Thursday, February 13, 2020

Democrats, it's okay to vote for Bernie

From The Week by Ryan Cooper

Bernie Sanders won the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday — with 90 percent of precincts counted, he had 26 percent of the vote, and networks declared him the victor. Sanders has won the popular vote in each of the first two contests in the Democratic primary and now has a lead in national polls. He is unquestionably the frontrunner for the nomination.

The win in New Hampshire, however, wasn't as big as many polls had predicted. Sen. Amy Klobuchar in particular drastically beat expectations, coming in at nearly 20 percent against a pre-election polling average of about 11 percent, while Pete Buttigieg also gained a couple points to 24 percent. Meanwhile, former Vice President Joe Biden got absolutely destroyed, just like in Iowa. He came in fifth with just 9 percent, compared to a polling average of 11 percent — and a total collapse from 23 percent just a month ago. It appears there is a significant population of voters who are just looking for any kind of moderate candidate who seems halfway plausible.

But the odd thing here is that a big number of these voters are almost certainly fine with Sanders — they have just talked themselves into thinking that he can't possibly win. Hey Democrats! You can just vote for Bernie Sanders if you want. It'll be okay.

It can be hard to see this if you watch too much of the hysterically anti-Sanders coverage on supposedly-liberal MSNBC — Chris Matthews recently spoke of his fear that Sanders is a secret communist who might execute him in Central Park — but the fact is most rank-and-file Democrats like Sanders just fine. Indeed, the Morning Consult poll found that his favorability rating among that group is 74 percent — the highest of any of the candidates, even better than Biden.

This isn't hard to understand. While Sanders isn't technically a Democrat, he has been a loyal soldier for all the causes the party supports (rhetorically at least) — universal healthcare, higher wages, more and better jobs, racial justice, LGBTQ rights, criminal justice reform, and so on — for decades. Neither is he some loopy extremist. While he has always held uncompromising egalitarian views, he is a savvy legislative tactician who has negotiated dozens of compromises through Congress over the years, from community health center funding in ObamaCare to a bipartisan bill to end support for the Saudi war in Yemen. Sanders has been widely covered by the media since 2016, and most Democrats plainly like what he is saying.

The difference is that Sanders insists the Democratic compromises of the 1980s and 1990s are no longer necessary, if they ever were. In his view, the party does not have to bow to either the corporate class or to white reaction (as Bill Clinton did) to win. Instead, following the trail blazed by Jesse Jackson in the '80s, he proposes to assemble a multiracial coalition of working- and middle-class voters, united mainly on economic grounds, to defeat the oligarchs that have a hammerlock on the Republican Party and still cling to influence at the top of the Democratic establishment.

That Democratic elite has spent decades hammering their electorate with the idea that radicals always lose, and that a corporate- and big money-friendly moderate is the way to go. Every election is 1972, and everyone to the left of Jimmy Carter is George McGovern — despite the fact that 1972 is as distant from today as 1924 was from that year, and the fact that moderates lost in 1980, 1984, 1988, 2000, 2004, and 2016.

As we see with the panicked switching between Biden, Klobuchar, and Buttigieg, this argument still clearly resonates with a lot of Democratic voters. But the truth is that you just can't know with any kind of certainty who would be the best candidate.

A Sanders nomination would be a risk to be sure, but so would nominating anybody else. Trump really might win no matter who is nominated. Biden has tons of baggage and is plainly terrible at campaigning. Mike Bloomberg has even more baggage. Buttigieg has no experience. Klobuchar is infamous for abusing her staff. And even while both the corporate media and the right-wing agitprop machine attack Sanders as a deranged socialist, he still polls well ahead of Trump in general election matchups — within 1 point of Biden and ahead of everyone else. And let's not forget that in the most recent election, the moderate candidate lost to the biggest buffoon in the history of presidential politics.

America is in a terrible fix, and there is no easy way out. As Alex Pareene writes in The New Republic, the Democratic electorate must "be given license to support what it supports." A Sanders nomination would bring along his increasingly good margins among non-white voters and his zealous base of small donors and activists. And in a crisis, gritty determination and commitment are surely more useful than timid hesitation. Who knows what dirty tricks the Trump campaign might try, or how inscrutable swing voters might react? Best to just go with a clearly good candidate and gear up for an all-out general election effort.



From Market Watchers: Bernie Sanders isn’t a radical — he’s a pragmatist who fights to un-rig the system By Mark Weisbrot

As Bernie Sanders continues to increase his standing in the Democratic primary, and his opponents in both parties feel the pain, there is an effort to paint him as an extremist of some sort. Someone who might even lose to Trump because of this alleged “radicalism.” But it’s not that easy to make the case on the basis of facts.

He has a 40-year track record as a politician. The things he is saying now are mostly what he has shouted from the mountain tops for pretty much the whole time. The main difference is that now, other Democratic politicians have joined him: on a $15 minimum wage, student-debt relief, free tuition at public universities, expanding Social Security, reducing income inequality, and some even on Medicare for All.

His actions speak even more consistently than his words: he understands that politics is about compromise. He fights hard for what he has promised to voters, but then takes the best deal he can win if it will advance the ball down the field, and prepares to fight again the next day.

That’s why he supported Obamacare when it was the best deal on the table — expanding insurance coverage to 20 million Americans, without the life-threatening exclusions for “pre-existing conditions.” This despite the fact that Obamacare was still quite a distance from Medicare for All — “health care as a human right” — that had been his passion and signature issue for decades.

But he is a “socialist,” his opponents cry, leaving out the first part of the term “democratic socialist” that Sanders always uses when this issue is discussed. There is much room to induce confusion here because the term “socialist,” in English, has a number of different definitions that have all become common usage over the years.

It can be used to mean anything from “communist,” as in the former Soviet Union, to the European social democratic or socialist parties that have governed for much of the past 70 years in countries such as France, Germany, Spain, and the U.K., not to mention the Scandinavian countries.

It should be clear to anyone who is not trying to frighten voters that Sanders is a social democrat of the latter, European variety. There will be no U.S. government takeover of the means of production under a Sanders administration.

The biggest expansion in government will be in public funding of health insurance. Like traditional Medicare, where less than 2% of expenses are administrative costs, public health insurance will be much more efficient than the current six times as much spent by the private insurance industry. And we won’t have 8 million people falling into poverty every year due to medical expenses, or worse, tens of thousands actually dying because of lack of access to affordable health care.

Sanders’ program is targeted at correcting a very harmful transformation of the U.S. economy that has taken place over the past 40 years.

Unlike the first three decades after World War II, when income gains were broadly shared as the economy grew, most of the increase in income has gone to those who already had much more than their share. Since 1993, for example, the top 1% of families captured an astounding 48% of the growth in this country’s income.

No wonder so many Americans feel like the system is rigged against them.

That right-wing transformation was mostly launched by the Reagan team, but it came to be accepted, and even deepened by some liberal political leaders as well. Perhaps this normalization of the radical changes of the past few decades is why some commentators perceive Bernie’s program — designed to reverse this damage — as “radical.”

Here it is important to note that the fight over this right-wing transformation has never been so much about “the market” versus “the state.” Almost every economy in the world is a mixture of both.

But the Reagan “revolution” and the counter-reforms that followed (e.g., the WTO, NAFTA, financial deregulation, permanent normal trade relations with China, anti-labor legislation and practices) were not so much about changing the relative weight of market and government.

Rather what changed most is that both markets and government were harnessed vastly more to redistribute income and wealth upward. The result is an America that is unique among high-income countries in the percentage of people who are employed full-time and yet struggling to get by, not to mention the more than 10 million children in poverty and more than half a million homeless people.

Sanders, in his reform program, seeks to use both markets and government to reverse this massive upward redistribution of income and wealth.

Of course, government has to take the lead with public investment where private investment would not be forthcoming — as in the transformation of some energy infrastructure to reduce carbon emissions.

But other important parts of Sanders’ program move the economy away from government toward more market-based solutions: for example, reducing the role of government-granted-and-regulated patent monopolies in driving up the price of pharmaceuticals, medical supplies, and health-care costs. Or breaking up other monopolies in favor of more market competition, in the technology and financial sectors.

Sanders also favors a less interventionist role for the Federal Reserve in the labor market, as the Fed has triggered almost all U.S. recessions since the end of World War II (except for the last two) by raising interest rates when this was unnecessary.

And he has led the way to reduce one of the most powerful and destructive abuses that our government has unleashed upon Americans and the world: the terrible, unnecessary, “forever wars” that most Americans now reject. Some of his best allies in this fight have been conservative Republicans who are skeptical of this aspect of “big government” — as has been true in the historic fight to stop U.S. military participation in Saudi Arabia’s genocidal war in Yemen.

In short, Sanders is much more pragmatic and less ideological than his opponents would like to admit. But we can expect to hear more — from various quarters — of this labeling him as a “radical,” if he continues to gain on his competitors in the Democratic primary.

No comments:

Post a Comment