A Bernie Story

The Bernie Sanders campaign is encouraging supporters to hone the telling of how they came to support his candidacy in a project called "My Bernie Story". The suggested format from the campaign for a Bernie story is to personalize a key component of Bernie's agenda by framing an issue around the supporter's own experience.  For instance, I could legitimately be encouraged to discuss the anxiety I have about global warming, and my particular concern about the future for my daughter and for my nieces and nephews, let alone for the entire planet, and relate it specifically to Bernie's plan to attack it aggressively and in the process transform our economy through his proposed implementation of the Green New Deal.  I could do this and be done with it, but it doesn't tell the whole story.

Periodically the campaign sends surveys asking supporters to pick their top 3 issues from among a huge laundry list: Climate Change, Medicare For All, Cancelling Student Debt and establishing Free Public College Tuition, Worker's Rights, Wealth Inequality, Getting Money out of Politics, Voting Rights, Civil Rights, Prison Reform, Housing Reform, Women's Rights, LGBTQ rights, Immigration Reform, Getting Billionaires and Corporations to pay their fair share of taxes, and so forth.  Bernie has policy positions on each of these that align with my own desires and they are positions that he can back up by a lifetime of activism and public service.  While I can sometimes see my way clear to prioritizing the list for purposes of completing the survey, I find myself very resistant to the idea of excluding anything.  All of them have been neglected, rejected, or actively undermined in every case by our elected representatives who act not at the behest of their electorate but of their donors.  After a lifetime of settling for what technocrats and think tanks and "the serious" among our elites have told me are the limits of possibility, only to be woken up by the 2016 and 2020 campaigns of Bernie Sanders to the reality I knew all along-- that the only thing "serious" about the conventional wisdom of what is possible is that it is seriously full of shit-- I want it all.  I don't know how this campaign 2020 thing is going to work out but I do know that no matter what the outcome is, something important has happened for those for whom Bernie Sanders' message has resonated.  In my case, it's an awakening from a self-induced coma.

I always want to start my Bernie story with my first presidential election, Carter vs. Reagan 1980.  In many ways it was a lot like Clinton vs. Trump 2016, but there was no Bernie.  Governor Jerry Brown of California who challenged President Carter in the primary was outside the mold, but he didn't even support universal health care.  As a pre-voter, I had developed a rabid distrust of Jimmy Carter in his first term, but I vainly cast my first presidential vote for him as a way of avoiding a victory for his far worse challenger, Ronald Reagan.

Reagan, a jolly, wealthy Hollywood has-been, company spokesman and ex-governor was used very successfully as an advertisement promoting wealth, power and capitalism the benefits of which would-- if left unfettered to grow as only a free market would lead them to, the theory went-- "trickle down" to the rest of us. Carter had merely promised more of the same.  Reagan promised Morning in America, and to Make America Great Again. His team pioneered the injection of irrelevant, divisive cultural issues into politics to corral the votes of a "moral majority." Tired of recession and stagflation and wage freezes and oil crises and enamored with the sunny airhead they remembered from B Movies and TV re-runs who spoke only in corny sound bites, the people bought in.  In return, Reagan's administration architected the regressive, dysfunctional top down order that has dominated our culture ever since, making any hope of social, economic or environmental progress a fading memory while exacerbating the conditions that threaten our common existence and demand progressive responses.  They ravaged social programs by reducing taxes--the shared cost to each of us for the shared services we get in return-- particularly at the top, from what had been among the highest rates in the developed world (which had largely fueled the social programs of the 30's through the 60's-- the rates have continued to dip in intervening years from a high of 70% at the start of Reagan's term to what are now effectively less than 30%).  Within his first term he had destroyed the air traffic controller's union ringing the death knell for labor across the country,  and cut the budgets of Medicaid, food stamps, public education and the EPA all while bloating the budget of the military.

In the presidential primaries of 1984 and 1988, I was thrilled to support the campaigns of Jesse Jackson (an acknowledged inspiration for Bernie Sanders), but I had to vote for Mondale (who got trounced by Reagan for his second term) and Dukakis (who Bush the elder defeated) respectively in the general elections.  The first president my vote ever helped to elect was Bill Clinton in 1992, who built a career on the proposition that Democrats, who had lost all but one of the prior 6 presidential elections, could regain their mojo by offering a light version of Reaganism-- not Republican Reaganism or Democratic Socialism but a Third Way.  The genius of this approach was that coming from a "liberal", Clinton could do what Reagan had wanted to but never could by putting an end to social programs such as welfare, making the notion of trimming social security palatable to the technocratic elite, and passing the "3 strikes and you're out" crime bill that has devastated poor communities for 30 years.  And still get the votes of the Democratic base.

By Clinton's second term, I had renounced my democratic party ties and registered as an Independent, though I continued to vote mostly for Democrats (making an exception for Ralph Nader in 2000) mostly to avoid the always worse alternative.  But over time, I stopped paying close attention to politics as a way of improving my own mental health.  The entire culture had drunk the Kool Aid.  There was no fighting it.

If my stupor was typical no wonder the 1% won.  People who had more to begin with and kept getting more got very good at convincing the rest of us who started with less and were getting less and less that it had to be this way.  So we let them take away our public institutions, taking their word for it that what was missing was the profit motive.  Labor was fractured while management and ownership became consolidated.  Instead of establishing careers, we became competitors in a job market.  As the owners became more and more corrupt and conspiratorial in their business and professional practices, the employee's role in many companies has become something akin to abetting. Pensions were replaced with 401Ks through which financiers and Wall Street profited regardless of the risk to us.   Credit boomed as it became the only way anybody could afford anything. We handed them our airports, our police forces, our schools, our prisons.  Whatever they could get their hands on.  We've seen the result.  After the financial crash of 2008, hope came in the election of Barack Obama, but it was crushed before he even entered the White House by his appointment to his cabinet of representatives of the deregulators and Wall Street executives who created the climate in which the catastrophe occurred, signaling that what mattered was not the people who had felt most of the brunt of the crisis whose hope had elected him but the 1%  by whose grace he was permitted to serve, just as if those who had voted him in had never won at all.  The success of Trump's right wing populism following Obama's 2 terms was symptomatic of a global dysfunction imposed from the top tiniest percent that tells us that the only choice that remains to us is between fascist capitalism represented by Trump and his kind and Third Way capitalism represented by the Democrats and their neoliberal counterpart around the world.

For 40 years, down has been up, low has been high, wrong has been right.

Republicans, the Alphas of the current order, have been honest about their part in the inversion of what our experience tells us about American reality.  At the same time they have been marshaling their vast stores of wealth in strategic purchasing of the chains that bind the rest of us-- state legislatures, judiciaries, the executive branch.  Republicans' motives are pure at least, which is how their insane politics win at all.  Democrats have been dishonest about their complicity. The Democratic leadership, a decidedly Beta class, have compromised the purported left agenda of their party in an effort to be regarded as "serious" by the moneyed establishment while selling out their traditional base, the poor, the working class, women.  The upshot is that the 1% has gotten wealthier and wealthier while real incomes for everyone else have gotten smaller and smaller.  And the planet continues to be squeezed to death for profit.

Capitalism is a Pathological Fatal Illness from which we must be cured.

And in 2016, out of the blue, Bernie Sanders came along to remind us that it does not have to be this way. Republicans need workers to win and they appeal to them with cultural issues; Democrats need workers to win and they appeal to them with party loyalty.  But the only candidate that workers need to win is Bernie Sanders.

For the past 40 or 50 years the  message of the 1% has been:  Not you. Us!  Who's in charge?, they ask rhetorically.  Not you. Us!  Who decides where attention is paid?  Not you. Us!  Who's got this?   Not you!  Us!  And we have taken it. We’ve taken what they’ve given us which is less and less.  While life has cheapened and become harder for us, they’ve taken free rein to exploit the world we all live in for profit, without giving back (unless you count the dribs and drabs they bestow as they see fit in large enough amounts to call themselves philanthropists, never mind how meagerly they address the issues facing us).

And this is the message of most of the candidates running with their plans and their platforms and their debate talking points that they leave it to us to opt out of.  You don't need to worry about how things will get fixed.  Not you.  Us. 

We've got news for them. We don’t want your stinking plans. Bernie Sanders is the only candidate who says, “Not me. Us!”   All. Of. Us.  And this is how I came to awaken from my 30 year self-induced coma and support Bernie Sanders and now I urge you, my brothers and sisters, to ask yourself, "Which side am I on?" and do the same.  Time is wasting.  At least our primary votes don't need to be wasted as well.  Please join the revolution.