The American voters have been looking forward to the 2020 election for almost four years, since the election of Donald Trump in yet another controversial election marred by shades of corruption and anti-democracy. Trump's blatant American-style Nazism - as opposed to the normal corporate fascism that hides behind platitudes - offended all Democrats, those Republicans whose racism is more subtle and hates to be exposed, and pretty much everybody not in his movement of white supremacists, radical Christians, and scared white working class left-behinds. This wave of disgust manifested in 2018 with a broad Democratic Party victory that flipped the House of Representatives and reversed some of the Blue losses in state governments. In 2020, the Democratic Party with its "Never Trump" Republican right flank planned to drive Donald Trump out of the White House and maybe even take control of the Senate.
Trump's shameless extremism threatens mainstream Americans' view of their democracy. "Trump threatens democracy" they cry out, and the 2020 Presidential Election has been billed for three years as a last chance to "save democracy", with losing to Trump viewed as an existential threat. From before it began, the 2020 election was imbued with a significance unlike any presidential election in at least 40 years. While most elections since Ronald Reagan brought the counter-revolution into power in 1980 have been little more than deciding which corporate officer would take his turn as chief executive, 2020 is seen by most voters as a life-or-death.
But hidden beneath the loud clamor to "save American democracy from Trump" lay another layer of existential threats that would explode into the open during the early stages of the Democratic Party nominating campaign. A growing number of the Millennial generation that came of age during the 2007 Great Recession and the Obama election, and the Generation Z coming of age now, see climate change, student debt, the health care system and rising costs as existential threats. And the Democratic Party Establishment - no, Rep. Clyburn, not poor black voters in South Carolina - sees Bernie Sanders as an existential threat. Almost ten months before voting would even begin, the Democratic Party Establishment met to discuss how to "Stop Sanders."
The problem the Democrats had was that they did not have a strong candidate to do exactly that. Polls also indicated that Trump would be stubbornly difficult to beat, and while Democrats including both Biden and Sanders generally out-polled Trump, the margins were disturbingly close, especially in the swing states Trump had stolen from the Democrats in 2016. Their presumptive frontrunner, Obama's vice president Joe Biden, was always gaffe-prone and in two prior presidential attempts had not managed to win a single primary. What was worse, as early as June 2019 the pro-Democrat cable news networks and some Biden rivals were openly expressing concern about his cognitive state. Clearly, the establishment could not put all its eggs in the Biden basket lest he have a tremor and drop it.
Maybe they could re-do Obama with a young, apparently-charismatic gay man. Being black helped Obama get elected, maybe being gay would help Pete. They could run the Harvard-educated, Cohen Group and McKinsey-trained Buttigieg as a "political outsider" and try to co-opt Sanders' movement. So Mayor Pete toned down his progressive rhetoric and bent the knee to the billionaire class and they filled his war chest. He focused early on next door Iowa and went into December 2019 as the leader in the Iowa polls. It all looked good through New Hampshire, because not only did Pete "win" Iowa but he was strong in the northeast, and toe-the-line Senator Amy Klobuchar made a surge in New Hampshire, allowing the media to spin Bernie's win there into "really a loss."
And, oh yeah, there was Mike Bloomberg and his billion$ as a backup.
The problem for the Establishment was that black voters said "helllll no!" to both Buttigieg and Klobuchar - and Bloomberg - for very good reasons. Young black voters had been seduced by Sanders and old black voters refused to transfer from Biden to either of his younger, fitter alternatives. Without old black voters, no corporatist candidate was going to beat Sanders. That meant the Establishment had no choice but to back Biden, despite how badly and obviously his cognition was slipping (he forgot God's name, for Christ's sake). And they had another problem: Sanders was on the verge of sweeping Super Tuesday. If nothing dramatic changed, it might all be over on the first Wednesday in March.
The Establishment demonstrated both the level to which it considered Sanders an existential threat - he alone refused billionaire money and was raising gobs of cash from the masses $18 at a time - and its power by getting both Buttigieg and Klobuchar to drop out and endorse Biden on the same day, while Bernie's one-time "friend" fauxgressive Elizabeth Warren took a lead pipe to his knees with the help of a billionaire feminist, and the corporate media broadcast Establishment talking points with the slavish uniformity of a state press. Throw in Republican-style voter suppression and likely high-tech vote flipping just to be sure, and the Establishment did it.
We all know what happened on Super Tuesday and we all knew what had happened: Bernie Sanders was done. Many exhorted us to keep going, it wasn't over, he could still win, but even they knew that Bernie Sanders was not going to be the Democratic Party nominee against Donald Trump.
But still they were two-thirds right: Keep going, it isn't over. Because electing Bernie Sanders president never was the final goal, never was going to be victory. It always was going to be Just the Beginning. Accepting that he is not going to win the nomination does not mean ending the fight, it merely means figuring out how to continue the fight. A new path. A new interim goal. A new way to get the change we need. The question is:
What Now?
We have to ask that question and we have to answer it because the present reality is not sustainable. The answer takes three steps:
1) What is the problem we are trying to solve, the opponent we are trying to beat?
2) What must we do to solve the problem, to win?
3) What are we trying to accomplish? Are we trying to reform the system, make some changes and tweaks to make it work better? Or are we trying to transform or even destroy the system? Do we want to create a whole new world? What do we want the world to look like when we are done? How do we define victory?