Friends,
Like Stephen Zunes, I
worked for the McGovern campaign, while living in Johnstown, PA. My
district of responsibility was an African-American section of the city, and I
was on a cloud as a vast majority of those voters supported George. For a $50
donation, I received a “Skinny Cat for McGovern” button, which I would wear
while shopping at a grocery store. I was teased unmercifully by the
cashier after the election. But sometime later as Watergate unfolded, she
told me I was right to support McGovern.
Kagiso, Max
Sanders Is Not Another
McGovern. I Know – I Worked on McGovern’s Campaign.
Vietnam Vets protest the war as George McGovern enters the Cow
Palace on October 13, 1972, in San Francisco, California. RON POWNALL / MICHAEL
OCHS ARCHIVES / GETTY IMAGES
February 26, 2020
With Bernie
Sanders now the clear front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination,
we are hearing talk that — despite polls indicating otherwise — he would not be
able to win against Donald Trump in November. Repeated comparisons are being
made to the 1972 landslide defeat of George McGovern — the only time the
Democrats nominated a genuine progressive — with the implication that a similar
fate would befall a Sanders nomination.
Speaking as a political
scientist, as someone who is not voting for Sanders in the primary, and as a
longtime Democratic activist who worked on McGovern’s campaign and was a friend
and collaborator with the late senator, I can say there is no justification for
the comparison.
First, that election was 48
years ago. Polls show that Americans are closer
on the issues to those articulated by Sanders today than Americans were to
those championed by McGovern in 1972. Same with important Democratic-leaning
constituencies. For example, the AFL-CIO, then dominated by Cold Warriors,
refused to endorse McGovern. By contrast, today’s unions are far more
progressive and are likely to actively mobilize their resources for Sanders.
Second, Richard Nixon — unlike
Trump — was a very popular president at that time. McGovern never came close to
leading Nixon in a single poll. Trump, by contrast, has had the most
consistently low popularity ratings of any president, and polls have
shown Sanders topping him by wider margins than any
of his Democratic rivals.
More importantly, McGovern’s
progressivism was not primarily responsible for his defeat.
The economy was doing great and
there was far less wealth and income inequality than today. Nixon was finally
ending the Vietnam War, which had been McGovern’s signature issue. The
embarrassing fiasco involving the dropping of Thomas Eagleton, his initial running
mate, from the ticket due to previously unreported mental health issues from
years earlier caused a huge drop in McGovern’s numbers from which he never
recovered. The “dirty tricks” campaign — planting phony stories, undercover
operations, posing as McGovern supporters engaging in disruptive behavior, and
more — that was later uncovered in the Watergate investigation that forced
Nixon’s resignation had an impact in discrediting the campaign. There were
weaknesses in the McGovern campaign’s organization and McGovern lacked the
charisma that has provided Sanders with such an avid following. And Sanders has
demonstrated a far more effective fundraising ability than McGovern, who was
badly outspent by Nixon.
Those who trumpet McGovern’s
loss generally fail to mention that when more progressive Democrats were
defeated in the primaries because voters were convinced that they needed a
“moderate” at the helm, they have usually lost. Examples include 1968, 1980,
1988, 2000, 2004 and 2016.
And let’s not forget that when
Republicans have ignored the advice that a certain candidate “can’t win”
because of extreme views, they have generally been able to mobilize their base
and win anyway, such as with Reagan in 1980 and Trump in 2016.
Those who fear that Republicans
will insist Sanders is a “socialist” and equate his social democratic policy
positions with Soviet-style Communism should remember that Republicans apply
such labels and worse toward practically any Democrat, even in situations where
the tactic is ludicrous. The Republican attacks are going to be vicious and
dishonest whoever is nominated. Furthermore, red-baiting doesn’t have the
resonance it did during the Cold War. The majority of voters at this point
weren’t even adults when there was a Soviet Union, which collapsed nearly 30
years ago.
Socialism is not as scary a
concept as it used to be: One poll found over 40 percent of Americans actually prefer socialism to capitalism, and other recent
polls have also yielded similar figures.
Still, from David Brooks to the Clintons, the message of Sanders’s
supposed “unelectability” persists. Notably, these have generally come from
conservative anti-Trump pundits and those in the Democratic Party establishment
who simply do not want to see a left-leaning president. Indeed, similar
arguments were being made against Elizabeth Warren when she was surging in
the polls last fall, even though she self-identifies clearly as a capitalist
rather than as a socialist.
They also know that every major
Democratic candidate has a good chance at beating Trump, so they naturally
would rather see a more conservative Democratic nominee than a more progressive
one.
Perhaps Sanders as the nominee
would alienate some moderate Republican-leaning voters. They are a vanishing
breed, however. There were no serious Republican challengers to Trump’s
re-nomination. Polls show overwhelming support for Trump among
Republican-leaning voters. (This is why Republican members of Congress have
been so afraid to challenge him, even when faced with clear evidence of
impeachable offenses.) Polls also show Sanders has more support among independent voters than any other Democrat and is running better than most
Democrats in key swing states.
The notion that nominating a progressive
candidate will inevitably result in Trump’s re-election simply isn’t true.
Jim Hightower, a left-wing Democrat who won
statewide office in Texas, has noted that within the white middle class, there
are more downwardly mobile angry voters who would be more attracted to
Sanders’s call to shake up the system in a progressive direction than a return
to normalcy. The status quo ante doesn’t have that much appeal.
Studies have shown, for example,
that areas in the northern tier swing states that shifted most dramatically
from Obama in 2008 and 2012 to Trump in 2016 corresponded almost exactly to
areas with the highest casualty rates from Iraq and Afghanistan. Trump actually
ran to Hillary Clinton’s left on foreign policy, disingenuously claiming —
unlike her — that he opposed the Iraq War, would end foreign entanglements and
would bring U.S. troops home. He could use the same argument against Joe Biden
or Michael Bloomberg.
Trump also made inroads among
working-class voters opposed to the North American Free Trade Agreement and the
World Trade Organization, which Clinton, Biden and other centrist Democrats
supported.
Sanders, by contrast, opposed
both the Iraq War and these neoliberal trade agreements. As the Democratic
standard-bearer, he would rob Trump of his advantage among the thousands of
swing voters whose children were disproportionately sent to fight overseas and
whose jobs were sent out of the country.
The antidote to right-wing
populism based on a nativist and racist ideology is a multiracial left-wing
populism based on inclusion. By contrast, a neoliberal centrism that has left
so many Americans struggling economically provides fodder for those who seek to
scapegoat immigrants and people of color.
Indeed, a Democratic victory
comes within reach if Democrats mobilize higher turnout among youth, people of
color, and other left-leaning Democrats and independents who stayed home or
voted third party in 2016. Sanders has demonstrated he can do this in
increasing youth turnout in the primaries and building a multiracial coalition.
And to win in the general election, Democrats also need to beat Republicans in
the enthusiasm gap, which can determine the numbers willing to actively campaign
for or contribute to their party’s nominee.
As Robert Kuttner and other analysts have
noted, energizing Democratic voters to turn out in high numbers would more than
make up for the limited handful of centrist voters turned off by Sanders’s
progressive politics.
It’s time for progressives to
push back on the Democratic establishment’s scaremongering and self-serving
arguments about electability. The notion that nominating a progressive
candidate will inevitably result in Trump’s re-election simply isn’t true.
Stephen Zunes is a professor of
politics and coordinator of Middle Eastern studies at the University of San
Francisco.
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski2001 [at] comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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