Thursday
Yesterday I was listening to The New Republic’s Brian Beutler interview of Harvard political scientist Theda Skocpol about Bernie Sanders and the state of the Democratic Party. In the Primary Concerns political podcast (the “Two Houses Divided” episode), Skocpol discusses how Sen. Bernie Sanders was “elegantly and ruthlessly” informed that his campaign was over. Immediately I thought of the scene in Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence where the New York Brahmin community subtly intervenes to separate Newland Archer from the scandalous Countess Ellen Olenska.
Just as Sanders had the quixotic illusion that he could be the Democratic nominee, so Archer thinks that he can leave his insipid wife and run off with the countess, who has separated from her abusive Polish husband. Archer, perhaps like Sanders, discovers that the forces arrayed again him are far more formidable than he anticipated.
To let Sanders down slowly, President Obama met with him for two hours before releasing a statement. Although the president acknowledged in the statement the senator’s considerable contributions to the political dialogue, he went on to fully endorse Clinton. Then, that evening, progressive icon Elizabeth Warren endorsed Clinton on the Rachel Maddow Show. Clinton herself has had nothing but praise for Sanders while declaring herself the winner. Sanders has still not conceded, but the air has gone out of his campaign.
The Age of Innocence is set in 1870s Gilded Age New York. We watch as the .1% goes into overdrive once it realizes that Archer has fallen in love with Olenska.:
Archer sat silent, with the sense of clinging to the edge of a sliding precipice. The discovery that he had been excluded from a share in these negotiations [with Olenska], and even from the knowledge that they were on foot, caused him a surprise hardly dulled by the acuter wonder of what he was learning. He saw in a flash that if the family had ceased to consult him it was because some deep tribal instinct warned them that he was no longer on their side…
Various machinations are put into play, including Archer’s wife May telling Olenska that she’s pregnant, even though she doesn’t know it to be true. This precipitates Olenska’s decision to return to Europe, and May hosts a special dinner to bid her farewell. The leading New York families, who previously have refused to associate with Olenska, show up:
There were certain things that had to be done, and if done at all, done handsomely and thoroughly; and one of these, in the old New York code, was the tribal rally around a kinswoman about to be eliminated from the tribe. There was nothing on earth that the Wellands and Mingotts would not have done to proclaim their unalterable affection for the Countess Olenska now that her passage for Europe was engaged; and Archer, at the head of his table, sat marveling at the silent untiring activity with which her popularity had been retrieved, grievances against her silenced, her past countenanced, and her present irradiated by the family approval. Mrs. van der Luyden shone on her with the dim benevolence which was her nearest approach to cordiality, and Mr. van der Luyden, from his seat at May’s right, cast down the table glances plainly intended to justify all the carnations he had sent from Skuytercliff.
In Sanders’s case, the meeting with the president may be the Democrats’ version of this meal. The senator dreamed of Countess Presidency, and now he has been told by the Democratic Party that he must return to his comparatively dull life in the Senate. They’ll accept him and praise him and let bygones be bygones if he promises not to cause waves:
In the drawing-room, where they presently joined the ladies, he met May’s triumphant eyes, and read in them the conviction that everything had “gone off” beautifully. She rose from Madame Olenska’s side, and immediately Mrs. van der Luyden beckoned the latter to a seat on the gilt sofa where she throned. Mrs. Selfridge Merry bore across the room to join them, and it became clear to Archer that here also a conspiracy of rehabilitation and obliteration was going on. The silent organization which held his little world together was determined to put itself on record as never for a moment having questioned the propriety of Madame Olenska’s conduct, or the completeness of Archer’s domestic felicity. All these amiable and inexorable persons were resolutely engaged in pretending to each other that they had never heard of, suspected, or even conceived possible, the least hint to the contrary…
Wharton informs us that this is how New York society avoids scandal. It is certainly how the Democratic Party tries to maintain unity:
It was the old New York way of taking life “without effusion of blood”: the way of people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency above courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than “scenes,” except the behavior of those who gave rise to them.
Having worked so hard, however, Sanders must be currently experiencing what Archer experiences: a sense of being boxed in by “the Establishment”:
As these thoughts succeeded each other in his mind Archer felt like a prisoner in the center of an armed camp. He looked about the table, and guessed at the inexorableness of his captors from the tone in which, over the asparagus from Florida, they were dealing with Beaufort and his wife [a couple brought low by scandal]. “It’s to show me,” he thought, “what would happen to ME—” and a deathly sense of the superiority of implication and analogy over direct action, and of silence over rash words, closed in on him like the doors of the family vault.
The big question for people now is whether ardent Sanders supporters, after having experienced true love, can move on to a relationship with Hillary. In the novel, Archer feels for the rest of his life that something vital is missing, but he also becomes a model citizen who helps New York live up to it potential. He does his duty, even as he and the reader weep for what could have been. Will those who poured their hearts out to Sanders do the same?
Something he knew he had missed: the flower of life. But he thought of it now as a thing so unattainable and improbable that to have repined would have been like despairing because one had not drawn the first prize in a lottery. There were a hundred million tickets in HIS lottery, and there was only one prize; the chances had been too decidedly against him. When he thought of Ellen Olenska it was abstractly, serenely, as one might think of some imaginary beloved in a book or a picture: she had become the composite vision of all that he had missed. That vision, faint and tenuous as it was, had kept him from thinking of other women. He had been what was called a faithful husband; and when May had suddenly died—carried off by the infectious pneumonia through which she had nursed their youngest child—he had honestly mourned her. Their long years together had shown him that it did not so much matter if marriage was a dull duty, as long as it kept the dignity of a duty: lapsing from that, it became a mere battle of ugly appetites. Looking about him, he honored his own past, and mourned for it. After all, there was good in the old ways.
We need to hold on to the vision that Sanders invoked, faint and tenuous though it may be. At the same time, “the old ways,” which in our case are traditional party politics, also have some dignity and some good. For several months we dwelt in an age of innocence, but now we must face up to our fallen world.