Sunday, June 28, 2020

For Many Young People, Socialism Is as American as Apple Pie

An excellent interview. — Molly
 
 
Bernie Sanders may never make it to the White House, but, just when we need them most, socialists like "Bigger than Bernie" co-author Megan Day have picked up his torch.
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In the devastating aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, many young Americans who felt betrayed by capitalism were introduced to socialism by Bernie Sanders' presidential campaigns. Meagan Day, a staff writer for the popular left-wing magazine Jacobin and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), serves as an example of how the Vermont senator radicalized a generation with a platform that called for policies like Medicare for All and tuition-free college. Day credits Sanders with her decision to choose socialism when she felt the time came to "pick a side" in American politics and has since been working to understand how the socialist resurgence the Democratic candidate inspired can grow without him in the White House. 

That's largely why, along with Micah Uetricht, the 31-year-old journalist chose to write "Bigger than Bernie: How We Go from the Sanders Campaign to Democratic Socialism," a book she discusses with host Robert Scheer on the latest installment of "Scheer Intelligence."

RS: Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence, where I hasten to say the intelligence comes from my guests. In this case it's Meagan Day, who has along with Micah Uetricht—I'm sure I'm mangling his name, and you'll correct me—has written a really interesting book called Bigger than Bernie. And these people both are connected with the Jacobin magazine; for those of you who don't know much about history, the Jacobin movement, it was a club movement, began in Paris in the revolution in 1789. It was a democratic club, but it was—some people have described it, I picked up one dictionary definition, "the most radical," and what'd they say, something else provocative—of the French Revolution. And then they were associated with Robespierre, and during the period from 1793-4 they had a reputation of being quite severe in their judgments of other people. We can discuss that. 

But it, Jacobin, has emerged as really one of the more interesting publications on the left. And they are absolutely fearless in examining this word that we haven't used much in our vocabulary, of socialism. And they were given a great audience, in a sense, because of the attacks on Bernie Sanders, who has admitted to being a democratic socialist. So that's one reason why I wanted to interview you, because I want to know where this movement goes from here. And the title of your book is Bigger than Bernie, and the subtitle is How We Go from the Sanders Campaign to Democratic Socialism. And it's published by a very good publisher, Verso; it has a long history in England of publishing, New Left Books. 

And so let us take this explosive word of socialism. And let me throw it back to your magazine. When people generally talk about democratic socialism, they talk about a less violent notion of it. And they usually think of the social democratic parties of Western Europe; they think of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, for instance. Sometimes they even refer to the Labour Party. So what is the connection between Bernie Sanders' democratic socialism and the Jacobin movement, going back to the French Revolution?

MD: Well, I should say that, you know, Jacobin was started before my time. And it's my understanding—I joined the magazine in 2017—that when it was started in 2011, it was actually initially meant to, the name was initially meant to be more of a winking reference to The Black Jacobins. That's a book written by C. L. R. James, and it's about the radicals of the Haitian Revolution. So I mean, obviously, people are going to connect it to the French radicals. And I think that that's intentional as well; my understanding is that it's supposed to be a somewhat provocative title. 

But in any case, the reality is that I joined in 2017 after having joined the Democratic Socialists of America in 2016, which I did because I had been personally activated and radicalized by the presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders. Now, it's not like I wasn't paying attention to politics at all prior to Bernie Sanders running, and it's also not like I didn't even know what, for example, socialism was. I understood what capitalism was, I understood that there was an alternative that was frequently referred to as socialism, and that it had a long and complicated history, and that it also had potentially a promising future. But what had never happened is that I had never asked myself the question: Are you a socialist? That had never occurred to me, to even ask myself that question. Because as far as I was concerned, I wasn't primarily a political actor. 

And when Bernie Sanders ran for president, starting in 2015, really picking up steam in 2016, the invective and the vitriol was very extreme. And the intensity with which the Democratic Party establishment appeared to want to squash the insurgent energy of a movement that, from what I could tell, was dedicated primarily to decommodifying health insurance and ensuring that we had tuition-free public college, was quite startling. And it caused me to then pose that question to myself. The question being, essentially: Which side are you on? It seemed suddenly that there were sides, and one had to choose a side. And I answered that question by joining the Democratic Socialists of America. I did this along with tens of thousands of other people. DSA had about 5,000 members when Bernie Sanders first announced that he was running for president; by mid to late 2018 it had 50-something thousand members. It's now up to 60-something thousand members.

We had 10,000 people join DSA between March of this year and right now, which is May of this year, because a similar process occurred. People paid attention to Bernie Sanders' second presidential campaign. They saw how panicked his, what we might call social democratic short-term agenda made the Democratic Party establishment, made the capitalist class, appeared to make the mainstream media. And they realized that actually there was—well, to put it in terms that Bernie Sanders himself has used, there was a class war happening, and that they ought to choose a side.

So now our ranks are swelling in the Democratic Socialists of America, and readership of Jacobin is growing. You know, I came in as part of the first wave of DSA members in 2016; I started writing for Jacobin in 2017. And now our readership continues to grow, as more and more people start self-identifying as socialists, start being curious about the history of socialism, about theories of social change that align with socialist values and a socialist political vision for the future. And hopefully, there will be more people who will be joining us down the line. Of course, Bernie Sanders won't be running again, so we'll have to possibly change up our tactics.

RS: So let me put this in some historical perspective. And you are now 31, so you're really talking about coming into the Bernie Sanders movement when you were, what, 25, 26?

MD: Yeah, that's about right.

RS: Yeah. And where did you grow up? 

MD: I grew up in San Antonio, Texas.

RS: Ah. And did you go to school there, and so forth?

MD: I mean, no, I went to college at Oberlin College. Yeah. I mean, I don't—if this is the direction that you're actually going to push it—and I certainly don't mind talking about my background, which is a background that is not consistent, I think, with everybody's in DSA. I grew up in actually a relatively wealthy household, not in a working-class household. My opinion on that is that, you know, from personal experience, I can say that one can actually get quite a crash course, quite an education in stark inequality, in that kind of environment as well. And so I went to Oberlin College, which of course is a liberal arts school; it's an extremely expensive liberal arts school, but it's also one with a long history of radical politics and social and political justice. And you know, I got interested in leftism while I was at Oberlin, but as far as I knew, nobody was interested in talking about socialism. And actually, nobody was really interested in talking about class, frankly. So it took until after Occupy Wall Street to really start, those wheels to really start turning in my mind.

RS: Right. And I think that's what's happened to a lot of people. And by the way, I was saying when I was chatting with you before, when I go to any of these demonstrations—like Occupy here in Los Angeles, or more recently after Trump's victories, and all these different marches—it seems to me the Democratic Socialists of America have the most interesting, rational, well-thought-out program. And so I'm not, you know, suggesting this is some wild thing to do. It's just that I'm comparing it to my own youth. I grew up in New York, in the Bronx. And when Bernie Sanders—little bit older than Bernie, but when he grew up in Brooklyn, the word socialism was really a quite conventional group you could belong to. Because most of the labor movement, indeed probably most of the elected officials on the New York City Council, would have considered themselves as socialists of one kind or another. And in fact most of the labor leaders in America had a connection with it. The word socialism only became really negative because of repression of the labor movement, repression of the ideas going, you know, back 100 years, but certainly coming out of the Depression. And it's relevant now because we may be entering a new depression; we're certainly in very deep economic trouble. And that's really what I want to talk about. 

Coming out of the Great Depression—I was born in 1936—socialists of one stripe or another, I would say, would define the majority in a place like New York City, certainly among working people. And the democratic socialists, who went on to be the major political parties in Western Europe, probably defined most of what was progressive politics. So oddly enough we seem to be at a moment now where, quite aside from Bernie Sanders, but because of this incredible collapse of the conceits of American capitalism, and the inability of our medical system in particular—not because of a lack of heroism from medical workers, but the way it's constructed, the for-profit industry—turned out to be perhaps the least prepared in the world of all of the different systems to deal with this. And suddenly Bernie Sanders' advocacy of Medicare-for-all, I would think to most people in this country would seem like a no-brainer. Now, we're actually even having a Republican president who, while he doesn't entertain support of a guaranteed annual income, certainly is willing—and a vast 94% of the elected officials in Congress supported giving everyone on unemployment an extra $600 a week, you know, without blaming them for once for being unemployed. 

So the reason I wanted to talk to you, and the reason I found your book, Bigger than Bernie, is that the socialism message, democratic socialism—which Biden and the others tried and the mass media, including MSNBC, tried to hang around Bernie's neck and strangle him with it and make him irrelevant—it now seems to me the most relevant framework for considering our obligation to people in this society. Everybody needs health care. Anybody gets the virus. I know I'm sounding a little bit like Bernie, but anybody gets the virus, everybody's in danger. You don't care whether, you know, what skin color, you don't care whether—you don't want them to worry about paying for it. So hasn't the mood shifted radically the objective conditions in your direction?

MD: I think so. I think the following. Bernie Sanders was not primarily interested in becoming president. Bernie Sanders wanted to become president because he thought that it would be a useful component of having what he calls a political revolution. But he certainly didn't think that his own victory in clinching the presidency was going to be the, you know, the end of that political revolution. On the contrary, it was going to be the beginning; it was going to be the beginning of the hard stuff, so to speak. So in that sense, even though Bernie Sanders did not win the presidency, I actually think it's important to ask whether or not his two campaigns—I would consider it in some ways a single campaign, you know, a sort of half-decade of Bernie Sanders—whether that actually contributed to our prospects for having a political revolution without him in the White House. 

I think the answer is indisputably yes, because it put socialism back on the map. It put certain platform demands, which we might call social democratic instead of socialist per se, but which do point to a future beyond the one of neoliberal capitalism which we're currently inhabiting—he put those on the map. They're extremely popular, you're right; I mean, Medicare-for-all is favored by a majority of people in the country, and some polls have it being favored by a majority of Republicans, not just Democrats. Because it just seems to make sense. The reason, to my mind, that Joe Biden won is primarily that the mainstream media was extremely aggressive in portraying Bernie Sanders as unelectable against Donald Trump. And the Democratic Party's voter base is so panicked about Trump that they just kind of swallowed that message, hook line and sinker, and voted for Biden even though they actually preferred, for example, things like Medicare-for-all and tuition-free college and a Green New Deal, which is Bernie's platform, not Biden's platform. The exit polls are actually pretty clear on this, it's pretty startling. 

So, yes, the mood is shifting. There are new opportunities for organizing, and Bernie Sanders—the half-decade of Bernie Sanders helped put us on better footing to organize toward that short-term platform and toward a longer-term vision of a world in which people are not subordinated to profit. One phrase that I like to use is that Bernie Sanders lost, but he didn't fail. Because his goal was not merely to win the presidency. Obviously we would have liked, we would have all liked for him to win the presidency; that would have been extremely useful in terms of building toward our long-term goals. But he didn't fail, in the sense that he didn't actually, you know, fail to contribute in a meaningful way to building a movement that could actually usher in a political revolution. 

As for the mood around his demands, I will say this, it did seem at the very beginning of the pandemic like people were very quick—people who had been extraordinarily hostile to Bernie Sanders and his program were very quick to suggest implementing short-term or emergency versions of his program, leading me to ask the question, if it's—you know, if it's not good enough for coronavirus, why is it good enough for cancer, for example, you know? Speaking of the health care system in particular. Or, you know, if we don't want people to go without, you know, pay that can tide them over in times of difficulty during coronavirus, then what makes it—is it really morally or intellectually defensible for us to allow people to go without aid when they are cash-strapped when we're not having a pandemic, right? 

So I think those questions are starting to arise, and I think that it might be leading to more popularity for Bernie's program. But we also have another problem, which is that people also, when they're experiencing a crisis, it does lead to an agitational energy on the one hand, but it can also lead on the other hand to a desire for security and comfort and a return to, quote unquote, "normalcy." We know normal wasn't good enough, we know that our society was deeply unequal prior to the coronavirus pandemic, but I worry that moderates are going to be able to take advantage of this by saying, you know, vote for us and everything will just, quote unquote, "go back to normal." So we'll see which one wins out.

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