After spending far more time obsessing over the thoroughly bogus triviality of whether Tom Brady was using ever-so-slightly deflated footballs while Bernie Sanders's insurgent presidential candidacy drew large crowds across the country, the media is still struggling to come to grips with the phenomenon of a powerful Sanders challenge to Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton. That's especially true with regard to the context of the campaign.
Generally presented as some sort of out-of-the-blue challenge to the orthodoxy of our financialized politics, the Sanders vs. Clinton battle actually has deep roots in decades past, with the Vermont senator representing major strands of the unfulfilled politics of the 1970s while the former secretary of state's candidacy is deeply rooted in the dominant politics of the 1990s.
As Sanders discusses in his Rolling Stone interview, his stance of today emerged in the tumult and protest and politics of the 1960s and 1970s.
It was a time of disastrous superpower over-reach (take your pick of dumbest war in US history, Vietnam or Iraq), perceived widespread corruption, and a yawning credibility gap for private and public establishments.
After the often desperate and frequently histrionic protests of the '60 and early '70s subsided, with assassination and scandal having claimed the most obvious alternate leaders, a "New Politics" -- paralleled by the famed "New Hollywood" cinema of the period -- began emerging for the 1970s. Critical of big corporations and Wall Street, very environmentally conscious, geared to renewable energy and conservation rather than fossil fuels and nuclear power, respectful of emerging non-white/straight/male constituencies, eager to reform the military, curb intelligence excesses, and end unnecessary and counter-productive foreign interventions, this new politics for the '70s had a raft of emerging leaders who epitomized key elements of the overall.
Idaho Senator Frank Church, California Governor Jerry Brown, Arizona Congressman Mo Udall, Colorado Senator Gary Hart among others, each spearheaded elements of the new politics. But it was still emerging when the 1976 presidential election rolled around.
In the wake of the Watergate scandal and subsequent ouster of President Richard Nixon, ex-Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter, appealing to evangelical voters and a populace exhausted by political drama, seized the moment with a campaign predicated on his pledge never to lie to the American people. He grabbed an early lead for the Democratic nomination over a divided field that included Church and Udall. Brown, then in his 30s, entering very late, blitzed Carter in a string of primaries but ultimately to little avail.
Carter went on to a very narrow win over Nixon's appointed vice president Gerald Ford (earlier Nixon VP Spiro Agnew having been forced to resign for corruption). While surfing elements of the new '70s politics, Carter went on to a largely apolitical middle-of-the-road presidency that repeatedly stumbled over deeper dynamics.
In retrospect, it would have been best for Democrats had the Republicans' Nixon-Ford presidential cycle gone on to own the oil-inflected economic stagnation/inflation of the '70s along with the 1979 fall of the Shah of Iran and consequent rise of the ayatollahs which, more than anything else, fueled Ronald Reagan's 1980 victory.
Nixon, Ford and their geostrategic architect Henry Kissinger hadn't cared much about the police state -- literally bristling with American arms -- I saw when I visited Iran as a student not long before the revolution. (By the end of the Nixon presidency about half of all Pentagon arms sales were to the Shah of Iran's regime.) Carter went along with it, like most power elites, because the Shah was supposedly America's ally.
Less than two weeks after Carter admitted the now-ousted Shah into the US for medical treatment in the fall of 1979, radical Islamist students seized the US embassy in Tehran. Thus began the humiliating 444-day hostage crisis which led to Reagan's landslide victory.
The advent of Reaganism and its aura of seeming muscular success required a different sort of political response for the '80s -- Hart took a leading role in this before being felled by a sex scandal breaking just as the Iran/Contra scandal hearings began -- all of which takes us away from Bernie Sanders.
His politics were forged in the '70s and essentially stayed there, increasingly out phase with America until, well, now.
Sanders incorporates all the elements of the "new politics" of the '70s mentioned above with another very explicit element from that period and earlier: Democratic socialism. In that regard, the politics of the Sanders campaign is very reminiscent of the approach taken by famed anti-Vietnam War leader Tom Hayden in his unsuccessful bid for a seat in the U.S. Senate and subsequent Campaign for Economic Democracy movement in California, where he was a key Jerry Brown ally and chairman of SolarCal.
Hayden's "economic democracy," which most saw as a moderate form of democratic socialism, had both real appeal and limits. Essentially two-fold limits, as it happened. Though he went on to serve two decades in the California legislature, Hayden and then-wife Jane Fonda's radicalism was a little too famous, as I discussed last summer in "Why Is 'A Half-Baked Version of Tom Hayden' Beating the Clintons?," The billboards across West LA containing incendiary Hayden quotes from the past when Hayden first ran for the legislature were quite memorable.
And, unlike Sanders in Vermont, the nation's second smallest state, way up in rural New England, Hayden in California faced some of the biggest and most entrenched corporate players on the planet, with big finance, oil, arms, and agriculture interests responsible for much of the state's economy at the time. (Los Angeles was then the world's arms capital.)
As it happened, with Hayden's then Santa Monica stronghold the equivalent of Sanders's Burlington home base, Hayden actually had more constituents in the California State Senate than Sanders has in the United States Senate.
Sanders is also benefited today by being decades removed from the Cold War, in the harsh and in part hyped light of which socialism was frequently lumped in with Communism.
In reality, folks like Sanders and Hayden -- who wrote a prescient article two years ago in The Nation touting the prospect of a Sanders presidential campaign -- would have been rounded up by the security forces of the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China. And they would be rather more decorously squashed in Vladimir Putin's Russia.
I suspect that, even with today's altered historical circumstances, Democratic presidential nominee Bernie Sanders would suffer from much the same sort of vilification that nearly did Hayden in when he first sought a safe Democratic legislative seat in LA. The prospect of which is probably Hillary's ace-in-the-hole with regard to the nomination.
Incidentally, it's not as though she is really a weak Democratic candidate. As someone who, for an intellectual exercise, put some real thought into how to beat her for this nomination, I think that a more conventional path, which is to say non-socialist, would not have worked nearly as well.
Sanders is exploiting a big and growing opening on the left; so much the better for him that it fits so well with who he is. (Well, except for some possibly inevitable political hack deviation on some military spending matters, an opportunity to deftly let air out of the Sanders balloon which the Clintons -- who seem to prefer winning inelegantly -- did not take.)
Maybe if Jerry Brown had finally read the end of his '70s fave rave book, E.F. Schumacher's Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered ...
As it is, Hillary's candidacy is both empowered and constrained by its deep roots in the politics of the 1990s. While she and Bill first emerged in the movement electoral politics of the early '70s -- hired for the anti-war McGovern for President campaign by none other than Gary Hart -- they quickly forged a very pragmatic politics as Bill very swiftly ascended the ladder of Arkansas politics.
During his 1992 presidential campaign and subsequent two terms in the White House, the Clintons focused on domestic policy, with job training and welfare reform programs to cater to a hollowing middle class, fateful deregulation for finance and energy, and a complex would-be consensus non-socialist approach to universal health care.
As David Halberstam wrote in War In A Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton and the Generals, Clinton came to the presidency without any particular interest in world politics and national security affairs. He was happy to arrive just after the end of the Cold War, but had no real post-Cold War agenda other than the emerging establishment consensus of a "New World Order" driven by global trade, commerce, and finance.
In reality, however, a "New World Chaos" was brewing. To their credit, the Clintons did adjust to changing circumstances. We'll never know if the Clinton White House would have gotten Osama bin Laden, who was more on their radar screen than that of the Bush/Cheney White House, had Clinton not been so ludicrously distracted by the non-serious Monica Lewinsky scandal and the even more bizarre impeachment of the president.
But Hillary seems to have taken the wrong lesson from their successful interventions in the Balkans, imagining that "humanitarian liberal" interventionism is a viable model in parts of the world like Afghanistan and Libya that are wildly different from Europe.
Hillary, of course, shifted her policy framework leftward over the past year, but it's all undermined by the Clintons' highly lucrative and ongoing friendly relationship with Wall Street.
Still, while the Clinton '90s had its share of missteps and wrong directions, it was a better time for American than today. And that is a powerful context for Hillary's campaign.
Meanwhile, the Clintons are scrambling with everything they know to try to pull out a win in Saturday's Nevada presidential caucuses. As I reported right after the New Hampshire primary last week, Hillary lost her 2 to 1 lead in the polls, falling into a dead heat with Sanders. That dead heat race continues as the potentially pivotal vote approaches.
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