In search of Bernie Sanders

I was determined to beat any queues at the Bernie Sanders meeting on 4 April, so I caught the early train to Milwaukee. But still, it felt like I was running late.

Partly this was because, fresh off the train and glancing at the map, I stomped off – with great certainty and at a decent speed – in exactly the wrong direction.

This at least allowed me to see the miles of empty factories and warehouses lining the north bank of the Menomonee River, a testament to the industry (from power tools to beer to Harley Davidson motorbikes) that made Milwaukee a famous part of the great mid-Western industrial belt of the US.

Eventually, as the expected landmarks refused to materialise, I worked out that I was heading the wrong way. A while after that, I turned north, then back past the university into town. By this time snow was swirling in the icy breeze.

Worried that I’d lost an hour, I dumped my bags at the hotel and walked rapidly back into town to the Harris Bradley Centre, where the doors were meant to open at 4pm for Sanders’ meeting.

I got there a little after 2pm, to find not a soul there.

I couldn’t believe it.

I walked around the whole building, and then walked around again. On the second pass, now on the opposite side of the street from the front entrance, a kindly looking woman asked: “Are you here for the event?”

I brightened up. “Sure”, I smiled. “But I thought it was over that side.”

“Oh no, it’s always been here”, came the reply.

“Ah well”, I thought to myself. “All’s well after all.”

I turned to head in, just as the kindly woman dropped her bombshell: “President Clinton will be speaking at 2:30.”

I melted into confusion. Had I been subject to some weird, giant, practical joke? Having come looking for Sanders and socialism, perhaps I should settle for seeing a clapped-out neoliberal hack instead?

I couldn’t even come up with a decent line as I walked off. Time to sit down, eat, and work out what had happened.

This proved not too difficult. Lurking in my most obscure spam folder, an email from Bernie told me that they had shifted the venue that morning. Just another two blocks south.

Gulping down a lunch roll and coffee, I lurched out into the snow again. By this time it was nearly 3pm, and I was stressing at the prospects of having to stand in some mammoth queue in freezing cold, only to face a lockout.

This time I had the right venue, but I needn’t have worried. An hour before opening time, a dozen or so Bernie supporters were gathered in a small foyer, out of the snow and cold.

I struck up a conversation with a group of four – three young women and a grizzled looking older guy. I wasn’t too sure what to expect. Perhaps they were rusted on Bernie supporters, fired with the enthusiasm of the promised political revolution and democratic socialism.

After introducing myself I ask one of the young women: “So, are you part of the Bernie campaign?”

“Oh no”, she replied. “I’m just here for the bands.”

The young woman and her friends crack up laughing – probably at the look on my face. Her answer turns out to be not quite true. They are, indeed, huge fans of 30H!3 and The Summer Set, who were opening for Bernie. But the bands are fans of Bernie, and she is a fan of universal health care (“I mean, it’s pretty basic, right? and other countries have got it – haven’t you guys in Australia got that?”). So she and her friends were more than happy to support the event.

The grizzled older guy is Mark. He’d never heard of the bands. He used to work in construction, among other jobs. He joined the conversation, telling us that he recently had his gall bladder removed and is out of pocket thousands of dollars. Even though he’s 65 and getting Medicare, it didn’t cover all the medications he needs. But his commitment to Bernie isn’t just because of this personal circumstance. He’s keen to tell me about the XL pipeline, and the new pipeline being pushed through by Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, and the raft of union measures that Walker has rammed through.

These initial conversations represent the two poles of the Bernie crowd I met. There are those totally new, obviously on side, but generally with more curiosity and a common sense support for key elements of the Sanders program, rather than any white heat of anger. Then there is an older crowd, anguished or angry (or both) about the demolition job that’s been carried out on working and living conditions.

One of the striking things among the people I talked with is how low people’s expectations are. The prospect of the Sanders campaign folding into yet another straight-up neoliberal Clinton regime was met with resignation. At least Bernie’s shifted the agenda, people said. We never thought he’d even get this far. We can’t expect too much, is the subtext.

“People are ground down”, one woman explained to me, after telling me about her work with young people affected by the epidemic of heroin sweeping small town USA. Another woman, a retired teacher, explained what an awful, blatant advocate for the 1 percent Hilary Clinton is, going back to her time on the board of Walmart, the biggest corporation in the country.

Everyone loves the Chicago teachers and their one-day strike the week before, but the sense was that it’s only one small push against a surging right wing tide. In these circumstances, it’s no surprise that people’s hope is vested more in a figure like Bernie Sanders, who promises to use the most powerful political office in history to do some good rather than look to ordinary people’s own power to transform the circumstances.

Time passed as the conversations continued. Now the line stretched out the door, down the block and around the corner. Eventually, at around 4:30, we started filtering in to the large hall. The room was dominated by a giant US flag covering one wall, while Bob Marley’s “Revolution” played at a good volume from the PA: pointers to the contradictions of the Sanders campaign.

After The Summer Set and other bands did their thing, it was time for the warm up speakers. The first one bounded to the podium and put in quite a performance. He put his whole body into his speech, tossing his fringe and suited arms around to emphasise his commitment to the political revolution. I couldn’t get out of my head that he looked like Leonardo DiCaprio playing some old-time travelling salesman. We’re being sold something. I felt like a bitter old cynic.

The following speakers did better, as far as my gut reaction went anyway. The head of the University of Wisconsin Students for Bernie chapter talked about her family’s home being threatened with foreclosure during the financial crisis. She talked of her mother having to defer treatment of the lump in her breast for five years, as the family struggled to avoid being thrown out into the street.

It’s a good crowd, maybe a couple of thousand, but not as big as some of the enormous, overflowing crowds that have greeted Bernie in other places. And while the mood was solid, we weren’t lifting the roof off the joint.

Eventually, the crowd’s sporadic chants were answered, and Bernie Sanders came to the podium to give us his standard campaign speech.

In the main, this was a terrific speech, and the crowd responded accordingly. He reminded us that the top 0.1 percent of people in the US own as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent. That the top 200 families have as much wealth as half of the people in the US. That just one family, the Waltons, the owners of Walmart, control as much wealth as 40 percent of the population. That the wages the Waltons pay are so low that many of their employees have to get federal aid in the form of food stamps. In other words, that ordinary taxpayers, like the people in this room, are subsidising the wealth of the Waltons.

“So I say to the Walton family, why don’t you get yourself off of welfare and start paying a living wage to your employees”. By this time, the crowd was pumped, shouting and clapping to every point. Bernie went on to talk about justice for undocumented migrants, for women, for LGBT people, for Blacks, for Native Americans, and for all the rest of us. To my ear, his rejection of racism and xenophobia against the Muslim and Arab communities drew the loudest cheer. He told us how change has always come from the bottom up, never from the top down.

On the plane over to the US from Australia, I had read The Jungle, the classic novel portraying the squalor and brutality of Chicago life and politics 100 years ago. In one passage, author Upton Sinclair describes the difference between people being beaten by the system, and people knowing and admitting that we are beaten. “The difference between these two things”, he writes, “is what keeps the world going”. Standing in that room, hearing people shout and clap despite being footsore from hours of standing, feeling people’s hope rise despite being sore in the heart from years of being ground down, it felt like, for a time, we stopped telling ourselves we were beaten. It was beautiful.

Beautiful, but to my mind also tragic. The tragedy being that all this energy, all this emotion, all the hope in the room tonight is tied, by the person of Sanders, to the Democratic Party – the party whose very name is a lie, dominated as it is by an unelected clique, accountable to no one and addicted to power. The Democratic Party that promised peace and then led the US into the sickening carnage of WWI and WWII and the Vietnam War. The Democratic Party that promises a just society, then delivers welfare “reform” and mass incarceration. The party with a proven record of deliberately generating optimism and tacking left, with the purpose of harnessing and then smashing that most potent political commodity – hope – before it can find an outlet that might threaten the stability of the system that the Democratic Party has always so happily, and so profitably, administered.

The historic role of Sanders-type figures in the Democrats has always been to generate interest and enthusiasm that more cynical and blatantly pro-capitalist Democratic Party members can harvest. Oh well, we’re meant to think at some point, there’s no Sanders available, so perhaps a kindly invitation to some clapped out neoliberal hack will have to do.

Grizzled old Mark, The Summer Set crew, and all the rest of us, need and deserve so much more than that.