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Thinking recently about the American dark age that appears to loom behind a (still likely) Sanders loss, and while trying to avoid blind optimism I have to point out some principles - ostensibly shared by communists - that at least suggest an alternate future.
To prephase, this presumes the reader is already on board with "Bernie or Bust," ie that Sanders' assault on the Democratic party is the defining opportunity of our moment. One common objection being, accepting this premise, what next when he loses?
The standard glum answer to this is four to eight more years of Obama followed by another, worse Trump, the clock starting either in 2021 or after Trump's second term, depending on which way the general goes. Possibly another 16-100 years before we get another such opportunity.
I don't like to use this kind of language, but this projection is undialectical. If you take away one message from Hegel, it should be that history is unidirectional. It's a ratchet. This is what separates us from the anarchists and trads.
Ideas don't disappear after they're discredited so as to to recur later. They remain in the form of *discredited ideas,* things that haven't worked. For the left and for workers, Obama is objectively in this pile. It's one of the few things these two groups seem to agree on.
Trump will fulfill this same role for the far right, and the workers who shrugged and let him shoot his shot in 2016 will agree that he didn't do much for them either. What probably won't happen is a flight to AOC and "the squad" as the new hope.
The Dems can try and sell that, but their contested primary races over the past four cycles have been dominated by an increasingly frantic push against the party establishment. If DCCC decides to try and anoint a successor, it won't turn out well.
By contrast, anyone who can credibly wield the cudgel of single payer health care will speak on behalf of the masses. This sounds stupid to people who are used to calling for collectivized ownership of the means of production. "You just want health care."
Thing is, current institutional support for single-payer is in the same realm as DotP. Mass collectivization schemes and a simple, commonsense reform like M4A are on the *same* distant, unimaginable horizon: the one where the state responds at all to the interests of workers.
As long as there's anyone who can credibly wave the flag of M4A, there will be a movement of workers in the US. For his part, Zizek lends some credence to this strategy.pic.twitter.com/PK1HdzaieV
In 2015 there was essentially nobody on the left who was prepared for the onslaught by the successor ideology. Now there's a small but dedicated group keenly on the watch. As the new liberalism takes hold, so will an immune response. Fewer and fewer people will buy compatibilism.
These lessons take time to learn. But once a space opens up it takes more than the loss of a couple insurgent campaigns to close it.
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