May 21, 2016

The destructive, “rule or ruin”—perhaps “rule and ruin”—way that Bernie Sanders and his legions of late are behaving toward Hillary Clinton and the mainstream Democratic Party suggests a different pedigree for Sanders' socialist politics than he himself thinks.

Sanders claims inspiration from Eugene V. Debs, the stalwart Socialist Party presidential candidate during the original pre-World War I Progressive Era. (Debs was later made a martyr for free speech for his opposition to U.S. entry World War I by the Woodrow Wilson Administration before he was ironically pardoned from jail by GOP President Warren G. Harding.)

Instead, Sanders’ may have a Jewish socialist pedigree in the “impossibilism” of a now largely-forgotten socialist gadfly of those times: Daniel De Leon.

De Leon was born of a Sephardic Jewish family in Dutch Curacao before his education in Europe and emergence in the U.S.before and after the year 1900 as a the dominant personality in the Socialist Labor Party. After his 16 year-old Venezuelan Jewish bride died in childbirth, De Leon during a lecture tour in Kansas, met Bertha Canary, a teacher and fellow socialist who bore him five children. They named their last son Genseric. This was the name of the Vandal barbarian king who during the dark ages, at least according to legend, made a pope kiss his toes. Is this (or a more northerly part of the anatomy) what Sanders wants Hillary Clinton to kiss?

De Leon became famous for the doctrine of “impossibilism” or basically the uncompromising rejection of any of reforms urged by other anticapitalists as a transition to socialism. In other words, no wage and hour protections, certainly no social security legislation, and no union movement like Samuel Gompers’ pragmatic, reformist AFL dedicated to raising wages in the here-and-now even if it meant settling for half a loaf.

In De Leon’s view, socialists who advocated reforms were diluting and diverting the pure revolutionary struggle whose motto must be “all or nothing at all.” They were not only deluded; they were sellouts and tools of the capitalist class or, as Sanders’ nowadays puts it, “the billionaires” and “oligarchs” to whom Hillary Clinton (may she roast in hell!) gave paid talks at Goldman Sachs. Sanders may give lip service to reform, but his version of “political revolution” in practice seems more and more like “impossiblism.”

De Leon was a brilliant orator and theoretician who favored peaceful revolution but had difficulty agreeing for very long with anybody other than himself in furthering that objective. The classic case is his influence on the founding of “the one big union,” the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), from which he split almost as soon as it was organized.

Bernie Sanders has long been known as what the British call a “back bench” oppositionist in Congress with little influence beyond making speeches. No wonder he detests Hillary Clinton who, whatever one may say about her, is a practical-minded, consequential politician.

As the Beatles sang in 1968: “You say you want a revolution/Well, you know/We all want to change the world…” The problem with Bernie Sanders he is not going to produce his desired “political revolution” except maybe in the grotesque form of contributing to the election of Donald Trump. Such are, and have always been, the unintended consequences of “impossibilism.”

Hillary Clinton has largely met Sanders’ challenge by trying to appease him by moving further left. The problem is that Sanders’ legions consider this not a principled conversion on her part, but just additional evidence of her dishonesty. With such true believers, there is no winning.

Ideally, one would like to  see Clinton show the courage to do what Adlai Stevenson recommended in 1952—“to talk sense to the American people”—and what Harry Truman practiced in 1948 by winning by fending off the Democratic Party challenges from both rightwing Dixiecrats and leftwing Henry Wallaceites, both of whom ran splinter presidential tickets. (Truman won, but defecting Wallace voters were enough to give Republican Tom Dewey the electoral votes of New York.)

Of course, the Stevenson—and Truman—strategy might not work in 2016 when Hillary has to appeal to an American electorate increasingly dominated by my generation which, together with even younger voters, too often acts like “the least great generation.”

This year at the Cannes Film Festival, there was much praise for the British-American film, Loving (based on an earlier documentary), about the black woman, Mildred Jeter, and the white man, Richard Loving, whose struggle for marital rights vs. the State of Virginia led to the unanimous U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1967 striking down the ban on interracial marriage.

The Loving case has become a landmark in the sea change in American attitudes in recent decades about same-sex marriage. I bring it up because, it seems to me, it also has important implications for current controversies about attempts like that in North Carolina to deny transgender people the right to use a public bathroom different from the biological marker on their birth certificates.

In the late 1950s, Hannah Arendt, who maintained a distinctively European attitude toward American racial attitudes, argued in a piece that was treated as borderline-scandalous in liberal magazines, including Jewish magazines, of the time that ending the color line in public school classrooms was important, but that ultimately the color line in bedrooms and marriages would also have to come down for Jim Crow to be defeated.

I think that, in retrospect, Arendt was right. We know this because the increase of marriages across both color and creedal lines—one of the most striking trends of the last generation—is also among the most important in making the U.S. a more just society, despite all the racial and other barriers that continue to separate Americans.

Back in 1896, when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld “the separate but equal” doctrine in Plessy v. Ferguson, the greatest injustice was not that whites and blacks might choose to sit apart on public conveyances, but that the government was given the authority to impose such a result on the basis of real or imagined biology. Behind the Court’s decision was an implicit reliance on the theory of Yale Professor William Graham Sumner that “mores” determined what was socially right, and that since the white Southern majority adhered to segregationist “mores,” their state governments could impose them as a matter of law.

I belong to a generation for whom “bathroom choice” for transgender people may be something new under the sun. But fundamental principles of right and wrong, at least in the U.S., should be a matter of the Constitution not social conventions or popularity contests. This is why I think that Jews in particular need to side with LGBT rights, particularly at a time when majoritarian demagoguery is threatening minority rights in ways not seen since the Joe McCarthy Era.