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Bernie and the New Left

A generational fault line has opened between Sanders and Clinton Democrats—but it can, and should, be bridged.

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What's with these kids?

In the wake of the Iowa caucuses, Hillary Clinton supporters are surely wondering how a previously obscure 74-year-old senator seems to have captured the imagination and support of millions of young people. Generations often have distinct political profiles, but seldom, if ever, has a presidential race polarized generations more than that between Clinton and Bernie Sanders. Since exit polls first popped up at the end of the 1960s, we've never seen one quite comparable to the one that emerged from Monday's Iowa Caucuses: Sanders's strength was at its greatest within the youngest age group (84 percent among caucusers under 30) and then declined in each successively older age band. Clinton's, of course, was the reverse: peaking among caucus attendees over 65 at 69 percent and then declining in each successively younger group. Sanders had a clear majority of voters under 45; Clinton, of those over.

A generation gap as wide as the Grand Canyon seems to be opening up in the Democratic Party and American liberalism more generally. To some in the opposing camps, the divisions appear rooted in incompatible ideologies and counterposed strategic conceptions of how to promote the progressive cause. Look more closely, however-as both sides must-and the divide appears less fundamental, less socialism-versus-liberalism, less idealism-versus-pragmatism. The Democratic Party as a whole is moving left, but at two different speeds. What makes these differences seem so intense is less a sharp clash of beliefs, and more that the divisions have emerged in the course of an almost unimaginably high-stakes presidential contest.

The Left Before Bernie

There have been presidential campaigns before whose supporters at least appeared to be disproportionately young. Eugene McCarthy's 1968 challenge to Lyndon Johnson over the Vietnam War was dubbed "the Children's Crusade." (I was one of those kids, joining up at age 18. As we were a hairy cohort in a day when long hair and beards signaled a disdain for authority to many of our elders, we were urged to go "Clean for Gene"-get a haircut and a shave-before we went precinct walking.) But no campaign has commanded quite so high a share of young people's support (more precisely, young Democrats' support) as that of the Vermont democratic socialist.

As mysterious as this may seem to countless political observers, "Berniemania" should come as no surprise. For the past half decade, there's been increasing evidence of a leftward turn among Democrats and the young. There was the Occupy Wall Street movement, whose activists were overwhelmingly young and whose message polled positively-even if people's reactions to the protesters themselves were mixed. There have been Black Lives Matter and the Dreamers-again, movements chiefly of the young. There's been the Fight for $15, a minimum-wage movement primarily of young minority workers in dead-end jobs. There was the surprising rise of Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century to bestseller status.

More broadly, there's been the emergence of a distinct civic left, as the nation's big cities have come under Democratic control. Today, 27 of the nation's 30 largest cities have Democratic mayors, the greatest partisan imbalance, possibly, since before the advent of Jacksonian democracy. Not all Democratic city governments are notably progressive, as the example of Chicago's Rahm Emanuel makes clear. But those cities that are have enacted minimum-wage hikes; mandated paid sick days; "banned the box" requiring job applicants to disclose arrests; cracked down on wage theft; and, in Seattle, given collective-bargaining rights to independent contractors. Even Emanuel saw fit to raise Chicago's minimum wage to $13 per hour.

Wherever this new left governs cities, a new generation of progressive coalitions has put them in power. In city after city, with variations based on the cities' demographics, these coalitions tend to consist of immigrant rights and advocacy groups, civil-rights organizations, environmental activists, and-usually the main funders and key players-unions. (These are not, however, municipal employee unions so much as private-sector unions that represent the new, largely minority working class: janitors, hotel employees, hospital workers.) And precisely because Democrats control so many cities and so few states (there are only seven with Democratic governors and Democratic majorities in both legislative houses), the policies that Democrats have been able to enact in the last half-decade have come from city halls, not state capitals, much less from Washington. For that reason, the policies with which the party is identified have been more liberal than if they had been enacted on the state or federal level, since urban Democratic governments are answerable to younger, more polyglot, more-organized constituencies than their state or federal counterparts are. Cities put the $15 minimum wage on the national Democratic agenda. They're today's laboratories of democracy, and in the absence of more centrist Democratic state governments, they've pushed the party to the left.

Finally, the leftward movement of both Democrats and the young, particularly on the central issues of class and power, has been screamingly clear in a succession of polls over the past several years. A Pew Research Center poll in 2011 showed that 49 percent of Americans under 30 had a positive view of socialism-more than how many had a positive view of capitalism. This was at a time when the percentage of young people who could pick Bernie Sanders out of a lineup was surely in the single digits. A New York Times poll last November showed that 56 percent of Democrats held a favorable view of socialism-69 percent of Sanders's supporters and 52 percent of Clinton's. A Des Moines Register poll shortly before the Iowa Caucuses showed that 41 percent of likely caucus-goers actually called themselves socialists.

Such numbers-though they've turned up repeatedly-tend to inspire disbelief, or at a minimum, confusion in the pundit class.

Most of the normal preconditions for conversions to socialism, or even warming to it, don't seem to exist in the United States today. There's certainly no democratic socialist organization out there recruiting large numbers of people. (The Democratic Socialists of America, of which I'm a vice-chair, is a small, barely funded group with minimal presence in most cities, and virtually none outside them.) The labor movement, which is no more (and often less) than tacitly and implicitly socialist, has been shrinking for decades, and has all but vanished from entire regions of the country.

Indeed, there's only one factor that explains this unprecedentedly favorable view of socialism among Democrats and the young: Contemporary capitalism. The financial sector's responsibility for the economic collapse of 2008 and the Great Recession; the towering levels of economic inequality; the economy's inability to engender middle-class jobs; the rising control that wealth exerts over politics and government-all of these add up, for a growing number of Americans, to a piercing indictment of our current economic system.

No one has borne the brunt of the new economy's dysfunctions more painfully than the young. College and college loans have become unaffordable, and most of the jobs available to graduates fail to offer the opportunity and security that they once did. Young people who don't attend college and try to go straight into the workplace after high school find only low-paying, service-sector employment; the kind of blue-collar industrial jobs their fathers may once have held have long since vanished.

Many on the left expected the nation to swing their way after the 2008 collapse, as the nation did after the 1929 crash. Instead, they were surprised by the rise of the Tea Party. Major economic dislocation, however, often inspires growth on both the left and the right, as the history of the 1930s makes clear. That it took the left longer to emerge here than it took the right can be explained by the fact that most Democrats and liberals initially thought the Obama presidency would provide sufficient remedy for the economy's ills. Only when it became clear that those ills were far more serious, and required far more radical surgery than conventional politics offered, did a reinvigorated left begin to emerge.

Given America's unique absence of a politicized labor movement or a socialist tradition, that time lag shouldn't be surprising. The New Deal didn't really start taking decisive action to benefit most Americans at the expense of capital-legalizing collective bargaining, creating Social Security, raising taxes on the wealthy-until 1935, six years after the Great Crash. It didn't enact the federal minimum wage until 1938. And just as the Sanders surge was heralded by Occupy, the Fight for $15, and a wave of municipal leftism, so the New Deal's left turn of 1935 was prodded by general strikes, mobilizations of the unemployed, the populism of Huey Long, and general unrest.

This is America. Left turns here-when they happen at all-take time.

Port Huron Revisited

With generational politics comes the possibility of generational rifts or generational succession. Such developments are never purely generational, of course. The business Democrats of the 1920s were supplanted by the New Deal Democrats of the '30s, but that was principally a consequence of changes in the class and ethnic composition of the party, and the mobilization of previously dormant constituencies. The young antiwar activists of the 1960s, whose political baptisms came in the presidential campaigns of Democrats Eugene McCarthy, Robert F. Kennedy, and George McGovern, carried on a fight with an older, more hawkish generation of Democrats that raged for most of the 1970s. In time, most of those hawks, many of them later prominent neoconservatives, moved into Republican ranks.

The current rift comes in a party that has become predominantly liberal in recent years. Polls show that the percentage of Democrats calling themselves "liberal" (not to mention "socialist") has grown considerably in the past 20 years. In the wake of the 2008 crash and as economic inequality has become central to the Democrats' concerns, the pro-corporate "Third Way" forces that once played such a prominent role in party circles have largely been marginalized. Center-left think tanks such as the Center for American Progress have authored papers advocating policies that would shift the balance of class forces-at least somewhat-towards workers. And such center-left economists as Larry Summers have become champions of unions and militant Keynesianism. Democratic elected officials from the white South, who generally represented the party's more conservative wing, are now almost entirely extinct. And the white South has become almost uniformly Republican.

But there can be schisms within liberal and left families, too. The classic American left schism-that between the New Left of the 1960s and the Old Left formed in the 1930s-first erupted in 1962 in Port Huron, Michigan. There, the young activists who were the original cadre of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) drafted a founding document that displeased their older sponsors for its failure to sufficiently emphasize such concerns as anti-communism and the value of unions. (It's worth noting that the early SDS-ers were, in fact, pro-union and no fans of communism.) In subsequent years, that rift within the left widened over the Vietnam War and, eventually, over much else.

Today, a new generational conflict has arisen within a largely liberal institution-the Democratic Party. Some of that rift is rooted in ideological principles and strategic perspectives. But mostly it grows out of a different, less far-reaching dispute over who's the better candidate to forestall a Republican victory this year.

I de-emphasize the ideological differences largely because for quite some time, the line between liberalism (more specifically, what American liberals would want to create if it were politically possible) and actual existing socialism (more specifically, the social democracies of Western Europe) has been growing steadily fuzzier.

Socialism no longer means the nationalization of the means of production.

It means a vibrant public sector, supported by high and generally progressive taxes, that exists within a market economy to do what the market doesn't do very well if it does it at all. That is, educate people; provide for their health care; provide resources to retirees, children, and the unemployed; help the poor. It means ensuring that workers have the power to bargain with and, in some places, help shape the priorities of, their employers. It affirms that citizens have economic as well as political rights.

At times, each of these beliefs has been voiced by leading American liberals-none more so than Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose 1944 State of the Union Address made the case for an Economic Bill of Rights. When Bernie Sanders spoke at Georgetown University late last year to provide his definition of socialism, he said he was a democratic socialist in the tradition of Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson (creator of Medicare, as Sanders pointed out), and of Martin Luther King Jr. Of the three, only King actually considered himself a socialist, and he didn't broadcast the fact lest it imperil his work for civil rights and economic opportunity. Roosevelt, asked to define his philosophy, called himself "a Christian and a Democrat."

But Sanders wasn't wrong in situating himself in an American liberal continuum. There's little he advocates that mainstream American liberals and left-populists haven't at one time or another supported, just as there's little he condemns that liberals haven't condemned as well. Indeed, Sanders's attacks on Wall Street are decidedly less vehement than those delivered by Roosevelt, who in his acceptance speech for the party's presidential nomination in 1936 termed the financial and corporate elites the "privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsty for power," who were seeking "control over Government itself." Roosevelt saw these financiers as a threat to democracy: The "political power we once had won," he said, was becoming "meaningless in the face of economic inequality." The preservation of "American institutions," he continued, "requires the overthrow of this kind of power." And at his final campaign rally that year, to a screaming crowd at Madison Square Garden, he said these "forces of selfishness and of lust for power" are "united in their hatred of me. I welcome their hatred."

Next to this, what Sanders says is small beer.

SANDERS IS ON SOUND FOOTING, then, when he claims a lineage of liberals and Democrats, even though he actually refrained from formally joining the Democratic Party until recently. Conversely, there are many institutions and individuals in Hillary Clinton's camp who would devoutly wish that Bernie's program could be enacted. The 52 percent of Clinton supporters who told the Times poll that they have favorable impressions of socialism-a group that surely includes the leaders of many of the unions that have endorsed her-probably don't take issue with Sanders's concept of what America should become. They're chiefly skeptical that he's chosen the right way to get there.

Of the various points of differentiation between the party's liberal mainstream and its left, between Clinton and Sanders, most don't rise to the level of doctrinal or philosophical differences. President Barack Obama, for instance, has called for making two-year community colleges tuition-free. Sanders has called for making four-year public colleges and universities tuition-free. If there's a principled difference between those two proposals, it eludes me. Clinton has proposed programs to make public colleges more affordable, but opposes making them tuition-free, saying that there's no reason why taxpayers should subsidize Donald Trump's children if they want to go to a public college. Of course, by the same logic-since there's also no reason why taxpayers should subsidize the junior Trumps if they want to go to a public high school-high school shouldn't be tuition-free, either. The difference here isn't philosophical, but rather, is rooted in Clinton's sense of what's politically possible and what's politically perilous, which makes her reluctant to create otherwise desirable programs that would require raising taxes on any household with an income under $250,000.

Most of Sanders's platform planks, moreover, are popular across the party's ranks.

At the New Hampshire Democratic Party's annual dinner last weekend, where both Sanders and Clinton partisans packed a downtown Manchester arena, the Clinton supporters cheered wildly as Sanders called for a $15 minimum wage and tuition-free college, and noted his vote against the war in Iraq-all positions, he had the good manners not to point out, that Hillary Clinton had declined to embrace. If Sanders's proposals engender some ideological pushback within Democratic circles, it's when they're considered in aggregate, when the taxes and spending to support his proposals are added up and the size of government measured. Here, too, however, I suspect much of the unease this may instill is rooted more in an appreciation of the political vulnerability of advocating so large a welfare state than it is in opposition to that state as such.

But if Sanders hasn't changed the party's words all that much, he most surely has changed its music. No Democrat-certainly, no Democratic presidential candidate-has attacked Wall Street and corporate leaders with as much vehemence, or put that attack so clearly at the center of his message, since Roosevelt in 1936. Clinton has advanced smart proposals to curtail dangerous banking practices, but she doesn't say that these proposals, or a broader attack on the wealthy in order to redistribute income and power, is her central message. It is most surely Sanders's central message, and it resonates deeply both with his supporters and beyond, for the same reason that Roosevelt's attacks resonated. That is, it is premised on an accurate assessment of who's to blame for shrinking the middle class and economic opportunity; it's an assessment that most Americans share, save those who blame immigrants and minorities for our economic travails (and even some of those, too); and, in their eyes, it makes Sanders's pledges to attack plutocracy and rebuild that middle class uniquely credible-as once it did Roosevelt's. This indictment of the mega-rich-an echo of FDR's claim that he "welcomes their hatred"-is thus the chief difference between Sanders and Clinton, the attribute that boosts him most politically, and that makes her contributions and speaking fees from major banks her chief political weakness. A pol who says he welcomes the hatred of the nation's most powerful individuals is someone millions of Americans perceive as being "for real," in a way that Clinton-or hardly anyone else who plies the politician's trade-can't easily be.

Hedgehog and Fox

The difference between Sanders and Clinton, as I've noted before, is the difference between what British political philosopher Isaiah Berlin, borrowing a phrase from the Greek poet Archilochus, called the hedgehog and the fox. The fox, Berlin wrote, is the political leader who knows many things; the hedgehog, the leader who knows one big thing. Clinton-who, when asked in Thursday night's debate, to name her first legislative priority as president, rolled off a litany of goals instead-is clearly the fox. Sanders-who answered the same question by saying his would be campaign-finance reform, because it's the sine qua non of restoring a functioning democracy-is the hedgehog. It may be that the evisceration of the American middle class over the past decade, in particular, has disposed much of the Democratic electorate to back Sanders as the hedgehog of redistribution and anti-plutocracy. Clinton, by contrast, is clearly counting on voters to recognize that the job of president requires a fox.

The fox's to-do list is different from the hedgehog's. Clinton has made clear that she's the pragmatic progressive: As president, she'd work to get the best deal she could on a range of reforms. With Republicans almost surely in control of the House, that usually would mean no deal at all, as Obama has long since found out. Sanders, it's clear, would try to mobilize his supporters to push major legislation-higher taxes, Medicare for all, free college tuition-that also have no real chance of enactment. So long as Republicans control at least one house of Congress, neither the pragmatism of the fox nor the idealism of the hedgehog will enable a Democratic president to prevail.

Sanders's timetable and his theory of change are probably more nuanced and drawn out, however, than they look when he presents them. In speaking of how he steered a major reform of veterans' health care to passage while chairing the Senate's Veterans' Affairs Committee, he tells how he scaled back his initial bill to win Republican support. The point of the story is to demonstrate that he is not the all-or-nothing guy that the Clinton campaign says he is. His record belies Daniel Bell's characterization of American socialists as being averse to the compromises of politics, to being "in but not of the world."

By the same token, Sanders surely realizes that the way to enact the kind of major reforms he champions is to mobilize millions of people-not to compel Mitch McConnell to back them, but to defeat a sufficient number of Mitch McConnells in subsequent elections. Sanders knows his history; knows that Roosevelt and Johnson were only able to enact their groundbreaking legislation because of Democratic super-majorities in both houses. He knows that Leon Blum was able to create the French welfare state in 1936, and Clement Atlee the British after World War II, because they headed socialist governments with clear parliamentary majorities.

When Sanders tells his supporters that reforms won't come absent a revolution, he can't only have in mind a massive mobilization on the Mall to pressure a Republican Congress on the day after his first State of the Union address. He knows that what is required is a prolonged effort by his supporters not just to mobilize for a day or a year, but to work for several years to elect the Congress that will pass fundamental reforms.

On the campaign trail, Sanders conveys an Obama-like sense of "the fierce urgency of now"

-now, with such widespread and intense discontent at the reign of money over politics, is the time to change the political order. What he and his supporters can change "now," in the first few years of his presidency, they will. But altering the direction of American politics and economics will necessarily take longer.

IF ANYONE UNDERSTANDS the kind of timetable that operates in the American political system, which was built as much to resist majority pressure for change as to enact the majority's priorities, it should be an American socialist. Michael Harrington, the brilliant, charismatic founder of the Democratic Socialists of America, understood that the task of dethroning the markets to build a more humane social order was the work of a lifetime-of several lifetimes, in fact, and that it would never end. Harrington entitled his autobiography The Long Distance Runner. Sanders-who, we've now learned, was a champion long-distance runner in high school-knows this in his bones. When he speaks of the need to build a revolution, he means two things. One, a force to convert the current anger and frustration of millions of Americans into a political tsunami this year. And two, a force that will be dedicated enough to work through the several election cycles it would take to build the kind of legislative majority that Roosevelt and Johnson secured to push through transformative legislation.

Among the liberals resistant to Sanders's appeal, as among those Hillary supporters who look favorably on socialism, I don't think this is a theory of change with which they'd take issue. Many of them back Hillary, rather, because they prefer a fox to a hedgehog. Their problem is not so much Sanders's policies as the narrowness of his concerns, and his unfamiliarity with-or at least lack of expertise in-the broad range of issues a president must confront, particularly when it comes to foreign and military policy. By that standard, Hillary may be better prepared to be president than any candidate in Lord knows how long: She knows the issues; she has her task forces. In Thursday's debate, Sanders readily conceded Clinton's greater familiarity with world affairs, but argued, as he always does, that his opposition to and her support for the war in Iraq demonstrate his superior judgment. He could, I suppose, have added that Abraham Lincoln had absolutely no knowledge of military affairs when he became president, while Jefferson Davis had served in the 1850s as Secretary of War, yet Lincoln proved by far the superior war president. Nonetheless, Sanders's failure even to bone up on world affairs could handicap his electoral prospects, not to mention his presidency. This failure is troubling: Perhaps Sanders learned the lessons of The Best and the Brightest-David Halberstam's account of how the experts led Lyndon Johnson to escalate the war in Vietnam-all too well.

It's possible however, that this year's Democratic electorate, particularly its young voters, will be more inclined than those in years past toward the anti-plutocratic hedge-hoggishness that Sanders personifies.

The real generational rift, then, is less ideological or broadly strategic than it is immediately tactical, reflecting different assessments of which candidate can win. Older voters, who lived through the Cold War, have seen Republicans demonize non-socialist Democrats as actual socialists to great electoral effect. Imagine what they'd do to a real socialist.

There's really only one precedent for the Sanders campaign

, one campaign when a socialist ran as the Democratic nominee for high office, and it's a sobering tale. In 1934, the famous socialist author and muckraker Upton Sinclair ran as a Democrat for governor of California on what was basically a socialist platform of building public works to put people back to work. He inspired thousands of progressive volunteers, and to general astonishment, won the Democratic primary and went into the fall campaign with a clear lead over the unpopular Republican incumbent, Frank Merriam.

Conservative Democrats refused to support Sinclair, and Roosevelt did a masterful job of equivocating, happily meeting with Sinclair but never actually endorsing him. Nonetheless, Sinclair's lead held up until the Republicans mounted a breathtaking counterattack with a month to go before the election. The newspapers refused to cover Sinclair's events and statements and joined in a campaign to demonize him. MGM Studios assigned a director, a production crew and a cast of extras to shoot films depicting dangerous-looking characters (the extras) telling an interviewer (a studio contract player) that they were coming to California as soon as Sinclair took office-and then had these films, labeled as newsreels, screened in every movie theater in the state. Sinclair, who'd never been subjected to this kind of attack and lacked the resources to respond, went down to defeat, even as Democrats were sweeping to victory in other states.

Sanders increasingly appears as politically adept as Sinclair was inept, but the thought that the American people would elect a socialist as their president still seems a stretch. Anyone with a radical past has things that can be dredged up. The past two Democratic presidents, neither of whom was remotely radical, were accused of radical ties-Bill Clinton of doing something nefarious (his accusers couldn't say what, exactly) while he was a young man visiting the Soviet Union; Barack Obama of befriending (actually, attending several events with) long-ago members of the Weather Underground. What could Republicans dig up on Sanders, who really did hang with radicals, who was one himself? Hillary Clinton can't make such attacks for fear of alienating Sanders supporters; Republicans will make them constantly.

For millennials, of course, socialism doesn't connote the Soviet Union, Mao's China, or Pol Pot's Cambodia. It connotes our European allies, whose socialist and social democratic parties have won their citizens free health care and college, paid vacation guarantees, and state-provided child care. That helps explain millennials' attraction to socialism, as well as their inability to see how Republicans will exploit Sanders's socialism to repel older voters.

BY ANY CONVENTIONAL METRIC, Clinton has got to be the stronger candidate in the general election. What may undermine the conventional metric this year is the excitement gap: Given any nominee with the prospect of winning, Obama-hating Republicans will have excitement aplenty, while excitement is the one thing Clinton seems unable to generate. That Republicans outnumbered Democrats in the Iowa caucuses is one indication of just how hopped-up the Republicans are. Sanders generates immense excitement among his followers, who are growing in number but who lag behind the legions that Obama brought to the polls. I still believe the fundamentals of American history suggest that the nation is not ready to elect a socialist president (much less one who would be 75 when he took office)-but it's early yet, the Republicans have problems of their own, and it's a most unusual year.

Supporters of both Sanders and Clinton need to understand each others' motivations and what each brings to the party. The Clinton liberals are rightly terrified that a Republican victory, given the GOP's conversion to a far-right cult, would exacerbate and lock in all that's wrong with the nation: racial and gender hatred and discrimination, the dismantling of the welfare state, voter suppression, the destruction of unions, and the stranglehold the super-rich have on the government. They see in Clinton the one candidate who can win-and make the Supreme Court appointments that would undo the damage that 35 years of largely anti-democratic rulings have wrought. For their part, the Sanders revolutionaries have prodded a party already moving left to make a frontal assault on the plutocracy threatening to engulf us-an assault that many Clinton backers support and that better positions the Democrats to meet the needs of the young and minority voters, and perhaps even of frustrated swing voters as well.

A rift between generations of Democrats is forming, but the ideological and strategic gaps that divide them aren't as great as they now may seem. Unlike some earlier divisions, this is a rift that should and can be bridged.

This article was published on February 8, 2016.

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