{"id":1800,"date":"2020-01-29T07:40:53","date_gmt":"2020-01-29T06:40:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/?p=1800"},"modified":"2020-01-29T07:42:07","modified_gmt":"2020-01-29T06:42:07","slug":"bernie-sanders-dangerous-trotskyist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/bernie-sanders-dangerous-trotskyist\/","title":{"rendered":"Bernie Sanders \u2013 Dangerous Trotskyist?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This article appears in the current issue of Solidarity<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In\nthe hunt for dirt on Bernie Sanders, hostile journalists have come up\nwith very little. He had his honeymoon in the Soviet Union. He\nwrote some dodgy stuff in an alternative newspaper as a very young\nman. And that\u2019s pretty much it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s\nhard to find anything really juicy in Sanders\u2019 past because his\npolitics have been fairly consistent from the time he joined the\nYoung People\u2019s Socialist League (YPSL) in the early 1960s until\ntoday. It was in the YPSL that he learned to be a democratic\nsocialist and he remains a democratic socialist even now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But\none story has recently surfaced which is getting a bit of circulation\n and it concerns Sanders\u2019 years as a dangerous Trotskyist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The\nstory, reported to a wide audience on 17 January by the Daily Beast\nwebsite (which is edited by Noah Shachtman, apparently a distant\ncousin of Max), runs like this:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In\n1980, when the Democrats ran Jimmy Carter for re-election as\npresident Bernie Sanders did not sign up to support him. Instead, he\nagreed to lend his name to the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and was\nan official Elector for the party for the state of Vermont. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\nshould explain that in the American electoral system, the president\nis chosen by the Electoral College. Every party that competes for\nthe presidency therefore must name their Electors. In the unlikely\nevent that the SWP had won a majority of votes in Vermont that year,\nSanders would have been an elector. (In the event, Vermont had 3\nElectors and they all voted for Ronald Reagan. The SWP candidate\nplaced 9th<\/sup>\nout of 9 candidates, receiving just 75 votes in the state.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why\ndid Sanders agree to be an Elector for the SWP? Most likely because\nhe was sympathetic to their ongoing effort to challenge the federal\ngovernment\u2019s decades-long attempt to infiltrate and destroy their\nsmall party. Sanders said as much at one of the very few SWP events\nhe spoke at. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cFor\nthe last 40 years,\u201d Sanders said, \u201cthe Socialist Workers Party\nhas \u2026 been harassed, informed upon, had their offices broken into,\nhad members of their party fired from their jobs, and have been\ntreated with cold contempt by the United States government.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\nThere\nis no evidence that Sanders joined the party or supported its\nplatform.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Four\ndecades later, some of the right-wing media have jumped on the story,\nwith the Daily Beast challenging Sanders\u2019 claim that he has been a\n\u201cdemocratic socialist\u201d all his adult life. \u201cHe has not always\nbeen the democratic socialist he claims to be,\u201d they declared. \n\u201cSanders could have supported the Socialist Party, the Democratic\nSocialist Organizing Committee, or\nSocial-Democrats U.S.A.,\nthe three leading democratic socialist organizations existing in\n1980. He rejected them. Instead he embraced a Marxist-Leninist\ncommunist sect that proclaimed its solidarity with Iran.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One\nwonders where they collected that list of \u201cthe three leading\ndemocratic socialist organizations,\u201d though I imagine the source\nwas Wikipedia. Anyone who was around at the time, or did actual\nresearch, would have been unlikely to include Social Democrats USA in\nthe list, for example. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sanders\nnot only lent his name to the SWP, but apparently spoke at one (maybe\ntwo) of their meetings. In 1984, it is reported that he said \u201cat a\ntime when the Democratic and Republican parties are intellectually\nand spiritually bankrupt, it is imperative for radical voices to be\nheard which offer fundamental alternatives to capitalist ideology.\u201d\n That\u2019s hardly a ringing endorsement of the SWP\u2019s particular\nbrand of Trotskyism and actually reflects the view that Sanders has\nheld for his whole life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Other\nwebsites followed up on the Daily Beast\u2019s \u201cscoop\u201d, including\nthe Washington Examiner which revealed that in\n1979, members of the SWP’s leadership circulated a document that\ncalled for \u201cthe destruction of the bourgeois state apparatus,\u201d\narguing such an act \u201cis a necessary prerequisite for the conquest\nof state power by the working class.\u201d \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Their\ncrack researchers also discovered that the \u201carchives\nof the SWP’s official paper, the Militant, demonstrate a devotion to\nwhat its writers believe was the \u2018true\u2019 purpose of the Russian\nRevolution, before it was supposedly corrupted by Josef Stalin.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The\npaper even found \u201can\nexpert on 20th century communism\u201d who told them that \u201cone of the\nSWP’s fans was Lee Harvey Oswald, who not only wanted to overthrow\nour government but actually assassinated our president, John F.\nKennedy.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So,\nthere you go. Bernie Sanders has now been exposed as a secret\nTrotskyist, a defender of the Iranian Islamist regime and linked\nsomehow to the Kennedy assassination.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\nIncredibly,\nnone of this has seemed to impact on the Vermont Senator\u2019s\ncampaign. The latest polls show him winning both Iowa and New\nHampshire.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This article appears in the current issue of Solidarity. In the hunt for dirt on Bernie Sanders, hostile journalists have come up with very little. He had his honeymoon in the Soviet Union. He wrote…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1801,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1800","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-solidarity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1800","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1800"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1800\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1803,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1800\/revisions\/1803"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1801"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1800"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1800"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericlee.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1800"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}