I wasn’t the only one bemused to learn a former Bernie Sanders strategist was last week fronting events hosted by Climate 200.
The Australian was incensed to report that Zack Exley, a “self-described socialist”, would be presenting “How to Win: Lessons from Obama, Bernie and AOC” for the group — though it fits nicely with the masthead’s attempts to paint the teal independents as “radical, extremist Greens.”
“We know the teals vote with the radical Greens up to 81% of the time, and this unfortunate trend looks set to continue, with Climate 200 teaming up with America’s socialist brains trust,” said Bradfield MP Paul Fletcher, whose electorate may very well turn teal.
I ask Exley, who was in Melbourne for the final leg of his trip, how it came to be that a left-wing agitator (then Texas governor George W. Bush once referred to him as a “garbage man”) was running workshops for the vehicle started by Simon Holmes à Court, son of Australia’s first billionaire. While Climate 200 supports many independent campaigns, it’s perhaps best known for its work with the teals, whose politics are a far cry from Sanders’ — or are they?
“I would just say give up all these categories, right?” he says. “This is where journalism goes really wrong and winds up misinforming everybody. Like, you need Climate 200 to have a certain kind of politics, and you need the Bernie world to have a certain kind of politics so that you can write about them.”
Exley — who runs a think tank called New Consensus, which was previously involved in pushing for a Green New Deal — is in Australia of his own volition, though paid for his ticket by doing events for Climate 200. He also met with think tanks, academics and activists interested in discussing how Australia might embark on a major transition to the new clean economy; he’s undertaken similar trips in Norway, Denmark, Finland and Germany.
But the political organiser is particularly interested in the teals — traditional liberals concerned about climate change.
“I was interested in the kind of liberalness of the teals, you know?” he says, arguing it is only liberal parties (in the European sense) that have “pulled off transformational economic upgrades in democracies”. “Historically, it’s not the labor types or the green types, even, or the social democratic types. It’s always the party of business.”
Australia’s current Liberal Party isn’t up to it, having become, like the Republicans, “a wacko right-wing party”. But Exley reckons the teals could step into the liberal void. “They may seem unambitious economically right now,” he says. “But when a big economic and financial crisis hits next, history says they are the most likely to be free to break with tradition and dogma and do big things.”
Exley co-founded Justice Democrats and Brand New Congress, political action committees aimed at running progressive challengers to “out-of-touch Democratic incumbents”. These helped elect “Squad” members Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar to Congress, as The Oz noted snippily.
As an organiser, he’s fascinated by what our community independents are achieving, writing in The New Daily that “Australia is an organiser’s paradise of hundreds of eager volunteers in neat, independently mapped electorates”. Though the US system makes it harder for independents to break in (as the Australia Institute noted, our system is uniquely suited to it), Exley hopes to take his learnings back home.
“I want us to try getting independents to run, and really figure out how to do something completely separate from the left and the Bernie movement,” he tells me. “Just seeing the kind of people who are working for these independent campaigns really confirmed that we just really need to start completely fresh, like totally outside of the Democratic Party … a real clean break.”
Exley was impressed with the candidates Climate 200 is backing, many of whom he met running workshops, singling out the community candidate for Nationals-held Cowper. “I know that a lot of the media calls them the ‘green teals’ or the ‘teal greens’ or whatever, but what I saw hanging out with all these campaign volunteers and organisers is they’re really not Green and they’re really not Labor people. They’re these very normal mainstream people that are really fed up with all of the existing parties.”
It’s clear Exley, with his penchant for “big organising”, would rather the movement was more centralised. “I really think that if somebody went out there and was able to recruit people like the teals in every district in Australia, I think they would have like, you know, 80 or 90 people in Parliament.”
“They’re going really slow,” he says, when I point out that it is communities, not Climate 200, who select candidates. “It’s a real commitment to just, like, let it be this community-led process and have it be this bottom-up thing.”
Exley believes there could be a model under which community candidates retain their independence on most issues but stand together on a “really common sense plan” to build a new green economy. Easier said than done. He doesn’t reckon the Greens will ever have mass electoral appeal, suggesting they, like Sanders, are perceived as too “weird” (he cites my recent Forget the Frontbench on Max Chandler-Mather). “This was the problem that we ran into, right? Like, the reason Bernie can’t get a majority.” Barack Obama, on the other hand, whose 2008 campaign he also worked on, was the “not-weird Bernie”.
“He stood for these, like, big, progressive-sounding ideas when he ran, but he was super normal,” Exley says. “That’s why Obama was able to win. Because everybody could see that he was a normal guy.”
Many would contend that it was Obama’s vague “progressive-sounding ideas” that were the problem. But Exley is convinced it is “normal people with a vision” who are going to save the day.
“My pitch to the normal people, like the teals, is, like, why don’t we build the clean economy that would avoid the apocalypse?” he says. “That’s my pitch.”
