Dear Citizens and Elected Officials:
Like many others on the left, I wondered what a post-heart attack, stent implanted Bernie Sanders would look like when he took the stage on October 15 for the fourth Democratic primary debate. He had suffered chest pains late on the evening of October 1st. This latest event was the one held at Otterbein University in Westerville, Ohio.
I could have saved my worrying. He looked and sounded the best I’ve heard him yet in the forums of this type. And he had better emotional range, the broadest I’ve seen in him: calm and deliberate in his policy responses, but rising to his trademark anger and indignation when laying out our dire national situation, our Economic and Ecological pain — inequality for the vast majority of our citizens, and for Nature too. He was much sharper than on September 12, at the third party debate held at Texas Southern University in Houston, Texas. There he sounded angry out of the gate, like he had an argument with someone just before taking the stage. And he sounded very hoarse as well, if you remember.
Of course, I did some fact checking on my own as the health of the 78 year old Senator from Vermont took center stage during his absence, pushing his policies out of the way for the time being. Most of what I read in the press gave no frame of reference for his comparative health, so here is some of the ground I covered and which I want to share with you.
President Dwight Eisenhower was 64 when he suffered a heart attack in September of 1955, and it happened during a five week vacation. He was subsequently hospitalized for 6 weeks. Some sources suggest that’s what he had in 1949 when serving as the President of Columbia University, out for two months. Eisenhower was a heavy smoker since his days as a cadet at West Point, and he carried the weight, the lives of millions on his shoulders in the decisions he made during World War II. Yet he ran again in 1956 and again won resoundingly, at the height of the Cold War.
President Lyndon Johnson, also a heavy smoker, had his first heart attack at the age of 47, also in 1955, and some suggest he also had one just before being sworn in after President Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963. On January 22, 1973, he suffered his fifth and fatal heart attack and died at the age of 64.
Vice President Richard Chaney who, over the course of his career, according to Dr. Sanjay Gupta’s report for CNN, had “five heart attacks, open heart surgery and a battery-operated heart pump,” had his first heart attack at the age of 37, while campaigning for Congress in 1978. He also was a heavy smoker.
I cite this background not to turn myself into a medical correspondent, but to supply the context of relative health and the burdens of ill health that we have tolerated — and accommodated in other comparable public officials. There is no indication of anything like these predictive patterns in Bernie Sanders (I’ve spared you the diet and exercise patterns of these three, pretty awful), indeed, quite the opposite. Of course, he is older and has been on a killer schedule for far too long since the primary race in 2016.
That being said, there are some personal sides to this “sticking with Bernie” piece. I have three stents myself which went into my heart in the summer of 2014, at the age of 64. And my cardiologist insists that there is an unpredictable factor of deposits from key arteries breaking off and causing blockage, a wild card even for those who appear to be healthy. So no guarantees for me — or Bernie. Or some of the other leading candidates in the race.
Sanders’ performance at the rally on Saturday, October 19th in Queens, New York was important, and not just for the ringing endorsements by Michael Moore and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the Mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico, Carmen Yalin Cruz. Bernie looked good, spoke long and passionately for almost an hour and a half, and put himself on the line by saying he was ready for the job of President in every way.
What hit home for me in his speech, and in Michael Moore’s and AOC’s, was the resurfacing of the importance of class, the working class, the lower middle class and the pain and hardships of their lives. Both Bernie and AOC used the term “universals,” how we must transcend all the potential divisions of “identity politics,” without minimizing the causes of women, immigrants, Black Lives Matter, the LGBTQIA+ community. And the way they both are proposing to do that is reflected in the content and scope of the Green New Deal. And as of late September, in AOC’s package of six bills called “The Just Society.” The “Vision” therefore leans towards the lower middle and working classes, and middle class, categories which cover some people in all of these “causes and identities,” who have been short changed for the entire span of Neoliberalism, since the mid-1970’s...And of course, then they appealed to the Grand Unifier of our inescapable environmental predicament, the collapse of Nature under modern capitalism and its Climate Chaos.
But I don’t want to dwell on the complex sociology and dynamics, the step by step, decade by decade drifting of the old Democratic Party away from its New Deal achievements, turning into, as far as economics goes, the party of the upper middle class professionals, Wall Street, Silicon Valley and the revolving door, turning its back on workers, and rural Americans, even while achieving some of the social goals of women’s causes and our LGBTQIA+ citizens — the non-economic aspects of “equality before the law.” This became, let us not forget, the party too of austerity, balanced budgets and shrunken economic dreams even in the most affluent of its home turf, like Montgomery County, Maryland. There, progressives backed away from comprehensive new mass rail transit plans, and even had trouble funding a scaled down bus rapid transit system which was meant as the non-threatening, affordable alternative to expanding Metro high speed rail and the missing light rail connectors.
Can do? No, can’t do. Well, it’s not good enough. Not for today’s problems.
Sanders and AOC’s stories, and Michael Moore’s, match my own, where class has left the deepest imprints on me. Not the rigid categories of the old Marxist fundamentalists from the 19th and early 20th centuries, what the Right means with the epithet “socialism,” but of author Steve Fraser’s life as portrayed in a fine and subtly grained handling of the fraught topic in his 2018 masterpiece, which you have never heard of: “Class Matters: The Strange Career of An American Delusion.” He looks at six themes and “hotspots” of traditional American history, and reworks our understandings to show how class mattered in all of them: the founding colonies at Jamestown and Plymouth; the Constitution; the Statue of Liberty (a shocker to progressives and the current discussions around immigrants); the “Kitchen Debates” between Nixon and Krushchev, and the mythology and realities of the Cowboy. There are some dramatic revelations from his own life (I’ve read two fine books of his and had no idea of his Philadelphia days and friendship with a cowboy from the upper middle class, who attended Swarthmore College, of all places, and then went West.)
But I digress. I grew up in a lower middle class family of a struggling small business owner, in the suburbs outside of the already-in-decline old industrial town of Trenton, NJ— which was also a racial powder keg which blew up in the Spring of 1968 when MLK was assassinated. Finances were so tight my mother had to go to work as a legal secretary when I was eight, and I became a latch-key kid, home alone after school. Vacations were rare, and limited to a week’s rental at the Jersey Shore and weekend trips to the immediate Northeast. And one train trip to New Orleans with an aunt to get rid of me for a week when family tensions between my mother and father ran high. Love was on a very tight budget in that family.
But I had eyes and ears. Eyes to see the differences between the “Coalport” ghetto of Trenton, my modest, Sycamore tree lined suburban street, and the gradual climb into the higher rungs of the American class system as one went through Lawrenceville and entered Princeton via Route 206. Their architecture and landscapes were strikingly different, as were the lot sizes and the automobiles. And the speech patterns, speech having always been a clue to what we otherwise deny in America, harder to disguise than the fashion trends.
What I am driving at is that I understand the proverbial weaknesses of Senator Sanders, the scars of class and family dynamics that speak of never being relaxed, always ready for the put downs, the betrayals of speech, accents and lack of poise, the same defensive crouch that was so apparent on the other side of “taking sides” on the American Dream: Richard Nixon. But so very different in who he takes on, and who he defends, and the very terms of the Dream itself from Bernie and AOC (And as FDR proposed revising it in the Second Bill of Rights.)
Let me add two other important events of my life, one from inside the family, and another from a later work “family” during my environmental career. They resonate until this day, and for our times.
In the summer of 1964, my formerly dearest cousin, a woman who cared for me, taught me gardening and about Nature, kept me going when my father died in 1963, and a prototype feminist of the Phyllis Schlafly school, not the Gloria Steinhem one, had an ugly fight with my future brother-in-law, a Yale astrophysics student who was all in for the Civil Rights movement.
My cousin grew up without a father in her home, went to a state college, got a Masters in Education and had to put an art career on hold. She was, as I look back now, sensitive to nature but was a Social Darwinist. My brother in law was from Ivy League parents (Yale and Wellesley, and attended Lawrenceville Prep School) who were on the way down — an aging executive in the aging steel industry who lived in a large white house on the Delaware River, not in Princeton or Lawrenceville.
It was an ugly, vicious confrontation, with the Yalie being thrown out of the house and asked not to ever return. Class and race were stamped all over this little Civil War, even though all parties were white, with the authentic, “honest, tell it like it is Goldwater” vs. the lying LBJ machine candidate (the last hurrah for the old New Deal?)...the racial epithets flying through the living room. I sided, painfully, but without hesitation, with my future brother in law. I look back, and think: was it not a microcosm of things to come, left vs. right, of class and race in their awfully complex dance, so hard to untangle, so easy to compartmentalize, race ever staying, “class dismissed.” (And remembering too the many heated arguments I had with my “Uncle Bob,” over the Vietnam War, Nixon and McGovern, himself a struggling small businessman living under the shade of an impossible shadow, his brother, in California, leading several of the nation’s major financial corporations. His wife, my mother’s sister, having no choice but to work, was the steady breadwinner of the family...Class, you say, has no place in America, it’s divisive and dividing: but there it was, staring me in the face, “All in the Family.”
Flash forward to my New Jersey Audubon “employment” family in the very early days of the George W. Bush administration. A founding couple of NJ Audubon, who kept it alive during the lean years prior to my arrival in 1989, were a former seminarian and a nun who later married. They stuck with the Republican Party mainly because of earlier family traditions and it’s stance on abortion, or so I inferred. The frictions between us grew especially from the Republican takeover of the House in 1994, under Newt Gingrich. Aside from the anti-abortion stance, what did an anti-spending, anti-tax, anti-regulatory Republican Party offer conservationists? Nothing at all in NJ, except for the residue of Republican moderates, a species which was going extinct. The details I’ll spare you, but it also was a preview of things to come and I have no regrets about my last trip and final speech in New Jersey, upon receiving the lifetime environmental award on September 9, 2001 at Sandy Hook, from the NY-NJ Baykeeper. It is hard to forget my last look at the Twin Trade Towers. I said, among other things, that “ there was no greater threat to environmental protection than the Republican Right,” a sentence which I had uttered years before in the presence of key figures within NJ Audubon, and which they hadn’t forgotten, or forgiven, apparently. After all, in clear ways, I was a threat to bi-partisanship — and to fund raising, which made of lot conservatives inside the organization very nervous.
Here I am, though, after all my adult life in politics, or at the edge of it, a man of the left in a party which has had no clear identity, much less coherent policies, so long after FDR and Harry Truman, and we can argue about Truman and the groundwork he laid for the Cold War until we turn blue. Or purple.
And here I am, watching one courageous man, full of obvious limitations, who by sheer determination and fidelity to some very old but powerful ideas on the left, has done more in three years to turn the Democratic Party around, back to its better roots in the New Deal and that all but forgotten Second Bill of Rights from 1944 than all the two-stepping, shape-shifting and identity struggles of the party and its leaders since 1976.
It remains, especially on the economic plane, a party without an ideology, with nothing to match the Republican’s, in the words of George Lakoff: lower taxes, smaller government, strong defense, free markets - family values. Ten words. Lakoff’s ten offers on behalf of Progressives fell flat to my ear, and unbelievably, and revealingly, did not mention the word “Equality.” They talked around it in this way: Stronger America, Broad Prosperity, Better Future, Effective Government, Mutual Responsibility. (From “Don’t think of an elephant!,” 2004.)
Until events prove Bernie to be unfit in health, or voters turn their backs on him, I’m with him and AOC in this most fluid and unpredictable of political climates. I’ve seen nothing like it except the year 1968.