The case for Bernie Sanders, revisited

The case for Bernie Sanders, revisited. 

By Matthew Yglesias

SlowBoring.com

March 7, 2021. 

Biden stands next to Sanders at Democratic Presidential Debate

(MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images)

Back in January 2020, Vox did an exercise where a bunch of different writers made their best cases for different potential Democratic nominees, and I made the case for Bernie Sanders.

Since I have more recently made the case that moderates are better at winning elections, there’s a tension there worth exploring. One thing to say about this is that, as I wrote in the piece about moderates, it’s not like ideological positioning is the only thing that matters for election-winning. And as I detail in the Sanders piece, Bernie personally has an excellent electoral track-record where he consistently runs ahead of the Democratic ticket.

The through-line in my argument across the two pieces, if you read them together or are generally familiar with Yglesias Thought, is that Democrats have specifically hurt themselves since 2012 with leftward moves on guns and immigration. And Bernie’s record on guns and immigration is actually more moderate than Joe Biden’s.

But rather than just leave it at that, I think it’s important to fully revisit the argument, because so much ended up changing between January 2020 and November 2020 that it’s interesting to look back at what has held up.

National security substance

One of my core beliefs about the Democratic presidential primaries I’ve covered is that way too little attention is paid to foreign policy issues. The current situation on legislation where the President of the United States is to the left of the median senator was a 100% foreseeable result of the map. It’s Congress that writes laws — all that time spent debating varieties of public options and different Medicare for All plans was basically a waste of time.

By contrast, while presidents certainly face constraints in foreign policy, the constraints are much looser.

And here, I just strongly prefer Sanders’ ideas. I don’t know exactly what’s in the water at the natsec think tanks, but somehow we are on the third straight president to take office and correctly say that the U.S. is expending too much attention and resources in the Middle East, but who then somehow finds himself dropping bombs in Syria.

I think both Obama and Trump had somewhat tense relationships with the national security establishment, and ultimately neither of them were able to successfully navigate it. Biden, to me, seems like someone who has a total mind-meld with the people and ideas that have shaped U.S. foreign policy to disastrous results in the 21st century, and I have really serious worries about this score. Separate from the Bernie question, I always preferred someone like an Amy Klobuchar or Pete Buttigieg to Biden, because I at least had hope born of uncertainty for their foreign policy approach. So far, nothing terrible has happened with Biden, but that’s my big fear about him — he hasn’t allayed it yet.

But the other big substantive point I marked in Bernie’s favor — macroeconomic policy — is different, and here Biden is doing amazing.

Full employment Joe

You have to remember that the economic and political circumstances of January 2020 were totally different. Unemployment was low, wages were starting to rise, the CBO was claiming that the economy was operating “above potential,” but the Fed had recently reversed course and started lowering interest rates.

I thought (and continue to think) it was very important to have a president who was a strong full employment hawk, and I was confident that Bernie would be that kind of president.

With Biden, the hope was built on his relationship with Jared Bernstein — one of the OG full employment hawks in Washington — who served as his economics advisor during Obama’s first term. But Bernstein was not a core figure in the Obama administration’s economic team, and the Obama Squad’s record on full employment was decidedly mixed. I worried that Biden could bring back a return to questing after grand bargains, or asserting that there’s no way demand shortfalls could be the cause of low labor force participation.

Yadda yadda yadda, pandemic, recession, CARES Act, yadda yadda yadda, Biden is now in office and leading the most exciting push for full employment that I’ve seen in my lifetime. Deutsche Bank thinks Biden and Jay Powell are going to team up to deliver GDP growth that is faster than the pre-pandemic baseline.

You can see they had three lines here. The teal is where they thought the economy was in trouble, and then the gray line where Democrats win a Senate majority and see another round of stimulus happening. But then there’s the dark blue line, when they realize that Joe Manchin is honest to God going to vote for a giant stimulus.

Biden is just kicking ass here, and good for him.

So that raises the question: Wouldn’t Bernie just have lost? I’m not so sure.

Bernie would’ve won?

Looking at the Real Clear Politics average, on the date that my piece published, Biden was running 1.7 percentage points stronger than Sanders. Bernie was ahead of Trump by more than Biden’s ultimate margin of victory, and Biden was doing even better than that.

Back in 2016, I had been pretty skeptical of arguments based on Bernie’s polling advantage against Trump, because I thought it largely reflected the paucity of anti-Bernie attacks in the media environment at that time. By January 2020, the situation was different. While Bernie clearly had electoral vulnerabilities that Trump would try to exploit, there had been plenty of daggers thrown his way, and I thought it was better-litigated.

To me, from the January vantage point, it was actually Biden whose record had gone a little unscrutinized in a while. I thought Trump would roast him in the Midwest over his votes for NAFTA and normalized trade relations with China, as well as many past statements in favor of cutting Social Security.

My vision for how Bernie was going to win was actually sort of similar to my view of how Trump won in the first place. Trump struck elites and political insiders as a wild and extreme figure since he said crazy things and seemed racist. But the mass electorate deemed him moderate because, in contrast to previous Republicans, he defended Social Security and Medicare and seemed sympathetic to the idea of expanded government provision of health insurance. Sanders, similarly, was coded as extreme because he is antagonistic to rich people. But I thought he was playing as a moderate by tapping into the side of his personality that proudly endorsed pro-life candidates down-ballot and crankily referred to open borders as a “Koch brothers proposal.”

I thought we were heading into a period where rising wages and a strong economy were going to make things very difficult for Democrats. It seemed to me that Biden, under those circumstances, would be stuck with wan retreats of Clinton’s arguments about Trump’s naughty words, while Trump argued that Biden would jeopardize the economy, take away your Social Security, and then come after your guns.

Bernie, I thought, had a policy argument that was well-suited to a period when the economy was strong — the basic idea that the richest country on earth shouldn’t be a place where people face medical bankruptcies and children grow up in poverty.

Obviously, we instead ended up with a very different campaign.

Known unknowns

The world was turned upside down by the COVID-19 pandemic, and then politics was shaken up by the great racial reckoning that followed the death of George Floyd.

And I think the do-or-die question for Sanders would have been how he navigated the post-Floyd protests.

One side of Bernie’s politics is all about class conflict and skeptical of identity politics. His razor-thin margin of victory in his first mayoral campaign in Burlington was at the time widely attributed to him securing the police union endorsement and running on higher pay for the cops.

Back in the day, Bernie was the kind of guy who would tout his “support for law enforcement” and stage photo ops with cops bragging about the pork he brought home.

David Shor explains that when looking at why Black and especially Hispanic voters flipped to Trump in 2020, “Clinton voters with conservative views on crime, policing, and public safety were far more likely to switch to Trump than voters with less conservative views on those issues.”

So my fantasy Bernie is the kind of Bernie who is dug-in on working class voters and their views. Someone who backs reform, but firmly rejects police abolition. And who, more than that, does what Biden would never in a million years do and calls out some of the woke posturing from Fortune 500 companies who’ll say “Black Lives Matter” on social media while lobbying against minimum wage increases or expansions of healthcare coverage. I think the anti-racist energy Floyd’s death unleashed could theoretically have been channeled into very productive political directions, but was instead mostly diverted into two separate streams — one of dead-end radicalism and one of hollow, elitist posturing.

But the other side of Bernie, especially in the past five years, is a guy who has totally transcended his Vermont political origins and just wants to agree with left-wing activists on anything and everything they happen to be saying.

I don’t think Biden navigated the post-Floyd moment all that well — this was the peak of the “basement campaign,” when he was basically just lying low and putting faith in the (retrospectively inaccurate) polls showing him way ahead — but it’s definitely possible that Bernie would have navigated it disastrously. One key difference is that Biden had rock-solid relationships with the established Black political leadership in America and won the Black vote in the primaries handily, so he was not defensive about being at odds with activists on some issues. For Sanders, his entry point to the Black electorate was precisely the activists who are frustrated with the established, Biden-friendly Black political leadership. I think it would have been very awkward for him to pirouette away from his people in that way.

I always thought that Amy Klobuchar was the real electable moderate in the race, even more than Biden. But if I had specifically known in advance that a police brutality case in Minneapolis was about to become the center of the political universe, I definitely would have picked Biden over Klobuchar! Bernie’s hypothetical candidacy is not undermined in that same kind of super-specific way. But with full knowledge of the racial reckoning that happened midway through 2020, it was probably better to have Biden. But also, I think Cory Booker might have been best of all.

That said, I don’t think the main points of the piece hold up badly.

Credible compromise

One point about governing that I made in the piece is that Sanders would be in a strong position to make legislative compromises with moderates and then sell them to the Democratic base.

A lot of mainstream Democrats formed a negative opinion of Sanders as a legislator based on the fact that the biggest Bernie fans on Twitter are shitheads and morons. But if you look at Sanders’ actual legislative record, it’s fine. He doesn’t pull bizarre Freedom Caucus stunts and torpedo bills. He’s also not a Twitter rando with a red rose in his username — he’s served in Congress for decades and knows how to count votes. What he does have going for him is that the shitheads and morons like him, so when President Sanders cuts a deal with Joe Manchin to raise the minimum wage to $12/hour, they’ll say “amazing! We raised the minimum wage!” while when President Biden eventually gets that deal done, they will characterize it as the most shocking betrayal of the working class in history.

The desire to see politicians elevated on the basis of thinking that their supporters are good is a kind of brain poison induced by mixing the genres of politics and fandom.

This is how so many people I know got sucked into the vortex of supporting Elizabeth Warren. I like Elizabeth Warren a lot. She appeals to me. And also to people who are like me — which is to say, to people that I like. There’s a lot of good Elizabeth Warren vibes in my social circle. But my social circle doesn’t feature cross-pressured swing voters, nor socially alienated people who might not even bother to vote at all. My social circle is great! It’s filled with responsible, intelligent people who will reliably vote for the Democratic nominee come hell or high water. So why on earth should you nominate someone who we love? Bernie brings a lot of terrible people into the tent, which is exactly what you need to do since the good and sensible people are not a majority.

Bring back class polarization

Now forgetting about Bernie and the specifics of the 2020 race, here’s what I think is the important point going forward — Democrats need to try to fight the tendency of the electorate to polarize along the lines of educational attainment rather than income.

Compared to Hillary Clinton, Biden seems like more of a lunchbucket, back-to-basics, old-school Democrat. The kind of guy who’d get along well with building trades unions or whatever. But he assembled by far the most bougie, upscale Democratic Party coalition that the world has ever seen.

And it’s not just bad for Democrats’ Senate map (though it is) — it’s a dangerous and destabilizing political paradigm.

Back in the aughts, Democrats won their fair share of the votes from the kind of people who think Epstein didn’t kill himself and complain about how you can’t trust the corporate media. We had 9/11 truthers in both parties, but especially among Democrats. By losing downscale cranks to Trump and making it up by winning the votes of high-minded suburbanites, you’re creating a situation where all the high-minded people are in one party while the other party is scarily authoritarian.

Now don’t get me wrong, it’s great to win high-minded people’s votes if you can win them in addition to the votes of the Obama/Trump or Hillary/Trump floating voters. That would just mean winning by huge landslides, which is of course a great idea. But bleeding more and more low-trust, less-educated people who see the world in terms of zero-sum conflicts is not a great trend. The ballast to politics in the last few decades is that the more cosmopolitan party is supposed to also be a party of left-wing class conflict that draws in the votes of people who see themselves in zero-sum conflict with the rich.

I feel pretty confident that the Bernie Sanders of the 2016 campaign had the right approach to doing that. I’m less clear that 2020 Bernie had it in him. But what I really think is that going forward, someone needs to try it. A politics of pure “trust the experts” and academic intersectionality theory is setting itself up to lose and then get permanently plowed under the way we’ve seen in Central Europe.