By
Rob Carolina
I voted for Bernie Sanders in the Democrats Abroad Global
Primary. I feel it's important to explain my reasons to the many friends I made
within the Obama campaign and Democrats Abroad UK.
Like everyone in the Democratic Party, I found myself
confronted with two very competent, experienced, and viable candidates for the
office of president. Secretary Clinton's accomplishments are many. Her wide
experience includes the White House, the US Senate, and the State Department. A
talented lawyer, over her years of public service she has taken each brief,
mastered its complexities, and delivered positive results.
Senator Sanders, in contrast, has spent a large amount of
his time in politics as an isolated voice advocating the merits of democratic
socialism. He spent decades warning of the consequences of America's emerging
winner-take-all culture and the slow drift away from the New Deal crafted by
President Franklin D Roosevelt in the 1930s.
This distinction is the key to my decision. Our nation, and
the grand experiment begun at its founding in the 18th Century, faces a new
existential crisis. Our country increasingly resembles the dysfunctional countries
that my late father visited as the international finance director for a large US
multinational firm in the 1970s. Returning to our Midwestern suburban house from
trips abroad, my father (a life-long Republican) would often lament that the
society he had visited was "one of those places where 1% of the people own
99% of everything". He felt there were few good prospects for such places
where the vast majority of the population was virtually powerless. He
celebrated the America that he knew – as a World War II veteran, beneficiary of
the GI Bill, and Ohio factory worker who moved from his blue-collar assembly
line job to a senior management role – as a more equitable society with
meaningful prospects for social mobility.
Four decades after my father's international travels, and
two decades after his death, many of the places he visited have made tremendous
strides in building a middle class and strengthening democratic institutions. In
that same time the United States has also changed. A small circle of the truly rich
have grown more distant from their fellow Americans while accumulating for
themselves a massive increase in the percentage of our nation's wealth. We have
more or less abandoned any pretence of asking people to consider "what you
can do for your country". We've adopted a winner-take-all approach to
every aspect of our lives and careers, providing ever-growing rewards to an
ever-diminishing group of "winners", while classifying anyone who
fails to reach the top of the pyramid as a "loser" – saddling them with
crushing student debt, or crushing medical debt, or both, and with no viable opportunity
to try again. The social safety net that remains is so filled with holes, and exists
so close to rock bottom, that even people who are caught in its grasp often do
not survive the fall.
I've already attended the funeral of one friend from my
generation (Generation X) who was crushed by our society's newfound
heartlessness. I've read the obituaries of others.
One of the most important jobs of the President of the
United States is to offer a hopeful vision for the future of our nation. The successful
candidate must then rally our nation, move closer to that vision, and defend that
vision against those who wish to deny us that same dream. This ability to offer
a compelling vision is what distinguishes great leaders from great managers. As
many others have written, Dr Martin Luther King, Jr captured the national
imagination and changed the political landscape by proclaiming, "I have a
dream." He did not announce, "I have a plan". This is the
difference between leadership and management. Leaders inspire our collective
devotion to reach the promised land, even if they don’t yet know how or when we
will get there.
I have no illusions that any Democratic president taking
office in 2017 will have the magical ability to sway the US Congress into some
semblance of rationality or even reasonability. President Obama began his time in
office attempting to find accommodation with the Republican Caucus. This is one
of the many reasons I supported him. But he was rebuffed time and again by those
who engage in hostage-taking politics. Witness the recurring threats of falling
from fiscal cliffs, the resulting downgrade of US sovereign credit rating,
failure to hold confirmation hearings for multiple executive branch
appointments, and a growing logjam of judicial appointments that wreaks havoc
with our criminal and civil justice systems.
President Obama discovered that he was not negotiating with
a disciplined and principled group of people sharing a core of common values.
Rather, he found himself sitting opposite an unruly mob who were uninterested
in compromise and happy to allow harm to our nation for the sake of personal political
expediency. His negotiating tactics changed. The new reality demanded a harder
line, and our president moved to take it.
Any Democratic president taking office in 2017 must be
prepared for the worst political ride in US history. But to make a difference, that
president cannot fail to keep faith with the core values that carry them into
office. Our current national nightmare of unprincipled gridlock caused by
unprincipled demagogues will only come to an end when the Republican Caucus
decides to clean its own house, bringing a renewed vigour to discussing the health
of our nation as a whole – or when it is replaced by something else. It will not
be fixed by more rigorous discipline within the Democratic Party. Nor will it
be aided by a policy of "triangulation" that merely confuses the
inequitable with the inevitable.
Senator Sanders has spent his career giving voice to a
vision for the future of America. When he started, this was a message that most
Americans were not ready to hear. In those days, the most pressing existential
threat to America was the Cold War and the potential for nuclear annihilation.
Most of us at that time simply did not have a clear sense of the economic and
social future of our country and the long-term damage that was about to be created
by the "Reagan Revolution". Americans of my generation, born in the mid-1960s
and 70s, have witnessed both the birth of Reagonomics and the terrible toll
that it has taken on our society. American generations younger than mine are also
worried about the bleak prospects for their future. They are right to worry.
It's been a rough ride for my generation. It is already worse for theirs.
The key to winning a presidential election is not only
mobilising the base of one's own party. It is equally important to persuade outsiders.
What America needs is a political leader for all of the people of the United
States. Yes, someone who can rally the support of the Democratic base by
demonstrating adherence to our shared set of values. But also someone who can
gather support from the growing plurality of Americans who do not identify
strongly with either major US political party.
A vast and growing part of the American population has begun
to fear, with justification, that their future is bleak. That those comfortable
with the status quo are leaving them
behind, voiceless and unprotected. That their concerns are ignored by the
establishment represented by both major US parties.
An America with little hope for the future is not America at
all.
Donald Trump has already exploited this fear to drive a
wedge through the heart of the Republican Party. Mr Trump's powerful appeal to
the powerless can only be defeated by a passionate, intrepid champion with a
better inclusive vision for America's future. Unless we promote a candidate who
can passionately advocate a vision that restores this same hope of an America
in which everyone can enjoy a better future, then we have failed to lead and we
risk failure at the polls in November.
This is not the time to move to the centre. We are at one of
those turning points in history where, as Yeats wrote, "Things fall apart; the centre cannot
hold." We (as a party) must confront the reality that this is not
merely an election of left versus right as we traditionally define these terms.
The "centre" of that 1-dimensional axis is a political desert. A
place that exists on a map, but nobody lives there.
Here now is the new American politics. Those who can
articulate and respond to the fears (and hopes) of the rising tide of the
powerless and politically unmoored will find success in our democracy. Those
who believe that the simple left-right labels continue to define us as a nation
will struggle as this once accurate barometer no longer forecasts the political
weather.
Nine years ago when I started my support for Barack Obama,
foreign observers who had lived in the US in the 1970s and 80s told me with confidence
that America could never elect a black man as President of the United States. As
we saw in 2008 and 2012, America has changed.
Today some tell me that America will never elect a president
who openly promotes a vision of democratic socialism. (They seem to ignore that
we already did this in the 1930s, 40s, and 60s.) I agree that in the 1970s, 80s,
and 90s, America was not ready for a president like Bernie Sanders.
But once again, times have changed. America is ready for
Bernie. So am I.
Rob Carolina
Co-Chair, Obama London (2008- )
Chair, Democrats Abroad UK (2011-15)
P.S. In voting for Bernie, I find myself (for the first time
in many years) disagreeing with my good friend and Obama London Co-chair, Karin
Robinson. Karin has already written a
heart-felt article about her choice to vote for Hilary Clinton. I respect
her views, as always, and thank her for consenting to my request to publish
this essay here on the same pro-Obama blog she founded so many years ago when
we first campaigned together.
