Place: North America

Interview by Jim Brash of North Star Editorial Board, February 26, 2016

Questions posed to Rachel Jackson, State Facilitator, Green Party Oklahoma Cooperative Council about their endorsement of Bernie Sanders

1.     Is the endorsement of Bernie a tactical move?

Our endorsement of Bernie Sanders in the Oklahoma Democratic Primary accomplishes two goals: 1.) to find a way to participate electorally given our state’s repressive ballot access laws, and 2.) to build a base to strengthen our efforts to reform those ballot access laws.

I must admit that I’m somewhat reluctant to write a response to my friend Barry Finger’s response to my article in the Winter 2016 issue of New Politics on Bernie Sanders while the Democratic presidential candidate race between Hillary Clinton and Sanders is still going on. Nevertheless, I will do so.

First, it should now be clear, in the wake of Sanders’ victories in yesterday’s Democratic caucuses, that Barry’s assertion that “the Sanders challenge within the Democratic Party has come to its natural conclusion” is not justified. Let’s not make grand pronouncements of this sort until we’re far closer to the Democratic National Convention.

Part 9 of A New Politics in America. This concludes the series. All nine parts can be fond on the New Politics website, newpol.org

So what does this era of a new politics in America mean? How significant are new right and new left in America today? Where do we go from here? What are we in the left to do? Should we be building progressive Democratic Party campaigns? Should we just go back to building the movements? Or is there another option? To figure this out, we have to understand that though we are in a new political era, many of the old problems still remain.

There is much to admire and learn from in Jason Schulman’s article “Bernie Sanders and the Dilemma of the Democratic ‘Party.’,” not least of which is Jason’s implicit insistence that the base of any future American left is composed of people who are currently in the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, and in its best elements represented by the Sanders’ insurgency. Obvious as this might be to readers of New Politics, this is still a disputed opinion on the radical left in America. We – Jason and I – both look forward to that movement developing a breakaway consciousness as it confronts an implacable Democratic establishment proudly wedded to the status quo.

This is party 7 of A New Politics in America. Part 6 and links to earlier parts can be found here.

Progressive Politics

Occupy, though it had eschewed politics, had important political ramifications. A few liberal Democrats soon appeared to give expression to the new movements within their rightward moving party.

On Tuesday, March 22, the New York City Council is expected to pass Mayor Bill de Blasio’s housing and zoning plan, which permanently ties the creation of a relatively small amount of not-that-affordable housing to the massive co-production of luxury housing.[i] It is being sold as the best we can do with the tools that we have. It is not. Instead, it puts to work the most lucrative and least effective tools available, and locks the city into repeated cycles of gentrification and displacement.

This is Part 6 of A New Politics in America. Part 5 and links to early parts can be found here.

The Tea Party 

The Great Recession and the government’s response to it gave a new impetus to the right. President Barack Obama’s election in 2008 in the midst of the recession proved an ideal catalyst for the bringing together of a new far right movement.

This is Part 5 of A New Politics in America. Part 4 and links to earlier parts can be found here.

If American politics have changed in the 2010s, however, it is in large measure due to disappointment in the Obama presidency. Many Americans thought in 2008 that they had elected a progressive, but they soon found out that the new president was nothing of the kind.

This is the fourth part of A New Politics in America. Earlier parts of the series can be found here.

The Republican Party responded to the white middle class and working class voters who had lost status, income, and pride in their country by working to turn their disappointment and depression into ressentiment and political power. Richard Nixon famously first saw how whites' resentment could be turned in the Republicans' direction during his 1968 presidential campaign, adopting the “southern strategy” of winning over the South’s racist white voters—the former Dixiecrats of the Democratic Party.

This is the third part of A New Politics in America. Part 1 looked at the Civil Rights movement and the White Backlash; Part 2 examined the impact of the economic crisis of the 1970s; Part 3 discusses the decline in American power, and then turns back to look at how all three elements contributed to the growth of a New Right from the 1960s to the 1980s.

The United States: A Declining World Power

While the United States remained a world power—and the greatest military power on earth after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991—U.S. military might did not necessarily always lead to military victory and modern weapons could not always ensure its place as the leading world power.

This is the second part of an article about the new politics in America today. The first part can be found here.

Deindustrialization and Downsizing Gut the Labor Movement

The second development that led to a new far right was the economic crisis of the 1970s, or, to be specific, the two recessions of the 1974-75 and 1979-82. These two downturns caused employers to close steel mills, auto plants and other manufacturing plants throughout the Northeast and the Midwest with a devastating impact on the working class and on the labor movement.

This is the first part of an article about the new politics in America today.

The presidential election campaign of 2016 represents a turning point in American politics, raising issues and political agendas that would have been unthinkable in the United States only a few years ago. The major media and the public debate whether or not Republican Donald Trump is a fascist, while at the same time there is a discussion about whether Democrat Bernie Sanders’ version of democratic socialism is the answer to the country’s problems. Trump’s political rallies have, at his instigation, become violent and he now threatens to send his followers to disrupt Sanders’ rallies.

[Sandy Boyer, a veteran socialist, radical journalist and treasured contributor to Socialist Worker and New Politics (see his review in our current issue), died last month after a short illness. Joan McKiernan, a longtime comrade and friend, offered this tribute to Sandy that speaks so well for all of us at NP and SocialistWorker.org.]

SANDY BOYER, socialist fighter, died last week. His death is a loss to all the working-class struggles and the social justice movements in the U.S., Ireland and, indeed, the world that he was involved in.

Whether it was Teamsters or teachers in the U.S., political prisoners in Ireland, Puerto Rican independence activists, Palestinian solidarity campaigners or the Black Lives Matter movement, Sandy was tirelessly exercising his brilliant organizing skills on their behalf.

The racist and utterly reactionary Republican legislative majorities that dominate the South are on an aggressive march this legislative session. From Texas to Florida, Arkansas to Virginia, and all the states in-between, they are employing cut-throat strategies and tactics to pass a package of regressive, exploitative and outright anti-human legislation drawn up by the likes of ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council)[1] and other right-wing think tanks. They are attacking the right to vote, Black voting districts, the right to education, access to housing, workers rights to organize themselves, wage protections, alternative energy plans, marriage equality, and the list goes on.

A while ago, I wrote a piece here that, among other things, argued that if Bernie Sanders were to lose the Democratic primary he should not, as he has promised several times to do, support Hillary Clinton for President. Many people on the Left, most recently Chris Hedges in an article for Truthdig, have argued that this promise makes Sanders a wolf-in-sheep’s clothing for the Left, and that he will inevitably betray the movement supporting him and the ideals he has campaigned on. For Hedges and others, this promise (along with running as a Democrat) is precisely why the Left should not be supporting Sanders and his campaign at all. While I disagree with Hedges that we should not support Sanders because of this promise, we should absolutely be wary of the likely possibility that he will keep this terrible promise; Sanders if anything has a tendency to keep his word. This is what he is known for, after all—being the rare honest politician.

The Sanders campaign has certainly sharpened the contradictions, hasn’t it? It’s been very clarifying to see Hillary Clinton and her surrogates running against single-payer and free college, with intellectual cover coming from Paul Krugman and Vox. Expectations, having been systematically beaten down for 35 years, must be beaten down further, whether it’s Hillary saying that to go to college one needs some “skin in the game,” or Rep. John Lewis reminding us that nothing is free in America. A challenge from the left has forced centrist Democrats to reveal themselves as proud capitalist tools.

Representative Lewis,

Yesterday, you stated the following about Bernie Sanders’s record on fighting for civil rights in the 1960s:

“I never saw him. I never met him. I was chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee for three years, from 1963 to 1966. I was involved with the sit-ins, the Freedom Rides, the March on Washington, the march from Selma to Montgomery and directed (the) voter education project for six years. But I met Hillary Clinton. I met President (Bill) Clinton.”

We are going to ignore the fact that Hillary Clinton was a Goldwater Girl, or that you once stated to a Clinton biographer that, “[t]he first time I ever heard of Bill Clinton was the 1970s,” or that it has already been well-established that Sanders worked with the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE) at the University of Chicago in the 1960s. We are also going to leave aside the fact that every mention of Bill Clinton in your book Walking With The Wind described an instance that he opposed some policy that you cherished.

Instead, we are going to talk about another person that you never saw or met.

First, full disclosure: I read most of Jack Ross’s The Socialist Party of America in draft. Although it is normally not good policy to then review the book, I felt I could express my respect for what Jack Ross is attempting and share my concerns in a way that could serve a useful purpose.

It may be that in 20 or 30 years we will look back to 2015 as the year that things really began to change in the U.S. This was the year we saw the intersection of the movement for higher wages and Black Lives Matter really begin to crystalize.

Bernie Sanders’s dropping the hammer on Clinton’s cozying up to the vile genocidaire Henry Kissinger was one of the fist pump moments of the campaign. That’s recognized by pretty much everyone now, so I don’t need to say much about it here.

The godfather of macro-level power structure research in the United States was the sociologist C. Wright Mills, author of The Power Elite (1956).