I’m Sorry. Hillary Clinton is not bringing a feminist revolution, she’s a white bourgeois feminist who trots out black and brown female bodies when it suits her and ignores them when her friends want to build more women’s prisons or sell arms to anti-feminist states like Saudi Arabia. Bernie Sanders is not bringing a socialist revolution, he’s a xenophobic, gun-loving politician. And thankfully, Martin O’Malley is not even worth talking about with his laughable poll numbers. All Democrats are well to the right of Germany’s Conservative Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Nixon was an advocate of universal insurance, and FDR’s New Deal was far more radical than Bernie’s modest proposals
The thing is, American politics are desperately personal, and because it’s about candidates and not parties or policies, we begin love affairs with our favorite candidates. We so badly want them to be superhuman, to be special, when in fact they’re some of the most frail, faulty, narcissistic, broken humans imaginable. But they represent to us something more, and we make them into revolutionaries despite all evidence to the contrary. Thus the deeply petty ritual of candidate endorsements by major newspapers being taken so seriously.
Bernie Sanders is a reformer, his ideas just sound revolutionary in the context of the media vacuum of establishment US partisan politics. Richard Nixon, for instance, was an advocate of universal insurance, and FDR’s New Deal was far more radical than Bernie’s modest proposals. Hillary Clinton is the embodiment of establishment US partisan politics, being the power player in the same dynasty that’s controlled (and compromised) Democrat politics for 25 years, but her symbolic value has her supporters convinced she’s the icon of a feminist revolution. Bernie’s supporters online and in the streets are calling him a revolutionary because they think it sounds impressive, and his detractors at the Washington Post and New York Times are calling him a revolutionary because they think it makes him sound far-fetched and dangerous. They’re doing this because of the personalization of politics. Make the person sound dangerous and their ideas become dangerous by proxy. And certainly the BernieBros are helping personify Sanders as foolish, racist, sexist, dangerous, whatever, but remember: while no candidate adequately addresses America’s broken racial politics, Bernie is no more the BernieBros than Hillary is her 2008 supporters who spent the campaign race-baiting Barack Obama.
There are no revolutionaries running, and even the reformer will break your heart.
The American political bubble truly is amazing. By virtue of an utter lack of outside influence and worldly experience beyond our national borders, it has managed to convince many intelligent people that their candidate of choice, Hillary Clinton, the most establishment politician in America today, a former Senator, First Lady and Secretary of State, is actually a change agent and that Bernie Sanders is a wild, reckless, dangerous revolutionary. Sanders is the only candidate currently running that represents the “incremental change” that John Avignone and Paul Krugman called for in their pro-Clinton attacks on him in Salon and the New York Times.
I’m not saying don’t vote for your candidate of choice, whoever they are. I’m saying don’t lie to yourself, don’t lie to your readers, don’t lie to whoever you’re trying to convince to vote for the candidate you’ve chosen to attach yourself to. Know what they really are, because anyone who votes expecting a revolution, feminist or socialist or otherwise, is going to be deeply disappointed by the current field. There are no revolutionaries running, and even the reformer will break your heart. As David Graeber once eloquently explained, “what reformers have to understand is that they’re never going to get anywhere without radicals and revolutionaries to betray”.
Your Candidate Is Not A Revolution by Zachary Gallant is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
