Cheap shot: Lessons in political science

The Bosses of the Senate, after Joseph Keppler, Puck, 1889. Via US Senate.

Sanders to Chuckie on why he lost in Nevada:

“As I understand it, we actually won the Latino vote yesterday, which is a big breakthrough for us. But the voter turnout was not as high as I had wanted.

“And what I've said over and over again, we will do well when young people, when working-class people come out. We do not do well when the voter turnout is not large. We did not do as good a job as I had wanted to bring out a large turnout,” he added.

Well, there's the thing (in addition to its being very far from certain that Sanders won the Latino vote). The whole theory of the Sanders campaign, suggested over and over again, is that Bernie himself is the key to bringing the young people and working-class people out, because they've just been sitting there yearning for for the opportunity. They haven't been voting very reliably in recent years—what's the point, in the pervasive corruption of our political culture? But with Bernie, there's hope for changing that, and they'll respond to that resonating message (semiotically speaking, the concept of "messages" that "resonate" may be the central theme of the whole election year):

our campaign is generating an enormous amount of excitement and enthusiasm all over this country. We are bringing large numbers of people into the political process.

So we now have three contests to report on, in Iowa and New Hampshire and Nevada, in which the Democratic turnout was lower than usual. It looks as if the theory may not be working quite right.

Which seems like a shame, really, because that's what's irresistibly compelling about the whole adventure, isn't it? Our apathetic youth, our frustrated workers, inspired by the message that you don't have to accept the political dispensation as it's given, decide to show up? "Show me what democracy looks like? This is what democracy looks like!" Wouldn't it be thrilling if some new political leader came out of nowhere to tell people that democracy can really work, and the armies of the disaffected believed it?

Oh, wait, we already tried that, didn't we? And it worked, from the electoral standpoint, in 2008 and 2012. The young and frustrated did come out in unprecedented numbers to vote for Obama. There was exactly the kind of political revolution Sanders is talking about, and it didn't change everything!

What went wrong with the Obama revolution? One thing, obviously, is that the new voters didn't realize they needed to get to the polls even when Obama wasn't on the ballot, in 2010 and 2014, to vote for the stupid and boring congressional candidates needed to put the program through. The Obama campaign had a vague idea of mobilizing them into a continuous force, "Organizing for Action", but they didn't stay mobilized, and the organization itself seemed to be degenerating into a fundraising agency.

But I prefer to say it didn't go wrong; rather, it didn't get finished. The administration made great starts on ending American war in the Middle East and providing universal health care and reining in financial institutions and starting that conversation on race and privilege, but none of that is anywhere near over. What remains is the less glamorous part of the revolution, the work of implementation.

What I hear, when I hear Sanders calling for a political revolution, is increasingly a claim that the revolution of 2008 didn't take place at all, that it was a fake. Which annoys me, of course, in my Obot soul, but that's not the point. I can imagine that other voters, the ones who showed up in 2008 out of a sudden sense of hope that politics could be relevant and democracy could work, would be asking themselves why this revolution should be any different. The Sanders campaign, with its broad denial that any progress has taken place over the last eight years, could be encouraging a higher level of cynicism and disengagement on the part of the very people it seeks to energize.