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The fate of the Bernie Sanders campaign is still being dissected by the activist left, with two long essays and a new documentary seeking answers for how a five-year quest for power ended in a few ugly weeks.
The arguments picked up when journalists Michael Tracey and Angela Nagle published a bitter look back at the Sanders campaign: "First as Tragedy, Then as Farce."
Nagle is an Irish academic who has argued that the left should reject "open borders," and Tracey is an American journalist who covered and advocated for Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii's presidential campaign.
Both incorporated some hobbyhorses into their theory of Sanders' defeat, arguing at points that Sanders should have distanced himself from Democrats' investigations into Russian influence and that Sanders alienated voters by embracing cosmopolitan immigration policies.
"The campaign's ethos was primarily tailored toward consolidating the voters being siphoned off by [Elizabeth] Warren - the young, supremely "progressive" and identity-fixated Left," they wrote. "And courting such voters was inversely correlated with courting the white working class and rural voters that were so vital to sustaining his electoral coalition in 2016."
The piece began with a rebuttal to Sanders adviser David Sirota, who had argued that Joe Biden's strength was underrated, noting that no modern vice president who sought his party's nomination had lost it. (Dan Quayle's short 2000 bid, eight years after he left the White House, is the anomaly.)
Nagle and Tracey called that a cop-out, considering the name recognition and cash advantage Sanders brought into the primary. He lost, they argued, because he tried to bring mainstream liberals into his coalition, instead of restless white populists. Neither came along, and so "left-wing fusionists proved themselves willing to self-annihilate in order to save liberalism."
That essay inspired a full rebuttal in Jacobin, the country's leading socialist publication and a fount of pro-Sanders essays and reporting. In "We Need a Class War, Not a Culture War," Philadelphia labor organizer Dustin Guastella argued that the authors had focused too much on the trivial, such as the preferences of activists on social media, and they had hand-waved away real problems, like cynical media coverage of Sanders.
But Guastella credited Tracey and Nagle with a point: Left-wing candidates, Sanders included, were "held hostage by a toxic brew of alienating language." Sanders was trying to build a left-wing political movement nearly from scratch, and doing so effectively meant winning voters who hated what they saw as left-wing cultural priorities; he'd have been better off with a "simple message built around destroying the obscenity of inequality and providing universal public goods."
Why did the campaign fail in 2020? It went back to the problems with liberals, he wrote. They thought Biden was electable, and their thoughts were reinforced by the mainstream media, which they trusted. "When liberal outlets began their relentless assault on Trump, Democrats' 'trust' in the mass media increased as Republican trust decreased," Guastella wrote. "In this environment, it's easy to see how Trump was significantly less damaged by liberal media attacks and how disaffected working-class voters can be attracted to a kind of apolitical nonpartisan 'throw the bums out' populism."
The media, defined largely as cable TV news and the corporations that own them, are the villains of "Bernie Blackout: The Revolution Will Not Be Televised." Pat McGee's documentary, which debuted on Vice this month, intensely covers the two months between the Iowa caucuses and Sanders' departure from the race. Its premise: Sanders was on track to be the Democratic nominee, until unfair and slanted media treatment threw him off the rails.
McGee relies on three kinds of footage: his own recordings from Sanders rallies, interviews with left-wing commentators and snippets of cable news. Everything is cited to advance the argument that media conglomerates distort reality, even a famous supercut of Sinclair TV channel hosts reading an identical promise to their viewers. (Sinclair, which produces conservative-leaning content for its syndicates, does not otherwise appear in the documentary.)
In McGee's telling, Sanders made no real mistakes of his own. The debacle in Iowa, when it took days to reveal that Sanders won the popular vote but Pete Buttigieg won more delegates, becomes a story of the media suppressing Sanders. Coverage of Sanders' narrow New Hampshire win is cited as proof that the media could not treat him as a front-runner unless it also treated him as a threat: "Despite Bernie's lead, the media finds a way to frame it negatively."
Some of McGee's points about cable news are undeniable. He cites research on how Sanders dominated primary coverage only when the story became nervous Democrats trying to stop him, and runs interviews with two former MSNBC hosts with stories of how they were admonished in the 2016 election for either promoting Sanders or criticizing Hillary Clinton.
But the documentary never interrogates the sort of problems debated by left-wing writers. The viewer is repeatedly told that no Democrat has "won the popular vote in the first two contests" without winning the nomination, implying that Sanders, by mid-February, had done almost everything he needed to win. But the fact that Sanders won only 26 percent of the New Hampshire vote, with most of his 2016 supporters migrating elsewhere, is portrayed as an irritating factoid the anti-Sanders media used to minimize him.
But as Tracey, Nagle and Guastella acknowledge, Sanders' collapse with the rural white voters who liked him in 2016 was a real problem, one that quickly destroyed him once he finally got into a two-way race with Joe Biden.
In McGee's version of the primary, Sanders didn't falter so much as the media conspired to destroy him. The argument isn't always coherent. At one point, we are told that "mainstream media warns that if Bernie Sanders comes out of Super Tuesday with the most states, his campaign will be unstoppable," the stated strategy of the Sanders campaign. Minutes later, after Biden bests Sanders on Super Tuesday, a talking head says that Biden may now be unstoppable, a point we are suddenly expected to view as unfair to Sanders.
"The Bernie Blackout" is a deeply pessimistic story about the Sanders movement, leaving the viewer convinced that no left-wing campaign could survive criticism from the modern media. The wider debate on the left about Sanders is more constructive and will not end soon.
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