Whither (Not Wither) the Post-Bernie Left

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As today’s Washington Post reports, the nine organizations that came together to support Bernie Sanders’s campaign aren’t yet giving up the ghost. Including such groups as the Center for Popular Democracy, People’s Action, and the Democratic Socialists of America, they’ve vowed to redouble their activism on behalf of his campaign so long as it lasts.

My guess is that it may not last much longer than the middle of next week, after the next round of primary contests. But even if it lasts well into the spring, these groups and others, like the Working Families Party, need to decide how their efforts for justice—which requires, among other things, a radical reworking of our economic system—will continue throughout 2020 and then, let us hope, through a Biden presidency.

Should Biden be elected, it’s not likely that he will come to power with his own mass grassroots organization, as Barack Obama did only to let it decay and disappear. What organization there will be, if the left—and I mean an expanded left, including such groups as Indivisible and a number of unions—sticks together, will be a mobilized left wing of the Democratic Party. Such a coalition can serve to block the return of Wall Street to the kind of power it exercised in the Clinton and Obama administrations, as my colleague Bob Kuttner outlines in an article the Prospect posted today. But it can also be a source of left pressure on Biden policy, as Deepak Bhargava suggests in an article in The Nation. After all, the landmark advances of the New Deal were in many ways a response to worker uprisings, and those of the Great Society a response to the civil rights movement. That, of course, requires this generation’s left to view a Biden presidency as an arena of struggle where victories will be possible, not the unalterable enemy that some on the left may regard it. The labor left backed Franklin Roosevelt when he enacted the reforms they supported, as the civil rights movement backed Lyndon Johnson when he did the same.

This is a path the current left will have to learn to walk.

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