But the more interesting question is substantive. As others have noted, this primary campaign has become a debate about change: the incremental, process-driven, insider's approach Clinton represents so effectively vs. the 'political revolution' Sanders proposes, a major realignment of power away from the financial titans and entrenched corporate interests, a resurgence of support for popular issues like higher wages and workplace benefits, affordable health and education, and the exclusion of Big Money from political dominance. Can we even imagine a political system organized along the lines Sanders proposes? Many still can't, but he has already succeeded in raising the question.
Just how interesting is this? One answer is to compare our process to France's. Despite some major differences, there are significant similarities: like the US and all other developed economies, France has been in a decades-long funk of sluggish growth, declining living standards, troublesome un- and underemployment, and the inevitable scapegoating of 'Others' such as immigrants, Muslims, and people of color, who steal 'our' jobs and drain our social welfare budgets. The rise of Marine LePen's National Front bears some resemblance to the Tea Party's rise to prominence, and to the faux populist nonsense of Donald Trump which has found such a surprising audience.
And France being France, a significantly more leftward response to this larger social and economic malaise has tried to assert itself. France's political traditions place the Socialists in the mainstream--a battle Sanders still needs to win--and include functioning Green and Communist Parties, so a Left Primary would already be a more diverse affair than competition within wings of the Democratic Party. Furthermore, France doesn't have a history of primaries like ours: the closed process of selecting a Presidential candidate within the ranks of a small number of party insiders gave way on the Left for the first time in 2007 to a more open election, in which any self-identified Socialist could vote. The results--first Segolène Royal, then François Hollande--were more democratic but arguably a disaster for the Socialist Party and the nation.
Will France's Left repeat the primary experiment this year, to select a candidate for the 2017 Presidential election? Negotiations are in progress, but so far the prospects look dim. Some Socialist insiders want a process that will simply renominate Hollande, faute de mieux, while others, like Prime Minister Manuel Valls, are no doubt hoping for some closed-door process that will operate like a decorous putsch to remove Hollande and replace him with a new insider ... such as M. Valls. Such a process, whatever the result, will produce the equivalent of Hillary Clinton, a fully vetted professional, a safe candidate of the center or vaguely center-left.
But what about all those insurgent voices on the Left who can see that traditional incremental fixes aren't working, and insist that a 'revolution' of the Left is the only way to fend off the populist retrenchment of the Right? If that is roughly what the Sanders campaign is doing in the US primary season, there are certainly candidates to do the same thing in France: the Communist senator Pierre Laurent, former Green Party leader and minister Cécile Duflot, and Left Party candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon in particular. Their parties have coalesced from time to time as the Left Front, and Mélenchon won 11% of the national vote in the first round of the 2012 Presidential election.
But here's where the French system--which always seemed to favor more parties, more varieties of position, more flexible opportunities for alliances and coalitions--is looking less supple than our clunky American two-party system. In other cycles the free-for-all first round of French elections invited a broad spectrum of parties to compete, and then broker deals to win a two-person second round that tended to look like a Left/Right, Democrat/Republican US election. In the upcoming election, though, this may not work. If all the various Lefts challenge Hollande (or Valls, or some other 'official' Socialist) in the first round, the Left will have no candidate in a second round. The election will be a face-off of the Right (perhaps even the dreadful Sarkozy) against the Far-right LePen--whose die-hard support all but guarantees her one of the two finalist spots.
What France's Left does not need is a lackluster candidate like Hollande, urging leftists to vote for another term of rightward slide because it's the least bad alternative. What France, like the US, could really use is a spirited competition on the Left, to debate whether serious structural changes, a 'political revolution,' is necessary. Such a debate has galvanized the young in America and brought new life to the political process. But it takes time for an outsider movement like Sanders's to grow: from last fall's awakenings to the winter face-offs in Iowa and New Hampshire and on to the next two or three months of competition in different regions and venues. If France had such a prolonged primary season, would a more dynamic change in leadership be possible? Would Mélenchon win over enough dissatisfied left Socialists to gain a plurality, or Duflot or someone else emerge as a new face? We'll never know, because 1) they won't compete in a simple winner-take-all primary, and 2) if they did, there would be no time for the momentum Sanders has achieved over many months of campaigning.
The hard truth, I think, is that the political process in the US, in France, in all the old democracies, needs such a galvanizing movement. The young are seriously alienated from the old political ways, and the allure of simplistic authoritarian solutions is a present danger. Old-style leaders like Hollande or Clinton will not deliver what's needed--they are too beholden to vested interests to bring about real change, and too predictable to interest the outsider elements that need to be brought into the political debate. Sanders is pointing to something much bigger than his own candidacy, and he has found a hearing among a talented and engaged mass of young people. People all over the world, and particularly in France, who believe in democratic process and political renewal should be paying close attention.
Updated to reflect the first French Left primary in 2007 (not 2012).
No comments:
Post a Comment