Jacobin: The Fight Is Far From Over

Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders transformed their respective countries’ policy agendas. That’s exactly why they can’t step aside for other candidates.

BY
JAMES A. SMITH

Excerpts:

When Bernie Sanders launched his first presidential campaign in 2015, no one thought it would achieve such change in the language of the Democratic Party and in American politics. But now, in the calm of decision — and with a second Trump administration at stake — progressives are wavering about whether it’s time for “Sandersism without Sanders.” Time, that is, for a candidate who has absorbed Bernie’s progressive agenda, but one younger, with less of the battle damage of years of activism, less free with the “S” word, less white and male, and less needlessly antagonizing to the Clintonites in the party.

Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek refer to the figure of the “vanishing mediator,” who like Mary Poppins or Alhambra in Ali Smith’s novel The Accidental, completely transforms a situation in the action of entering and then withdrawing from it. It took this cool old guy to give the Left its confidence back, but isn’t it time he accepted this function of temporary catalyst and made way for another candidate?

The lesson from the UK is: we’ve been there. Don’t do it. Bernie needs to run.

Perhaps the most troubling part of the Bernie-skeptic critics’ case is that Trump is going to lose whoever the Democrats put up. From the midst of the ongoing rise of right-wing European populism, Trump’s re-election seems frankly more plausible than his election was in the first place.

It took the 2017 election for the UK left to grasp it, but the idiosyncrasies and intransigence of a candidate like Corbyn or Bernie are not something leftists and progressives can afford to throw away. As they begin pondering who to run for president in 2020, Americans shouldn’t make that mistake.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/01/bernie-sanders-jeremy-corbyn-election-socialist


Bernie Sanders stands on the statehouse steps during the annual Martin Luther King Jr Day at the Dome event on January 21, 2019 in Columbia, South Carolina. Sean Rayford / Getty