M. Scott Mahaskey/Politico via AP Images
Bernie Sanders with AOC at a campaign rally at the University of New Hampshire yesterday
If Bernie Sanders wins the New Hampshire primary, we are left with a scenario where the Democratic finalists are likely to be Sanders and either Pete Buttigieg or Mike Bloomberg. I include Bloomberg because if Buttigieg were to falter, Bloomberg’s billions could allow him to be the corporate-Democrat alternative to Sanders.
A Bloomberg-Sanders finale would make explicit what has been implicit for nearly half a century—throughout the era of Carter, both Clintons, and Obama: The “centrist” wing of the Democratic party is really the corporate wing.
Bernie Sanders embraces the socialist label as a badge. In fact, he is about as socialist as the sainted Franklin Roosevelt.
Roosevelt tried and failed to get national health insurance. Public universities in FDR’s era were free. The income tax, beginning with World War II, was steeply progressive. We invested in massive public works. Sounds pretty much like Bernie (and like Elizabeth Warren if she somehow rallies and stays viable.)
That picture of America was—and is—mainstream. And Roosevelt did two other big things that made everything else possible. He put government on the side of the labor movement. And he drastically regulated and limited the toxic potential and political power of the big banks.
The reversal of that tight financial regulation, beginning in the 1970s, opened the door to financial excesses that widened extremes of income and wealth. The turning away from a close alliance with organized labor eliminated the most potent force both for decent workers’ earnings and the most valuable bridge over schisms of race.
The big difference between Roosevelt and his Democratic successors beginning with Carter and the Clintons was their willingness to make political alliances with bankers and their lukewarm support of the labor movement. The financial collapse and its intensification of long-standing pocketbook grievances distanced a lot of the working class from the Democrats and paved the way for Trump.
Given how the legacy of Roosevelt has gotten away from us, it would now take radical, transformative change to get back what most Americans once cherished as mainstream. The question is whether voters can look beyond the labels to the substance.
In the view of much of the commentariat, there is a kind of symmetry between Sanders as radical left and Trump as radical right. This is baloney.
For one thing, Trump is an aspiring dictator while Sanders is a principled small-d democrat. For another, the Republican Party has slavishly converted itself into Trump’s personal machine, while the Democratic Party remains a coalition with a wide range of views (as Sanders’s detractors never tire of pointing out).
What’s true, however, is that economic grievance can go left or it can go right, sometimes far-right. When the center gets into bed with the corporate elite, that opens the door to the populist right and the neofascist right.
Explosive events in Germany last week offer a warning, one that is creepily evocative of events here at home. The state of Thuringia, in the former East Germany, had been governed by a progressive coalition of the Left Party, the Green Party, and the Social Democrats. The state’s minister-president, or head of government, Bodo Ramelow, was from the Left Party, but his actual policies were mildly social democratic.
Following state elections in October, in the hope of blocking another progressive government, the local Christian Democrat (CDU) and Free Democrat (FDP) leaders made a pact with the devil. For the first time since the Hitler era, they broke the taboo of never brokering a deal with neo-Nazis. State party leaders of the CDU, the FDP, and the neo-Nazi Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) made a secret deal to cast all their votes for the local FDP chief as minister president. The FDP leader, Thomas Kemmerich, was elected by one vote.
When this occurred, the national public reaction was outrage. Chancellor Angela Merkel, as national head of the CDU, was appalled that her designated successor, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, had failed to block this deal. After mounting public pressure, the new minister president of Thuringia resigned; and then a humiliated Kramp-Karrenbauer resigned, too. There will be new elections to select a successor to Merkel, and there are calls for new elections in Thuringia.
Whoever takes over the CDU nationally, the Merkel era of moderate conservatism is over. Arithmetically, the only real alternative in Thuringia to a coalition with the neo-Nazis was the CDU agreeing to be in a coalition with the Left Party. But CDU leaders explicitly ruled out that course, deciding that they would rather govern with neo-Nazis than with moderate socialists.
Sound familiar? The same thing happened in Germany in the early 1930s, when conservatives backed Hitler. In France in 1936, when the socialist Leon Blum, a Jew, led a popular front coalition, the slogan of the French right was “Better Hitler than Blum.”
In the aftermath of the Thuringia debacle, many German conservatives were quoted as saying that they were in a bind because the choice was backing the far right and the far left, as if the neo-fascist AfD and the mildly socialist Left-led coalition government were in any way symmetrical evils. As an authoritative article in Der Spiegel put it: “At its core, the message of the CDU’s state chapter in Thuringia is very simple: We’ll work with anyone, just not the left. They would rather wheel and deal with the far-right than have to share power with the left. This attitude has existed in Germany before: in the final days of the Weimar Republic.”
As in the case of Sanders versus Trump, the one side is made up of committed democrats, the other of thuggish, aspiring dictators. The other ominous parallel is the role of the business conservatives and supposedly mainstream Republican legislators. By slavishly backing Trump, they would sacrifice American democracy rather than suffer moderately progressive policies.
The idea of symmetry between the despotic right and the democratic left is a dangerous illusion. In November, we will have what could be our last chance to save our democracy.
