Bernie Sanders and members of the Squad have made a deal to defend President Biden as he arms and funds genocide.
NOTE: AP reports today: “President Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 race for the White House on Sunday, ending his bid for reelection after a disastrous debate with Donald Trump that raised doubts about the incumbent’s fitness for office. The unprecedented announcement, delivered less than four months before the election, immediately upended a campaign that both political parties view as the most consequential in generations. The president — intent on serving out the remainder of his term in office — quickly endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to take on Trump and encouraged his party to unite behind her, making her the party’s instant favorite for the nomination at its August convention in Chicago.”
Bernie Sanders, with Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (AOC), Ilhan Omar, and others in the left wing of the Democratic Party are lining up to try to save Joe Biden’s crisis-ridden campaign — a campaign for a deeply unpopular millionaire whose main legacy will be supporting a genocide in Palestine.
That might seem shocking. The leaders of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) — and of Jacobin — have made supporting Bernie and the Squad the tentpole of their strategy since the Sanders phenomenon started. Those electeds were supposed to be the left wing of the Democratic Party, moles inside the Party working against the grain to drive radical politics. In fact, when they first appeared on the political scene, they challenged the party leaders to a degree, calling for Medicare for All and a Green New Deal. Now, though, they’re working behind the scenes to strike a deal with Biden to try to save his run for reelection.
The support for Biden by this left wing is driving a contradiction inside the DSA: its National Political Committee has rescinded its endorsement of AOC over Palestine, though the New York City chapter of DSA hasn’t, and there doesn’t seem to be a change of direction regarding the basic strategy either. The contradiction here is deep. DSA leaders can’t fully support AOC for fear that its members will rebel, yet their electoral strategy is showing itself to be bankrupt, and they lack any apparent consensus on an alternative.
The fact that Bernie and AOC are striking a deal with Biden for some policy items — with other Squad members fully supporting his campaign — shows something crucial. The left wing of a capitalist party of genocidal millionaires was never going to save us.
We need a completely different solution. Not cynical deals with a party of the capitalists, but a working-class party that can rid us of our masters forever.
“I’m With (Genocide) Joe”
Just a few days ago, Sanders penned an op-ed expressing full-throated support for Biden remaining the presidential candidate for the Democrats. “In the coming weeks,” Sanders writes in solemn tones,
I will do all that I can to see that President Biden is re-elected. Why? Despite my disagreements with him on particular issues, he has been the most effective president in the modern history of our country and is the strongest candidate to defeat Mr. Trump — a demagogue and pathological liar.
Yes, he writes, Biden does support genocide. Yes, the debate was a disaster. And Sanders and Biden disagree on several policy items. But it’s time to ignore all this.
Enough! Mr. Biden may not be the ideal candidate, but he will be the candidate and should be the candidate. And with an effective campaign that speaks to the needs of working families, he will not only defeat Mr. Trump but beat him badly.
If we close our eyes to all those problems with Biden, Sanders writes, we’ll find a “good and decent Democratic president with a record of real accomplishment.”
The op-ed was part of a deal Sanders and AOC have struck with Genocide Joe.
One insider told The Intercept that this has “less to do with him as the presidential candidate and more to do with protecting their own political futures.” But crisis brings opportunity, too, if you’re an enterprising Democrat.
In the days before the op-ed appeared, Bernie and AOC met privately with two of the president’s top advisers and made a deal: if Biden took up parts of their policy ideas, they would try to help save his presidency. Then, on the same day The New York Times published Sanders’s op-ed, Biden released his plan for the first 100 days of a next presidential term. The plan includes items that have long been important to Sanders as well as AOC, including raising the federal minimum wage, instituting a rent cap, expanding Social Security benefits, and intensifying the push for environmental policies. Then Biden hosted Sanders and “young worker leaders” for the prestige of a meeting with the president on pro-worker policies.
AOC, too, has also come out strongly for Biden since his disastrous debate performance. Ilhan Omar, for her part, had already said she supports the president’s 2024 bid for reelection.
Their support for Biden comes as the party itself is seizing up in its biggest crisis of leadership in decades.
We know the story so far: Biden and the DNC manipulate the primary process to try to make sure Biden will be the candidate. Biden crashes and burns in the debate: an utter disaster. The party machinery starts to seize up and shake; major Democrats start asking openly, Can Biden be replaced? Then Trump survives an assassination attempt and comes out looking stronger than ever.
In all this, Biden faces a quiet revolt of the big bourgeoisie, who long supported him; some are withholding $90 million of donations to his campaign until he drops out. Others are defecting to Trump.
But the problems for the party run even deeper. Biden was wildly unpopular before the debate. His stand on the genocide in Gaza — making sure Israel has plenty of bombs and money — has already cut away his support among young people, a crucial demographic for the party.
Now most of the Squad is rushing to his defense.
The agreement wrung from Biden, then, was purchased at the cost of a candidate aiding and abetting genocide, and who presided over the repression of the Palestine movement, not to mention helped to break the railway workers strike in 2022 — strikebreaking that members of the Squad and Bernie supported too.
They’ve sold themselves to Biden and have little to show for it. Even if Biden wins reelection — this is a long shot — the policies Biden agreed to are not particularly impressive. The agreement for more pro-environmental policies has already been undercut by Supreme Court decisions limiting the capacity of the federal government to regulate pollution. Biden’s embrace of “green capitalism” is running aground because big capitalist investors don’t see the industry as very profitable — for them, destroying the ecosphere is better for profit margins.
And even though Biden has tried to forge closer relationships with labor, like when he walked on a UAW picket line a few months ago, the pressures of capitalist politics and economics mean he has remained firmly on the rulers’ side — for example, breaking the railway strike, which threatened his plan for recovery from the pandemic. Besides, major sections of the ruling class are becoming disenchanted with Biden’s rhetoric about higher taxes and greater regulation, driving them into Trump’s arms. Without them, that is, without their money, Biden is dead in the water.
The Electoral Strategy Is Collapsing
In all of this, we’re witnessing the death throes of an electoral strategy which the DSA has pursued for years.
Since Sanders’s first presidential push, the DSA’s leaders have put electing left Democrats at the heart of their strategy. This has meant organizing endlessly for him and members of the Squad, arguing again and again that we can use the party for our own working-class ends, even to build toward socialism.
And, in fact, as Sanders and the members of the Squad became national political figures, they sometimes challenged their party’s leadership. Sanders, for example, ran primary campaigns against Clinton, and later Biden, for the presidential nominations.
And yet this electoral approach has missed something fundamental. The Democratic Party is not an inert bucket waiting for us to fill it up with radical ideas and people. It’s a sophisticated organism that has honed the skill of disciplining its members to fall in line with its leaders.
Kim Moody points out in his book Breaking the Impasse that the party uses both a “carrot” and a “stick” on its members: party leaders can work to ensure dissenters don’t find their way onto influential party committees and can threaten to challenge them in primaries with better-funded Democrats. Those who fall in line are rewarded with better committee positions, safer reelection campaigns, and private audiences with the highest levels of power.
With these material pressures always at work, we’ve seen a marked shift in Bernie and the Squad, from oppositional to a “loyal opposition.” It’s a shift, as Moody points out, “upward” in the party, bought at the cost of moving “rightward.” Bernie resigned himself to the party’s bureaucratic moves to ensure he wouldn’t be a presidential candidate; Squad members and Bernie lined up behind Biden’s railway strikebreaking; all but Tlaib have endorsed Biden’s next presidential run; and on and on.
Now the electoral strategy faces an existential crisis.
Not only are the elected Democrats loyal to the party’s leaders, but this whole electoral enterprise on the Left is running out of money. Elections become more expensive every year, and now more than ever, they are dominated by the big bourgeoisie: an auction for the highest bidders. More to the point, the party is breeding mass discontent, even disgust, with its leaders, especially among the youth.
Even someone like Tlaib — who is refusing to endorse Biden — offers no path forward. Try as she might, she works inside a party run entirely by pro genocide millionaires, committed to preserving a capitalist system that is destroying the ecosphere.
The problem of supporting the party can’t be solved by saying the Left should unify behind any Democrat to beat Trump and the Far Right — a kind of “popular front” logic. That’s because the party is organized by, and works for, the ruling class, through its funding, its selection of leaders, its disciplining of dissidents, and so on. In other words, it exists to protect the foundations of a capitalist system. The anger and frustration of the masses generated by a Democratic administration, in other words, only emboldens the Far Right. Defeating it requires a real, working-class, and independent alternative.
What we’re finding now is that there is no fight in the Democratic Party — by Bernie, Tlaib, AOC, Omar, or whoever — for a break with it, clean, dirty, or otherwise. Instead, the strategy of the left Democrats is to cut deals with party leaders for policy concessions. They’re doing this even though there aren’t even mechanisms in place to hold the administration accountable for them.
A party for the ruling class can’t be the vehicle for real working-class politics.
But today we have a chance for a completely different kind of politics, from below, by and for the working class.
The ruling class is in crisis. One segment of it doubts its own political path forward because of Biden’s ineptitude. Mass discontent, especially among young people and workers, is shaking the political structure from its base. We don’t need another Democrat who will sell out the most basic socialist principles — on strikes, on Palestine — for some policy concessions.
There’s another path: a working-class party fighting for socialism. That kind of party, independent of the ruling class, can actually put forward a working-class and socialist perspective: support, don’t break, strikes; fight to link them to the struggle for Palestine in the streets and at work, and against repression. And fight to overthrow a society run by the rich at the cost of the ecosphere and human life.
We deserve working-class politicians whose role isn’t propping up a failing social system, but denouncing the capitalist system and calling out its politicians — helping us see a social alternative and calling ever-greater numbers into the streets, and onto the picket lines, to win it.
We have a world to win. Bernie and the Squad can’t help us to win it.