[Vision2020] Tom Hayden: I'm Switching from Bernie to Hillary

[Nicholas Gier]

I Used to Support Bernie, but Then I Changed My MindI have a variety of
concerns about both candidates’ campaigns. But I intend to vote for Hillary
Clinton in the California primary for one fundamental reason.
By Tom Hayden <https://www.thenation.com/authors/tom-hayden/> April 13,
2016 The Nation

I am committed to building a united front against Donald Trump, and working
with both Democratic and independent voters toward the best possible ticket
and platform for the Democratic Party in November. But sounding out
supporters of both Sanders and Hillary Clinton, I’m worried that terrible
friction is brewing between the two Democratic camps left in this primary.
Democrats all have to unite to win the White House and Supreme Court this
year, building bridges without permanent bruising or the confusion of
divide-and-conquer.

The state of the race is in flux. Respect and support for Bernie are
rising, though Hillary maintains a 212-delegate edge. As of April 3, *The
New York Times* assessed
<http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/04/us/politics/bernie-sanders-hillary-clinton.html>
that Bernie will need “landslide” victories in the battles ahead. He’s
certain to win more than the 16 states where he has already prevailed. Most
of those states have been similar to Wisconsin, where 88 percent of the
population is white, an enduring issue for the Sanders campaign. But of the
major primaries that are coming up, several might be fruitful territory for
Bernie. In New York, Hillary will need to tack towards Bernie on fair-trade
issues or face losses in the Rust Belt regions of northern and western New
York. Here in California, Bernie trails Hillary by six points, with 7
percent of the electorate undecided. And my sense is that California is
winnable for Bernie. Lose or win, Bernie represents the most impressive
independent campaign in American history, with the final chapters and
legacy yet to be written.

I was an early supporter of Bernie, one of those who thought he could push
Hillary to the left, legitimize democratic socialist measures, and leave an
indelible mark on our frozen political culture. More deeply, I believed he
was the best possible messenger in the wake of Democratic Party
shortcomings. As I have argued for years, the liberal failure to create
jobs in my Rust Belt heartland, Michigan, for three decades, destroyed
hundreds of thousands of lives. Even after the activist explosion against
free trade at the Battle of Seattle in 1999, standards of living remained
stagnant. It was clear that the next generation would live lesser lives
than our parents had. The tuition for a four-year public-university
education almost doubled in cost between 2000 and 2015, while student debt
rose to 1.2 trillion dollars in 2015. Racial disparities rose with police
violence and mass incarceration rates. Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin fell
to Republican governors, and Congress returned to GOP control.

Like the WTO protests in 1999, Occupy Wall Street “changed the
conversation” in America, as the tepid mainstream media phrased it. But we
didn’t need a conversation, we needed a change, and soon, in order to save
a whole generation.
When Occupy sputtered out, Bernie’s campaign was destined to fill the void.
Since winter, the two campaigns have become more visceral, even bitter,
fulfilling my fear of a damaging split that could result in lower turnout
among Democratic and independent voters this fall, assuming the
presidential vote is close. It has become so fractious among Democrats and
independents that I began to think that only Trump or Cruz could save us
from ourselves. Support for Trump is dropping off now because of his
slobbering racism and misogyny, while Cruz represents an even more pompous
version of the same. At its core, their appeal is to working-class voters
hammered out of their jobs and drawn to economic nationalism, combined with
angry resentment of all the social progress achieved from the ’60s until
now.

Little is predictable about this election. However, some facts still
linger. Without Bernie landslides, Hillary will keep her delegate edge
despite Bernie’s overall achievement. If Bernie wins New York and
California, each by 1 percent, he still falls short.

Bernie’s army will keep climbing every barricade possible. In his ideal
scenario, victories in the final primaries should lead the Democratic
superdelegates to shift loyalty from Hillary. Nonetheless, Bernie has
received endorsements from only seven House members and none from his
current Senate colleagues. No matter how much they agree with Bernie on the
issues, no matter what doubts they hold about the Clintons, those running
for election or reelection are unlikely to see themselves as benefiting
from having a democratic socialist/independent at the top of the ticket.

Hillary is, well, Hillary. I remember seeing her on Yale’s green in 1969,
wearing a black armband for peace while a kind of Armageddon shaped up
during the Panther 21 trial and Cambodia invasion. Even then, she stood for
working within the system rather than taking to the barricades. Similarly,
in Chicago 1968, she observed the confrontations at a distance. If she had
some sort of revolution in mind, it was evolutionary, step-by-step. In her
earlier Wellesley commencement speech, she stated that the “prevailing,
acquisitive, and competitive corporate life is not the way of life for us.
We’re searching for more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating modes of
living.” But from there it was a determined decades-long uphill climb
through those same institutions that had disenchanted the young Hillary.

There are two Hillary Clintons. First, the early feminist, champion of
children’s rights, and chair of the Children’s Defense Fund; and second,
the Hillary who has grown more hawkish and prone to seeking “win-win”
solutions with corporate America. When she seems to tack back towards her
roots, it is usually in response to Bernie and new social movements. She
hasn’t changed as much as the Democratic Party has, responding to new and
resurgent movements demanding Wall Street reform, police and prison reform,
immigrant rights and a $15-an-hour minimum wage, fair trade, action on
climate change, LGBT rights, and more.
The peace movements from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan, too, are a living
legacy that fuels the public majority against sending ground troops into
the fiery jaws of war another time. Bernie voted for the war in
Afghanistan, but correctly faults Hillary for her hawkish impulse towards
regime change. We are likely to live under a what amounts to a war
presidency until either a new catastrophe or new movement leads to an
alternative to the “Long War” on terrorism.

The populist clarity of Bernie’s proposals can be problematic, even for
some of his supporters. For example, to simply reject Obamacare in the
belief that “political revolution” will lead to a single-payer solution is
simplistic. The path to a Canadian-type system or Medicare for All has
fallen short in California and Vermont, and will require Republican defeats
this year and in 2018, followed by a presidential showdown in 2020.
Meanwhile, Obamacare and the Medicaid expansion are helping 20 million
Americans now, mainly youth and people of color, which is a huge
improvement that no thoughtful radical can dismiss as merely “reformist.”
My friends at National Nurses United are to be congratulated for spending
millions supporting Bernie and tirelessly rolling their buses through so
many states thus far, but I don’t see a rollout of a Plan B, which requires
at least two presidential terms and three more congressional elections.
Bernie’s position reinforces the voter impression that his idealism will be
blocked in practice. Hillary and Obama’s approach, following on her
children’s-health-insurance law, is much easier for voters to understand
and support.

** * **

Fracking will be a salient issue in both New York and California, where it
has motivated and mobilized thousands of grassroots activists. The
anti-fracking movement achieved a historic moratorium on fracking in New
York State, where local governments had considerable leverage in a
home-rule system. Big names in the entertainment business lent their
prestige to the nascent movement, too. Next, the New York model headed to
California, amid fracktivists’ confidence that Governor Jerry Brown would
either ban the practice or adopt a New York–style ban. I enlisted in the
anti-fracking campaign, spending many hours over these three years
advocating inside and outside the Brown administration. The movement hasn’t
succeeded in California yet, but we’re still committed.

The arguments among environmentalists are the deepest and most frustrating
of any I’ve seen for 40 years—but they’re important to understand. Along
the way, there have been historic achievements. Our environmental-justice
movement, with the leadership of state Senator Kevin De León, wrote into
law a requirement that 25 percent of billions in California’s cap-and-trade
dollars would go to benefit disadvantaged communities, such as the Central
Valley and South Central LA, many of which are predominantly of color.
Nearly $300 million began pouring into such communities on a yearly basis.
California is spending $120 billion over four years on clean energy, the
largest such investment in the country. We also passed the first
divestment-from-coal bill in history. Under Brown’s leadership, California
created a Global Green Bloc of states and regions, from Canada to China to
Europe and Latin America, building a zero-emissions or low-emissions
economic powerhouse. A 2014 report found
<http://next10.org/2014-california-green-innovation-index> that there are
200,000 clean-energy jobs in the state, surpassing jobs in the fossil-fuels
industry.
But the fracking debate continues to leave permanent scars. Despite the
governor’s historically high approval ratings, the fracktivists take every
media opportunity to thrash him personally. They rack up names on online
petitions, but so far have failed to gain political traction. Their
apocalyptic view has only worsened. In addition to personally attacking
Brown, whose approval rating is 56 percent, they have brutally attacked
NRDC and “establishment” environmentalists for not achieving a moratorium
in California. Their tactics build their online membership, but turn off or
confuse more mainstream Californians.

The Democratic primary may deepen this antagonism and result in defections
among Hillary supporters. Hillary wants limits on fracking: a ban where
individual states have blocked it, like in New York; safeguards against
children’s and family exposures; a ban where releases of methane or
contamination of ground water are proven; and full disclosure of the
chemicals used in the process. Bernie’s position is that he’s simply
against all fracking.

But Hillary’s position goes beyond what virtually any state has done. *The
New York Times* writes
<http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/05/us/politics/hillary-clinton-bernie-sanders-climate-change.html>
that she “has pledged to end subsidies to the fossil fuel industry to pay
for her ambitious climate plan” and intends to install 500 million solar
collectors in four years. If and when Obama’s Clean Power Plan is upheld in
the federal courts, now a likelihood after Justice Scalia’s death, that
will bring a even greater change.

Meanwhile, Bernie’s total fracking ban leaves the question of how to do so
unaddressed. His energy platform is comprehensive, but he offers no
strategy to implement the Paris Summit in the short term. Instead, Bernie
will call his own summit of experts in the first hundred days he is
president. There is no recognition of the overwhelming wall of opposition
from the Republican Congress, which can only be broken on state-by-state
organizing. The climate clock is ticking towards doomsday. Where are we
moving next, beyond waiting for the overthrow of *Citizens United*?

For some, like myself (who suffered a serious stroke while investigating
fracking sumps in San Joaquin County last year), the question couldn’t be
more urgent. I am fully supporting state Senator Ricardo Lara’s legislation
setting firm timelines for the phasing out of asthma and cancer-causing
emissions of black carbon, methane, and f-gases as an emergency health
measure. The bill includes three key deadlines—40 percent methane
reductions, 40 percent of hydrofluorocarbon gases, and 50 percent cuts in
black-carbon emissions—all by 2030. Emissions of invisible particulate
matter are an immediate threat to the lives and safety of millions of
California workers, children, and residents of inner and rural towns. The
Lara bill is an issue both candidates could immediately unite immediately
around.

My second worry about Bernie’s candidacy is that he has not really faced an
all-out Republican-financed media assault in this entire campaign. If he’s
the nominee, that will be merciless. And my third concern: Bernie is
leading an incredible movement and sowing seeds for the future, but lacks a
concrete plan for turning his legacy into a permanent progressive force. We
don’t know what will happen to the army of supporters he has assembled, but
we already know the pattern of many similar projects—which end up going
into decline or divisions.

Voting on June 7 is a personal responsibility for myself and other
Californians, just as it is for my friends and colleagues in New York on
April 19. What is to be done in this agonizing situation? I still believe a
united front against the Republicans is the best and most necessary
strategy. But I can’t vote for a united front on June 7.

I intend to vote for Hillary Clinton in the California primary for one
fundamental reason. It has to do with race. My life since 1960 has been
committed to the causes of African Americans, the Chicano movement, the
labor movement, and freedom struggles in Vietnam, Cuba and Latin America.
In the environmental movement I start from the premise of environmental
justice for the poor and communities of color. My wife is a descendant of
the Oglala Sioux, and my whole family is inter-racial.

What would cause me to turn my back on all those people who have shaped who
I am? That would be a transgression on my personal code. I have been on too
many freedom rides, too many marches, too many jail cells, and far too many
gravesites to breach that trust. And I have been so tied to the women’s
movement that I cannot imagine scoffing at the chance to vote for a woman
president. When I understood that the overwhelming consensus from those
communities was for Hillary—for instance the Congressional Black Caucus and
Sacramento’s Latino caucus—that was the decisive factor for me. I am
gratified with Bernie’s increasing support from these communities of color,
though it has appeared to be too little and too late. Bernie’s campaign has
had all the money in the world to invest in inner city organizing, starting
18 months ago. He chose to invest resources instead in white-majority
regions at the expense of the Deep South and urban North.

Bernie comes from a place that is familiar to me, the New York culture of
democratic socialism. From the Port Huron Statement forward, I have
believed in the democratic public control of resources and protecting the
rights of labor. My intellectual hero is C. Wright Mills, a Marxist who
broke with what he condemned as the stale “labor metaphysic” of the
communist and socialist parties, embracing instead an international New
Left led by young middle-class students around the world. Mills was fresh,
honest, and always searching. The 1962 Port Huron Statement declared that
we needed liberals for their relevance in achieving reforms, and socialists
for their deeper critique of underlying systems. We did not declare
ourselves for socialism but for a massive expansion of the New Deal,
combined with an attack on the Cold War arms race. We called for a basic
realignment of the Democratic Party through the force of social movements,
but not through a third party. We even went “part of the way with LBJ” in
the face of the 1964 Goldwater threat. From there the Democrats divided
over race and Vietnam, eventually leading to Nixon. Even in the ’80s and
’9os, our campaign for “economic democracy” chose not to identify as a
socialist movement. With the coming of the 2008 Wall Street crash and
Bernie’s campaign, our political culture has changed profoundly in its
tolerance of socialist ideas. But is it enough after this truly divisive
primary season?

I wish our primary could focus more on ending wars and ending regime change
too, issues where Bernie is more dovish and Hillary still harbors an inner
hawk. Both Bernie and Hillary call for “destroying” ISIS, whatever that
might mean—but it certainly means we are moving into yet another “war
presidency.” At least there is strong bipartisan opposition to the
open-ended deployment of troops on the ground. But Hillary’s penchant for
intervention and regime change can only be thwarted by enough progressive
Democrats in Congress and massive protests in the streets and online.
Neither candidate so far is calling for the creation of a new peace
movement, but that’s the only way to check the drift into another war.

So here we are, at the end of one generation on the left and the rise of
another. Both camps in the party will need each other in November—more than
either side needs to emerge triumphant in the primary. We still need the
organizing of a united front of equals to prevail against the Republicans.
It will take a thorough process of conflict resolution to get there, not a
unilateral power wielding by the usual operatives. It’s up to all of us.
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