Bernie Sanders, counter-revolutionary
Feb. 18th, 2020 09:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sethgI just read a 2012 book by Chris Mooney called The Republican Brain. It’s a follow-up of sorts to his 2005 book, The Republican War on Science. In this latter book, Mooney explores why so many people in the Republican base seem more disposed to distrust scientific evidence than Democrats. To look for answers, he turns—this will shock you, I’m sure—to scientists.
He brings forth research from a variety of psychological studies indicating that on a widely-used scale of personality traits, liberals (not just Democrats in America, but people who favor liberal parties all over the world) tend to score high for a personality trait known as “Openness to Experience,” whereas conservatives tend to score high for a personality trait known as “Conscientiousness.” Think of a stereotypical liberal with no compunctions about trying out new foods, new drugs, and new pronouns, contrasted with a stereotypical conservative who wants their bed neatly made, their flags flying according to code, and their genders strictly binary.
Mooney acknowledges that when one of our two parties caters to people with the most extremely conservative personality traits, our body politic suffers. (Oh, Chris-of-2012, wringing your hands over polarized America, you don’t know how good we had it back then.) But he also acknowledges that we need all kinds of personalities for a healthy political system, and he admits that liberal personality traits, taken to extremes, can also be bad. He closes his book with a plea for Democrats to be a little more conservative, personality-wise. Don’t feel compelled to both-sides everything to death! When a Democrat has the White House, make yourself feel some loyalty, dammit!
Eight years later, Mooney may get his wish. Because, in the current presidential primaries, we have a true conservative Democrat running: one who knows how to make not-Open-To-Experience hearts beat faster, one who promises to Conscientiously set the country aright just so.
I refer, of course, to Bernie Sanders.
We are unused to seeing Sanders as a conservative because he is the only candidate who embraces the “socialist” label instead of shying away from it. But he is not promising to repeat Lenin’s revolution of 1917; rather, he is promising to undo Reagan’s revolution of 1980. His epithet of choice is “billionaires,” not “bourgeoisie” or even “bosses.”
As Corey Robin explains in The Reactionary Mind, the common thread in conservative ideologies, going back to Burke if not Hobbes, is hearkening back to the hierarchies of an idealized past. (The more intellectually honest conservatives know that they are working from an idealization and not genuine history; they just think that if they are returned to power they can make reality match the ideal this time around.) Contemporary Republicans feel nostalgic for an 1890s and its hierarchy of men over women, white over other races, native-born over alien, and so on. Sanders represents that faction of the left that feels nostalgic for the economy of the 1960s, when anyone could get a steady job, not worry about paying for health care, and could afford to send their kids to college. The hierarchy this faction wants to re-establish is one where unions and the Federal government had corporations on a short leash. While a Joe Biden presidency would be the moral equivalent of a third Obama term, a Sanders presidency would be a rerun of LBJ (minus the Vietnam War).
No, the 1960s weren’t literally a time when anyone could get a steady job. This to me is the essence of the Sanders/Warren split; Warren understands how the society and economy of 2020 are not like they were in 1960, and how leashing capitalism now requires different tools than it did then. And besides, the 1890s weren‘t literally a time when white Americans were dominant; the non-WASP white people in the Republican orbit, if they were transported to the real 1890s, would hardly end up at the top of the racial pyramid. In both cases we are dealing with idealizations, not actual history.
Pundits and consultants, when looking for crossover appeal in a presidential candidate, look for someone who splits the ideological difference between the two major parties. (Trump himself, who in 2016 ran to his party’s left on free trade and infrastructure-building, fit this pattern.) But Sanders, conspicuously left-wing in ideology but conspicuously nostalgia-seeking in character, is developing a different sort of crossover appeal, especially since most voters pay scant attention to ideology.
Two recent polls demonstrate this. In a USA Today/Ipsos poll, conducted on February 12–13, 40% of voters said they admired Sanders’ character and 39% said he shared their values, putting him ahead of all the major Democratic contenders, and well ahead of Trump himself (26% admired Trump and 31% shared his values). A Yahoo/YouGov poll conducted on the same days asked Democratic primary voters who they would choose in a head-to-head contest between various pairs of candidates. Not only did Sanders win these matches against Biden, Bloomberg, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, and Warren, but independent voters who planned to vote in Democratic primaries favored Trump by a higher margin than people who identified as Democrats. Against Warren, Sanders’s ideological neighbor, the contrast is especially striking: he beats Warren by 2 points among Democrats but 19 points among independents. (Lest you attribute this to sexism, the Democrat/independent gap is much smaller when Sanders goes head-to-head against Klobuchar.)
Bernie Sanders is not my first choice for the presidency. In the long run, he may not turn out to be the electorate’s first choice, either. But this is the second presidential campaign in a row where he has performed far in excess of everyone’s expectations. Anyone who hopes to defeat him, or imitate his success, should set aside platitudes about “socialism” and “free stuff,” and take a clear-eyed look at why he is succeeding.
He brings forth research from a variety of psychological studies indicating that on a widely-used scale of personality traits, liberals (not just Democrats in America, but people who favor liberal parties all over the world) tend to score high for a personality trait known as “Openness to Experience,” whereas conservatives tend to score high for a personality trait known as “Conscientiousness.” Think of a stereotypical liberal with no compunctions about trying out new foods, new drugs, and new pronouns, contrasted with a stereotypical conservative who wants their bed neatly made, their flags flying according to code, and their genders strictly binary.
Mooney acknowledges that when one of our two parties caters to people with the most extremely conservative personality traits, our body politic suffers. (Oh, Chris-of-2012, wringing your hands over polarized America, you don’t know how good we had it back then.) But he also acknowledges that we need all kinds of personalities for a healthy political system, and he admits that liberal personality traits, taken to extremes, can also be bad. He closes his book with a plea for Democrats to be a little more conservative, personality-wise. Don’t feel compelled to both-sides everything to death! When a Democrat has the White House, make yourself feel some loyalty, dammit!
Eight years later, Mooney may get his wish. Because, in the current presidential primaries, we have a true conservative Democrat running: one who knows how to make not-Open-To-Experience hearts beat faster, one who promises to Conscientiously set the country aright just so.
I refer, of course, to Bernie Sanders.
We are unused to seeing Sanders as a conservative because he is the only candidate who embraces the “socialist” label instead of shying away from it. But he is not promising to repeat Lenin’s revolution of 1917; rather, he is promising to undo Reagan’s revolution of 1980. His epithet of choice is “billionaires,” not “bourgeoisie” or even “bosses.”
As Corey Robin explains in The Reactionary Mind, the common thread in conservative ideologies, going back to Burke if not Hobbes, is hearkening back to the hierarchies of an idealized past. (The more intellectually honest conservatives know that they are working from an idealization and not genuine history; they just think that if they are returned to power they can make reality match the ideal this time around.) Contemporary Republicans feel nostalgic for an 1890s and its hierarchy of men over women, white over other races, native-born over alien, and so on. Sanders represents that faction of the left that feels nostalgic for the economy of the 1960s, when anyone could get a steady job, not worry about paying for health care, and could afford to send their kids to college. The hierarchy this faction wants to re-establish is one where unions and the Federal government had corporations on a short leash. While a Joe Biden presidency would be the moral equivalent of a third Obama term, a Sanders presidency would be a rerun of LBJ (minus the Vietnam War).
No, the 1960s weren’t literally a time when anyone could get a steady job. This to me is the essence of the Sanders/Warren split; Warren understands how the society and economy of 2020 are not like they were in 1960, and how leashing capitalism now requires different tools than it did then. And besides, the 1890s weren‘t literally a time when white Americans were dominant; the non-WASP white people in the Republican orbit, if they were transported to the real 1890s, would hardly end up at the top of the racial pyramid. In both cases we are dealing with idealizations, not actual history.
Pundits and consultants, when looking for crossover appeal in a presidential candidate, look for someone who splits the ideological difference between the two major parties. (Trump himself, who in 2016 ran to his party’s left on free trade and infrastructure-building, fit this pattern.) But Sanders, conspicuously left-wing in ideology but conspicuously nostalgia-seeking in character, is developing a different sort of crossover appeal, especially since most voters pay scant attention to ideology.
Two recent polls demonstrate this. In a USA Today/Ipsos poll, conducted on February 12–13, 40% of voters said they admired Sanders’ character and 39% said he shared their values, putting him ahead of all the major Democratic contenders, and well ahead of Trump himself (26% admired Trump and 31% shared his values). A Yahoo/YouGov poll conducted on the same days asked Democratic primary voters who they would choose in a head-to-head contest between various pairs of candidates. Not only did Sanders win these matches against Biden, Bloomberg, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, and Warren, but independent voters who planned to vote in Democratic primaries favored Trump by a higher margin than people who identified as Democrats. Against Warren, Sanders’s ideological neighbor, the contrast is especially striking: he beats Warren by 2 points among Democrats but 19 points among independents. (Lest you attribute this to sexism, the Democrat/independent gap is much smaller when Sanders goes head-to-head against Klobuchar.)
Bernie Sanders is not my first choice for the presidency. In the long run, he may not turn out to be the electorate’s first choice, either. But this is the second presidential campaign in a row where he has performed far in excess of everyone’s expectations. Anyone who hopes to defeat him, or imitate his success, should set aside platitudes about “socialism” and “free stuff,” and take a clear-eyed look at why he is succeeding.
