Why Sanders is the only who can defeat Trump?

Para a versão em português clique aqui

If I start the text with such a categorical question, it is because the Democratic Party primaries basically revolve around this: between 60 and 65% of Democrats stated that the presidential candidate’s ability to defeat Donald Trump is more important than his proposals in themselves.

For those who think this is not outstanding, Meagan Day and Matt Karp well remembered that in the 2004 elections, in which George W. Bush’s reelection was at stake, less than half of the Democrats said the same thing.

In addition to highlight the candidate’s political viability, answer why Sanders is the only Democrat who can defeat Trump will also give us a chance to discuss the main characteristics of the democratic socialist (as he calls himself) who is convulsing the most powerful country in the world.

1- Sanders’ mythology

If there is one feature that brings Sanders closer to Trump — and that is precisely what makes him so competitive — it is that the Democrat is building a myth about the American nation.

By “myth”, one must understand a narrative — as easily intelligible as it is emotionally powerful — that fixes a synthetic representation of the country. And the aim is not only explain the present, but also produce forms of consciousness and affections that modify it.

Trump shout that the well-educated liberal elites (the coastal elites) mismanaged the country and, worse than that, degraded the moral values ​​of the average American citizen (the real americans). Sanders translates the conflict as the 99% struggle against the 1% in which the financial elites concentrate the wealth produced by the american workers.

In comparison to other Democrats, New York Times journalist David Brooks wrote: “Sanders is the only candidate telling a successful myth. Bloomberg, Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar all make good arguments, but they haven’t organized their worldview into a simple compelling myth. You may look at them, but you don’t see the world through their eyes.”

In the middle of the 21st century, we discovered that the consequences of globalization range from the displacement of production chains to the economic threat, the subjective uncertainty and the loss of symbolic references. While Trump used the fear as an element of cohesion in stressing the dangers of modernity and investing on the narcissistic notion of “national community” to preach a cut to a utopian happiness in the past (Make America Great Again), Sanders mobilizes positive affects that remember the promises of equality inscribed in the promulgation of the American constitution, but they mainly concern hope for the future. Beyond the desire to more health and education, the democrat’s speeches advocate a new relationship between the possible and the political imagination far beyond the slogan yes, we can.

Sanders understood that to convince voters — those who voted for Trump and those who still undecided — it is not enough to expose arguments slowly and patiently. More than that, it is necessary to design a political horizon that mobilizes values, affections and ways of understanding and being in the world. Election is a dispute of ideas, and also symbolic competition: it must be demonstrated, but above all convinced and passionate. In 2016, while Hillary Clinton touted the triumphs of the Obama administration (nothing much different from what Joe Biden has been doing), it was Trump who bet on despicable alt-right symbols that had the strength to engage emotions and feelings in an uncivilized proposal.

In the beautiful statement of the French philosopher Simone Weil, “anyone who is merely incapable of being as brutal, as violent, and as inhuman as someone else, but who does not practice the opposite virtues, is inferior to that person in both inner strength and prestige, and he will not hold out in a confrontation”. No Democrat understood this better than Bernie Sanders.

2 — The Bernie Sanders Youth Revolution

It would not be incorrect to say that Sanders, like Trump, presents himself as a populist. It remains, however, to differentiate which type of popular figure each builds and why that will be decisive in the next elections.

Trump understood the dissatisfaction that was growing at the bottom of American society and placed himself in the figure of leader in the most proper sense of the term: the symbolic unification that creates a stable meaning and configures the identity of an entire field around him. Sanders, on the other hand, also represents a center, which does not serve to magnetize the Democratic camp, but to be crossed and thus split the personalist focus of the candidacy. This is how, after all, his campaign works: in a feedback loop between the electorate and a well-represented candidate in the campaign motto Not Me, Us. Not for another reason, “Sanders” is the electoral expression of the fights of Ocuppy Wall Street, Fight for $ 15, Black Lives Matter and #MeToo.

While his Democratic competitor Joe Biden has all sorts of billionaires among his donors (including more than Trump), the Vermont senator has appealed money from the Super-PACS — famous funds that collect contributions from billionaires and distribute to selected campaigns — to bet on ordinary voters. If Trump intends to revalue the American common man, it is Sanders who truly does so as his campaign is financed by the population itself.

To give you an idea, more than 1.4 million people contributed to your campaign in 2019 with donations averaging $ 18 per person, which includes donations from teachers, salespeople, supermarket attendants, workers, waiters, nurses… and young people — many young people — from those who ask their parents for money to those who earn few money in unstable jobs. To involve this youth in the campaign, Sanders launched the BERN app through which volunteers self-organize and act, in a decentralized way, in home visits, phone calls, meetings with other volunteers, information sharing, crowdfundings, etc.

But why this contamination of youth by the Sanders phenomenon can be decisive? In the United States, the percentage of those who do not attend the polls is around 50%. Winning these votes, therefore, is critical to electoral victory in 2020 — and what fills us with hope is that the majority of these are young people (about 35% of non-voters are between 18 and 29 years old). Considering that the Democrat presents a radically innovative platform, it is not too much to think that unlikely people will go to the polls in a wave fueled by collective contagion and the impact of his proposals on the lives of young American workers and students.

Just as immigrants coming en masse after the First World War meant a new constituency that made Franklin Roosevelt’s victory and his New Deal viable, rescuing the young could lead the victory of the democrat with the most radical program ever since.

3 — Sanders’ economic populism

Unlike the other Democratic presidential candidates, Sanders is betting heavily on polarizing Trump through the economy. In the past election, on the contrary, the opposition took place between, on the one hand, the establishment represented by Hillary Clinton (Nafta, fight against terrorism, alliance with Wall Street and almost nothing about the offshoring of American jobs). And on the other hand, Trump’s populism which associated reindustrialization and trade protectionism programs with the activation of the Nation State as a social-paranoid pathology to blame immigrants and feed familiar, identity and excluding affections. According to a survey by the Pew Research Center, 25% of non-voters said they didn’t go to the polls because they were averse to any of the candidates (the same percentage was 13% in 2012 and 8% in 2008).

Without giving up the identity and racial agendas that marked Bill Clinton and Obama’s administrations, Sanders conducts a transformative reflection on the economy with the capacity to involve the impoverished classes. If it is true that the American economy is doing well based on macroeconomic indices (inflation, interest rates, unemployment, etc.), the Democrat replies that nominal wages grew at almost the same rate as inflation; firearm deaths have reached their highest level in 20 years; the safety net and access to public services worsened.

In doing so, Sanders attacks the Achilles heel that really undermines the public support of Trump, far more effective than the criticisms that sell Trump as a buffoon, anti-republican, misogynist or any other definition that, correct in themselves, don’t take much people to the polls. The little popular appeal galvanized by the recent impeachment process against the Republican, for example, is a proof that democracy and other issues such as abortion and minority rights are no longer so convincing. In its place, the socialist demoralizes the current economic context by opposing it to the horizon of social policies that the United States has never had — free health insurance and free access to higher education; cancellation of student financing debts; increased taxes on large fortunes; reform of the financial system.

As is known, in the last election the counties that voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012 and then changed to Trump in 2016 were decisive. What should also be taken into account is a survey by the American National Elections Survey that showed how voters who changed Obama by Trump were more “concerned about the current financial situation” than any other voters. It’s the economy, stupid.

If Sanders provoked a redemption on ideas and terms like socialism, it was because that was the name he gave to the refusal of austerity (and also of war, racism, sexism and homophobia). Before the more conservatives Democrats are startled by him socialist inspiration, it is good to say: Bernie Sanders’ program does not violate the general rules of operation of the liberal economy (not for nothing, he insists that his socialism is similar to that of the Nordic countries), but argues that Americans can take risks in the free market with a safety net. It’s the economy too, stupid.