Why a Sanders preselection would be a disaster for the American left

Bernie Sanders, the aging Senator from Vermont, is surging in polls for the democratic preselection, with some even putting him ahead of Hilary Clinton in Iowa and New Hampshire. There is a great deal of excitement about the success of this avowedly socialist candidate among the global left. Yet a Sanders preselection is more likely to damage momentum for left-wing ideals in America than spur them.

The main reason is consolidation. Over the last eight years America has seen a substantial move towards the left in its politics. The government is now involved in health care in a big way thanks to the affordable care act. Charges for the implicit deposit insurance government provides to banks has seen the biggest banks break themselves up to avoid being regulated as systemic to the financial sector. A liberal turn in foreign policy has seen Iran end its nuclear program. The keystone pipeline was vetoed and the Obama administration has acted against climate change. And then there are the recent gun control executive orders, among many other things.

America must bank these wins. A Democrat President would secure these reforms and encourage a further shift in the centre of American politics towards left-wing values.

Clinton is the ideal candidate for this role. This is largely because the centre can get behind her. She has experience. She is widely seen as competent. Like Obama, she prefers a technocratic approach to policy that is evidence-based and open to using markets or state power depending on what is most appropriate on a case-by-case basis. In so doing she leaves the door open to the best of right-wing thinking. These factors give her an aura of safety: she is steady pair of hands who won’t offer up any surprises.

This aura makes her palatable to centre-right voters who don’t want to back an extremist like Trump or Cruz—or Sanders. With Rubio and Bush trailing substantially in Republican primaries, a Clinton candidacy leads straight to Democrats in the White House. There can be no better insurance policy against Republican repeals of the affordable care act, a return of the Bush-era tax cuts, increases in military spending or disastrous environmental negligence.

A Clinton Presidency would also extend the achievements of the Obama administration. Among many things, commitments under the Paris Climate Change agreement would be prosecuted. America’s energy mix would continue to move away from fossil fuels. And preschool programs, which are one of the most important and empirically verified policies for addressing the racial divide in American, would be rolled out with government funding.

A Sanders candidacy would of course espouse policies that are further left than this, but it would also jeopardise the gains of the Obama years because losing the Presidential election would suddenly become much more likely.

Australia’s experience with carbon pricing provides an instructive case study in the ramifications of failed consolidation. The Green party blocked Australia’s first attempt at carbon pricing—the emissions trading scheme of the Rudd Labor government—because it wasn’t left enough. This led to an entire electoral cycle of delays in the establishment of a carbon pricing mechanism in Australia. As a result, carbon pricing measures arrived just as Labor’s popularity waned in its second term, making a repeal political viable. Had Labor been able to consolidate Carbon Pricing early under the ETS, they could have contested the next election under different policies and expanded carbon pricing rather than finding it dismantled by the conservatives.

A Republican win would see a similarly dramatic reversal of the Obama years. The left should not gamble with such high stakes lest the gains of the past 8 years go the way of Australia’s carbon price.

Even if Sanders did manage to attract the median voter and win, he would undoubtedly face a hostile legislature as right-wing and centrist voters hedge their positions by electing Republicans to the House. He would then have power over little more than foreign policy, in which he has few opinions and little experience, in stark contrast to Clinton.

One of the reasons why Sanders has attracted so much support is because he has maintained the same principles for decades, while Clinton seems to move with the currents. Yet Clinton’s approach could easily be seen as a plus. Contemporary policy-making is an extremely complex process, one that requires patient analysis to identify the roots of problems, not just their symptoms, an open mind for sophisticated solutions, not just a commitment to more or less government, and steady follow through to make sure implementation is thorough and sustained, not just good intentions.  

This is doubly true when the matter of political tractability comes into play. American institutional arrangements are designed to prevent rapid change and the dramatic exercise of state power. In such an environment you cannot, for example, go from the affordable care act to a single-payer health care system in one cycle. Clinton can play ball in this environment because she can trace her way through the maze of both policy and political complexity. Sanders would rather just paint over it in broad ideological brushstrokes.

The Republican primaries have given the left an outstanding opportunity to consolidate and extend the gains of the Obama years. A Sanders candidacy would put this in jeopardy. His campaign has played a vital function in taking Clinton to task, but she remains the correct choice. Hoping to blast America on a rocket to socialism is greedy and foolish when you have an opportunity to simply drive safely to the left. 

Mark Fabian is a doctoral candidate in economics at the Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University.