Episode 63 – Revolutions and Reconciliations: The Bernie Sanders Movement with Ryan Grim

Macro N Cheese Episode 63  
Revolutions and Reconciliations: The Bernie Sanders Movement with Ryan Grim 
April 11, 2020 

Ryan Grim [intro/music] (00:03): 

In a way that could be more difficult in a parliamentary system. The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence and voters here in the United States often look longingly over at parliamentary systems saying, God, wouldn’t it be nice if I could actually feel good about the vote that I cast?  

Yeah. That’s why I think we’re at such an interesting moment because as the Sanders campaign is coming to an end, you now have this massive, unprecedented opening for radical change in the country. 

Geoff Ginter [intro/music] (01:23): 

Now let’s see if we can avoid the apocalypse altogether. Here’s another episode of Macro N Cheese with your host, Steve Grumbine. 

Steve Grumbine (01:34): 

All right. And this is Steve with Macro N Cheese. Today, we are taking a trip into the political world. I have Ryan Grim joining us today. Ryan Grim is the Intercepts’ D.C. Bureau Chief. He was previously the Washington Bureau Chief for HuffPost, where he led a team that was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and won once.  

He edited and contributed reporting to groundbreaking investigative project on heroin treatment that not only changed federal and state laws but shifted the culture of the recovery industry. The story by Jason Cherkis was a Pulitzer finalist and won a Polk Award. He grew up in rural Maryland. He has been a staff reporter for Politico and the Washington City Paper, and a former contributor to MSNBC.  

He’s a contributor to the Young Turks Network and author of the book, “We’ve Got People: from Jesse Jackson to Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, the End of Big Money and the Rise of a Movement.” You can find Ryan on Twitter @ryanGrim. And with that, welcome to the show, sir. Thank you so much for joining me today. 

Grim (02:42): 

Thanks for having me here. 

Grumbine (02:43): 

Absolutely. Let me set the stage here. We’re obviously in the midst of a horrible pandemic and we’ve got a primary going on, which is probably not the top priority of most people. We’re locked in our homes. We’ve got a situation where we’re looking down the barrel of a depression with the forced ceasing of the economy for the foreseeable future.  

With that, I guess the point of inviting you on having heard you discuss on Rising and other shows, the state of affairs for the progressive movement and perhaps what it means to be revolutionary and the politics of Bernie Sanders and AOC. Can you give me a little bit of a lay of the land, I guess, as to how this progressive movement and the quote, unquote “revolution” that’s marketing anyway, is going on in the midst of a pandemic? What are we looking at right here, right now today? 

Grim (03:45): 

Well, it’s interesting. It’s certainly a revolutionary moment, but the kind of revolutionary movement has dissipated would not be the right word, but it‘s confused about what its role is right now. You know, the Bernie Sanders Campaign as we speak is still going on. Yet, most of his senior campaign aides are participating in postmortems about the campaign.  

Many of the people who work at a high level for him want him to call it quits. A lot of the organizers who work for him have put their energies into corr . . ., coronavirus response, doing everything they can to try to mitigate the worst of the pandemic that we’re living through.  

That’s just a function of the primary going Joe Biden’s way in March. You could say that there are still a lot of ballots still left to be cast, but it’s hard to envision Bernie Sanders coming back from the deficit that he’s facing now. Like I said, yet at the same time in this bizarre paradox, the public has never been more open to the kind of politics that Bernie Sanders is putting forward.  

So, you know, the Progressive Movement is going to have to reckon with why it was that there was this gap between the policies that voters in the Democratic Primary said they wanted, and the candidate that they ended up going with, who is not the best candidate to put forward those policies. And a lot of it comes down to notions of electability and also have a lot of Democratic voters trust the media a lot more than Republican voters do.  

And the media was leaving nothing to the imagination when it came to what it thought of Bernie Sanders as president. And so the question now is what is the left going to do to try to make sure that this revolutionary moment turns into something serious and isn’t seized instead by fascist reactionaries who use it to just cement some type of ethno-nationalist surveillance capitalism. 

Grumbine (06:03): 

I look at Bernie Sanders and for the, this has been repeated so many times over the last 40 plus years, the guy has been a modicum of consistency, both in terms of being a gentleman within the party and also fighting for the exact same things. You could almost play a 1970s clip of Bernie Sanders in 2020. And it would be the same story he’s been fighting for the same things over and over again. 

Grim (06:28): 

And he hasn’t really aged, which is odd. You can look, you go back and you look at videos of him in the eighties and you’re like, wait, he looks 78 there. What’s going on here? 

Grumbine (06:42): 

What do you think it is? This message clearly staying on message has benefited Bernie in the sense that the people that wanted to hear that heard it, but it’s been used against him on the flip side, in that, you know, people try to paint him as rigid. They tried to paint him as not creative, as not listening and being angry Bernie. We heard the Bernie bro stuff. He’s old, he’s this? What exactly do you think it is that Democrats don’t like about Bernie Sanders? 

Grim (07:18): 

Well, I think a small thing that doesn’t get enough attention or didn’t get enough attention among his supporters as they were strategizing was the really hard feelings that came out of 2016. A lot of that was ginned up by the establishment, by supporters of Hillary Clinton who produced this narrative about Bernie, the one that you alluded to with the Bernie Bros and all this.  

And then when Clinton lost to Trump, a nontrivial portion of Democratic voters blamed Bernie Sanders for it and were told to blame Bernie Sanders for it by some leading democratic figures. I think the part that Sanders contributed to that, that was a mistake that cost him in 2020 was staying in the race through kind of the end of April, May, June, July, 2016 when mathematically he was eliminated.  

The only way he had a shot at winning the nomination toward the end in 2016 was by persuading super delegates to switch from Hillary Clinton to Bernie Sanders. But of course that’s not why super delegates were created to deny Hillary Clinton the nomination and give it instead to Bernie Sanders. They were created for precisely the opposite purpose. And so he ended up creating three months or so worth of bad blood with a portion of the party that didn’t benefit him at all. And that was unnecessary.  

And so there was this well of hostility toward him among this slice of voters who swung wildly in Biden’s direction as Bernie surged. And you actually saw Elizabeth Warren trying to tap into that. If you remember in early January, when she first complained about a script that Bernie’s canvassers were using, which said, you know, Elizabeth Warren is great. She’s my second choice.  

But her coalition is well-educated, white, suburban voters, and we need a broad multiracial working class coalition. And Elizabeth Warren, blew that up and said, “how dare you trash me like this?” And then she specifically said, “we all remember the 2016 primary. We don’t want to go back to that toxicity of 2016.” So she clearly sensed that if she could tap into that anger that people had about how 2016 unfolded that she could tarp Sanders with it in 2020. And that was a cheap shot from Warren, but all politicians are going to take cheap shots at you.  

Your goal is to try to not give them the ammo. And so, you know, had he not stayed in all the way through 2016 and it had gone out as more of a statesman than a factionalist, he may have been better positioned in 2020. That’s just not who Bernie is. What was it? 1974? I think he ran for governor as a third party candidate in Vermont. And he was at like half percent in the summer before the election.  

And he writes in his memoir about having this meeting with Jeff Weaver and his wife Jane and some other aids. And what should we do? Democrats are trying to get us to drop out. So we’re not spoilers. It’s going nowhere. You know, it’s awful. And he decided, nope, I’m going to take it all the way to election day. And he ended up with maybe 4% or so. And he was very proud of that in his memoir. So this is how he looked back at that decision. He’s just not somebody that quits races. So here we are. He hasn’t quit this one yet though he may soon. 

Grumbine (11:04): 

Let me ask you a question on that front. So as a Progressive myself who is fully bought in to not only the policies that he’s been advancing, but also maybe it’s ideological. Maybe it’s just an economic underpinning, but very staunchly against the concept of neoliberalism, not in the pejorative, but in the proper term neoliberal, the alternative here is market-based everything — markets capitalizing on the profit for coronavirus, markets capitalizing on the profits for green energy, markets capitalizing on the profits for literally everything. 

And so once Bernie would drop out, were he to drop out, we would be left with Donald Trump who is out lefting Biden right now, talking Medicare For All. And we’d be left with Joe Biden, who Democrats let’s be fair, they go back to sleep if there’s a Democrat in office. 

Grim (12:02): 

Right. 

Grumbine (12:02): 

There’s nothing in any way, shape or form fighting for change. They are very content with status quo and status quo isn’t working for a lot of us. A lot of us are living with rotten teeth and literally one paycheck away from complete and utter destitution. And they’re okay with that. They’ll literally go back to sleep and be chill as long as it’s vote blue, no matter who.  

So for me, Bernie staying in the race may be the only way hearing about the policies that will protect my children and my own life and the planet, et cetera, will ever get heard because green parties and third parties and stuff like that, they’ve got no platform. Even when they try to, the media is clearly against Sanders who’s just acting as a revolutionary within the party. They’re not going to give any time. So basically everything that matters to folks in the progressive world dies on the vine and we just become outside noise that people can write off.  

Can you speak to that? Because this is going to lead us to a point where it’s like, okay, so you have a choice of falling on the sword and going back inside, which is what Bernie has done in the past, or literally the rupture, splitting where they go beyond that and they take the Progressives off somewhere else. What are your thoughts on it? 

Grim (13:17): 

I think part of it is that the left has been so starved of a place in the national conversation that, that became the goal. Right now, or at least a few weeks ago, the left for the first time was kind of envisioning itself, not just getting listened to, but in power and enacting the change that’s been pushing for for decades, particularly as Sanders was coming out of Nevada as the front runner.  

That’s a huge change from what the left had been aiming for just recently. You know, if you think about the 2000 Ralph Nader campaign, the goal there was to force the media to just talk about the things that the left was interested in – corporate corruption, greed, so on. And his primary goal was to get on the debate stage with Bush and Gore. They kept him off the debate stage, but that was the goal. G 

et on the debate stage, maybe get 5% nationally so that they could continue doing that again. But the goal was not to win the White House. In 2016 when Bernie Sanders ran against Hillary, again, the argument was that he wanted to help create a national conversation around the issues that you’re talking about, because if he didn’t do it, then they would just get completely ignored and Hillary Clinton would win and everybody would go to sleep just like you said.  

But then something strange happened along the way, which is that he went from a message candidate to a real candidate who had a real shot of winning. And so what I would say to your question is that at some point the left has to then ask itself, are we here to engage in a national conversation and have our voice heard, or are we here actually win and take power and then force them to listen because we’re the ones who are in power.  

And if you decide on the latter, then you make some different strategic decisions about your campaigns, your movements, and your organizing efforts — than if the goal is to be heard, simply to be heard. But to your point, Anita Dunn, Joe Biden’s senior advisor recently trashed Bernie Sanders after the debate said, Joe Biden handled that guy who’s basically just a protester on stage in a statesman like fashion or something like that.  

It was very generous of Biden to stand up there with that protester. And so if the left doesn’t see itself as protesters anymore, but actually sees itself as an equal or a greater than an equal on stage with Biden, then the decisions about what to do strategically are a little bit different than if he is a protester out to raise an objection and be heard. 

Grumbine (16:11): 

With Duverger’s Law, the first past the post, and the other structural concerns that are clearly constitutional and legal and tons of precedent, you name it, I’m really enjoying what you’re saying. So I want to make sure I’m hearing this correctly. What does that strategic view look like when you recognize we’re not here just to be the activist wing of the Democratic Party.  

We want to be heard. We want our values championed and we want to fight to the end. We don’t want to just be shown the door midway through after they stack the deck with super delegates. What does that mean to you? What does that sound like? 

Grim (16:53): 

What it says is kind of interesting because for the most part, the two party system works against the interests of the Progressive wing of the party and not just the Democratic Party, but works against what you would call the left through 200 years of American history, because the first past the post, it pushes people towards the middle and people understand that.  

On the other hand, there are moments in time where it could actually have an advantageous effect for the left, which would be because it’s a two-party system because it’s this first past the post, that if the left can win the internal struggle within the Democratic Party, even by 51% of 49%, then they go into the general election having only won, let’s say 26% of the country.  

They now go into the general election with the mandate of 50% of the election going up against the opposition party, negative partisanship, which means people just despise the Republican Party or Republicans despise the Democratic Party means that lots of these voters, upwards of 90 plus percent are just going to vote for whoever their party’s nominee is whether they like that person or not.  

Now, the left has tons of experience with that phenomenon, that feeling that you don’t have a choice. So you’re going to have to cast your ballot for you name the person that Democrats have nominated over the years. And so what it means is that that same phenomenon could go the other direction. That the corporate wing of the party, you know, if they’re beaten in the primary, because there’s no place for them in a world of negative partisanship in the opposing party, then they rally behind the left wing of the party.  

And then the left wing of the party becomes the one that’s in control in a way that could be more difficult in a parliamentary system. The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence and voters here in the United States often look longingly over at parliamentary systems saying, God, wouldn’t it be nice if I could actually feel good about the vote that I cast — you know, go vote for a Socialist Party or a left-wing party that actually stands for values that I believe in. 

 And yes that would be nice, but that’s all it would be– something that feels nice. Voting is itself, to me, not something that is itself a moral act that the consequences of voting are what are moral. The instrument of the vote itself is completely devoid of ethics and of values and of morality. Just getting to vote for a nice party in Spain if you don’t get the outcome that creates a more just society, you haven’t actually done anything. You went into the polling place and made yourself feel good. 

Grumbine (19:53): 

Right. 

Grim (19:54): 

Which is fine. That’s good. It’s better than not feeling good, but we shouldn’t get carried away with it. So there is a scenario where if you continue to see, like right now, Bernie won voters under 50. If the left can push that to 60, win everybody under 60, it’s kind of a new ball game as baby boomers are fading from the scene. The future of the party could be one where the left instead of losing 55, 45 wins 55 45, and then captures the energy of the party. 

Grumbine (20:29): 

It’s interesting because you look at the media and it’s quite clear that the media is being run by someone. Somehow or another that they’ve got the same message. Almost every station you flicked through. It’s like a running soundtrack across all of them. Sure. You get a few new adjectives with Chris Matthews or Cuomo or somebody.  

But the reality is that it sounds almost identical. It sounds like a script almost. And for me, my body rejects it kind of like the matrix where it’s too scripted. It just doesn’t sit well. And you look at alternative media and they’re trying to fill the void and we’re all trying to fill the void.  

I love the Intercept. I love your work, but in reality, our viewership and listenership and readership and so forth, doesn’t come anywhere near obviously what the mainstream does. The power of media, the power of propaganda is overwhelming. And Leni Riefenstahl would blush with what she’s seeing in the United States right now, with the way everything from economics to trying to whitewash the reality of climate change.  

It’s amazing because it goes way beyond the party. It’s saturated into the culture, and you’re still dealing with the remnants of the Red Scare and McCarthyism and the Vietnam War and the Cold War. How would you see as someone who has got a front row seat to the media world, how do you see media being able to bring these stories further to the front, to be able to really impact the narrative so that there is a counterbalance to the propaganda of the corporate world? 

Grim (22:10): 

Well, I think it’s wide open now because of this pandemic. I think it was for a couple of generations, extremely difficult to get any kind of imaginative, Progressive agenda to be taken seriously by mainstream or by particularly on cable, which is becoming increasingly influential, particularly in primaries. But now with the pandemic, I think changes everything.  

And the economic consequences of pandemic. You not only have a solidifying of the idea of public health, public health was kind of a phrase that people would toss around, but nobody really took it seriously. We don’t have a public health system in place.  

And as a result, you’re seeing the United States handle the coronavirus worse than anywhere else in the world. It’s exposing that this patchwork private approach to healthcare just simply doesn’t work. The people who also spent the entire campaign saying, how can we pay for X, Y, Z, have been exposed as just economically illiterate.  

And the people who argued that well, Medicare For All might be great, but 165 million Americans have private insurance through their employers. And they love it. Those people look like clowns now. And so I think there’s a real opportunity now for people to rethink what is possible and what’s right. 

Grumbine (23:40): 

Yeah. With the gig economy, especially in New York City where the epicenter of this pandemic is striking America hardest, it’s quite clear that employer based healthcare is just not the way to go. I watched the movie Joker the other day and I had not watched it.  

In fact, I had been warned not to watch it. I had not watched it until just the other day. And now I understand why they told me not to watch it. For me, I felt a kinship, not with the murdering of sorts, but with the class warfare that Arthur Fleck felt being beaten down and mocked and teased and tormented and otherwise left the squalor.  

And I started to think about a marketing campaign of I am Arthur Fleck. And I stopped myself because I don’t want to give the wrong impression. But the flip side to that, I’m going to tell you the truth. I actually openly cried during the movie. 

Grim (24:39): 

It’s a great movie. 

Grumbine (24:40): 

It is the most honest movie I’ve ever seen. You got the bougie rich kid with the pampered and got handlers and everything. And you’ve got this poor kid who was adopted, doesn’t know who his parents are and has been kicked and beaten. And the night and day of not having healthcare and being mentally ill in a city, the rats, it was just unbelievable.  

And then I talked just the other day to Lauren Ashcraft of New York’s 12th district. And she spoke about the rats. This is like real. This is like real to some large degree. That is real. And for a guy that lives in suburban Pennsylvania, from Washington, D.C., mind you, that was terrifying to me. And then to watch that movie, I realized we may not be able to vote our way to where we need to be.  

And I hope it never looks quite like that. But at the same time, though, you think to yourself, the IPCC put out the report not too long ago, about 12 years. And that was I think two and a half years ago. We have made no meaningful strides except for maybe this virus. 

Grim (25:49): 

Right, right now we’re making strides. 

Grumbine (25:50): 

Accidental, right? And healthcare is at an all-time low. And you figure people are going to be coming out of this. People that should not have been isolated, who are mentally ill, are going to be isolated and mentally ill on their own. I imagine suicides will pick up along with the vertical line that is now the unemployment numbers.  

I don’t know what will come from this. I just know that a working-class revolution outside of the political structure looks more and more like the way, and I could be wrong. But to me, it spoke to me. It really made me feel like, Hey, you know what? They weren’t waiting for permission. And it was time that they’re struggle — I think Martin Luther King said, Hey, when is the right time for us?  

When is it right to tell you about our suffering. I see comfortable people thinking that we’re just being too loud. Look at how they treated Colin Kaepernick just for kneeling. I look at how people got very upset at Black Lives Matter for grabbing the mic out of Bernie Sanders hands last time. I looked at how they treated Black Lives Matter when they came to a Hillary event last time. 

 I look at how they talk about Bernie Sanders. The quote you used from Dunn, who basically mocked him as an activist on stage. There’s no respect whatsoever for the suffering in this country. Even as this virus goes on, you’ve got Trump trying to figure out how he can open up the country for business. There’s not even a pause for the suffering in America. What are your thoughts on that? I’m not trying to goad you into radical thinking. I am though curious. I see a lot of parallels here. 

Grim (27:37): 

Yeah. That’s why I think we’re at such an interesting moment because as the Sanders Campaign is coming to an end, you now have this massive, unprecedented opening for radical change in the country. You have Biden is still resisting the idea of embracing some sort of universal health coverage, Medicare For All, but he’s doing so against even extraordinary pressure from cable hosts who are coming to the conclusion that wait, actually, we’re doing this wrong and that the private health insurance system just isn’t working.  

It won’t be able to withstand the surge of claims coming in. And so then if the insurance system can’t handle a massive crisis, then wasn’t it really an insurance system? And so just on that front, I think you’re going to see a lot of movement in a progressive direction, but it also shows the potential of large-scale social change in the face of a crisis, which is what’s needed.  

Like you said, to stave off the worst of the ravages of climate change. I could kind of go both ways on that question. Because on the one hand you are seeing fairly well unified global response to the pandemic. On the other hand, it took it happening basically for people to take it seriously while people were dying in Italy and China. And you’re getting reports from Italian doctors of anybody over 60 not getting treatment because they were so overwhelmed.  

A lot of people here in the United States were still going to the beach. We’re still partying. We’re still going to work. Still going about our lives. And so for climate change activists who say — look here’s what the UN says is going to happen 10 years from now. They’ve got a harder task than the public health people were saying — look what’s happening in Italy right now and is coming here in a matter of days.  

And they were still facing a bit of an uphill climb in getting people to completely understand what was going on. Even today. You still have some states that are holdouts that are even as they see what’s happening in Seattle or in New York City, there’s still kind of resisting taking it seriously. So if even in the face of actual evidence in front of your own eyes, but still hard to bring everybody on board that can make you pessimistic about what’s possible when it comes to radical change to deal with climate change.  

On the other hand, you’re never going to convince everybody. And a lot of global leaders who would in general, be extraordinarily resistant to the kinds of things that had to be done. Like nobody wants to destroy on purpose, their own economy. They did it anyway because they came to recognize that it was the least bad path out of the crisis. So that would be the argument for some optimism, that reality could actually maybe forced eventually, 

Intermission (30:51): 

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Grumbine (31:45): 

I spoke to Steve Keen a couple of days ago and he’s a good friend. And he oftentimes paints a very pardon, the pun, Grim picture. It was literally terrifying the way he described, because a few months back, we had interviewed him about climate change and the actual burning up of the planet as we speak. He went into some great detail of, Hey, you know, once the permafrost starts melting and old pathogens and toxins and viruses and bacteria, re-released back into the atmosphere, you’re witnessing your practice exam right now.  

This is just a test. And he said, I had an opportunity to figure out where I was going to live. Was I going to go to the UK? Was I going to go to the Netherlands? Was I going to go to Australia? Was I going to go to Thailand? And he broke down how he assessed where he was going to stay. And he chose Thailand by the way. And he said, the reason why he chose Thailand was this. They had experienced the SARS virus. They learned from it.  

They took direct action and they had the supplies on hand to make sure that the country was capable of surviving. They had the right ventilators. They had all the things that needed. He said, I feel really bad for you all. He didn’t pull any punches. He said, the United States is behaving as a third world nation.  

Basically, they didn’t prepare for any of this. You don’t have the infrastructure for it. And I’m quite afraid that between the depression coming your way and climate change coming your way and the yahoo kind of bootstrap mentality your nation has, it’s going to be quite a challenge for you guys to make it through. And that just about made my blood turn ice cold.  

It about made my blood turn ice cold. And I looked just at little things like the algae down in Florida and the coastal creep that you’d see as the oceans rise and the fact that we don’t have an answer still. And we’re still trying to pretend like taxes are going to somehow or another pay for this massive infrastructure build and the climate change package that we need to put together to prepare for it. And we’re still acting like we got a choice in the matter. It’s amazing to me. 

Grim (34:05): 

Yep. We are set up in the United States to run under particular conditions. And we do not handle crises that require a coordinated response or a robust safety net or appreciation for the dignity of regular people or anything like that. So, yes, I had an editor who was on her honeymoon right as this was starting. And I said, you know, I’m not in the business of giving a whole lot of advice, but you don’t even have to come back if you don’t want to.  

The United States probably the worst place where you could ride out this epidemic. Like wherever you land in the world, chances are that it’s better. Now, all things aren’t equal. There’s lots of reasons that you’re going to come back to your home country, but yeah, we’re deeply unprepared for this and also what’s coming next. 

Grumbine (34:59): 

Let me ask you. Assuming that the Democratic establishment wins out, there is no Bernie Sanders presidency and either Joe Biden or they pull a fast one at the end and slip Hillary Clinton in there, or they pull a Cuomo or whatever it is that the private corporation of the Democratic Party does. What do you think is a Progressive’s pathway in dealing with an establishment that clearly doesn’t value its voice? 

Grim (35:29): 

So, at that point, the window for change would be the early part of the next administration — Biden or Cuomo or Clinton. The idea would be that the Obama administration accomplished some decent things in the early part of its administration. And there were even better things that were on the table that lost.  

And so, the idea would be for Progressives to position themselves better to try to make sure that when their bills being written and that let’s say there is a Democratic control of Washington, by some chance that Progressives are actually being taken seriously and are part of that coalition in a way that they weren’t really in 2009.  

It was more written by this centrist wing of the party with the Progressives just left to complain that they weren’t doing enough. So the question has to be what can Ocasio-Cortez wing of the party do between now and January of 2020 to build its power to force whoever’s in the white house to grapple with their demands. 

Grumbine (36:38): 

You couldn’t have laid the thread work out here better. That was where I was going. I guess the question is with Rashida Tlaib putting out this Mint the Coin Bill she worked on with Rohan Grey. There is people trying to advance policy now. AOC went out there right out the shoot with the Green New Deal. I haven’t heard as much about that lately, which is disappointing.  

I’m not going to lie as I would like, especially given it’s here and now need, but you had spoken and I’ve watched her shift to a more, I don’t like the word centrist, but more of a coalition building approach, as opposed to a factionary approach. 

 I know that the left and I’m a member of that would like to see a more militant approach to things but based on what you just said in terms of getting a seat at the table while we are the minority, and whether we are the majority in terms of votes or the minority in terms of organization, we’re the minority in terms of structural ability to shift the narrative. With that in mind, tell me about this shift you’re watching with the squad and with AOC in particular, in terms of their approach to dealing with the establishment types. 

Grim (37:57): 

My guess is on what you’re seeing is she hasn’t, like you’ve pointed out, she doesn’t moderate any of her policy positions. It’s more that her tactics are less confrontational than they might otherwise be, or that they were in 2018. And my guess is that what you’re seeing a little bit of is a short-term recognition or a recognition that in the short term, the bums lost, so to speak.  

The Progressives did not win the primary. They did not manage to get Barbara Lee into house leadership. There were still in the junior chair relative to the party establishment. And so if that’s the case, and if time is so much of the essence, then in order to start making change quickly. And so then the other point would be If Ocasio-Cortez is diagnosing one of Bernie’s problems or obstacles to winning the nomination as a perception that his style is too antagonistic or whatever on behalf of some significant chunk of the Democratic primary electorate.  

And if Ocasio-Cortez feels like she could win some of those people over with a different tone or demeanor, but the same policies, then that seems worth a shot. As we have been talking about, like you said, that if you poll Democrats, Bernie Sanders platform is widely popular. And so, if that’s the case, then what is it?  

What’s the gap between support for him and support for his policies and how do you fill that gap in so that a candidate who espouses and genuinely believes in all of those values can also get majority support within the Democratic primary electorate. So I think what you’re seeing partly is an attempt to crack that code, which should be crackable.  

Like how do you get people to vote for what they say they believe in? So that the good news is that’s doable. The question is how do you do it? So I think that’s partly what you might be seeing with the posture that AOC has been taking lately. 

Grumbine (40:19): 

Okay. So let me ask you follow up with Elizabeth Warren, clearly both in 2016 and now in 2020, basically not siding with Sanders. Is that her not siding with Sanders policy positions? Or is that her saying, Hey, I’m a vote blue, no matter who core Democrat and what you’re doing here doesn’t unite us. And I can’t be part of you because if I’m part of you, then I will no longer be part of them. Is that what she’s saying basically? Or is there something more ideological to it? 

Grim (40:53): 

I think it’s more of a third thing that they’ve often been portrayed as these good friends, but there’s never actually been a friendship. Then there’s nothing unusual about that. Like these senators see each other in the Senate in general, but not like the 1950s or whatever, where they’re all going to the same dinner parties and socializing together and all of this.  

I don’t think that Warren really quite respected Sanders as a legislator and as a leader from her time that she was observing the Senate 2009 up until 2015, when he ran for president. I mean, she probably saw him in similar way that Anita Dunn did as a protester. She probably thought of him as a well-meaning protester but a protester nonetheless and saw herself as what she said toward the end of the campaign. 

Bernie and I agree on things, but I get things done. I’m more effective, and I work hard. She does the things that Sanders says he disdains, you know, calling people when it’s their birthday, working hard on building those relationships. And so, I think that as the campaign went on, that probably became extremely frustrating for her to see herself losing to him because she had clearly miscalculated on whether or not he was out of the race in September, October, particularly after his heart attack and left him for political dead.  

And he came back and passed her as she fell. And so, the establishment politicians were much better at subsuming their own, whatever emotions they may have had invested in the outcome and understanding that their best path forward was getting in line behind what Obama was suggesting be done and endorse Biden and coalesce around the anti-Bernie.  

Whereas I think there was a whole mixture of things going on with Warren. One of them being, she may agree with him on policy, up and down the board, but genuinely I think doesn’t think he would be an effective president or at least convinced herself of that. So, I don’t know if that fits in with any of the ones that you had mentioned, but that’s my guess. 

Grumbine (43:13): 

It’s all information, right? All of this comes together to create a better picture. I mean, at the end of the day, Bernie has taken the role of activating people and he didn’t work the way that the others did where they worked within the elected class, if you will, as opposed to the voter class. And I think that that’s a huge distinction actually want to thank you for making me think of it in those terms.  

Not that I revere these people that put their pants on one leg at a time, but I also understand that in the end, it’s about influencing others and he’s invested his entire existence in influencing or giving voice to people that are otherwise not paid attention to. And he didn’t pay attention to the people that are used to being paid attention to.  

And so, the dichotomy there is almost too delicious to ignore, but at the same time, though, it does speak volumes to the egos and the tactic. The answer of, you know, if I stand out there and I’m going to take a little bit of my own story momentarily, I’m an MMT activist. A lot of time I’ve gotten a lot of black eyes because I didn’t do it in a nice way.  

I took a sledgehammer to people largely because the kind of stuff that I’m talking about is typically more of an awakening and people don’t just read casually MMT and get it right. I don’t know what it is, but there’s a light that has to go on to realize how very vaporous money is not really some hard construct and that hard belief of what they think it is, and so forth, is difficult to crack.  

And so I went out there with a sledgehammer, well, for the people that were interested in a sledgehammer, I won them. They loved it. They were licking it up. It was great. But for the other 90%, the other 90% couldn’t quite handle the shotgun approach. And these are lessons. I’m a student. So I’m sponging this up and this is good for me because I want to be effective more than I want to be right. And I think that this is a lesson that progressive left, not so much that you have to bend a knee that in no way, shape or form is the message I’m taking from this.  

But I am saying, what I’m hearing you say is that some of the lessons, if you’re doing an after-action reviewer of post-mortem here might be, Hey know, where the power is, find out how to work that to make sure that you are not put to the curb, because at the end of the day, that’s what happened here. That literally looks like what happened here.  

And I listened to Jimmy Dore the other night for what it’s worth. And he was railing on Sanders for being part of the establishment. And here we are talking about how Bernie rubbed the establishment wrong because Bernie didn’t make the phone calls and do the sweet nothing. So you’re kind of going to be damned if you do, and damned if you don’t, depending upon who’s listening. How do you carve out that biggest swath? Or do you have to carve it out both directions? It is a truly moving target. 

Grim (46:23): 

Yeah. Right. And Bernie has tried to always have it kind of both ways that he doesn’t really say bad things about Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, or Democratic leaders, but instead speaks broadly about a Democratic establishment. And so, Joe Biden, for instance, like he barely said anything bad about Joe Biden throughout the campaign, while at the same time presenting himself as a revolutionary.  

And so how are you gonna be a revolutionary without overthrowing these people who were in power? And so in some ways I think AOC is to be compared to him is a bit unfair. Because he’s kind of having it both ways. He gets to be this kind of vision of Bernie Sanders that people want him to be, but then he behaves internally in a different way, but then he doesn’t do it as effectively. L 

ike if you’re gonna not say anything bad about Joe Biden or Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi or Democratic elites, then you should be in a position where you can actually get something from them. Whereas you would be generous to them while they would have the knives out for him. And that type of asymmetric relationship is never going to end well. 

Grumbine (47:34): 

Let me ask you this. I will end on these subjects and I also want to talk about your book for a couple of minutes at the end here. But last go-round, Jill Stein came out of the woodwork and said, Hey, I’ll give up the nomination for the Green Party, Bernie, if you’ll come and run in our party. And clearly, he didn’t take that. Neither did Nina Turner.  

They chose to stay within the Democratic Party feeling that they had a chance to reform it or whatever and great success. I think that the Bernie Sanders group was able to invigorate Progressives to believing that they had power, that they could do something there’s that, but here we are again in 2020, this movement is sitting here kind of in neutral, trying to figure out where does it go from here?  

I guess my question to you is a third party the right approach? I know it’s an approach, but is it the right approach? Is there any life available for a third party in this country? 

Grim (48:34): 

I don’t think so. People say, well, there’s been different parties that have formed throughout America. That’s not really the right reading of history. Other parties collapsed first. And then new parties formed actually pretty much only happened once, which was when the Whig party collapsed and the Republican Party among many competing smaller parties became the one that replaced it.  

And so, you could only form a new party if the other party collapsed first. And so presumably we’re talking about the Democrats here, so there’d have to be some reason short of Progressives actively walking out of it. That’s not going to do it. You’d have to have some reason for the Democratic Party to completely collapse.  

And so, the Whig Party collapsed over slavery. It was a North South coalition and it just couldn’t survive anymore under the tension of the abolitionists and anti-slavery folks and the pro-slavery folks within the same party. So, it fell apart. There isn’t currently an issue inside the Democratic Party that comes anywhere near the resonance of slavery — that sense of a division between people within the party.  

Like we were talking earlier, most Democrats agree on most major issues. You’re more likely to find some major disagreements, not on that level, but significant disagreements within the Republican Party actually. I don’t think big money and corporate power are going to rise to the level of a slavery that breaks a party apart because so many Democratic voters are like, well, look we’re a capitalist society.  

We need to protect the environment. We need to protect peoples’ basic rights. We need to make sure everybody has healthcare. And that’s more important than fighting over the idea of capitalism in the way people really were fighting over the idea of slavery. And so short of that, there’s no reason that a third party could succeed. 

Grumbine (50:37): 

I appreciate that. So you wrote a book recently, “We’ve Got People: From Jesse Jackson to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the End of Big Money and the Rise of a Movement.” Tell us about that real quick and where we might be able to pick that up. 

Grim (50:53): 

Um, yeah. So if you don’t want to get on Amazon, which people should avoid Amazon, if they can, you can shop around and find it at the TYT. Young Turks has it at their bookstore. If independent booksellers should be able to, to ship it as well, or you can get it on as an audio book or an e-book. It basically traces the fight between the left wing of the Democratic Party and the establishment wing roughly from the 1970s until today. 

 But with a real focus on Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign in 1984 and 88 up through today, a history that is not really told much. And people, I think Progressives should be proud of what they’ve accomplished, but also learn from mistakes that they’ve made along the way. And the only way you can do that is learn about them. 

Grumbine (51:44): 

Right. No, I appreciate that. I’m going to be picking it up today as a matter of fact. Awesome. Ryan, I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for taking time. It’s funny, I’m enjoying actually hearing your children in the background. Mine are upstairs doing the same thing. 

Grim (52:00): 

Soundtrack of a pandemic. 

Grumbine (52:03): 

This is called interviewing in the midst of a global covid interviews part whatever. All right, well look, thank you so much. And I look forward. Hopefully we can talk in the future. 

Grim (52:16): 

I’d be happy to. 

Grumbine (52:18): 

Thank you very much. This is Steve Grumbine and Ryan Grim, Macro N Cheese. Have a great day, everyone. We’re out. 

Ending Credits (52:29): 

Macro N  Cheese is produced by Andy Kennedy.  Descriptive writing by Virginia  Cotts  and promotional artwork by Mindy Donham.  Macro N Cheese is publicly funded by  our  Real Progressive  Patreon  account. If you would like to donate to  Macro N Cheese,  please  visit  https://www.patreon.com/realprogressives