B Writes

To Senator Bernie Sanders,

My name is B—, and I am a 21-year-old history student at the University of — in —. I am writing to ask you a few questions and express my hopes regarding the future of leftism in America. I wanted to preface this letter by acknowledging my general naïveté – while I am certainly quite passionate about politics, fairly conscious of the goings-on of the American state, and confident in my ability to relay my ideas, there will certainly be blind spots in my understanding of the American political landscape and my strong emotions about these issues may well have dilated and contracted certain aspects of the recent election cycle to fit my pre-existing notions about things – oh, to be unburdened from the rational, responsible need to qualify one’s statements and just be blindly confident! It must feel liberating to be on the political right, even if it is not exactly enlightening. The passion (and, perhaps, also the naïveté) that prompted me to wish to write to you will also lead to me being rather harshly critical of those who you work with and their respective constituencies; I have moderated this somewhat for the sake of good taste, but I do not wish to pull my punches too completely.  

I want to open with a few of my burning questions about the state of American politics: Where do you hope the American ‘left’ goes from here in terms of platform and messaging, and where do you believe that it will actually end up going? Do you perceive the Democratic Party to truly represent the political ‘left’ in the abstract sense when compared to other political groups and parties around the world (this one is a bit of a layup, I am afraid)? Do you believe that it is possible for effective enough rhetoric and policies to pierce the obscurantist veil that the American right has set up around itself, or are less upstanding efforts necessary? Was there ever any hope of this election going any differently when the right had rallied around President-Elect Trump and taken (in my opinion, at least) the opportunity to end the American experiment that they have been actively undermining public faith in for at least two decades? Why did the Democrats (and the section of the American left that rallied behind Kamala Harris) seem to acquiesce to the Republicans choosing their own policy battlefield and meet them on their terms, allowing the discourse to be nearly entirely about (ostensibly) debatable social issues – was there a great Democrat attempt to emphasize the economy that I managed to miss somehow? How might it be possible to get politicians to vote against their selfish economic interests and re-establish the primacy of the government over corporate interests, as opposed to the other way around? What can I really do to affect meaningful change today? Is the New York Times’ integrity drowning in its modern hunger for clicks? And one final one from my girlfriend – In which of your colleagues do you see hope for the future, according to their ideals and the firmness with which they assert them? 

While I hope to receive a response, I understand that such a thing is extremely unlikely. I hope to share a few of my own opinions about the election and the future of the American left, if you may consider them. I find that the modern left’s preoccupation with intersectionality and identity politics to be a grievous political error (and it is a great victory of the normative societal forces to be able to paint the left as unserious and dedicated to niche social identity instead of serious economic and political critique), even if it is a noble and upstanding series of positions to take that I identify with personally. The class divide and wealth gap is becoming ever more absurd, yet the Democrats’ failure to move their position away from a centrist preservation of this deeply unequal status quo (thanks to their debasement by corporate money) led them to appear in my eyes to be doing absolutely nothing out of some fealty to an amiable political reality that doesn’t exist anymore (or perhaps never did?) in the face of the ultra-cynical Republicans, who seemed to pull every political lever, vote along party lines every time, and generally aim to destroy any political process that did not specifically work for them. While I am sure the Democrats engaged in a good bit of this behavior, it seems to me that the impossibility to escape obstruction is a devastating failure of the two-party system and first-past-the-pole-voting. One of the biggest hang-ups that I have in my comprehension of American politics is that I must remember that it isn’t really intended to operate in good faith; I have spent so much time agonizing over the failures of our systems, the difficulties built into the voting process, the relative imbalance of a single vote’s power based on geography, the wealth pouring into politicians’ pockets from lobbyists, etc., forgetting that this system isn’t meant to serve the best interests of the American people, but instead a small cadre of extremely wealthy people. This singular observation renders many of my questions posed to you moot, but I feel irresponsible not to at least ask them.

I genuinely believe that the average Trump supporter has an accurate initial jumping-off point: that American systems are broken, the ‘elite’ (I would certainly disagree about who and what this ‘elite’ is and why it is problematic, however) are wreaking havoc on the United States, and that the majority of well-established media sources are not particularly useful sources of journalism that speak truth to power today (although, again, I would disagree on why – the notion of ‘elite capture’ is one that seems to have eluded the Murdoch-enslaved masses and saddens me every time I go to open the Washington Post). However, every single point of the thought process beyond that initial one seems to be more informed by a response from the fearful, insecure id of the white American than a particularly serious attempt at political thought. I often wonder whether it is possible to reach these voters with a populist message that isn’t backed (miraculously – it is truly incredible that they do not see the hypocrisy or rampant cynicism) by the world’s wealthiest man and the poster child of New York City luxury and excess, but I fear at this point Trump’s diehard fans are far too entrenched to be interested in any message at all beyond the line of revenge that they appear to be taking, or perhaps that the message was a bit of a shifting smokescreen akin to the definition of fascism found in Ur-Fascism by Umberto Eco: “But it was a rigid discombobulation, a structured confusion. Fascism was philosophically out of joint, but emotionally it was firmly fastened to some archetypal foundations.” Whether or not these beliefs and political messages are real, hyperreal, or a simple cover for a more base (read as: white supremacist) message, I wish the media machines that spun them had a far stricter fealty to reality and truth than they did to party. 

The American left has a serious responsibility: to gain an understanding of which battles to fight, how to appeal to the working class, and how to combat the vindictive, destructive efforts of the coming Trump regime. I write you, Mr. Sanders, believing that you are one of very few politicians who, even if we may not entirely align politically (I am a good bit more radical than the content of this letter may let on), seriously believes in his position and makes an effort to fight for genuine leftist values in just about the least friendly place to do it. At some point in my future, I would like to either enter American politics or be taken seriously when writing about it, and although that moment may not be right now, I am certainly hopeful that you might respond and illuminate me about some of the misconceptions that I surely carry with me. Thank you for your service to a dying dream of America; I hope that we may resuscitate it. 

Sincerely,

B—

(letter written in late November and mailed in early December 2024)