by Paul
Mason
Even Lebanon
voted for Bernie Sanders. As I write, the small rural upmarket
Grafton County, NH has Sanders beating Clinton by 32 per cent. The
county is 94 per cent white, 3 per cent Asian, 1.8 per cent Hispanic
and 0.9 per cent Black. It’s middle-class white America and they
voted, on a large turnout, for the first serious left-wing candidate
in the history of the Democratic Party.
What does it
mean? Quite simply that the radical progressive sentiment that’s
swept Greece, Spain, Scotland and the British Labour movement has now
hit America. It’s the same basic pattern: protest movements against
austerity and financial power in 2011 were heavily repressed. They
did not peter out, but simply worked their way into mass
consciousness.
The unequal
global recovery did the rest. That and the sight of political elites
revelling in the rising inequality that results from sustaining
growth through printing money. Oh, and the abject failure of the
West’s expeditionary warfare doctrines, which have produced — in
Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya — four spectacularly failing
states.
In Spain, so
entrenched was the elite culture in politics, that the alternative
had to come out of nowhere — in the form of Podemos and the En
Comu community activist movements that now control three major cities
and 20 per cent of the vote.
In Greece it
came via an old political formation — Syriza — newly
infused with protesters and disaffected social democrats. In Britain
it’s flowing through many conduits: the tens of thousands of
pro-independence left-wing Scots who flooded into the SNP after the
failed referendum, the millions who made Ukip the third largest party
by share of the vote in 2015; and the hundreds of thousands of people
who joined Labour to support Corbyn.
In the USA
it’s going to work out differently. US politics is now — despite
a bunch of rigmarole dating from the era of Meet Me In St
Louis — highly networked. What we saw in NH was effectively a
swarm — with new voters, young activists and middle-class older
voters — responding to an effective media campaign by Sanders:
switching and swarming to achieve last night’s result.
Sanders — like
Syriza and Corbyn— is a known quantity. His politics are clear and
actually have deep roots in US culture: a mix of Keynesian economics,
America-first trade policy, opposition to expeditionary warfare,
critical support for Israel, legalising 11m undocumented migrants
while restricting future migrant flows through visa reforms, and a
universal healthcare system.
What’s put
him on a roll — both in Iowa and New Hampshire — is
simple: the failure of elite control in the Democratic Party. A whole
host of candidates could have bridged the gap between Sanders and
Hillary Clinton, offering greater choice. The list is long, if
admittedly non-spectacular, of people to the left of Clinton, or with
reputations less encumbered, but for some reason the entire Democrat
establishment assumed that, if everyone withdrew, it would be a
shoo-in for the former First Lady.
So now the
Democrat establishment faces two choices: throw everything at
Sanders — detaching itself from the mass base of enthusiastic
support; or hedge its bets by filtering resources, experts and
cautious public support in return for pledges to moderate his
platform if selected. With Trump himself having won big in the
Granite State, the prospect of a Sanders v Trump race will almost
certainly tempt a third establishment candidate like Mike Bloomberg
to run.
Two things
make a potential Sanders nomination unique. First, when Corbyn took
over Labour, it was a signal moment of panic for the UK
establishment: it understood for the first time since George Lansbury
left office in 1936 that the party was no longer under establishment
control. In the USA the Democratic Party is far more amorphous as a
political machine, because of the federal system and powerful local
governments. It can, I think, tolerate Sanders as a figurehead in a
way Labour and the PLP have found it hard to tolerate Corbyn.
The second
thing is, America is a country big enough to enact Sanders’
programme with ease. There is no European Central Bank to stage what
looked to many in Europe like a financial coup; no bond market big
enough to stage a run on Treasuries at the promise of higher debt and
public spending; no military power capable of bullying it into
submission. Sure, there is a bunch of mad-as-hell militia types on
the populist right, but a Sanders nomination would actually appeal to
their sense of fair play.
What we are
seeing all over the developed world is the detachment of ordinary
voters from an entrenched, increasingly hereditary elite, wedded to
high finance and high inequality.
Weirdly,
what New Hampshire showed, is that the elite’s head office — the
haut Democratic networks of the east coast — has very few
defence mechanisms against the radical surge. Above all, unlike in
Britain, Spain and Greece, it cannot rely on the much of the
established media to destroy Sanders because the broadcast media long
ago destroyed its own credibility by becoming a self-imitating
entertainment circus; and because, well, the internet.
It’s by no
means over. There’s the unions, there are the powerful city mayors.
There is identity politics, which in America can break towards the
establishment as much as the challenger.
But on both
the left and right of American politics, the radical moment has
begun.
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