The Walking Dead, or has Sanders done a Corbyn?

‘Dead man walking’ is an overused expression. But I can’t help feeling it fits Bernie Sanders perfectly. Barring some kind of miracle, the only thing that stops his campaign for the presidency being over, is that he won’t admit it.

An analysis in the New York Times rang a bell with me:

While Mr. Sanders has not ended his bid, he has fallen far behind Mr. Biden in the delegate count and has taken to trumpeting his success in the battle of ideas rather than arguing that he still has a path to the nomination.

Supporters of Jeremy Corbyn, soon to be ex-Leader of the Labour Party, led us into two general election defeats. The second, in December, was crushing. His supporters now claim that he ‘won the debate but lost the election’.

How much worse would the defeat have been had we lost the debate too?

Lost causes both. However well read the campaigns may have been

All this reminded me of a note a friend of mine posted online some weeks ago.

I had been wondering how Momentum had been able to do so many things in the General Election that the Labour Party could not or did not do.

A friend in Momentum told me to read "Rules For Revolutionaries" by Bond and Exley.

My first reaction was, “if it’s an idea from Momentum, it’s probably best to stay well away from it”. Momentum is a faction inside the Labour Party that was set up specifically to back Jeremy Corbyn. So it shares responsibility for his failure.

When I expressed my scepticism, however, my friend responded that I should perhaps read the book. That was a reasonable reply, so I did – or rather, I listened to it, my preferred way of getting to know books these days (haven’t tried it? I suggest you do. You can listen while doing something else, which is particularly welcome if the something else is housework).

The book’s by Becky Bond and Zack Exley and it’s a fascinating read (or listen). It’s an American study, so it’s hardly about anything anyone in Europe would recognise as revolutionary. It’s about basic reforms, radical only for the States, such as healthcare free at the point of care or university education without fees.

Many intriguing ideas

It focuses above all on organisation and tactics, drawing heavily on the authors’ experience of the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign. 

They have some excellent ideas. The biggest is the extensive use of volunteers, rather than paid staff. Volunteers can recruit others who can recruit still more, creating a spreading network of supporters actively working for your candidate.

The other, related to it, is to raise your money from huge numbers of small donations. That’s been very much a keynote of both of Bernie’s presidential campaigns, and it’s impressive: it leaves him beholden only to ordinary voters and not to the huge corporations or lobbying organisations that have been toxifying Washington politics for at least a century and a half.

Not all of this is directly transferable to the UK. For instance, a curse and an advantage of US politics is the primary election.

It’s a curse, as the Democrats are discovering now, because it leaves a party squabbling with itself as candidates vie for the nomination, while Trump sits in the White House trying to look presidential.

The advantage is that it gives candidates a long time to connect with voters to listen to their concerns and to communicate a response.

We have no such institution in Britain. Arguably, we should. I think it most unlikely that Corbyn would have led Labour into the last election if Labour voters, and not just members, had been consulted. But for the moment, we don’t.

However, it is perfectly imaginable that we organise discussions with voters about principles. For instance, in Corbyn Labour has had a leader who was a Brexiter without the guts to admit it. Without that handicap, the Party could have spent the time after the referendum explaining to its supporters that Brexit would harm their lives, even if they had voted for it. That might have kept enough voters on side to win an election, and even have built support to reverse the Brexit result.

So some of Bond’s and Exley’s proposals could certainly be applied in Britain. But surely not by Momentum. Bond and Exley are all about recruiting huge networks of volunteers and empowering them to campaign as they see fit. That means delegating authority, and accepting the small number of inevitable failures for the sake of the far greater overall gain.

Momentum, to give you an idea of how the faction operates, sent out a ballot to its members over the Labour leadership election. Did it delegate the choice to its members? Did it heck. It called on them to either accept or reject only one option, the politburo’s.

Sorry. Momentum has a National Coordinating Group. However it behaves, it’s not actually called a politburo.

None of this, though, is the biggest problem with the book. The real problem is that it was written by people associated with a losing campaign. The book drops a hint as to why Sanders lost.

Becky Bond wrote Rule 4 of the Rules for Revolutionaries. That’s ‘Fighting Racism must be at the core of the message to everyone’.

She describes a public meeting at which candidates were asked to react to the call ‘Black Lives Matter’. My transcription of the audio is:

… his [Bernie’s] response to protestors was to declare, “black lives of course matter. I spent fifty years of my life fighting for civil rights and for dignity.” Then he continued, “but if you don’t want me to be here, that’s OK. I don’t want to outscream people.”

It was in this way that Bernie missed a crucial, early opportunity to put race at the centre of the message to everyone.

One of the most remarkable aspects of Bernie Sanders’ campaign, particularly the current one, is his inability to gain traction amongst black voters. Like Bernie, Corbyn’s response to accusations of anti-Semitism, was to point at decades of campaigning against racism.

More fundamentally, however, Bond’s account of this moment provides a glancing reference to a much more serious problem that the book fails to address: it doesn’t matter how well you organise if the candidate’s no good. And he’s no good if he can’t put together a winning coalition of voters.

That’s Corbyn, but it’s also Sanders. Not only can Bernie not mobilise black voters, he can’t break out of the narrow circle of those who share his views. Here’s the New York Times again, with comments that apply as strongly to Corbyn:

Mr. Sanders proved unable to expand his base well beyond the left or to win over African-Americans in meaningful numbers. He failed to heed warnings from traditional party leaders, and even from within his campaign, about the need to modulate his message and unify Democrats.

Sanders rejects what he sneeringly refers to as the Democrat ‘establishment’, which makes it surprising that he’s angered by the failure of the centre and right of the Democratic Party to rally behind him. In the same way, Corbynists in Labour denounce anyone else as ‘Blairites’ or ‘Red Tories’. 

That doesn’t matter too much if the objects of their contempt are fellow Labour members. We voted for the Party anyway, despite Corbyn. But outside the Party, there was nothing like Party loyalty to oblige the huge numbers who mistrusted Corbyn to stick with him in spite of their aversion. So they voted against.

It can be invaluable to have clever organisational methods. Great campaigning tools are even more valuable. But if your candidate isn’t prepared to reach out to voters who don’t already share his views, well, he’s doomed before he starts.

Bernie. Jeremy. Walking dead both.