The Democratic Party's Cynical, Anti-Democratic Maneuvers Against Bernie Sanders

By Branko Marcetic, Jacobin

05 May 20

New York Democrats have struck Bernie Sanders from the ballot, canceling the state’s June primary. It’s left a bitter taste in the mouths of his supporters, whose disillusionment with the Democratic Party will only deepen.

lmost as soon as former vice president Joe Biden was left as the only candidate still running in the Democratic primary, the celebration that typically follows a nomination victory was replaced by panic among Democrats and the liberal press: Would the party unify? Would Bernie Sanders supporters get behind Biden? Three weeks later, New York Democrats have effectively canceled the state’s Democratic primary, angering Sanders supporters and deepening the party rift Biden backers fear may hurt his chances in November.

When Sanders officially suspended his campaign on April 8, he made clear he would stay on the ballot in upcoming primary contests to accrue delegates and wield some influence over the party platform and rules come convention time. But before the month was even over, New York lawmakers slipped a provision into the state’s budget bill paving the way for the New York State Board of Elections’ unanimous vote last Monday to remove Sanders from the ballot. Co-chair Douglas Kellner called the primary “a beauty contest” that is “unnecessary and frivolous,” and cited health concerns around voting during a pandemic.

The decision elicited outrage from top Sanders advisers like Nina Turner, who charged it had a “chilling effect on democracy,” and Jeff Weaver, who called it a “blow to American democracy.” But it’s also infuriated rank-and-file Sanders backers, who told Jacobin they feel disrespected, silenced, and believe the decision will make the mission of defeating Trump in November more difficult.

Joseph Henderson was a Sanders delegate for New York’s 21^st district, a rural area in the northern part of the state bordering Vermont. He estimates he spent hundreds of hours over the holidays driving around, organizing events, and gathering signatures in the dead of winter to be on the ballot, all of which has now been for naught.

“For a party that calls themselves the Democratic Party, they really don’t care for actual democracy,” he says.

Diana Klementowski first got involved in politics in 2000 because she “despised George W. Bush so much.” She supported Sanders in 2016 before campaigning for Hillary Clinton in Ohio for the general election, and decided to become a delegate this year.

“I did a lot,” she says. “As soon as you could start collecting petition signatures, I literally ran out the door, went to my car, drove down the road and started petitioning. I was darn determined.”

Klementowski says she spent three to four hours a day nearly every day for weeks collecting signatures, gathering more than 150 of the 500 her group of five needed. Apologizing at one point for using the word “damn” in describing her reaction to the latest news, Klementowski clearly found it difficult to hold back a sense of betrayal.

“They’re the only stupid state to do this,” she says. “I’m very, very, very angry.”

It was much the same for Toni Kennedy, a registered nurse and Democratic member of the Potsdam town council who was inspired to enter politics by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Kennedy, too, went door-to-door in the bitter cold of January gathering signatures to get on the ballot as a Sanders delegate.

“New York is one of the hardest states in the country to get on the ballot for,” she says. “So when you put a lot of work into getting on the ballot and you do everything you’re supposed to do, to just be removed without any say or consideration, it’s very undemocratic.”

Confirming the Worst Suspicions

It isn’t just potential delegates who feel let down. Zohar Gitlis, thirty-two, Henderson’s neighbor and a volunteer for the Sanders campaign, comes from a Democratic voting family and says she’s held a “pretty go with the flow, loyal Democratic mindset” for her entire voting life. After supporting Sanders in 2016, she door-knocked for Clinton that October due to her concern over Trump being elected. This year, she believes she spent somewhere close to ten hours a week on the campaign for a month and a half, including gathering signatures for ballot access phone-banking, and volunteering in New Hampshire.

“I did a door-to-door during a snowstorm one Saturday afternoon, asking for signatures,” she recalls. “I remember thinking, ‘This is great, ‘cause so many people are at home.’ But I definitely got a lot of ‘I can’t believe you’re out right now.’”

For Gitlis, the decision to cancel the primary has made it hard to envision eventually having one-on-one conversations with voters for the Biden campaign.

“I’m feeling more alienated than ever by the Democratic establishment, more completely taken for granted and disrespected,” she says. “This news definitely ignited that feeling, more than any of the other outrageous things that have happened in this election cycle, ‘cause I guess it was personal, ‘cause I’d gathered signatures.”

“It’s a slap in the face,” says Jay Bellanca, upstate co-chair of the New York Progressive Action Network, an affiliate of the Sanders-backed Our Revolution. Bellanca, who first got involved in politics working for Kirsten Gillibrand’s 2006 Congressional campaign, says the cancellation is already undermining party unity going into November.

“I’ve tried to bridge the gap between the Bernie people and the establishment, and every time, it just makes it so difficult when they do things like this,” he says. “The ‘DemExit’ thing has picked up steam again.”

It was a sentiment repeated again and again by Sanders supporters, who, while personally committed to defeating Trump in November, now fear it will be much harder to get others on board. Several recounted similar feelings among others in their social networks: that they were angry, feel the decision confirms their worst suspicions about the party, and that they can’t bring themselves to go the extra mile to elect Biden come November — some may even vote third party.

“I know a lot of people who have voted blue every election of their lives and knocked on doors for plenty of candidates they don’t like who are feeling particularly uninspired to do that this cycle,” says Gitlis.

“You’ve now caused the disunity that Trump would only dream of,” says Larry Cohen, Our Revolution board chair. “Those of us who are committed to beating Trump and electing Joe Biden president, this makes it harder.”

Others see more far-reaching consequences in the cancellation, with many Democratic voters fearing that Trump will use the pandemic as justification to cancel the election in November.

“New York has provided a precedent for this,” says Kennedy. “It only makes it easier for Trump to do it, to say he’s only doing what blue states have done.”

As it stands, the decision to cancel on the basis of health concerns makes little sense. For one thing, Cuomo has already pledged to give all registered voters the ability to vote absentee. And even with the cancelation of the presidential primary, most of the state’s residents will still be voting in June in an array of down-ballot races anyway.

The decision is also difficult to square with the party’s resistance toward earlier calls to delay primaries over the risk of magnifying the pandemic’s spread add suppressing voting. Illinois governor and Biden supporter J. B. Pritzker ignored the Chicago Board of Elections request to delay the state’s primary despite having urged people to stay home just days earlier, while Ohio’s Democratic Party challenged its Republican governor’s decision to postpone his, and the Democratic National Committee threatened states with losing delegates if they delayed their primaries too far in the future.

Meanwhile, Biden campaign staff and Biden himself repeatedly misinformed voters that it was safe to vote in person, arguing that elections were held during the Civil War and 1918 influenza, and reportedly insisting against delaying Wisconsin’s primary. Coronavirus cases and deaths have since been traced to all those elections.

It’s all left a sour taste in the mouths of supporters of Sanders, who, despite his loss, make up a significant chunk of the Democratic base, particularly its younger cohort. Biden is currently struggling with younger voters, a key part of Obama’s winning coalition, and who have been frustrated at Biden’s refusal to embrace elements of Sanders’s agenda. For them, the cancellation of New York’s primary seems just further proof that the party, for all its demands for unity, is bent on proving it can win without them.

“If they cut progressives out, I hope they don’t blame us if Biden loses the election,” says Kennedy.

V-E Day Plus 75: From a Moment of Victory to a Time of Pandemic

By Andrew Bacevich, TomDispatch

05 May 20

 

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There was certainly a hint that the previous century was not going to unfold in a particularly propitious manner when World War I, “the war to end all wars” (a phrase famously attributed to American President Woodrow Wilson), proved but an introduction to a second world war that would make the first look more like a skirmish. Add in the fact that the pandemic to end all pandemics, the 1918 “Spanish flu” (that may actually have originated in the United States), killed at least 50 million people on this planet before being forgotten in the catastrophic Great Depression and, until recently, essentially dropped from history.

And that, mind you, is the world that Andrew Bacevich’s parents and mine inherited. They -- at least those of them who fought in that second world war -- would later be dubbed “the greatest generation” (a phrase made famous as the title of a 1998 book by journalist Tom Brokaw). At least in my experience and those of my friends, however, the fathers of that era knew better and generally were remarkably silent about that war of theirs and its supposed glories, even as, in my childhood, Hollywood was putting shining versions of it on every movie screen around.

Now, we’re two decades into a new century, one in which the U.S. has been fighting a series of wars that won’t end (no less end all war) and in which this country has only recently been consumed by a Spanish-flu-like global pandemic whose best (that is, worst) days may still be ahead of it on significant parts of the planet. In that context, TomDispatch regular Bacevich, author of the new book The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory, considers what the children of that “greatest” generation (including both him and me) have to look back on 75 years after their parents' war (at least the one in Europe) ended in a triumph that promised an American world beyond compare and has ended up in a nothingness that's sad to behold.

-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch

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he 75th anniversary of Nazi Germany’s surrender in May 1945 ought to prompt thoughtful reflection. For Americans, V-E Day, as it was then commonly called, marked the beginning of “our times.” The Covid-19 pandemic may signal that our times are now coming to an end.

Tom Engelhardt, editor and proprietor of TomDispatch, was born less than a year prior to V-E Day. I was born less than two years after its counterpart V-J Day, marking the surrender of Imperial Japan in August 1945.

Tom is a New Yorker, born and bred. I was born and raised in the Midwest.

Tom is Jewish, although non-observant. I am a mostly observant Catholic.

Tom is a progressive who as a young man protested against the Vietnam War. I am, so I persist in claiming, a conservative. As a young man, I served in Vietnam.

Yet let me suggest that these various differences matter less than the fact that we both came of age in the shadow of World War II -- or more specifically in a time when the specter of Nazi Germany haunted the American intellectual landscape. Over the years, that haunting would become the underlying rationale for the U.S. exercise of global power, with consequences that undermined the nation’s capacity to deal with the menace that it now faces.

Tom and I both belong to what came to be known as the Baby Boom generation (though including him means ever so slightly backing up the official generational start date). As a group, Boomers are generally associated with having had a pampered upbringing before embarking upon a rebellious youth (Tom more than I), and then as adults helping ourselves to more than our fair share of all that life, liberty, and happiness had on offer. Now, preparing to exit the stage, we Boomers are passing on to those who follow us a badly damaged planet and a nation increasingly divided, adrift, and quite literally sick. A Greatest Generation we are not.

How did all this happen? Let me suggest that, to unpack American history during the decades when we Baby Boomers sashayed across the world stage, you have to begin with World War II, or more specifically, with how that war ended and became enshrined in American memory.

Of course, we Boomers never experienced the war directly. Our parents did. Tom’s father and both of my parents served in World War II. Yet neither were we Boomers ever truly able to put that war behind us. For better or worse, members of our generation remain the children of V-E Day, when -- so we tell ourselves -- evil was finally vanquished and good prevailed.

Never Forget

For Tom, for me, and for our contemporaries, World War II as history and as metaphor centers specifically on the Nazis and their handiwork: swastikas, mammoth staged rallies, the Gestapo and the SS, the cowardice of surrender at Munich, the lightning offensive campaigns known as blitzkrieg, London burning, the Warsaw Ghetto, slave labor, and, of course, a vast network of death camps leading to the Holocaust, all documented in film, photographs, archives, and eyewitness accounts.

And then there was der Führer himself, Adolf Hitler, the subject of a fascination that, over the decades, proved bottomless and more than slightly disturbing. (If your local library ever reopens, compare the number of books about Hitler to those about Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini or wartime Japanese emperor Hirohito.) Seventy-five years after his death, Hitler remains among us, the supreme villain routinely pressed into service by politicians and media pundits alike intent on raising the alarm about some imminent danger. If ever there were a man for all seasons, it is Adolf Hitler.

Hitler's centrality helps explain why Americans typically date the opening of World War II to September 1939 when the Wehrmacht invaded Poland. Only in December 1941 did the United States (belatedly) join the conflict, the Imperial Japanese Navy’s attack on Pearl Harbor and other American installations in the Pacific forcing Washington’s hand. In fact, however, a full decade earlier Japan had already set out to create what it would eventually call its Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. In September 1931, its forces invaded then Chinese-controlled Manchuria, an undertaking that soon enough morphed into a very large and brutal armed conflict with China proper in which the United States participated on a proxy basis. (Remember the Flying Tigers?) In other words, World War II actually began in Asia rather than Europe, with the first shots fired years before the Nazi attack on Poland.

Yet launching the narrative in September 1939 has the effect of keeping the primary focus on Germany. From a moral perspective, there are ample reasons for doing this: Even in a century of horrendous crimes -- the Armenian genocide, Stalin’s extermination of Ukraine’s kulaks, and Mao Zedong’s murderous campaign against his own people -- the sheer unadulterated evil of the Nazi regime stands apart.

From a political perspective, however, intense preoccupation with one example of iniquity, however horrific, induces a skewed perspective. So it proved to be with the United States during the decades that followed V-E Day. Subsumed within the advertised purposes of postwar U.S. policy, whether called “defense,” “deterrence,” “containment,” “liberation,” or “the protection of human rights,” has been this transcendent theme: “Never Again.” That is, never again will the United States ignore or appease or fail to confront a regime that compares to -- or even vaguely resembles -- Nazi Germany. Never again will it slumber until rudely awakened by a Pearl Harbor-like surprise. Never again will it allow its capacity for projecting power against distant threats to dissipate. Never again will it fail to lead.

Of all Donald Trump’s myriad deficiencies, large and small, this may be the one that his establishment critics find most difficult to stomach: his resurrection of “America First” as a primary principle of statecraft suggests a de facto nullification of “Never Again.”

To Trump’s critics, it hardly matters that “America First” in no way describes actual administration policy. After all, more than three years into the Trump presidency, our endless wars persist (and in some cases have even intensified); the nation’s various alliances and its empire of overseas bases remain intact; U.S. troops are still present in something like 140 countries; Pentagon and national security state spending continues to increase astronomically. Even so, the president does appear oblivious to the historical antecedent -- that is, the imperative of standing ready to deal with the next Hitler -- that finds concrete expression in these several manifestations of U.S. national security policy. No one has ever accused Donald Trump of possessing a profound grasp of history. Yet here his apparent cluelessness is especially telling.

Not least among the unofficial duties of any president is to serve as the authoritative curator of public memory. Through speeches, proclamations, and the laying of wreaths, presidents tell us what we should remember and how. Through their silence, they give us permission to forget the parts of our past that we prefer to forget. Himself born barely a year after V-E Day, Donald Trump seems to have forgotten World War II.

New Signs for a New Time?

Yet let’s consider this admittedly uncongenial possibility: perhaps Trump is onto something. What if V-E Day is no more relevant to the present than the Treaty of Ghent, which ended the War of 1812? What if, as a basis for policy, “Never Again” is today just as outmoded as “America First”? What if clinging to the canonical lessons of the war against Hitler impedes efforts to repair our nation and our planet?

An abiding problem with “Never Again” is that U.S. policymakers have never applied it to the United States. Since V-E Day, individuals and regimes deemed in Washington to be the spawn of Hitler and the Nazis have provided justification for successive administrations to accumulate arms, impose punishments, underwrite coups and assassination plots, and, of course, wage war endlessly. Beginning with Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and China’s Mao Zedong, the list of malefactors that U.S. officials and militant journalists have likened to Hitler is a long one. They’ve ranged from North Korea’s Kim Il Sung in the 1950s to Cuba’s Fidel Castro in the 1960s to Iraq’s Saddam Hussein in the 1990s. And just to bring things up to date, let’s not overlook the ayatollahs governing present-day Iran.

Two decades after V-E Day, a succession of presidents deployed lessons ostensibly derived from the war against Hitler to justify the Vietnam War. John F. Kennedy described South Vietnam as "the cornerstone of the Free World in Southeast Asia, the Keystone of the arch, the finger in the dike." Failing to defend that country would allow "the red tide of Communism," as he put it, to sweep across the region much as appeasers had allowed the Nazi tide to sweep across Europe. "Everything I knew about history," Lyndon Johnson reflected, "told me that if I got out of Vietnam and let Ho Chi Minh run through the streets of Saigon, then I'd be doing exactly what [Neville] Chamberlain did in World War II," a reference, of course, to the Munich Agreement with Hitler, which that British prime minister so infamously labeled "peace in our time." Even as late as 1972, Richard Nixon was assuring the public that "an American defeat" in Vietnam "would encourage this kind of aggression all over the world."

Vietnam provides but one example among many of how viewing problems through the lens of World War II in Europe has obscured real situations and actual stakes on this planet. In short, the promiscuous use of the Hitler analogy has produced deeply flawed policy decisions, while also deceiving the American people. This has inhibited our ability to see the world as it actually is.

Overall, the approach to statecraft that grew out of V-E Day defined the ultimate purpose of U.S. policy in terms of resisting evil. That, in turn, provided all the justification needed for building up American military capabilities beyond compare and engaging in military action on a planetary scale.

In Washington, policymakers have shown little inclination to consider the possibility that the United States itself might be guilty of doing evil. In effect, the virtuous intentions implicit in “Never Again” inoculated the United States against the virus to which ordinary nations were susceptible. V-E Day seemingly affirmed that America was anything but ordinary.

Here, then, we arrive at one explanation for the predicament in which the United States now finds itself. In a recent article in the New York Times, journalist Katrin Bennhold wondered how it could be that, when it came to dealing with Covid-19, “the country that defeated fascism in Europe 75 years ago” now finds itself “doing a worse job protecting its citizens than many autocracies and democracies” globally.

Yet it might just be that events that occurred 75 years ago in Europe no longer have much bearing on the present. The country that defeated Hitler’s version of fascism (albeit with considerable help from others) has since allowed its preoccupation with fascists, quasi-fascists, and other ne’er-do-wells to serve as an excuse for letting other things slip, particularly here in the homeland.

The United States is fully capable of protecting its citizens. Yet what the present pandemic drives home is this: doing so, while also creating an environment in which all citizens can flourish, is going to require a radical revision of what we still, however inaccurately, call “national security” priorities. This does not mean turning a blind eye to mass murder. Yet the militarization of U.S. policy that occurred in the wake of V-E Day has for too long distracted attention from more pressing matters, not least among them creating a way of life that is equitable and sustainable. This perversion of priorities must now cease.

So, yes, let’s mark this V-E Day anniversary with all due solemnity. Yet 75 years after the collapse of the Third Reich, the challenge facing the United States is not “Never Again.” It’s “What Now?”

For the moment at least, Tom and I are still around. Yet “our times” -- the period that began when World War II ended -- have run their course. The “new times” upon which the nation has now embarked will pose their own distinctive challenges, as the Covid-19 pandemic makes unmistakably clear. Addressing those challenges will require leaders able to free themselves from a past that has become increasingly irrelevant.

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Andrew Bacevich, a TomDispatch regular, is president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. His new book is The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky's novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.