We talk to journalist and activist Naomi Klein about Bernie Sanders’s historic presidential campaign as he suspends his bid for the 2020 Democratic nomination, and about coronavirus capitalism — President Trump’s response to the pandemic. Sanders “opened up the window of what was possible politically in this country,” says Klein, a senior correspondent at The Intercept, Rutgers University professor and longtime Sanders supporter.
Excerpts from the transcript:
NAOMI KLEIN: More than anything else, I think what the campaign did is help us find each other. And by “us,” I mean that huge “us” of the “Not me. Us.” campaign. And he did this not just in this campaign, but in 2016, where he really broke the spell of the Reagan era, that spell that has lasted for four decades, that told people, who believed, that this system that was funneling so much wealth upwards and spreading insecurity, precariousness, poverty and pollution for everybody else — everybody who saw that system and thought there was something deeply wrong with it, what the neoliberal era told us was that we were the ones who were crazy, we were a tiny minority of fringe people, and that we should just accept it. And what the Sanders campaign did in 2016 is tell us that we had been lied to, that, in fact, there were so many millions of us who saw that this world was fundamentally upside down. And all of the incredible organizing, including digital organizing but also in-person organizing, wove this amazing web, and we were able to find each other and find that we were many and they were few. And so, I don’t think we can ever thank Bernie Sanders and the campaign enough for that. And being part of the campaign as a volunteer — but I did go to four states for the campaign — was some of the — provided some of the greatest moments of my political life. I mean, I was in Nevada when we won, and got to be part of that incredibly joyful moment and just got to meet so many other like-minded people.
And I think in Senator Sanders’s address that we just heard, Amy, I think he was so correct in zeroing in on the conspiracy of lowered expectations, right? He focused — he very directly addressed the American public and said, “If you don’t believe that you deserve universal healthcare, you’re not going to get it. If you don’t believe that you deserve a safe planet, you’re not going to get it.” And I think that that is really at the heart of why he lost. You know, we’ve heard again and again, Bernie has won the battle of ideas. But the truth is, there is a difference between winning a battle of ideas, winning an intellectual battle about what kind of policies are right and just and will keep us safe, and believing that you can win. You can simultaneously win that battle of ideas and still believe that you will never actually win, that you are still a weak minority, that you will still be destroyed by the forces of establishment power and money.
And that, I think, is the real generational divide that Bernie was also speaking to in that address. You know, I don’t think that Bernie lost because of a battle between leftist and centrist, although of course that battle is still raging, but we had a progressive majority on the issues. But where the generational divide comes in — and Bernie spoke to this — is that among voters not just under 30, but in many cases under 45, under 50, were starting to believe that they could actually win. And I think particularly among that majority of young voters, that always backed Bernie, they understood that the intellectual project of neoliberalism was bankrupt, that it had lost its powers of persuasion, and that these words like “democratic socialist” were not as scary anymore. In fact, they have become appealing. But I think for that older generation, that has — particularly the older generation that has a living memory of the state violence of the 1960s that waged literal war on revolutionary movement leaders, that sent them into exile, that sent them into their graves, that surveilled them, blacklisted them, when Bernie’s opponents raised the specter of the Red Scare that would be used against him, that was incredibly triggering, terrifying, and they couldn’t — progressive voters who agreed with Bernie could not believe that he could win, where younger voters did believe that he could win. And that was, I think, the most important generational divide.....
I think that there is no doubt that the way this pandemic is playing out is opening — is further opening up that window of what is politically possible, indeed what is necessary for people’s survival. And so, yes, support for Medicare for All is surging, as well as support for other kinds of programs, like housing for all, that were always at the center of the Sanders campaign. You know, in your headlines just now, we heard news about the air clearing around the world. We are seeing that it is possible to clean the air. A lot of people like that as one of these silver linings of this crisis. But this isn’t how we want to clean the air. We don’t want to clean the air by crash, by brutal crash. We want to clean the air by craft. We want to design policies that care for workers, that protect workers, that retrain workers, but allow us to live in a way that doesn’t poison people’s lungs, which, by the way, is part of what is making black and brown communities more vulnerable to the coronavirus, because those are the communities that have the most polluting industries in their backyards. That’s one of the factors. So people are seeing this and being radicalized by this and demanding policies that were at the center of the Sanders campaign.
So, what we have to be focused on, what the movement that the Sanders campaign represents, but also all of the social movements that were part of that campaign, independent social movements, and also movements that never joined the campaign — what we need to be focused on right now is winning those policies for a kind of a people’s bailout in this moment of profound crisis. And we need to be focused on beating Donald Trump in November, absolutely.....
I think that the battle, frankly, when it comes to disaster capitalism and this sort of corporate free-for-all that we are seeing right now under cover of pandemic, that that battle was lost when the rescue for people was bundled together with the corporate bailout. I think the demand that we need to make on lawmakers right now is that they need to keep those things separate so that they aren’t held hostage, right? When we look at the fact that there was — that people voted for that bailout who shouldn’t have voted for it, it was because they couldn’t be seen, or they felt that they couldn’t be seen, to be voting for what Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called “crumbs for our families,” right? Because those crumbs are not nothing when people are starving. So, the battle, really, the political battle, was lost when those two things were bundled together, when the people’s rescue was bundled together with the corporate rescue. So people need to send that message very, very strongly.
The fact is, there is power right now, and there is power from the working people who are holding the world together — this country together, but the world together — the healthcare workers, the janitors, the caretakers, the delivery workers, the people who are picking our food, under very unsafe conditions. And we are seeing a wave of job action from these workers, who understand themselves to be so essential despite decades of having their labor belittled by those in power. And that is one of the great — it was one of the great strengths of the Sanders campaign, was that he always recognized the power of those essential workers. It’s why he was supported overwhelmingly by Amazon workers, by grocery store workers and, of course, by nurses and by teachers. And so, this is a time for us to be organizing and taking leadership from those workers.
And I have to say that one of my great, great regrets from having been involved in this campaign is watching my friends in the progressive movement who didn’t support Sanders, in part because they weren’t able to take leadership from those working people who recognized Sanders as their champion from the very beginning, and they felt that those workers didn’t understand their own best interests, and so they wanted them to support somebody else. And this is a moment where if we say that we have so much gratitude for these frontline workers, let’s trust them politically, too, and let’s do everything we can to augment their political power. Let’s demand that of our trade unions. Let’s demand that of ourselves. Let’s support them tangibly. But let’s also take leadership from them, which is something that Bernie Sanders always did, and it is one of the things that I love most about him.
For
the full transcript and video interview, please go here:
https://www.democracynow.org/2020/4/9/bernie_sanders_naomi_klein
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