It is a pity that Bernie Sanders will never be president of the United States. The sadness is in knowing that rare are those politicians whose forthrightness has them climb the heights to power. In the United States, there is hardly any instance of political leaders unafraid to speak the truth who have been elected to the White House. Bernie Sanders, a leftist by American standards, tried once to be a candidate for the presidency. America being America, he did not do well.
Sanders is an ageing figure, untouched by any unbridled ambition. And yet when he speaks, one feels that there is much that is presidential about him. In recent days, his sharp riposte to Israel’s Netanyahu on the issue of pro-Palestinian protests by students on American campuses demonstrates the clarity of principles Sanders upholds as a senator.
A Jew himself, Sanders has not let his religion come into his perceptions of the atrocities being perpetrated by Israeli forces in Gaza and other regions of occupied Arab land. He has bluntly reminded Netanyahu that protests against Israeli military action, which has left close to 35,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza, have nothing anti-Semitic about them.
Senator Sanders has thus reminded Israel’s hawkish leader that he cannot twist facts and play victim in the present circumstances. It is interesting that in conditions where President Joe Biden has been pretty squeamish about dealing with Netanyahu in a tough manner, Sanders has given the Israeli prime minister a piece of his mind. Sanders from such a perspective has done what a president should be doing.
And there comes, again, that sad feeling that Sanders is not president. His presence proper in that high office would have added to the dignity of the office. He has a clear view of popular aspirations and has never been willing to coddle men exercising a morally questionable hold on power. His worldview has no room for compromise with those who do not regard power as a trust to be held and exercised to its highest standards.
In American politics, well-meaning men and women have generally found it hard to attain presidential office. But there have been some such men, an instance being Jimmy Carter, whose hearts were in the right place and whose contributions to their country and to the world would have elevated politics to the state of the sublime.
Carter’s defeat at the hands of Ronald Reagan was a return of the familiar message that a president espousing human rights as an underpinning of foreign policy -- and so turning America away from being a global policeman -- did not deserve a second term. The irony is that in terms of larger history, Carter will loom as a figure of huge significance, with Reagan regarded as no more than a footnote.
A politician who could have made a difference was Eugene McCarthy. The senator from Minnesota put up a brave fight at the New Hampshire primary in 1968 with his powerful anti-Vietnam War message, forcing President Lyndon Johnson to forgo a second term in the White House.
The difficulty with principled individuals, those with causes and commitment to the causes, is that they are often tripped up by men of lesser or no principles or with priorities of pointless import
McCarthy’s ideals resonated with large groups of Americans for whom the war in distant south-east Asia was simply slicing through their traditional belief in liberal democracy. McCarthy offered these Americans a choice. He promised to end the conflict in Vietnam and recover the moral ground in American politics. Acutely conscious of the divisions wracking the country, he offered a fresh beginning.
And he would have if Robert F Kennedy had not joined the race when it became obvious that McCarthy had turned into a leading candidate for the presidency. Kennedy’s ambitions were those of a carpetbagger. Keen to occupy the office that had once been his brother’s, he did not consider the idea of waiting for the future or of being McCarthy’s running mate at the November 1968 election. Had Kennedy not been shot in Los Angeles, it would be hard to predict if he would have won the Democratic nomination, given that Vice President Hubert Humphrey was to soon throw his hat into the ring.
The upshot of it all was that McCarthy had been galvanising public support for his campaign. Had his politics not been disrupted by Kennedy and later by Humphrey’s entry into the race, McCarthy could well have gone on to beat Richard Nixon, the Republican nominee at the election in November.
The difficulty with principled individuals, those with causes and commitment to the causes, is that they are often tripped up by men of lesser or no principles or with priorities of pointless import and are thus eventually compelled to make their way out of mainstream politics.
Following years of New Labour in the United Kingdom, with politics making no difference between a socialist Labour and a capitalist Conservative Party, Jeremy Corbyn offered hope of a liberal change. In his hands was the authority to take the Labour Party back to its ideological moorings, to a restoration of Clause Four and therefore a revival of the party. But then Keir Starmer and his clan of right-wing Labourites came in the way, undermining Corbyn at every opportunity.
A Corbyn administration would have rolled back the negativism and politics of pleasing the crowd and appeasing the entrenched classes that has been part of Tory politics in the last thirteen years. In these days of a rising cost of living and a failure of diplomacy in Ukraine and Palestine, Corbyn would have exercised assertive leadership in Britain. His party did not give him that chance.
That reminds one of two significant mishaps in modern Indian politics. Following the assassination of Indira Gandhi in October 1984, President Zail Singh should have called on Pranab Mukherjee, the senior minister in the government, to assume the country’s leadership. But Zail Singh blundered into swearing in an untested Rajiv Gandhi as the new prime minister. Dynastic politics took over where democratic transparency should have been.
And then there is the tale of how India’s communists failed to endorse the experienced Jyoti Basu as the country’s prime minister. It was a self-inflicted wound on the part of the CPI(M). It deprived India not only of what would have been its first communist prime minister but, in a larger sense, could have been a major step toward ensuring the continuity of secular politics in India.
Democracy often leaves by the wayside political leaders who could have made a difference. It throws up, in a good many instances, individuals in whom mediocrity is the claim to leadership. That is the disappointing part of the story.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is Consultant Editor, Dhaka Tribune.
