Victims of the Revolution
Bernie Sanders’ 2020 run for the office of President is now over.
No, Sanders isn't mathematically eliminated. But the odds against him are stacked impossibly high.
And yes, Sanders beat Biden up pretty good during the 2020 campaign’s first one-on-one debate on Sunday night. But it was too little too late.
It’d take a miracle to revive Sanders’ flagging campaign.
It’s easy to assume, based on Sanders’ stellar performance in the early caucus states, that Sanders made some kind of devastating mistake between the Nevada caucus and Super Tuesday. Or that Sanders’ failure to attract older black voters was the engine of his campaign’s demise.
That may be. But it wasn’t just those things.
The Sanders campaign’s strategy was premised, in large part, on the assumption that Sanders, and his message, would activate a massive, and previously-untapped, reservoir of voters who had never voted for a Democrat. Or who hadn’t pulled the lever for Blue in a long time. Or who had never voted at all.
Young voters. First time voters. Former trump voters. Disenchanted voters who hadn’t voted in years, but who would presumably rush off the political sidelines for Bernie. The Sanders Revolution was, according to Sanders and his surrogates, slated to reveal a new silent majority.
But the foot soldiers of the revolution didn’t show up on Super Tuesday. They didn’t show up on Super Tuesday II, either. And now, the Sanders campaign, having surged through the early caucus states, appears as dead in the water as a sail boat on a windless sea.
Below I’ll argue that the primary engine that powered Sanders’ base - ideological fervor - caused the campaign to make unwarranted assumptions which ultimately tanked Sanders’ chance at securing the nomination.
Sanders’ Foot Soldiers
Sanders’ most ardent supporters are apparently uninterested in reflecting on what it is about the Sanders message, tactics, or followers that prevented Sanders from winning the Democratic nomination. Twice.
They’re spending their time, instead, lobbing rounds of blame downrange just as quickly as they can acquire targets. The problem can’t be Sanders, or the inflexibility of his platform, or the inflexibility of his approach.
The problem was the “establishment.” It was the “mainstream” media. And puzzlingly, they’ve claimed that it was “voter suppression.”
Voter Suppression is Real and It’s Wrong
The explicit and implicit voter suppression in the United States, targeted as it is at poor and minority voters, is appalling. By any standard. I’m passionate about the suppression issue. I’ve thought and written about it quite a bit, in fact.
Unduly long lines, voter roll purges, voter ID laws, and gerrymandering (among other nefarious tactics) no doubt depressed voter turnout on Super Tuesday. They always do.
However, it requires an impermissible leap of logic to conclude, based on the existence of voter suppression on Super Tuesday in general, that the suppression must have benefited Biden. (Or Sanders, for that matter.)
There’s just no reliable way to be sure one way or the other.
Revolutionary Assumptions
I’ve highlighted the alleged Super Tuesday voter suppression example because it illustrates the kinds of unwarranted assumptions that, I posit, were at the very core of the Sanders movement. I think also that there are interesting parallels between the Sanders campaign’s post-Super Tuesday collapse and the collapse of the Viet Cong after the Tet Offensive in 1968.
Didn’t see that one coming, eh? Fair enough.
Bear with me and keep reading.
The Tet Assumption
Obviously, Sanders’ 2020 bid for the White House doesn’t actually have a whole lot in common with arguably the largest military campaign of the Vietnam War.
Tet in Brief
The Tet Offensive (“Tet”) was a large-scale and elaborate military operation that occurred during the Vietnam War. It involved thousands of Viet Cong guerrillas, stationed clandestinely throughout South Vietnam, who attacked, simultaneously, hundreds of American and South Vietnamese targets across the entire country.
On one hand, North Vietnam won the public relations battle associated with Tet. Tet incensed an already-war-weary American public which had been told (lied to), repeatedly, that the war was nearing an end.
Evening news anchors steadily funneled the grizzly and chaotic footage of Tet into American homes. And those images appeared far from consistent with the White House’s assurances that Vietnam had been largely pacified. The pressure on President LBJ to end the war reached a fevered pitch.
On the other hand, Tet was a decisive and catastrophic military defeat for North Vietnam. Tet caught American forces, and their South Vietnamese allies, flat footed. In executing the Tet attacks, however, the Viet Cong, for the first time during the war, abandoned their hit-and-run guerrilla tactics. They were instructed to stand and fight. In-so-doing, they relinquished their only tactical advantages over the United States’ overwhelmingly superior forces: stealth and mobility.
So, once the American military juggernaut got back up off the mat, the gloves came off, and the Viet Cong could not, and did not, survive that toe-to-toe slugging match.
The End Of the Cong
North Vietnam’s civilian and military leadership showed themselves, throughout the war, to be extraordinarily shrewd tacticians. Their practices were often shocking in their brutality. But they were effective.
(North Vietnam also had the tactical advantage of being an authoritarian regime and therefore faced no meaningful internal dissent.)
Question: How could the North Vietnamese leadership have bungled Tet so fundamentally?
The North Vietnamese regime rolled into power on the same wave of revolutionary Marxism that displaced European, colonial overlords across the developing world during the early to mid 20th century. (Not a bad outcome overall.) The spirit of those ousters was the spirit of revolution.
In planning Tet years later, the North Vietnamese leadership sought to instigate in South Vietnam the same sort of violent revolution that ushered the regime to power in the North. In so doing, they fell victim to the pitfalls of their own revolutionary ideology. Specifically, they were compromised by the sort of confirmation bias that so-often undermines humans beings’ best-laid plans.
Answer: Tet was premised on a fantasy of revolution.
The members of the North Vietnamese leadership were much like other 60s-era Marxist revolutionaries. They were idealogues. And they believed, fervently, that once the Viet Cong guerrillas launched their attacks in the South, millions of oppressed South Vietnamese peasants would throw down their plows, grab their rifles, and join the glorious revolution.
That didn’t happen.
There was no proletarian uprising. So the Viet Cong guerrillas, wielding only small arms, squared off in the end against the premier fighting force on the planet. The American war machine recovered quickly from Tet’s initial shock-and-awe effect. And without the reinforcement of the hoped-for proletarian army, the Viet Cong guerrillas were decimated.
After Tet, the once universally-feared Viet Cong ceased to exist as an effective fighting force.
The Sanders Offensive
The Sanders movement made unwarranted assumptions similar to those made by the communist North Vietnamese in 1968. And the movement made those assumptions on similar grounds.
The Problem with Ideology-Driven Movements
Ideology-driven movements, and the beliefs that fuel them, are attractive because they provide certainty in the midst of an existence (human existence) that’s inherently unpredictable. The believer enjoys certainty about both:
How the world (and individuals) ought to be ordered.
The precise course of action humanity should take to realize that order.
For example, many religious folks find comfort in their belief that as long as they follow their organization’s prescribed guidelines, their retirement to a pleasant afterlife is guaranteed. As such, they need not fear death.
That’s a huge existential weight lifted off the shoulders of the faithful.
The problem with ideology-driven movements, though, is that an individual’s implacable certainty about the outcome of events has no bearing on the actual outcome of those events.
The idealogue is, therefore, vulnerable, perennially, to disappointment when ideological predictions come face-to-face with a reality that’s inconsistent with ideological dogma.
The Sanders Dogma
The Sanders movement isn’t anti-American. It’s not communist. It’s not authoritarian. It’s not even really socialist.
But the movement is definitely ideological.
And like every ideology-driven movement, it has only a limited capacity to consider the validity of any idea that’s inconsistent with its predetermined dogma. Therefore, the Sanders ideology, and the campaign it spawned, was in some ways ill-equipped to predict and defend against certain threats to its success.
I’ve witnessed the fallout of this phenomenon, over and over, in my engagements with Sanders’ more ideology-driven supporters. They seem to believe that anyone who isn’t 100 percent on board with every element of the Sanders platform either:
Hasn’t been sufficiently exposed to the Sanders platform;
Is the enemy (i.e., a “neo-liberal,” “corporate Dem,” “shilling,” “snake," etc.); or
Is a conservative (also the enemy but somehow less so than the Democratic party).
Like most other ideologues, the Sanders ideologue’s worldview is impossibly binary: on every issue it’s black or white, good or evil, with us or against us.
The Tet Connection
1968 saw a similar phenomenon play out in South East Asia.
The North Vietnamese leadership convinced itself, via its own propaganda, that there was a massive civilian army in South Vietnam that was eager to join North Vietnam’s revolutionary cause. North Vietnamese forces needed only, they convinced themselves, to liberate their South Vietnamese comrades from their loathed, capitalist jailers.
The North Vietnamese Ministry of Propaganda was right about the injustice of the American overlords’ dominance over Vietnamese affairs. But its prediction of a proletarian uprising in South Vietnam was fundamentally - catastrophically - inaccurate. The Tet Offensive was an ordeal from which the Viet Cong never recovered.
Likewise, the Sanders campaign’s ideology-driven prediction that its message would activate a race-neutral, gender-neutral, working class, revolution, was off the mark. On Super Tuesday, and on Super Tuesday II, leftward-inclined Americans opted for the Moderate alternative to the Sanders revolution.
That was, and is, a perhaps disappointing outcome for those of us who thirst for a fundamental restructuring of American society including a more equitable and more sustainable status quo.
It’s also a warning to anyone who aspires to challenge America’s power structure:
Tread lightly.
The American populace that enthusiastically elected trump, is incredibly resistant to genuine reorder of the status quo.
Same in the End
The Sanders’ camps’ ideology-driven predictions were as inaccurate in their assumptions about as-yet-untapped revolutionary fervor in the American populace in 2020 as were the North Vietnamese leadership’s assumptions about the revolutionary impulses of the South Vietnamese populace in 1968.
In both cases, ideology and confirmation bias coalesced into basically false assumptions about the nature of political and social realities.
Let this be a lesson to all of us who Bern for real Progressive change in America. The full frontal assault, winner take all, scorched earth, revolutionary approach may not be the route to lasting change.
