During his State of the Union address, President Biden, despite great efforts, put me in such a drowsy state that I was about to change the channel. Just as I was about to press the remote, the camera cut off Biden, animated and smiling standing behind the lectern, to move to Senator Bernie Sanders, sitting in the audience looking so crestfallen it made me breathless. The great Bernie, a former scourge of Democratic Party caciques, wore a mask – obviously to protect himself against COVID – but his appearance was that of a muzzled hostage. You couldn’t see his expression, but you could still feel his frustration and his anguish, both furious and pathetic.
Since his arrival in the White House, Joe Biden has only marginalized his main rival in the Democratic Party, the one who almost overthrew the candidacy of Hillary Clinton in 2016, and again that of Biden in 2020, both designated by the leaders of a political party sometimes as hierarchical and vengeful as the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In Washington, as in Moscow in the 1920s, insurgents are not forgiven, especially those who sail under an independent social-democratic flag. Ironically, Sanders’ “anti-establishment” success in the 2016 primary campaigns was the consequence of the same anger that led billionaire heir apparent Donald Trump to his unexpected victory. Many of the votes for Sanders could have been given to Trump, and vice versa, those from Trump to Sanders, during this remarkable and brief opening in a normally closed political system. Although their agendas and personalities have been very different, Sanders and Trump have both benefited from the widespread feeling that American politics is run by a political-financial-media oligarchy that keeps enriching the rich and punishing the people. ordinary. The signs of this oligarchy displayed two famous euphemisms: “North American Free Trade Agreement” and “Permanent Normal Trade Relations Agreement with China”. Other signs spoke of the “liberation” of the financial markets, in parallel with the “liberation” of the Iraqi and Afghan people. However, at the start of the election season in 2015, even the most alienated citizens knew that the Clinton and Bush families, far from being enemies, were allied in a massive dismantling of well-paid industrial jobs, protections against a Wall Street predatory and avaricious, and the lives and health of tens of thousands of young men and women lured by promises of military glory to the defense of the republic against foreign “terrorism.”
And here is Bernie Sanders victim of his success. The “populist” spirit embodied by Sanders and Trump did reject the Clinton/Bush policy, but the only real electoral beneficiary was Trump. It’s not Sanders’ fault that Trump is a crook, and he didn’t know how to stay ahead of the reformist and rebel pack. No question of allying with Trump – in the Senate, the threat of re-election by the ogre of Mar-a-Lago forced Sanders to make common cause with the Democratic caciques. At the start of the 2020 campaign, these same caciques, supported by the New York Times And washington post, arranged to stop Sanders in his second crusade. Yet despite suffering a heart attack in October 2019, Sanders nearly knocked Biden out of the race by securing a majority of votes in the first three primary elections, before he collapsed in South Carolina, where the State party boss James Clyburn ended the dream of a Democratic Party revival and saved the Biden candidacy. Biden won a majority of the “Super Tuesday” primaries with the tacit support of treacherous Elizabeth Warren, another left-leaning candidate who attracted enough potentially pro-Sanders votes to win Biden. On principle, Sanders campaigned for Biden against Trump, but he didn’t take advantage of it.
With the tiny Democratic majority in Congress, Sanders once again found himself hostage to the leadership he had fought against for decades. Sen. Joe Manchin is blamed for the progressive failures of the Sanders program, but, in fact, it all suited the arch-clientelist Biden, who pretended to be a new Franklin D. Roosevelt, when he only wanted to be president and leader of his party. The key photograph of Sanders’ legislative defeat shows him, in August 2022, sitting alone on the stairs of the Capitol, exhausted, with his head bowed, as the Biden/Manchin coterie signed into law the bill called Inflation Reduction Act. No more question of universal health insurance, an increase in the minimum wage or even a restoration of the tax credit for children. And, of course, no surcharge on the billionaire class.
Sanders, 81, has already promised he will not run for president in 2024 if Biden, 80 on his side, decides to run for a second term. In case he changed his mind, Clyburn and Biden moved reliable South Carolina to the top of the Democratic primaries to edge out insubordinate-leaning Iowa and New Hampshire. That way, we run less risk of a breakthrough from another Bernie Sanders.
John R. MacArthur is editor of Harper’s Magazine. His column returns at the beginning of each month.