Bernie 2020 and nostalgia for Tolstoy
Thoughts after canvassing for Bernie in New Hampshire.
On Friday, I went to Bennington, VT, to canvas for Bernie Sanders ahead of the Democratic primary today in New Hampshire.
We couldn't sleep on Friday night. Even with a long drive at six am the next morning, we didn't get to bed until well after three. There was a lot to talk about: serious discussions of polling and Pete Buttigieg memes. We had been there for Bernie's 2015 campaign when even as a political philosophy student at a liberal arts college I felt energetically lonely. (I know now all those complications in the entanglement of liberal arts higher education institutions with the idea of political "progressivism".) Sentiment among my peers was divided: Some even argued that a Trump victory was justified from a leftist standpoint. It would help spur a leftist uprising more voracious than if another centrist Democrat took office, they said. It's possible now, of course, to claim that they were right in simple terms. But by no means does that mean it's worth it and I knew that then. I refrain from naming any names but I hope it's clear I think that's idiotic.
I remember watching the final debate live-streamed in the student center and looking at the people talking and drinking beer and laughing and feeling so alienated. No one looked as frustrated as I felt. (To be fair, those people may have been in the comfort of their own nests clutching laptops. Or taking a long walk in the woods. There must have been more than a few who saw the future long before election night.). I watched Trump win the election on television. I ogled, friends around me joking and hanging out, long after others had gone upstairs or left defeated. I went to bed drunk and woke up to my class not canceled (anthropology must go on) and the eerie silence that would persist for weeks which was an annoyingly taunting reminder of how loud the unbothered laughter had been before. I was alienated even from the new, collective frustration.
When the 2020 election began and Bernie officially announced his candidacy I wanted to handle it differently. I work a minimum wage job in a large city because my other option was to work a minimum wage job in the mid-size city I'm from. Two or three years ago my thoughts about the future were drenched with the academic intrigue and years of Ph.D. purgatory that my professors urged me to envision, that I urged myself to envision out of familial duty to them. My desires now are not less ambitious but I've embraced with relief the idea of a more creative path. Accordingly, in this election, I wanted to be less emotional and more active.
So I canvassed in New Hampshire partially for selfish reasons. Because I just wanted to be there. When Bernie Sanders wins the New Hampshire Democratic primary, I want to feel actively a part of the movement I have been a part of in spirit (and in the act of voting) for years. I intend to go to more states during this primary, not just to beat Trump, or because I think Bernie is perfect (he's not), but because I desperately want it to be possible to elect a President with the sheer force of numbers and will and the spirit that moves people.
There are many ways "history" "changes," but small coincidences of fate and timing sometimes open up possibilities for massive shifts. Even in a fucked, rigged, shitty election, masses in concert cannot be stopped even by billionaire monsters and deep state agendas. This is one thing I know from my life as an obnoxious Very Online liberal arts-educated childhood know-it-all who classically had her life changed from reading Tolstoy at twenty. But the point is it really doesn't matter who anyone is -- the election of Bernie Sanders by the people will be a major political event of our lifetime.
In my final paper for a class on War and Peace from 2017, unrevised, which was the beginning of my interest in the idea of patterns in history and the tension between chance and inevitability, I wrote:
"To the question What moves people?, Tolstoy asserts that historians’ answers are useless because historians will always tell you that it is great men like Napoleon...
...thus the question becomes If not a divine force, and if not genius men, what other force moves people? Historians seem to have assumed we all know this force without providing an answer, which Tolstoy identifies as one of the many contradictions of historians’ work: 'When it suits their theory, they say that power is the result of events; and sometimes when they need to prove something else, they say that power produces events' (1184). As long as historians write histories only of single men like Napoleon and 'belief [the old foundation of historical movements of people] has been destroyed,' the concept of power for explaining historical phenomena is inevitable, and therefore we must define power."
For Tolstoy in War and Peace, "power" is a Rousseauean transference from the commanded to the commander, in essence, similar to Bernie's oft-posited notion of power: an object and a tool of the wealthy to be held in contempt by the people who are oppressed by it, not necessarily the same something that is wielded by the oppressed against the powerful. What moves people, that spirit, is something other than power.
"'For history to recognize men’s freedom as a force capable of influencing historical events, that is, as not subject to laws, is the same as for astronomy to recognize a free force moving the heavenly bodies' (1212)... Men and history both like to find order in the apparent chaos of events, and draw patterns from it in order to explain it and soothe his confusion and existential dread. But if everything acts according to laws, there is no room for God, no room for miracles, no room for chance."
On Friday, I went to Bennington, VT, to canvas for Bernie Sanders ahead of the Democratic primary today in New Hampshire.
We couldn't sleep on Friday night. Even with a long drive at six am the next morning, we didn't get to bed until well after three. There was a lot to talk about: serious discussions of polling and Pete Buttigieg memes. We had been there for Bernie's 2015 campaign when even as a political philosophy student at a liberal arts college I felt energetically lonely. (I know now all those complications in the entanglement of liberal arts higher education institutions with the idea of political "progressivism".) Sentiment among my peers was divided: Some even argued that a Trump victory was justified from a leftist standpoint. It would help spur a leftist uprising more voracious than if another centrist Democrat took office, they said. It's possible now, of course, to claim that they were right in simple terms. But by no means does that mean it's worth it and I knew that then. I refrain from naming any names but I hope it's clear I think that's idiotic.
I remember watching the final debate live-streamed in the student center and looking at the people talking and drinking beer and laughing and feeling so alienated. No one looked as frustrated as I felt. (To be fair, those people may have been in the comfort of their own nests clutching laptops. Or taking a long walk in the woods. There must have been more than a few who saw the future long before election night.). I watched Trump win the election on television. I ogled, friends around me joking and hanging out, long after others had gone upstairs or left defeated. I went to bed drunk and woke up to my class not canceled (anthropology must go on) and the eerie silence that would persist for weeks which was an annoyingly taunting reminder of how loud the unbothered laughter had been before. I was alienated even from the new, collective frustration.
When the 2020 election began and Bernie officially announced his candidacy I wanted to handle it differently. I work a minimum wage job in a large city because my other option was to work a minimum wage job in the mid-size city I'm from. Two or three years ago my thoughts about the future were drenched with the academic intrigue and years of Ph.D. purgatory that my professors urged me to envision, that I urged myself to envision out of familial duty to them. My desires now are not less ambitious but I've embraced with relief the idea of a more creative path. Accordingly, in this election, I wanted to be less emotional and more active.
So I canvassed in New Hampshire partially for selfish reasons. Because I just wanted to be there. When Bernie Sanders wins the New Hampshire Democratic primary, I want to feel actively a part of the movement I have been a part of in spirit (and in the act of voting) for years. I intend to go to more states during this primary, not just to beat Trump, or because I think Bernie is perfect (he's not), but because I desperately want it to be possible to elect a President with the sheer force of numbers and will and the spirit that moves people.
There are many ways "history" "changes," but small coincidences of fate and timing sometimes open up possibilities for massive shifts. Even in a fucked, rigged, shitty election, masses in concert cannot be stopped even by billionaire monsters and deep state agendas. This is one thing I know from my life as an obnoxious Very Online liberal arts-educated childhood know-it-all who classically had her life changed from reading Tolstoy at twenty. But the point is it really doesn't matter who anyone is -- the election of Bernie Sanders by the people will be a major political event of our lifetime.
In my final paper for a class on War and Peace from 2017, unrevised, which was the beginning of my interest in the idea of patterns in history and the tension between chance and inevitability, I wrote:
"To the question What moves people?, Tolstoy asserts that historians’ answers are useless because historians will always tell you that it is great men like Napoleon...
...thus the question becomes If not a divine force, and if not genius men, what other force moves people? Historians seem to have assumed we all know this force without providing an answer, which Tolstoy identifies as one of the many contradictions of historians’ work: 'When it suits their theory, they say that power is the result of events; and sometimes when they need to prove something else, they say that power produces events' (1184). As long as historians write histories only of single men like Napoleon and 'belief [the old foundation of historical movements of people] has been destroyed,' the concept of power for explaining historical phenomena is inevitable, and therefore we must define power."
For Tolstoy in War and Peace, "power" is a Rousseauean transference from the commanded to the commander, in essence, similar to Bernie's oft-posited notion of power: an object and a tool of the wealthy to be held in contempt by the people who are oppressed by it, not necessarily the same something that is wielded by the oppressed against the powerful. What moves people, that spirit, is something other than power.
"'For history to recognize men’s freedom as a force capable of influencing historical events, that is, as not subject to laws, is the same as for astronomy to recognize a free force moving the heavenly bodies' (1212)... Men and history both like to find order in the apparent chaos of events, and draw patterns from it in order to explain it and soothe his confusion and existential dread. But if everything acts according to laws, there is no room for God, no room for miracles, no room for chance."
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