Book Review: Our Revolution

By Bernie Sanders

Before the Democratic primary for the 2016 presidential election had even begun, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was widely considered to be the anointed nominee of the party. Secretary Clinton had laboriously amassed a formidable political machine and went on to receive the endorsements of almost every democratic lawmaker of note. Taking on the most powerful political machine in the country was probably a frightening prospect for many, but not for Bernie Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont who caucuses with the Democrats.  On April 30^th 2015, he announced he was running for president, standing behind a wobbly podium hastily erected on the lawn in front of the capitol. “Let me just make a brief comment, be happy to take a few questions, we don’t have an endless amount of time, I’ve gotta get back” He declared matter-of-factly to the assembled press, jerking his thumb towards the capitol before launching into a brief description of the policies his campaign would be supporting. Late-night talk show comedians later joked that Sanders distaste of conventional politics was so great he didn’t even take the time to comb his hair before launching the campaign, but what he lacked in polish he more than made up for with a detailed policy prescription for fixing the country’s problems.    

In Our Revolution, Sanders tells the tale of how his run for president, dismissed as a “fringe campaign” by pundits in Washington, won eighteen million votes as well as eighteen states before being narrowly defeated by Secretary Clinton. The latter half of the book briefly touches upon the wrangling ahead of the convention that resulted in a reasonably progressive Democratic Party platform, before Sanders lays out his policy agenda in detail with the help of charts and graphs.

For those interested in a detailed account of the history of the Democratic Party, I would recommend reading Thomas Frank’s excellent Listen, Liberal, previously reviewed on this blog. In order to understand the magnitude of Bernie Sander’s success on the campaign trail, one needs to be aware of the rightwards shift of the democratic party for the last forty years or so. Far from being an extreme left-winger, Bernie Sanders political views largely reflects what mainstream democrats used to stand for before the Bill Clinton era of triangulation and neoliberalism. Popular policy positions supported by Bernie Sanders, like expanding Medicare and Social Security, making public colleges tuition-free and switching to a single payer healthcare system as well as strong support for organized labor used to be mainstream positions inside the Democratic Party before the age of Bill Clinton. Bernie Sanders, dismissed as a leftie without a comb by many conservative democrats, was unfashionable enough to stand up for what he believed in and lean against the wind during a time when many democrats abandoned the party’s principles as laid down by Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal. As in fashion as in politics, it turned out, as growing unrest and inequality meant that his message came to resonate with a great many voters, including independents and republicans, during the 2016 election.  

Barack Obama’s successful 2008 presidential campaign harnessed the potential of social media and the online community to solicit donations and turn out voters. During the 2016 election cycle, the Sanders campaign was largely ignored by the press, and was forced to go online in order to gain traction and get their message out. The mainstream media didn’t spend that much time talking about policy substance, instead they choose the focus on the horse-race aspect of the campaign and the contentious republican field. When Bernie Sander’s campaign managed to amass an incredible war chest, financed entirely by small donations by ordinary people instead of billionaires and large corporations, the media was grudgingly forced to cover the campaign.

It is painful to think back on how poorly and unfairly the Sanders Campaign was treated by the media. In Our Revolution, Sanders recalls sitting sown for an hour-long interview with a major newspaper and laying out his policy in great detail, before being asked to comment on something Secretary Clinton had said. The next day that was the headline and all talk of policy substance was forgotten. This was often the case when Sanders appeared on television, he often had to answer questions about the statements of Hillary Clinton and other candidates and was seldom asked about policy or anything even remotely concerned with the lives of ordinary Americans.

Having followed the Sanders campaign with great interest, I’m already familiar with the policy positions he lays out in Our Revolution, most of them are well thought out and reasonable. I would, however, object to his insistence on a 15 dollar an hour minimum wage. The cost of living varies greatly depending on in which state of the country you live. Surely it would be better to calculate what is a living wage in each state and then index that sum to inflation? In rural Montana, for example, a living wage might be ten dollars an hour, among the glittering skyscrapers of New York it might be twenty-five. His support for a single payer Medicare-for-all healthcare system is especially relevant today. As I write this review, republican congressmen and senators have had to face hostile crowds at several town halls, their constituents worried about what’s going to happen with their healthcare now that the GOP has promised to repeal the Affordable Care Act without specifying what it will be replaced with.

Reading Our Revolution brings back all the excitement of the 2016 Presidential Campaign. It’s undeniably sad when you look at Bernie’s spirited campaign and think about what might have been, but ultimately Bernie Sanders has managed to awaken a great many young people from the millennial generation who were previously unengaged with the political process, and turn them into citizens taking an active part in their democracy. It’s hard for a presidential campaign to get higher praise then that. Elections come and go, but democracy requires constant participation at the state and local level.

Book Review: The Pursuit of Power, Europe 1815-1914

By Richard J. Evans

The Penguin History of Europe series attempts to chart the history of the continent that is perched on the western end of the Eurasian landmass from antiquity to the present day. The Pursuit of Power deals with the century or so from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the start of the First World War, when the empires of European nations dominated the world and the lives of ordinary people were irrevocably altered by numerous technological and scientific innovations. Richard Evans is a Cambridge historian who has spent many decades studying and thinking about nineteenth century Europe, this book represents the culmination of his academic life, and is not just a very interesting read in itself, but serves as an ideal springboard for those interested in studying a wide variety of topics related to this era.   

The twenty-or-so year period during which the Napoleonic Wars took place spelled disaster for people of Europe. Unlike in the First World War, the fighting took a heavy toll on civilians and devastated entire communities. During the Congress of Vienna, in 1814, the victorious powers of Austria, Prussia, Russia and Great Britain created a framework for how Europe might avoid similar conflicts in the future. Their purpose was also to quell the revolutionary fires that the French revolution of 1789 had lit. Austrian statesman Clemens von Metternich was to be the chief architect of this supposed return to the conservative order. In France, the monarchy was reinstated in the shape of the portly Louis XVIII, and Tsar Alexander I continued to rule over Russia by divine right. In Evans’s word, they were “reforging the chain of time”. Yet this chain turned out to be a whole lot less durable that von Metternich had hoped. The nineteenth century was fraught with upheaval, truly it was the age of the -isms, as such diverse ideologies as fascism, liberalism, socialism, communism, utopianism, feminism and anarchism confidently entered the political stage. A new liberal bourgeoisie spoke up loudly for human rights from their prosperous suburbs, while countless workers in Europe’s teeming industrial centers turned to socialism and social democracy to ward of the excesses of capitalism. The success or failure of their uprisings depended on the support of a mostly conservative rural peasantry. The nobility and the church, who had been important power players during previous centuries, lost most of their power and privileges, while popular pressure ensured that many of the ideals of the French revolution were far from dead and buried. During the nineteenth and early twentieth century the institution of serfdom was abolished, voting rights expanded to include most of the male population and many laws were passed to protect common people from hazardous factories and unscrupulous profiteers.

Even a conservative bastion like Russia failed to fully ward off these clamors for reform, and in 1861 Tsar Alexander II emancipated the millions of serfs who had tilled the Russian soil since the time of Alexander Nevsky. The Austrian empire was unable to stay united and had to bow to vocal minorities in its diverse realms, granting concessions to Serbs and Croats and eventually allowing Hungary semi-autonomy and its own legislative body. The nation that changed least during this time, and as a consequence was the undisputed loser of nineteenth century Europe was the Ottoman Empire. Otto von Bismarck dubbed this harried patchwork of disparate realms, with characteristically caustic wit, as “the sick man of Europe”.

In 1815 everyday life for most Europeans was not that different from the way it had been in previous centuries. People travelled by horse and carriage, like they had done since the Dark Ages and peasants tilled the soil with ox and plough. In towns and cities refuse was thrown out of your window and landed on unfortunate passersby and any operation, no matter how trivial, was likely to end in infection and death. One hundred years later the onward march of science and technology had fundamentally changed all these previously immutable aspects of life and countless more, unless you lived in some remote rural hamlet that was exceptionally backwards, or the Ottoman Empire. Thanks to railroads that soon crisscrossed Europe like great serpents of iron, distances were greatly reduced and the bulk transportation of goods and people was now possible. Agricultural innovations meant that farmers could greatly increase their productivity, which was just as well since many of their farmhands were carving themselves a pair of wooden clogs so they could leave for the city. These cities had up until then been stinking collections of hovels, unhealthy breeding grounds for all kinds of nasty diseases. The more humans that gathered in one place, the worse it got in terms of squalor and uncleanliness. During the summer of 1858, the river Thames was overflowing with industrial waste and rotting refuse, not to mention the odd human corpse that had swelled in the summer heat to become a grotesque vessel of noxious gasses. Conditions were so bad that Londoners dubbed this assault on their olfactory senses “The Great Stink”, and tasked the visionary engineer Joseph Bazalgette with building a comprehensive sewer network for the entire city. This helped make cholera epidemics a thing of the past, and other European cities were quick to follow. Such improvements in public health may seem less interesting and noteworthy than pitched battles fought by hundreds of thousands of soldiers to the roar of cannon and shot, but they had an immeasurably more positive impact on ordinary people’s lives. Medicine also changed rapidly during the nineteenth century, with improved hygiene greatly increasing chances of survival after surgical operations and new methods of dulling the pain of going under the knife, such as letting the patient imbibe chloroform or morphine.  

The nineteenth century also saw Europe becoming industrialized. Britain led this revolution in manufacturing, but other nations, most notably Germany, gave them a run for their money. Production of goods was now possible on a grand scale, and the number of laborers required to work in the new factories that sprang up in many European cities led to the rise of several of the -isms that I mentioned earlier. Europe was the first continent to embrace the industrial revolution, which gave them a crucial advantage against other nations, and these technological breakthroughs enabled European nations to impose their will on other, less developed regions, by establishing colonies all over the world. The undisputed master, both in terms of industry and colonial possessions, was Great Britain, on whose empire the sun reportedly never set. Britain’s dominion over this blue planet of ours was so complete that the Reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901) was later known as the Victorian era. For all its imperial pomp and splendor however, Britain’s supremacy was about to be challenged. After having been the dominant continental power in Western Europe for many centuries, the unification of Germany, culminating in the formation of the German Empire in 1871, saw France reluctantly resigning itself to being number two on the continent. Jealous of the other “Great Powers” Germany also wanted its place in the sun, i.e. colonies in Africa, and started to expand its navy, a direct challenge to Britain. During the latter half of the nineteenth century, German industry, particularly in the fields of chemistry and electronics, led the world. Together with another rising empire of the same era, namely that of Japan, Germany was to accelerate the decline and eventually sound the death knell of Romanov rule in Russia. After having been humbled by the Japanese in the Russo Japanese war of 1905, Germany finished off the ailing colossus in the First World War.

Evans describes how a more cautious and measured generation of statesmen who remembered the horrors of the Napoleonic Wars were replaced with new blood towards the end of the nineteenth century, brash imperialists who had imbibed readily from the Kool-Aid of their own propaganda. As breakneck industrialization progressed and the Great Powers acquired more colonial possessions, they signed and countersigned a great many diplomatic treaties which soon meant that Europe was covered in a patchwork of alliances. Coupled with rising nationalism and xenophobia, the continent turned into a tinderbox waiting to go off. Worse still, shrewd statesmen like Otto von Bismarck were no longer around to restrain the more violent impulses of unsuitable autocrats like Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany or Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. The First World War was surely one of the greatest tragedies to ever befall humanity. That devastating conflict, together with another world war a generation later, spelled the end of Europe’s global hegemony.

The Pursuit of Power tells the tale of a century where Europe progressed by leaps and bounds, and took the undisputed center stage in world affairs. Sometimes it tells too much, such as when the exact length of Austria’s railway network in 1855 is compared to that of France, but the reader gets the point that European countries progressed greatly in every conceivable metric during this time, except the Ottoman Empire. If you don’t want to read every chapter of the book I understand that, since it is exceptionally lengthy, but I would highly recommend The Pursuit of Power and feel that my own knowledge of this pivotal time for Europe has been greatly increased.