Confessions of a Warren-Sanders Unity Voter
The American left today: Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. (c/o C-SPAN)
FOR the past several years, I have been a student at a prestigious liberal arts university, a regular reader of Jacobin and similar leftwing publications, and a participant in the democracy, having cast my first vote in the election that produced Donald Trump—in other words, I fit the archetype of the die-hard Bernie supporter. Yet I would hardly describe myself in that way, though I plan to vote for Bernie Sanders in the primary. Conscious of the age-old pathological tendency of the left to exert more energy dividing itself into oblivion than on fighting the common enemy, I, along with more of my peers than is widely acknowledged, have adopted a personal policy of desperately hoping that either Sanders or Warren (or Andrew Yang!) will be the Democratic nominee for President, and that whoever falls short of the nomination will have no reservations in campaigning for the victor.
Many leftists consider such a stance to be spineless, unprincipled, and generally intolerable. I have read the deluge of opinion pieces warning of the existential chasm separating Sanders and Warren. Some of these pieces, like as those that claim we can’t “trust” Warren or that her victory would represent an “unconditional surrender” in the class struggle (what class struggle?) can be dismissed as thinly-evidenced alarmism. Others, like those that argue Warren is insufficiently committed to Medicare for All, make good points about the importance of long-term momentum in building support for universal policies like Medicare for All, but take an unrealistic view of political possibility. I support the political revolution, but it is unreasonable to suggest, as Sanders often seems to, that a sudden uptick in popular participation in government will magically dissolve the structural impediments of our democracy and break the stranglehold of special interests on lawmaking. I, like the plurality of Gen-Zers, align with Sanders’ ideological identification as a democratic socialist and recoil from Warren’s self-description as “a capitalist to my bones.” Yet I fear that (a) young people, jaded by the terrifying reality in which we have come of age, will continue to chronically under-participate in the political process (whatever our views of capitalism and socialism), thus depriving the political revolution of its most important asset; and (b) that Sanders has overplayed his hand, not by proposing radical policies but by proceeding as if their enactment is assured if only he becomes President. Once the movement hits up against the grim reality of politics—once its honeymoon phase is over—the failure of many of its lofty ambitions may give rise to widespread disillusionment. The experience of the left in power in Greece and in so many other places has taught us that much. This view is pessimistic, but here is something you should know about my generation if you don’t already: we have learned earlier than most to be pessimistic.
A realistic view of the next several years is that neither a Sanders nor a Warren administration will deliver on most of its major policy priorities. Instead, both will deploy executive orders to protect undocumented immigrants, to reign in the worst excesses of large corporations and monopoly capital, to lessen the cruelty of the criminal justice system, and to mitigate global warming. Perhaps most importantly, both will appoint liberal Supreme Court justices. For the last year, I have planned to vote for Bernie Sanders because I believe in some form of ecological socialism as the last hope for humanity, but just as much, if not more, because of the one area where Sanders truly stands apart from the others, which also happens to be one area where he will have real freedom to enact sweeping changes: reversing the course of American foreign policy and transcending the bipartisan strategic consensus that reigned uninterrupted from the end of World War II to the rise of Donald Trump.
That all changed for me this week, after CNN published a bombshell story claiming that, during a meeting between the two in December of 2018, Sanders told Warren that a woman couldn’t win the presidency. Hours after the story appeared, Warren confirmed it in a statement that read, in part, “Among the topics that came up [in the meeting] was what would happen if Democrats nominated a female candidate. I thought a woman could win; he disagreed.”
This turn of events is surprising. In the first place, this story—regardless of its truth or falsity—is a brazen repackaging of a bizarre and malign narrative, authored by the Clinton campaign in 2016 and kept alive by its denizens in the years since, that Bernie Sanders is some kind of sexist. There was the time MSNBC pundit Mimi Rocah volunteered that “Bernie Sanders makes my skin crawl” and also that “I can’t even identify for you what exactly it is…I see him as sort of a not pro-woman candidate.” There was Center for American Progress alum Emily Tisch Sussman’s declaration, newly relevant in light of recent events, that “Basically, at this point if you are still supporting Sanders as opposed to Warren, it's kind of showing your sexism.” Hand-in-hand with this line of argument, if one can call it that, is the related idea that women are obligated to support the only woman candidate in the race. This notion was most famously exemplified by Madeleine Albright’s remark at a 2016 Clinton rally in New Hampshire (which I attended) that “there is a special place in hell for women who don't help other women.” Most depressing of all was Gloria Steinem—who, lest we forget, bestowed honorary womanhood on then-Congressman Bernie Sanders in 1996—suggesting on Bill Maher’s talk show that the behavior of young female Sanders supporters can be explained by the fact that they “are thinking, where are the boys? The boys are with Bernie.” (She later rolled back the bizarre remarks and apologized.)
The principle problem with this narrative is that, on the basis of the facts, Sanders is a consummate political feminist. His gruff and eccentric personal style may be off-putting to some (though equally endearing to many others), but the aging Senator has been pushing for equal pay, paid maternity leave, and free access to abortion and reproductive healthcare for longer than many of the pundits now attacking him have been alive. Insofar as Sanders’ policies would furnish women with an unprecedented level of economic empowerment and independence (with insufficiently discussed ripple effects, like making it easier for women to leave abusive relationships) Sanders is the most feminist candidate currently running. This is in part what Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other members of the “Squad” were recognizing when they chose to endorse him over Senator Warren. In a 1988 television appearance that circulated after the CNN story broke, Sanders remarks, almost offhandedly, that “in my view, a woman could be elected President of the United States.” In other words, Sanders once said on camera precisely the opposite of what he is now accused of saying—eight years before Elizabeth Warren switched her party registration from Republican to Democrat.
Yet even that didn’t stop Sanders from trying to draft Warren into the race in 2015. As is widely known, Sanders only launched his own campaign, which revitalized the left, transformed the Democratic Party, and in turn paved the way for Warren’s 2020 run, after she demurred the first time around. That is a fact that has received entirely too little airing in the course of the present story. The Intercept has also reported that the Sanders campaign has been researching whether the same person could legally serve as vice president and treasury secretary simultaneously. The person they had in mind? Elizabeth Warren.
The appearance of the CNN story is also surprising because it signals the sudden and strange death of a non-aggression pact that has held between the two leftmost candidates in the race for over a year. The two Senators are personal friends, and their mutual refusal to attack each other for six consecutive debates has been widely noted. So long as the truce lasted, it was good for the progressive cause. But now it seems to have been broken in the most cynical way. The release of the story was perfectly timed for Warren, coming a day from the last Democratic debate before the Iowa Caucus. It also came just days after the first poll of Iowa for two months showed Sanders in the lead for the first time, with Warren losing ground. We can’t know whether Warren personally directed the timing of the leak, though it appears that two of CNN’s sources got their information from Warren personally in the immediate aftermath of the 2018 meeting, and thus are probably her staffers. Sanders’ campaign has said it believes the story to be an intentionally timed leak by the Warren campaign. That’s unprovable, if not quite conspiratorial. But even if Warren didn’t personally orchestrate the leak, she took ownership of it by confirming its only operative detail so soon after its publication, and then doubling down on it at the subsequent debate, which CNN hosted.
All these facts make the leak disappointing and strange. But when renders this thinly-veiled hit-job gutting and shocking is that Warren chose to go on the offensive not by announcing a new policy or emphasizing any substantive difference between Sanders and herself, but rather with a naked appeal to identity politics. She has chosen to break with Sanders on the grounds that his feminist credentials are unsatisfactory—a claim that, as the Clintonite pundit class has amply demonstrated over the last year, can only really be expressed with a kind of sentiment-heavy, substance-free, smoke-and-mirrors intimation that more or less boils down to stating the unacceptable fact that Bernie Sanders is an old, white man.
According to CNN, in the same meeting Sanders also decried the Democratic party’s increasing fixation with identity politics. He would have been right to do so. The obsession with identity politics is one of my generation’s few durable contributions to contemporary political life, and it is not one to be proud of. Any appeal that narrows the horizon of the Democratic party (to a particular gender, racial group, sexual minority, etc.) rather than broadening it to a mass formation, based on class solidarity and transcending barriers of identity, undermines our efforts to defeat the right. To the contrary, it is playing their game. This does not mean that the party should ignore identity-based inequities that mandate special attention, most prominently those of racism in criminal justice and the economic legacy of slavery and segregation. It only means that we must not lose sight of the fact that all particularistic appearances of oppression are driven by universal mechanisms of power, and it is those power-interests who stand to gain if we miss the forest for the trees. Just as freedom is more than merely the ability to choose between 200 flavors of ice cream, diversity initiatives at Google and Goldman Sachs cannot be a substitute for empowerment of the poor—democracy in the best Athenian sense. What we need is a democracy that concerns itself not with superficial freedom but directly with power as the means to attaining real freedom.
Last year, that unassuming right-wing demagogue and unthinking man’s thinking man, Jordan Peterson, participated in a much-publicized debate with the Marxist philosopher Slavoj Žižek. Both men’s mutual contempt for identity politics was on display throughout the course of the debate, which led many viewers to wrongly conclude that the two did not really disagree on much. What those viewers missed was this critical distinction: Peterson, like much of the right, thinks identity politics are an existential threat to decent society. Žižek, with the best of the left, knows that identity politics are a threat only because they are a distraction from what is an actual existential threat to decent society, i.e., class-based oppression, and from the only way of defeating that threat, i.e., radical, emancipatory, class-based politics.
Bernie Sanders, who is as close as contemporary America comes to the leader of a mass, class-based political movement, is of the Žižekian school when it comes to identity politics. It was likely this sentiment that he was expressing on that fateful night at Elizabeth Warren’s D.C. apartment. Warren “disagreed” with Sanders’ assessment of identity politics’ in the Democratic party. Sanders now stands accused of telling Warren that he thought a woman could not be elected President in the United States in 2020, which he vehemently denies. Sanders has rebutted the accusations against him by insisting that what he actually said was that Donald Trump is a “liar” and a “sexist” who would “weaponize” Warren’s gender as a campaign issue. The Washington Post has published an account that differs from CNN’s and backs up Sanders’ defense, citing a separate source who claims Sanders merely said that “Trump would use nefarious tactics” against whoever the nominee was. An alternative account of the meeting is gradually emerging, one in which Sanders demonstrates not his own sexism but his concern about the dismal reality of sexism in America. That was what he meant to express to Warren, his friend and a woman about to dive headlong into that reality in the most public and vulnerable-making way imaginable.
But let us imagine for a moment that Sanders did in fact tell Elizabeth Warren that a woman can’t be elected President today. Identity politics have so poisoned our public discourse that no one can pronounce the real, diabolical truth about this allegation, which is that even if Sanders did say word-for-word what he is accused of saying, he would be guilty not of sexism but of grim realism. The objection to such a statement, and the oblique pivot to the question of Sanders’ personal sexism, depends on a monumental, mind-boggling hypocrisy, which is the fact that Hillary Clinton supporters have been saying exactly the same thing for three years. Pro-Clinton liberals, by way of rationalizing their defeat in 2016, frequently claim that her loss was due, in whole or in part, to sexism. In other words, they wish to assert that Clinton lost not because she was too centrist, or too strategically inept, or too secretive, or whatever other strictly political failing, but rather because she is a woman, combined with the fact that Americans are intractably misogynistic. Clinton herself has claimed this on multiple occasions. A dizzying number of people, in fact, good liberals all of them, have made this claim. I happen to find this explanation completely plausible. Indeed, in an election that was decided by a margin of 80,000 votes across three states, any of a dozen factors—even Russian interference and James Comey—is probably sufficient to explain why Clinton lost the electoral vote despite decisively winning the national popular vote. (How these micro-explanations should factor into the broader lessons we must learn from 2016 is a different matter: the liberal punditocracy would also have you believe that Russia’s intervention was not the straw that broke the camel’s back but rather a decades-old, massive conspiracy to give the camel scoliosis.) Pointing to base social anxieties, such as the perpetual fear of the uppity woman, is a way of giving form and comprehensibility to the amorphous, previously-unimaginable rage and cruelty that liberals perceive in the dawn of the Trump era. Centrist democrats have made the point that sexism sunk Clinton’s candidacy again and again, and it passes for feminism. Now, Bernie Sanders is alleged to have made an identical point, and it is implied that he is a sexist. The contortions of fact and logic involved in such a reversal are almost too much to bear. How can anyone hold such a contradiction in their mind? and why hasn’t anyone in the media pointed out as much?
Indeed, if Warren’s sudden change of strategies had been a shock, the conduct of certain sectors of the media has been shockingly predictable. Warren has not accused Sanders of being a sexist, nor even raised the possibility. In fact, her statement goes on at mawkish length to insist that “she has no interest in discussing this private meeting any further” because “Bernie and I have far more in common than our differences.” Yet she only had to confirm the most anti-Sanders version of the story, and, lo and behold, the media has done her dirty work for her. Of course, whatever benefit Warren thanks she stands to gain in the short term, the press are not out to help the movement. The media feeds off controversy and highlight reel-worthy episodes of interpersonal drama. Furthermore, mainstream outlets have shown a tendency to fawn over centrist candidates like Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar well beyond their standing in the polls, while ignoring, downplaying, or inaccurately reporting on Sanders’ exploits. In other words, the media are out to divide the left. In the aftermath of the CNN article, Poltico ran the headline “Warren-Bernie feud escalates” (what feud?). The faceless, second-hand news website Business Insider posted a typical bootleg of the original story, beefed up by assurances that that the "explosive story” proves that "the truce between Warren and Sanders campaigns shows signs of fraying” (grab your popcorn!). The New York Times published their own fairly fawning version that backed up CNN’s claims while missing the Washington Post’s counter-reporting.
But worst of all has been the original instigators, CNN. Sensing a way to maximize attention on themselves after being the ones to create the controversy in the first place, CNN’s anchors spent the day of the debate hyping up the looming clash of former allies on the left. Then, during the debate itself, CNN’s moderator, Abby Phillip, committed an amazing act of journalistic malpractice. First, she directly asked Sanders why he had said what the anonymous sources in the article claimed he had said. He responded that he had not said it, repeating his earlier denials. He proceeded to cite a litany of reasons why it was was absurd to think he would ever say a woman couldn’t be President, not least that the woman he lost the 2016 nomination to went on to beat the current President by more than three million votes. Phillip asked Sanders to reconfirm his denial yet again, and then pivoted seamlessly to Warren, to whom she asked: “Senator Warren, what did you think when Senator Sanders told you a woman could not win the election?” It was as if the previous minute had been erased from time. Sanders’ denial was presented as worthless—literally nonexistent—while the story CNN had originally reported was presented as unchallenged reality.
Phillip’s act was not the same as giving candidates unequal time, failing to pushing back on lies, reciting industry talking points, or any of the other dreary media practices that have become standard fair at Presidential debates and that frequently lead the supporters of one candidate or another to (rightly or wrongly) cry foul. Rather, it was a breach of the unspoken code that governs the ways journalists can and cannot speak about different classes of purported “facts.” Things that are merely alleged, and particularly anonymous allegations that are actively contested, have to be treated as such. Thus one cannot (yet) print “the serial rapist Harvey Weinstein;” instead, one has to say “Weinstein, who faces multiple counts of criminal rape and predatory sexual assault….” Warren accepted Phillip’s gift gladly, saying that she had disagreed and that a woman could indeed beat Donald Trump. To support that contention, she pointed out the irrelevant fact that the men on stage had together lost eleven elections, while the two women had lost none. (Warren has won both Senate elections she has contested since becoming a politician in 2012, while the lion’s share of the eleven defeats she referenced were Bernie Sanders’ runs for various offices in the 1970’s as a candidate of the tiny third-party outfit Liberty Union.) As the New Yorker’s Amy Davidson pointed out, the exchange between Phillip and Warren “closed the loop of a story in which [Warren’s] version of the meeting was an unquestioned fact.” Incredibly, in CNN’s post-debate coverage, pundit Jess McIntosh (formerly of Emily’s List) asserted that “this isn’t a he said/she said story. This is a reported-out story that CNN was part of breaking,” despite the story being practically the definition of he said/she said. With standards like these, CNN must be considered more of a piece with something like Buzzfeed News than New York Times, much less the New Yorker. Perhaps that isn’t so surprising after the events of the last few years, but it’s depressing nonetheless.
My best hope now is that this attack job won’t produce its desired result of knocking Sanders’ support just before the Iowa caucus. Better yet, it may help Sanders more than it does Warren. Worst of all, and highly possible, would be that the impression of infighting saps leftwing turnout and hurts both campaigns, to the benefit of Joe Biden. The campaign season is entering a new phase; it remains to be seen whether low blows between similarly-positioned candidates are a better idea now than they were when Kamala Harris staked her candidacy on personally attacking Biden. But there is reason to think that early-state primary voters are relatively inured to this kind of highfalutin skullduggery. The Times assures us that Sanders’ alleged remark “risks alienating many Democrats.” In what way does it risk that? In the way that allegations of misconduct against Al Franken risked alienating Alabamans about to pass judgment on Roy Moore, who had been accused of pedophilia and sexual assault? In the way that Russiagate was surely the single most salient issue for ordinary voters in the Rust Belt, just like it was for MSNBC viewers? As is often said, the New York and Beltway press live in a bubble, and tend to afflicted by a blindness as to what is and isn’t important to the little people. Warren isn’t necessarily immune to the same blindness. It may that a maneuver like this backfires against the very person it was intended to aid.
I have a great personal admiration for Elizabeth Warren. She is toweringly smart, palpably compassionate, broadly shares my priorities for the country and the world, and would be a fantastic president. I plan to vote for Bernie Sanders in the primary, and I hope that he becomes the nominee. If he fails to win, I would be overjoyed if alternative turns out to be Warren. I also hope against hope that the left will come together to support the nominee in the general election, even if it ends up being a figure like Joe Biden. I think most people of my age feel the same way. We must never forget who and what the real enemy is.
But the unprovoked political hit job that Elizabeth Warren conducted this week on her erstwhile comrade-in-arms proves that, like Sanders and like everyone else in politics, she is human, all too human. Warren abandoned the reasoned language of political discourse and stooped to ad-hominem attack, carried out by rumor and owing its potency to the seduction of identity politics. Sanders has done no such thing; instead, he continues to make the case for a radical politics of social solidarity, economic restructuring, and ecological transformation, trusting that the people will put their faith in him on that basis alone. That is the politics we need, and it is why a 78 year-old social democrat from Vermont is the candidate of so many politically-engaged young Americans. But another way of saying this is that the differences between Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren do in fact matter, and that makes me very sad.