[ CBS News reported that Bernie Sanders had just done exactly what
many critics have long called on him to do: He asked his supporters to
dial back the personal attacks on rivals in the Democratic primary and
focus on substantial policy differences.] [[link removed]]

HOW THE TRANSFORMATIVE POWER OF SOLIDARITY WILL BEAT TRUMP  
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Naomi Klein
January 22, 2020
The Intercept
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_ CBS News reported that Bernie Sanders had just done exactly what
many critics have long called on him to do: He asked his supporters to
dial back the personal attacks on rivals in the Democratic primary and
focus on substantial policy differences. _

Supporters of Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders
at a rally in Minneapolis, Minn., on Nov. 3, 2019., Photo: Scott
Heins/Getty Images // The Intercept

 

It made for a tough juxtaposition. Late Monday night, CBS
News reported
[[link removed]] that
Bernie Sanders had just done exactly what many critics have long
called on him to do: He asked his supporters to dial back the personal
attacks on rivals in the Democratic primary and focus on substantial
policy differences.

“We need a serious debate in this country on issues,” Sanders
said. “We don’t need to demonize people who may disagree with us.
… I appeal to my supporters: Please, engage in civil discourse.”
He pointed out (rightly) that “we’re not the only campaign that
does it. Other people act that way as well.” But he added, “I
would appeal to everybody: Have a debate on the issues. We can
disagree with each other without being disagreeable, without being
hateful.”

Then, early the following morning, the Hollywood Reporter sent out a
press release about its new cover story with the subject line:
“Hillary Clinton on 2016, her new doc and Bernie: ‘Nobody likes
him.’”

Inside were excerpts from a stunningly destructive interview
[[link removed]] in
which Clinton obsessively picks every scab of the 2016 primary race
and refuses to say that she would endorse Sanders if he wins the
nomination — the very thing establishment Democrats falsely claim
that Sanders did in 2016 (in fact, as the New Yorker reported, he
campaigned tirelessly for her, sometimes doing three events a day
[[link removed]]).

Within seconds, that 2016 primary feeling flooded my bloodstream.
Screw what I had planned for the morning — none of it felt as
importing as firing off a volley of rage tweets about Clinton, her
staggering absence of self-awareness, and her outrageously revisionist
history.

But I did something else instead. I blocked Twitter, chatted with my
son about why he’s such a Bernie fan (“He will beat
[[link removed]] Donald
Trump”), and started writing about being on the Sanders campaign
trail in Iowa and New Hampshire over the last couple months. Because
among Sanders’s steadily growing base of supporters, the mood is
about as far from rage tweeting as you can get. In fact, despite the
senator’s reputation as a finger-waving grump, the more time I spend
with the campaign, whether in small meetups or huge rallies
[[link removed]], the more I am struck by
the undercurrent of tenderness that runs through all these events.
Surprisingly enough, the force that is bridging what at first seem
like huge divides — between multiracial urbanite Gen Z-ers and aging
white farmers, between lifetime industrial trade unionists and
hardcore climate organizers, between a Jewish candidate and a huge
Muslim base — is a culture of quiet listening.

This crystalized for me last Sunday in Manchester, New Hampshire, when
I met with about 15 volunteers who were heading out to knock on doors
on a frigid morning. Huddling in a strip-mall campaign office next to
a Subway and a Supertan, they were reviewing the messaging that is
proving most resonant with voters. That Bernie will fight for us
because he always has. That he has the courage to take on the
billionaire class. That he has a path to victory because of the
unprecedented grassroots movement that the campaign has built.

After the official part of the meeting, one of the volunteers took me
aside. Making the case for the candidate and the policies is
important, he said, “but what I have found is that the most
important thing we can do is listen. People need to share their
stories. That’s even more important than talking.”

Canvassers and organizers across the country report the same thing:
that once a space for listening (as opposed to lecturing) has been
opened up, the stories start pouring out. About how the loss of a
family member to cancer was compounded by being hounded by medical
debt collectors. About the deep fatigue and full-body stress of
working three jobs and still struggling to make ends meet. About a
student debt that ballooned so fast, studies had to be aborted, along
with any hope of earning enough to pay back the creditors. About
feeling unsafe walking the streets in a hijab and missing family
members blocked by Donald Trump’s travel bans. About skipping
necessary treatments and critical medications for lack of funds. About
fear of having children in the face of climate breakdown. And so much
more.

After these intimate stories have been shared, people are more open to
hearing how the movement that the campaign is building could make
their lives better with bold policies from Medicare for All to erasing
college debt to a $15 minimum wage to a Green New Deal.

If this sounds less like conventional electoral campaigning and more
like old-school political organizing (maybe even consciousness
raising), that’s because it is. As Ruby Cramer observed
[[link removed]] in
an excellent report for BuzzFeed News in December, the campaign’s
animating mission — whether in the field or on digital platforms —
is to convince millions of Americans that, contrary to what they have
been told, their pain is not the result of a failure of character or
insufficient hard work. Rather, it is the consequence of economic and
social systems precisely designed to produce cruel outcomes, systems
that can only be changed if people drop the shame and come together in
common cause.

Sanders, Cramer writes, “is imagining a presidential campaign that
brings people out of alienation and into the political process simply
by presenting stories where you might recognize some of your own
struggles. He is imagining a voter, he says, who thinks, _I thought
it was just me who was struggling to put food on the table. I
thought_ I _was the only person. I thought it was all my fault. You
mean to say there are millions of people?_” 

To achieve the scale and speed of change that Sanders is pledging, the
people currently supporting his campaign will need to stay organized
and keep pushing for change on the outside.

This is one of the fascinating ways that the campaign’s slogan
“Not Me. Us_._” has gradually taken on a life of its own, with new
layers of meaning added as the project matures. When the slogan was
first unveiled, it seemed to mean something narrow and specific: This
campaign was not about voting for a messianic leader who would fix all
of our problems for us. To achieve the scale and speed of change that
Sanders is pledging (and that we desperately need), the people
currently supporting his campaign, with small donations and volunteer
work and eventually votes, will need to stay organized and keep
pushing for change on the outside, just as they did during the New
Deal era.

The slogan still carries that meaning. That’s why it matters that
Sanders is endorsed by some of the most courageous and militant trade
unions and grassroots organizations in the country, from the United
Teachers Los Angeles
[[link removed]] to
the Dream Defenders [[link removed]] to
the Sunrise Movement [[link removed]].
These organizations have already shown themselves willing to stage
strikes and engage in disruptive protest to win tangible victories for
their members, and they can be counted on to keep building and
exercising that kind of disruptive power after the election.

But as the campaign has gone on and the base has grown, the slogan’s
meaning has become more layered. “Not Me. Us.” is now also the
first-person voice of that worker or student or senior or immigrant
who previously had been suffering in silence and solitude, blaming
themselves, and who now sees that they have more company than they
ever dared to imagine. Now it also means: “I thought it was just me.
Now I know it is us.”

The next step is to convince this emergent “us” that it is
powerful, capable of winning a very different kind of society. That is
no small task. I’ve often noticed that plenty of people arrive at
Sanders rallies looking pretty worn down — by overwork, by debt, by
fear, by the daily barrage of Trump crimes and outrages that pound all
of our nerves and yet never seem to provoke any real accountability.
With an administration in the White House performing impunity all day
long every day — even in the face of a historic impeachment trial
and the obvious urgency of climate breakdown, and with an armed far
right marching in the streets — the possibility of deep progressive
change can feel like a fantasy.

I think that’s part of why Sanders talks for a good long while at
those rallies, even when it’s his third event of the day and he
would surely rather call it a night. It takes time to move a crowd
through the arc of emotions — from naming the problem to remembering
how big the “us” actually is, to mapping the plan for how we are
going to win, to really feeling in our bones that this impossible
thing might just happen. In a culture expert at the art of isolation
and disempowerment, it takes real effort to persuade a group of
beat-up people that they could be part of ushering in a radically
different future.

[Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont speaks on stage after receiving the
endorsement of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez during a Bernies Back rally in
Queens, NY, on October 19, 2019. (Photo by Bastiaan Slabbers/NurPhoto
via Getty Images)]
[[link removed]]

Related
[[link removed]] - Can
the Bernie Sanders Campaign Alter the Course of the Democratic Party?
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And yet that is what is happening on the campaign trail every day,
which is the true threat that the Sanders movement presents to the
political and economic elite. Countless numbers of working people are
starting to actually believe that they could exercise transformative
power, simply by escaping the various structures isolating and
dividing them. It is an awakening, in the truest sense of the word —
the collective construction of a new group identity in real time.

If there was one moment when this power began to be unleashed, it was
the Queens rally with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in October, when
Sanders exhorted
[[link removed]] everyone
in the 25,000-strong crowd to look to someone in their midst, someone
they did not know, “maybe somebody who doesn’t look like you, who
might be of a different religion, maybe who come from a different
country. … My question now to you is are you willing to fight for
that person who you don’t even know as much as you’re willing to
fight for yourself?”

Would they fight to end student debt, even if they had no debt? Would
they fight for the rights of immigrants, even if they are a citizen
themselves? And so on.

As the overwhelming
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to that rallying cry attests, people were more than moved — they
were altered. And it’s worth examining why. I think it might be
because, while a great many Americans are asked to kill and die for
their country, they are almost never asked — across divisions of
race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, and nationality — to
stand up and fight for one another. And if we did that, if we were
able to escape the idea that our only job is to ferociously fight for
ourselves or, at most, our own narrowly defined identity group, it
would irrevocably alter the arithmetic of power in this country. As
the artist and author Molly Crabapple told
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crowd at a Sanders rally in Conway, New Hampshire, on Sunday, “You
know what beats the politics of hate? The politics of solidarity.”

THIS IS YET another meaning “Not Me. _Us._” has taken on: “I
am not only for myself. I am also for you, and us.”

There is another layer of meaning the slogan has taken on, this one
more ephemeral. Over the past three long years, it has become a
political cliché to say that the task is not only to defeat Trump,
but to defeat the broken system that made Trumpism possible. But what
does that mean in practice? Some of it surely has to do with reining
in the outside political power of the ultrarich. Some of it, no doubt,
has to with confronting the racism and misogyny Trump so powerfully
marshals for his advancement.

But defeating Trumpism also means confronting forces that are harder
to pin down — like the hypernarcissism cutthroat individualism that
Trump so perfectly embodies as a reality show star made famous by
firing people for sport, encouraging contestants to step on each
other’s necks to get ahead. A man who now rules the country
according to the same forces that torment his own psyche, a
never-ending sense of personal grievance and a bottomless need for
more power and wealth.

[[link removed]]

Related
[[link removed]] - Forget
Bernie vs. Warren. Focus on Growing the Progressive Base and Defeating
Biden.
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This is why, after Trump was elected, I started calling
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all of us to “kill the Trump within,” whether it was our
Twitter-addled attention spans, or the absurd idea that we are all
individualized brands in a marketplace rather than people in
communities — or that sees other people and even other movements as
rival products competing for scarce market share. And of course, the
Trumpiest part of us all may be the one that can’t resist joining a
mob to shame and attack people with whom we disagree — sometimes
using cruel personal slurs and with an intensity set to nuclear.

At the time, I speculated that if we de-Trumped in some of these ways
— perhaps resolving to spend a few more hours a week in face-to-face
relationships, or to surrender some ego for the greater good of a
project, or to recognize the value of so much in life that cannot be
bought or sold — research suggests that we would also become a lot
happier. Which will come in handy since miserable people aren’t
likely to stick with the kind of movements we need to build in order
to achieve any of this systemic change, movements that do not have a
finish line in sight and, indeed, will require of us a lifetime of
engagement.

This, I think, is the most radical meaning of “Not Me. _Us._”
Because without this shift from a culture of hyperindividualism and
unending interpersonal competition, we have no hope of achieving the
bold policy transformations we need. The campaign — out on the
doorstep, in union halls and high school gymnasiums and breweries —
has become that kind of space, a place for hundreds of thousands of
people to escape the nonstop self-promotion and self-obsession of our
Trumpian times. To become a little less “look at me” and a little
more “feel the power of us.” Particularly for his many young
supporters, raised to be terrified that they will fall behind if they
do not frenetically maximize their productive output and constantly
perform the most marketable version of themselves, “Not
Me. _Us_.” has become an invitation to imagine another path to a
good life: through the collective, generational mission of rolling out
what Sanders has called “the decade of the Green New Deal.” 

Because without a shift from a culture of hyperindividualism and
unending interpersonal competition, we have no hope of achieving the
bold policy transformations we need.

This is why social media will always be a double-edged sword for the
Sanders campaign. Without Twitter, Facebook, YouTube (and now TikTok),
the senator would have no way to do the kind of things that his
campaign pioneered in 2016. Those platforms are what allow the
campaign to communicate directly with its base and beyond, bypassing
media gatekeepers whose anti-Sanders bias has been so exhaustively
demonstrated. Social media is how those powerful moments at rallies
and speeches go viral, alongside the videos telling stories of
everyday hardships carrying the message that “you are not alone.”
These platforms (and others) are also how many people find out about
the organizing meetings where they will share their own stories face
to face and ramp up their commitment to the campaign.

But they are not neutral pathways simply connecting people. These
platforms are for-profit data extraction mills ruled by black-box
algorithms that are designed to maximize “engagement” (aka
conflict) in ways that are almost the precise inverse of the cultural
shift the campaign is attempting to achieve.

Twitter is a case in point. Even as the campaign on the ground fosters
a culture of radical listening, Twitter’s character limit lends
itself to short, declarative certainties, not openness, uncertainty,
and certainly not curiosity. Even as Sanders asks us to “fight for
someone you don’t know,” Twitter’s algorithms goad us into
brawling with one another over every perceived slight. And even as the
campaign encourages us to put “me” on the back burner and find the
biggest possible “us,” Twitter (and Instagram and Facebook) are
designed for us to flaunt and curate an idealized version of ourselves
that is too often going to make somebody else feel like crap.

There is certainly a place for righteous rage in the Sanders campaign
— indeed rage at myriad cruelties that flow from bottomless greed is
one of its core animating emotions. Sanders supporters also have every
right to call out rampant double standards in how the campaign is
treated, whether by the press or the Democratic National Committee
(and these sorts of callouts often win fairer treatment).

But Sanders is also right to ask his supporters to avoid attacks on
political rivals that feel ad hominem, personal, or just nasty (and I
admit that I have failed to control my tone from time to time
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of the attacks are well earned, but that hardly matters. Because once
an ugly mood starts to go viral, it has the power to overshadow an
entire political project. And that’s a big problem because it
drastically undercuts what is most special and least understood about
this historic campaign: that it is giving thousands of people
permission to be kind to strangers and thereby build a movement so
large, disciplined, and determined that it will make those truly
deserving of our collective rage quake.

That, in summary, is why I stopped myself from rage-tweeting yesterday
and wrote this instead. When I went back online to check in on how
that inescapable platform had reacted to the tough juxtaposition of
Sanders’s call to “cool it” with Clinton’s nasty provocations,
I saw that #ILikeBernie and #NobodyLikesHim were both trending. There
was some anger in there, sure, but for the most part, the hashtags
had inspired a torrent of heartfelt stories filled with the fearsome
power of us.

Not me. Us. That’s how we win.

_Postscript: I have endorsed Bernie Sanders for president and spoken
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campaign events, but contrary to some reporting, I am not an official
campaign surrogate._

_[Naomi Klein is a senior correspondent at The Intercept and the
inaugural Gloria Steinem endowed chair of media, culture and feminist
studies at Rutgers University. She is an award-winning journalist and
best-selling author, most recently of "On Fire: The Burning Case for A
Green New Deal." She has also written "The Battle for Paradise," "No
Is Not Enough," "This Changes Everything," "The Shock Doctrine," and
"No Logo."]_

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