end.  Ultimately any real movement will have to break from the Democrats if it wants actual change, not just removing Trump from the White House.  Which in itself only guarantees another Trump.

P.S. - as J. St. Clair mentions, Sanders supported the bombing of Kosovo and Serbia along with Clinton; voted for the killer sanctions on Iraq and the initial invasion of Afghanistan, never mentioned Hillary's coup in Honduras and supported the bombing of Libya.  This is his version of a 'social-democratic' foreign policy.

Red Frog

November 5, 2019