There are no words for how extraordinary this document is. How many times has Bernie Sanders poured cold water on his supporters fire? Twice? Three times? Is this the only time? And it's over the issue of Israel?
If ever there was a remarkable development in American politics, this is it.
I never hated Bernie Sanders's policies: I agreed with well over half of them, and on the issue of gun control he's to my right. What I hate is how he was willing to risk the collapse of American democracy in order to enact them.
Neither Sanders nor his movement should be blamed for Donald Trump, and yet they can.
Whatever any of us thinks of Hilary Clinton, 2016 could have... should have?... been the greatest moment for liberal reform in American history. We'd just had a historically liberal-to-progressive President and were about to have a moderate-to-liberal President with greater skill in building huge coalitions than any President since Lyndon Johnson, who could make deals with the left and bring along a sizeable coalition of the right. Instead? Well, you know instead...
Bernie Sanders was not Donald Trump on the left, but he was the left's 'tea party', and like the Tea Party he's probably enabled the rise of a leftist demagogue to be named later, and just like the origins of the Tea Party got away from its founders with unintended consequences, the Sanders movement got away from his founding goals, as they always would.
It's extraordinary how his movement heard a message completely different from the one Bernie Sanders issued.
His tactics are that of a Marxist who sees no distinction between liberal and conservative, but his policies are just a 1970s international socialist who saw a model in European heads of state like Bruno Kreisky and Willy Brandt. His mindframe exists in the era before 'identity' became the left's primary concern, and it wouldn't surprise me if he privately views issues of racism and sexism as a luxury distraction from the issues of all working people.
The vast majority of followers couldn't care less about this sort of history, which they see as unforgivably behind the times. They speak of the intersections of identity like a revelation: as if everyone before them did not understand issues of racism and sexism, and therefore every era before theirs was asleep to the real concerns.
Sure, the most passionate Bernie supporters were the next-generation socialists, but along with them were the most fervent metoo and Black Lives Matter proponents who take their cues from bellhooks, Audre Lord and Rebecca Solnit (who, ironically, supported Clinton), along with anti-colonialists who take their cue from Frantz Fanon and Edward Said: relegating the young socialist Bernie Bros back to the margins of American discourse with astonishing speed.
So it follows that Israel would be international enemy #1. Not because Israel is that bad, but because when viewed through extreme social theory, Israel appears that bad. It was not founded on colonialism, but there's little doubt that the founding had elements in common with colonialism. The other European colonial projects are pretty much over. Europe has long since ceded their empires, and the tiny Israel is their last bit of microscopic evidence that white colonialism animates the world - regardless of how implicating Jews resembles antisemitic tropes, regardless of how implicating Jews resembles antisemitic tropes, regardless of how Israel was only founded to stop the longest victims of white European crime from being hounded by them anymore, regardless of that Jews are the most reliably left/liberal demographic in the entire world. There's always a new war in Israel, however small, with new news to stoke their fire. , regardless of that Jews are the most reliably left/liberal demographic in the entire world. There's always a new war in Israel, however small, with new news to stoke their fire.
There is very little Saudi-American population who feels a great connection to Saudi Arabia, and most Chinese Americans are trying to put as much distance from the Chinese mainland as the globe permits. But however much less Israel violates human rights than those two human rights beasts, Israel has 2.4% of the American population who never stopped feeling deeply connected with it, and Israel's particular human rights violations are sprawled around every newspaper page and link. It's a completely unique situation in the American demographic spread.
But Bernie Sanders is the son of Jewish immigrants whose views were partially formed by the mid-century Jewish experience. For him, the Holocaust is probably not just another tragedy in the long history of white oppression, it's THE tragedy. Sixty years ago, Bernie Sanders spent ample time in Israel, and I think he views Israel tragically. The early Israel was arguably the truest socialist state on earth, a champion cause for the left, and there is a probably a deep part of of him that cannot let Israel go as a lost cause and believes that with security, Israel may yet become a northern Europe-like state of social democrats, the one which proves that, with socialism as the ultimate aide, Europe can let go of the eras-old antisemitism which he still feels just underneath their surface in his kishkes.
There are few movements more Jewish than socialism. The world's most famous socialist was Jewish, and socialism wouldn't have overtaken Europe without massive quantities of Jews relinquishing their religion for socialism. Without evidence that socialism works particularly for Jews, the best evidence that socialism works for everyone is missing.
For all my venom at Bernie Sanders, there's a lot to admire. I fully recognize that much of my revulsion is visceral and Oedipal, not intellectual. He's an extremely Jewish type of person, I grew up among a dozen Bernie Sanderses, each of whom took a different direction politically and intellectually from both Bernie Sanders and each other. He's what would happen if any of us became famous and listened to, and our temperament is not a recommendable example of how to conduct oneself in public discourse: the dogmatic obsessions, the blindness to unintended consequences, the willingness to endanger good relations for the sake of feeling right, it's all stuff I recognize intimately from well over half a dozen deep intimates.
And especially within myself.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/22/opinion/bernie-sanders-israel-gaza.html
No comments:
Post a Comment