My problem with this Ryan Cooper piece isn’t that I necessarily disagree with his argument. Actually, I do not think that I do. My problem is that he doesn’t give me many reasons to accept his argument.
If the question is whether or not the candidacy of Bernie Sanders will have a significant and lasting impact, and/or that its surprising strength is a leading indicator of a resurgent left-wing in American politics, then I think Cooper needs to do better than to point out that Sanders “ran on extremely aggressive and easy-to-understand left-wing policy.”
Of course, Cooper also points out that Sanders had been “for years the most left-wing member of the Senate, from the second-smallest state in the nation.” But I don’t think either of those facts help us answer the question.
What Cooper is responding to is a study by political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels which purports to show that “it is a mistake to assume that voters who support Mr. Sanders because he is not Mrs. Clinton necessarily favor his left-leaning policy views.”
Exit polls conducted in two dozen primary and caucus states from early February through the end of April reveal only modest evidence of ideological structure in Democratic voting patterns, but ample evidence of the importance of group loyalties.
Mr. Sanders did just nine points better, on average, among liberals than he did among moderates. By comparison, he did 11 points worse among women than among men, 18 points worse among nonwhites than among whites and 28 points worse among those who identified as Democrats than among independents.
It is very hard to point to differences between Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Sanders’s proposed policies that could plausibly account for such substantial cleavages. They are reflections of social identities, symbolic commitments and partisan loyalties.
Yet commentators who have been ready and willing to attribute Donald Trump’s success to anger, authoritarianism, or racism rather than policy issues have taken little note of the extent to which Mr. Sanders’s support is concentrated not among liberal ideologues but among disaffected white men.
It’s true, we might expect a Blue Dog Democrat or a candidate like former Senator Jim Webb of Virginia to run stronger than Clinton among whites and men and independents. Of course, a common mistake is to think that independents are in the middle instead of on the fringes. This is probably never more true than in a partisan primary or caucus. So, Sanders’ strength with independents might be the key to seeing where his left-wing support was coming from.
What we definitely know is that a ton of Sanders’ support was coming from young voters, regardless of race or gender. And that seems to me to be the best indicator that the future will be more friendly to Sanders’s brand of politics than the past.
But, then, is Sanders really responsible for this future? Did he indoctrinate a whole generation of kids into despising Wall Street and capitalism? Will it be relatively easy in the future to raise tax revenue and win support for things like free college education and needed infrastructure spending?
It’s hard to disentangle something like that, but Sanders at least gave voice to a resurgent left and found a receptive and enthusiastic audience with our nation’s future voters.
You can try to diminish how left-wing his support actually is by pointing out that racial minorities (who presumably have the most to gain from a left-wing resurgence) actually rejected his pitch and stuck with the woman who made all those speeches to Wall Street executives. You can point out that women, who trend more left than men, were not persuaded to abandon a chance at having the first woman president, but I don’t see how that means that they love Goldman Sachs and expensive college.
There are a lot of men who don’t really like Hillary Clinton, and not a few who aren’t thrilled with the idea of any woman being the president. But I don’t think that explains why Sanders was so popular on our college campuses.
My intuition tells me that a combination of demographic change, expensive college, expensive housing, and stagnating wages will lead to a resurgent left in the near future. I don’t think Sanders created this future, but he identified what they’re going to care about. And he proved that you can now say things in American politics and get taken seriously when only a few years ago you would have been laughed out of town.
The flip side is what Trump represents. He represents the nonconstructive reaction to our economic difficulties, and he also represents the crackup of the Republican Party. The GOP isn’t going to be able to continue in its old form and have political success on a national level. Their national security/pro-business/Christian conservative model is not only completely rejected by the next generation, but there’s no longer any consensus between those groups even within the party.
So, the left will enjoy a period here where they play the Harlem Globetrotters to the Republican’s Washington Generals. I think that guarantees a left-wing resurgence. Just think about the Courts, for starters.
As a result, I think the Sanders campaign will be remembered fondly. I think it will be seen as a turning point. I’m just not sure it will actually deserve a whole lot of credit for anything other than being timely.
“The pretty obvious implication is that much of Sanders’ support came from racism, sexism, and hatred of the Democratic Party rather than left-wing ideology.”
I recognize those talking points…
? where did the quote come from? It’s not in booman’s piece. One of the linked pieces?
It’s a line from the Ryan Cooper piece.
Thanks
The quote in full context;
Changes what is appears to mean.
Because they are arguing that Sanders voters are unable to understand his positions and policies or aren’t bothering to learn them. Thus they must be racist, sexist and stupid.
LOL Of course, I have seen Sanders voters who think the same holds true of Clinton voters: They have not bothered to check what Sanders is saying.
So Sanders is some Tabula Rasa for ALL Dems…?
No actually they were arguing MOST voters don’t take time to learn the issues;
The word decades means their research wasn’t about just the 2016 primaries, but they applied that research to the 2016 primaries.
Hmm, did they go back to the 20s and 30s to find out if those strikers getting beat up and shot had any notion of what they were doing out there?
No, but then again they aren’t arguing what people back then voted on. They are arguing what people in our hyper politicized age where around 40% of the vote is already assumed to be for one or another party before the election season even begins.
Well, sorry to upset their apple cart but the 2008 Democratic nomination was basically decided by an issue: Iraq. Had Clinton voted against the AUMF she would have won Iowa in 2008.
What the authors conflate is primary versus general elections. I can list primary fights where issues clearly did matter. Certainly in 1972 and 2008.
In 2008 the primary was decided as a referendum against Bush and his illegal wars, Clinton voted for the AMUF, Obama had no vote. Yea i get that.
However there was a growing problem nobody wanted to talk about on the campaign trail, that directly affected many more Americans than that one vote.
The very bad economy wasn’t on any body’s “political” radar, until October ……….. but it existed before long before October,
In March 2008, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York provided an emergency loan to try to avert a sudden collapse of Bear Stearns.
In August 2007, Jim Cramer got on TV and yelled “THEY KNOW NOTHING.” It was an earthshaking rant, arguing that Wall Street was in horrible shape, and that the Fed was asleep at the wheel.
PS this wasn’t an isolated incident;
Markets Fall as Lender Woes Keep Mounting AUG. 4, 2007
But for some reason the voters did not respond, until October, when it was too late.
A direct pocket book issue wasn’t as important as a dead vote from 6 years previous?
even though these people were yelling their head off about it;
Mortimer Zuckerman, John Paulson of Paulson & Co., Jonathan Miller, Nouriel Roubini, Ann Pettifor, Steve Keen, Dean Baker, Raghuram Rajan, Peter Schiff.
kinda proves my point eh?
Nobody actually argued about what was going to consume most of President Obama’s time in his first term. The crashing economy quite a few saw coming, but the political class wanted to ignore.
Clinton and Obama both ignored it in their primary. Who would voters have chosen if it HAD been made an issue?
Do you think Clinton would have listened to a different set of advisers? I seriously doubt it. In fact, it is charged that the Clintons were heavily involved in advising Obama on his economic team because the faces were familiar ones.
Thank you for proving my point.
We’ll never know will we?
BTW the republicans probably wish they had Mitt and his VP choice instead of McCain and Palin as VP choice when this happened.
The rest is post election and actually irrelevant to my point.
Well, if similar were happening today? Who do you imagine the voters would be choosing between Hillary and Sanders? They have quite different views on that issue. Obama and Clinton DID NOT–they did have differences in temperament and that is where Obama beat McCain. In his confidence. I don’t know how HC’s temperament would have presented itself.
Voters know what HC would DO, don’t they? Or they surely think they know.
It actually is happening, Negative Interest Rate Policy and Zero Interest Rate Policy, qualitative easing seven years into a recovery????????
Europe still unable to unwind the aftermath of the crash.
China doubling down on ever larger debt to keep their economy running?
Janet Yellon having trouble getting the Fed rate above a quarter point seven years after the crash?
U6 near 10% (U3 is the official unemployment rate. U5 includes discouraged workers and all other marginally attached workers. U6 adds on those workers who are part-time purely for economic reasons.)
Wages stagnant seven years into a recovery?
People with tens of thousand of dollars of debt from college unable to find a above minimum wage job?
It is happening, and Bernie did try to talk about it.
He pushed her left on economic issues.
Trump also played on this issue.
The problem is given 35 years of deep partisan divide, people go to their favorite scape goat, instead of trying to break out of the failed memes we are told to use and find solutions.
The only reason FDR was able to do what he did was the deep problems that were getting worse, something the safety net keep us from.
The underlying problems that created the crash in 20078 haven’t been dealt with just papered over, and using ZIRP, NIRP, QE the powers that be have kept BAU going for a while. No actual recovery in the traditional economic sense has occurred, where jobs and wages grow along with other aspects of the recovery.
Very few KNOW what she would do.
Yes but as the authors of the original article, not coopers response, would say, filtered through their quote here;
Fox News voters have a very different view of what she is going to do than most people who actually cast ballots in the democratic primary.
The modern media establishment is built to propagate and then take advantage of this partisan divide.
Their study records how the revolution the right has pushed upon the body politic has worked out. Deep partisan divide so the people who financed the political process gains from the grid-lock, no matter how it turns out for the rest of us, and how the partisan media operations keep people doubling down on their favorite political reasons instead of looking for new solutions.
Today is a more managed decline, as opposed to toppling buildings. Must not break the china.
Mino, it ain’t managed just jerry rigged until it crashes again and they expect more bailouts. They have so much toxic junk floating around in so many places that a other crash will put us back to Sept 2008, only with many much poorer people and fewer rich. They are not managing as much as exploiting for now.
The difference this time, China is slowing down and has far too much debt. There is no China to ramp up like they did.
…they expect more bailouts.
Well, are they wrong?
They just might be. However this time it might involve require bankruptcy’s and restructure similar to the 2009 General Motors Chapter 11, than Hank Paulson’s bailout for Wall Street.
They are even talking helicopter money to the proles again. And deciding it is not the solution. LOL
Have you seen this paper? Someone noticed how the weasels changed the debate…
http://cdn.equitablegrowth.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/08104325/howell-fiedler-luce-right-min-wag
e.pdf
Only two methods exist to increase gdp: higher labor costs, or higher welfare payments, which can be by tax and welfare or print money and welfare.
Conservatives are in favor of boosting gdp by print money and welfare, but hidden in the rhetoric of tax cuts: increasing the size of EITC payments. Ie, replacing cash welfare payment with tax refunds far in excess of tax revenue.
Keynes and FDR opposed welfare, and instead fought for increasing labor costs to eliminate profits, which come only from monopoly and rent seeking. (Michael Pettengill)
Isn’t that a big complaint about Sanders–he is boringly on message and about issues? Don’t they recite his lines along with him? He has used his time for teaching, no?
What difference will social media have on the authors’ metric?
I have a goodly number children, grandchildren and families around me and their friends, and I assure you they can feel his positions. Not one of them so far as I can tell are racist or sexist, a few are gay. Most have or are incurring some sort of college debt and car loans. The only thing is they don’t all vote but there is some peer pressure to change that. Hillary was not their first choice. ( there is even a Trumper in there) One of them and his wife started working for Bernie toward the end. They will be back.
One of Sanders’ favorite talking points is income equality and that resonates with a lot of his supporters. The greatest income inequality has occurred since the Reagan Era, although there is evidence of income inequality leading up to the 1929 stock market crash. The following link provides the degree of income inequality from 1913-2013. For the United States, the late 1920’s and 2008 are the same! The least income inequality occurred from 1950-1980. The interactive graph provides the degree of income inequality by state and region. New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Florida, and Texas are big income inequality states. For region, the Midwest has the least income inequality, although Illinois is basically identical to the U.S. from 1913-2013.
http://www.epi.org/multimedia/unequal-states-of-america/?utm_source=Economic+Policy+Institute&ut
m_campaign=9c279245cd-Unequal_States_06_16_20166_16_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_e7c5826
c50-9c279245cd-58344625#/United States
No left wing movement (progressive) in the Democratic Party is going to succeed without a majority of POC. Get a candidate that appeals to them, Democrats will move left.
No Democratic candidate for president will win without that support.
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http://www.npr.org/2016/03/28/472160616/-berniemademewhite-no-bernie-sanders-isnt-just-winning-with-
white-people
Your first sentence and your second are not mutually exclusive.
I wonder where those young people will be when they have to start paying taxes. If I had been born in 1996 I would be one of those Sanders supporters. But I was born 50 years earlier and that time has tempered my idealism some and increased my pragmatism and my understanding of how I think the political system works. Sanders has moved the Overton window slightly left, making possible talking about ideas that were formerly verboten. And he should be credited with that. But he can also assume some responsibility for the skepticism and distrust in the political process, which until now has been the domain of the right.
You need to have wages to pay taxes, no? And believe it or not, poor people pay a shit lot of taxes in their various regressive forms.
It’s a good question. They may support the same policies in general but not necessarily the funding mechanisms, given how it may affect them as taxpayers.
Sales taxes, fees and SS and Medicare taxes are still taxes. But I know they get an earned income tax credit. Why not pay a living wage?
He pointed out the skepticism and distrust by actively supporting and discussing polices that are overwhelmingly popular and yet have not been put in place by our elected government representatives:
63% of Americans want to raise the minimum wage
68% of Americans say the rich don’t pay enough taxes
65% of Americans say corporations don’t pay enough taxes
72% Americans back government investment in infrastructure
61% Americans back more funding for public schools
60% of likely American voters favor stricter banking regulations
77% Americans support path to citizenship or legal status
67% of Americans are unhappy with income inequality
If this is what Americans want then why don’t our politicians deliver them? Why wasn’t anyone willing to point out the obvious before this? What is wrong with this picture?
Because the voters want these things, vote for people who say one thing and do another, and then those same voters, the day after the election, go back to work, staring at their phones, and alcoholism.
So in talking about “poor people”, that’s a very broad brush-stroke. People really poor pay no taxes, except regressive ones like on food and gas. They don’t make enough income to pay taxes. People who work and pay taxes benefit from the earned income tax credit, which could certainly be expanded as one of the ways to decrease the disparity in income inequality. Raising the minimum wage is another way (or several) to help low-income earners. But my implication was that at 20, when I was in college, I didn’t pay income taxes because I had no income. And so it’s easy to want more when someone else is being asked to pay for it (college, health care, etc.). That view changes with age.
Sanders call for a more progressive tax policy was one of the things I liked most about his campaign. It’s a great way to reduce income disparity. Obama already went some ways toward that by raising rates on the highest earners, but it should go farther. The wealthy really got way too much of a break since Reagan’s cuts.
LOL Have you ever looked at all the fees and charges on just utility bills? Water, power, phone…
Drivers license, tags? Sin taxes?
Well, sure I have. Have you ever looked at property taxes?
Likewise regressive. How do you thing gentrification happens?
Your costs were also microscopic compared to the present day. Debt slavery decades after college has a way of focusing the mind.
There was once free education for vets, and when I was young it was almost free, not quite but very low. ( I had to borrow some.) I understand other countries have free or low cost college. Why not us? Is there some law of nature.
On wages, if we paid a higher wage we could do away with much of the earned income tax credit. Of,course, higher wages may bring a little inflation but so what? It can be dealt with. Higher wages mean people have more money to spend and since most spend it all it means more business and more people working.
“Someone else is being asked to pay for it..”
Sounds like Thatcher. If I don’t like paying for wars, can I opt out? The criteria is not what you pay, it is what we want and the resources we are willing to devote to it. Does it benefit the public purpose or not? Higher wages and free health care and education arguably pay for themselves, not so bombs. We need to think somewhat more expansively and not get trapped in the right wing meme. Or say it another way. Not everything ( some perhaps but not all) should be judged from the cost or profit or whether government is or is not doing it. But that is the neoliberal way- privatize it all, since government is incapable.
Oh, FFS. Among women, her net favorable rating is -3. Bernie’s is +15.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/190403/seven-women-unfavorable-opinion-trump.aspx
In other words, there are a lot of people who don’t really like Hillary Clinton. There is no vast misogynist conspiracy.
And yet she is the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party. Most votes, most delegates, most states won.
.
Is it really so hard to internalize the idea that a sizable fraction of her votes came from people who dislike her but think she is best placed to win?
Because she started off her campaign with 100% name ID, or as close as one can get. I wish I had saved the link but non-white voters approve of Sanders by the same margins as Clinton. It’s just that close to half of non-white voters still had no idea who Sanders was towards the end of the primary.
Some people have done the work…
The Poor Pay a Higher Percentage of Income in Taxes
As multiple states grapple with ways to raise revenue to stave off budget deficits or pay for underfunded state services, many are considering adding to the very taxes that are hardest on the poor – excise taxes, sales taxes and fuel taxes, in particular.
According to the report, the lower one’s income, the higher the effective state and local tax rate. Combining all state and local income, property, sales and excise taxes that Americans pay, the nationwide average effective state and local tax rates by income group are 10.9 percent for the poorest 20 percent, 9.4 percent for the middle 20 percent and 5.4 percent for the top 1 percent, the report said.
http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/stateline/2015/1/15/the-poor-pay-a-higher-pe
rcentage-of-income-in-taxes
Honestly, this comment is gibberish:
I read things like this and I ask myself are the writers even modestly interested in the data.
Here is the key thing to know about the most recent primary: Clinton and Sanders were both well liked within the Democratic electorate. So this part of the article proceeds from a false premise: it simply is NOT true that Sanders vote was anti-Clinton.
Here is why this is important: the vote for Sanders was a POSITIVE Sanders vote, not a negative Clinton vote with notable exceptions (see West Virginia)
The are a number of reasons why Sanders took off. First and foremost was that his policy positions and his life story conveyed an impression of authenticity. Each re-enforced the other. He became the truth teller: his activist past AND his positions on Iraq, Education and other issues were complementary.
Too often people try to reduce the complexity of why a politician appeals to voters. So they say its ideology, or personality or something else. The truth is that it is all of those things.
Which is why it is so damn fascinating.
The real question in my mind is what is more important: authenticity or ideology?
The real question in MY mind is what is more important: winning or losing?
Winners talk, losers walk.
.
moving on….
I disagree. I think it will lead to a resurgent right. If Trump had the electoral resume of Gary Johnson, he would be a shoo-in for President. Hesitation ate Trump among the blue collar comes not because the masses believe in one-way trade or love for Wall Street. it comes because he has no resume and an erratic history.
Why did Sanders fail? The short answer is that Democrats hate white people (even those who are white themselves) and old men. There is no such hate for old white men in the Republican Party (duh!), so Trump, despite having a steeper slope to climb than sanders, won.
That’s “Hesitation about Trump”. You need a better spell checker.
misspell it.
You just misused it.
Trying to turn that around onto booman’s spell checker is pretty hilarious(ly pathetic).
Missed one letter in “about”. Checker turned it into “ate”.
http://usuncut.com/politics/berniemademewhite-is-top-trend-and-it-is-hilarious/
Indeed, it is.
This election I learned that black voters over the age of 45 in the deep south were the only racial minorities #BernieMadeMeWhite
Guess so…”racial minorities (who presumably have the most to gain from a left-wing resurgence) actually rejected his pitch and stuck with the woman who made all those speeches to Wall Street executives.”
I’m not going to engage the “who is a minority” issue, but I think it’s fair to ask why Hillary Clinton got overwhelming support from African Americans in many places. I recall that this was somewhat addressed by Charles Blow in this column in the NY Times, in which he used the term “Bernie-splaining” for the phenomenon of Sanders supporters lecturing black voters about why their interests actually lay with Sanders.
Please don’t quote to me statistics about how young black voters tended to support Sanders unless you’re planning to slice and dice the entire electorate in little demographic niches.
Ah! He tried to campaign with meaningful arguments instead of worthless platitudes. I see. Worthless platitudes do seem to be working well over the last 40 or 50 years. That’s all the (R)’s have and they have taken over the House, Senate, most statehouses, a majority on the Supreme Court and soon the Presidency.
Stagnation in Europe has led to support for both the right and the left at the expense of the establishment parties.
And this is the worry. If establishment parties are unable to reverse the economic decline for those in the bottom 80%, the appeal of Trump, Le Pen and ideas like Brexit are going to grow.
Under the surface is a very real crisis of legitimacy that is going to grow worse over time.
Electoral fraud can save the Establishment, especially if (D) and (R) stand together as they do to shut out third partys with ballot restrictions.
Sorry – I think the electoral fraud stuff is nonsense.
The idea Ohio in 2004 was stollen is nonsense. Bush lead in 9 of the last 10 Ohio polls – the RCP average was Bush +2.1. The final result was very close to the predicted results from the polls.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/Presidential_04/oh_polls.html
You apparently count the Framers of the Constitution as (D) and (R), as the electoral system(s) they set up are the reason that we have a First-Past-The-Post electoral system which always settles into two political parties that can win.
There is no “Independent” or independent party that can win the White House, and “Independent” and independent parties rarely win anything more than city council seats.
If you want to discuss how beneficial it would be to change how elections work, I’m game. First and foremost, let’s adopt something like a Single Transferrable Vote, and then “Independent” and independent parties are worthwhile of discussion, as they don’t just become spoilers.
Until then, third parties are nothing more than money-making schemes and unicorn wish lists.
“Democrats hate white people”
Civil rights legislation in the 1950s and 1960s, especially the Civil Rights Act of 1964, passed Congress with as much Republican support as Democratic. Then came 1968 and the GOP’s decision to pursue a Southern Strategy appealing to racial resentment. As we all know, it worked like a charm for the next 40 years; it’s only starting to crumble now.
At the same time as the GOP was going all out with its Southern Strategy and the politics of resentment–racial, religious, “cultural”, it hardly matters what you call it–the Democratic Party was seeking to attract minority voters, who were not stupid and could see what the GOP was up to.
This is what Voice characterizes as hating white people. Indeed, most of what he writes just oozes racial resentment. Anyone who points this out is then attacked as being politically correct.
You know, I kinda agree with Freddy on this: being “politically correct” in our behavior and speech has replaced actually doing something concrete in policy about inequality and racism.
http://fredrikdeboer.com/2016/02/25/economic-reductionism-again/
“In the place of material efforts to address material problems, anti-racism has instead become focused on symbolic displays by white progressives, who spend endless amounts of time acknowledging their white privilege but no time at all actually working to tear that privilege down…Meanwhile, the government of Flint poisoned the city’s water. You can’t fight that with privilege checking. They exist in entirely separate spheres of life.”
The government of Flint, Michigan poisoned the water supply because the city is in receivership and governed by a board appointed by the state government, which is firmly in the hands of the Republican Party and doesn’t gives a rat’s ass about Flint.
If you want to give a legitimate example of white progressives screwing the poor and minorities by dint of malice, negligence, or incompetence, by all means do so. The poisoned water supply of Flint strikes me as an illegitimate example. If I’m wrong about that, by all means explain my error. Thank you.
Have you noticed how many other cities have suddenly discovered they have heritage lead in their delivery systems and are starting to move on replacing it? And a trickle of stories about falsified data emerging? You do know that urban centers have tended to be Dem enclaves for quite some time. Even down here in Texas, Dems run the cities most of the time.
Flint’s poisoning WAS due to bad actors, but the failure to maintain and upgrade our infrastructure is decades old. Since we started refusing to pay taxes, in fact.
Since the time a certain failed actor screamed about how BAD government was, while asking for a very important job in the same?
You may not agree, but the clearest example of white progressives…”screwing the poor and minorities by dint of malice, negligence, or incompetence” is vividly exampled by Rahm Emanuel and what he has done to Chicago Public Schools.
Can you fill this in for me, I read this site and other progressive sites every day and I don’t see this? Maybe posting a couple examples may help
Sanders LOST! Against a candidate smellier than Richard Nixon. That was the last gasp of the old Left. Now the neoliberals reign supreme.
I guess they reign over the neo-Democrats.
I don’t think this is the last gasp of the left. It may just be the beginning. The neos should enjoy their time, it is coming to an end, faster than they think. Our problems with education, health care and inequality and poverty are simply not going away. If Sanders got all those millions to vote for him, they can only grow and become more restive if the issues are not addressed.
“smellier than Richard Nixon”
I’m always reminded of the story that gets passed down in my family about my grandmother and Richard Nixon. She idolized JFK and loathed Nixon. Apparently during the 1960 campaign, she tore a full-page advertisement featuring Nixon’s face from the Los Angeles Times and used it to wipe her feet on.
But then again Nixon. In case people have forgotten, he was a venal bastard who gave the go-ahead for the cover-up of a criminal conspiracy, met with his associates regularly to discuss how things were going, and took steps to obstruct justice. Yep, that smells like a rose compared to that witch Hillary Clinton.
Maybe you’d like to dredge up the Vince Foster affair.
In one of her emails released by the Russians she brags about how she will take the oath of office with her hand on Vince Fosters skull.
So yes, much worse than Nixon.
.
Provide a verifiable source for the statement about Clinton’s e- mail._
“[Sanders] can also assume some responsibility for the skepticism and distrust in the political process, which until now has been the domain of the right.”
(quoted from a remark up-thread)
This is exactly why my support for Sanders has been tepid, despite my overall agreement with his policy goals. There is a great deal of skepticism and distrust out there among young voters, and Sanders has quite happily appealed to them by echoing their distrust–especially of Hillary Clinton. OK, maybe that sort of appeal is “just politics”, but it has definitely tempered my enthusiasm for Sanders.
I’ve seen the way that the 26 year old member of my household–one more young person struggling to get established independently–has responded to the two Democratic candidates. He has been spending hours every week listening to Sanders’ speeches here and there. He imbibes Hillary bashing rants from various websites, then repeats them to me. Or at least he did until a couple of weeks ago, when he insisted Hillary Clinton was a criminal on account of her e-mail server. At that point, I noted that I was old enough to remember very clearly the Bill Clinton presidency and that the e-mail affair was another faux scandal cooked up by wingnuts, just like all the ones they cooked up in the 1990s.
Thank you. We’re on the same page.
In the aftermath of the Wall Street Crisis which resulted in precisely 1 conviction, the idea that Sanders bears some responsibility for cynicism difficult to believe in the extreme.
Wall Street took the American economy down, got bailed out, and then wound up richer than ever.
That is what created cynicism, not poor Bernie Sanders.
Can I give this two 4s?
Sanders did not create the cynicism.
He exploited it.
It would be political malpractice not to.
You know, Clinton taking personally money from the same firms that got bailed out strikes me as at LEAST as responsible for the cynicism.
Funny, I am fairly certain that it is the political process itself that can “assume some responsibility for the skepticism and distrust in the political process … “
But go ahead, shoot the messenger. Maybe the right beat us to it because it has been drummed into them for years that “government doesn’t work,” and they have reliably voted in candidates that guarantee it won’t work.
Then the DLC decided the Republicans were on the right track for the gravy train.
JoelDanWalls, I think your comment hit the nail on the head for me. I remember thinking Jerry Brown was awesome in 92 while in school, but there wasn’t an Internet to help me stew in the juices of conspiracy and righteous indignation like there is now. Moreover, being here in Cali, where Sanders camped out for a month, I saw a lot of Sanders passion in areas, particularly at first, but saw a lot of Sanders skepticism crop up as things went on. The press liked to play up the close polls, as did the social media, but in my daily life I wasn’t seeing it. By the time Election Day came around, one person in my office voted Sanders, while other once-supporters decided to go with Hillary.
Things were clarifying for me a month ago when my neighbor told me he didn’t want to vote for anyone who was going to “screw up his retirement.” As he noted, blowing up banks or deporting millions of people didn’t sound like a safe bet. It’s possible youth voters may come to feel that way too as life moves forward.
Hmm, is this your argument?
“In their book, they argue that ordinary voters have basically zero control over government policy, because they have no idea what’s going on, politically speaking. They don’t understand government, they don’t understand policy, and they don’t have a good grasp on what politicians believe. They vote based on identity and partisanship, and, when given the chance in plebiscites, regularly make ignorant and self-damaging choices.” (from Booman’s link)
No political leader turned young Americans left. Reality turned them left.
The fact is, Bernie Sanders is the first presidential candidate to respond to this leftward turn of American youth, in other words, to their troubles and aspirations. Isn’t that what politicians are supposed to do, respond in a timely fashion to their constituents’ problems? In this case, the constituency represents the future of the nation and the Democratic PArty in particular. But he doesn’t “deserve a whole lot of credit for anything other than being timely”, after all, he’s just some “wild-haired” 74-year old Brooklyn Jewish socialist from an obscure lily-white state.
How would you like these headwinds?
http://wolfstreet.com/2016/04/15/revolt-of-the-debt-slaves-millennials-gen-xers-consumer-spending/
With low wages and high debt it is a wonder consumer spending is as much as it is. I have been noticing empty stores in my home town, just closed down. Could it be no one has the money anymore to buy things? Maybe $8 an hour doesn’t leave much left over even with two working? The stock market seems to know this. It has been “stuck” for some time now.
I have yet to see that they are “turned left.” Time will tell. Right now they are idealistic and that’s the appeal. Authenticity is what they are drawn to, supposedly. But what is authentic about Sanders? He’s an Independent who put on a new cloak. His running as a Democrat is a sham. His reluctance to accept his loss is delusional. And this is what has folks all jacked up.
I remember, I’ll say once again, OFA. All those young (and old people) turned on, organized. And once the election was over all they could do was sign on-line petitions that went nowhere, did nothing. Some stayed in progressive politics. Most just went on about their lives and left legislation to the legislators. Very few folks stay actively engaged in civics. Maybe they blog.
He has been saying basically the same things for 40 years.
Clinton has been saying the same thing for about 10 months in some cases.
Leave aside the Clinton comment. Sanders has been saying the same thing for 40 years, that’s true. So does that make him rigid? Or authentic?
You know, the idea of “the left” is really quite broad. And as I read the comments here, different aspects of “the left” seem to pop up as differing priorities. So we all kind of “talk” past each other, IMHO.
Maybe folks can make clear their own definitions of “the left.”
Maybe both.
He has been right for a very long time about the size of the defense budget, and the tendency of the US to become involved in ways mistakenly.
He has been warning about Wall Street control of politics for about 40 years as well.
I would say on those he has been pretty right, and pretty authentic.
He was right too about welfare reform.
I don’t try to define “the left.” I prefer to use the term progressive. Many of Bernie Sanders issues are related to principles I learned over 50 years ago in religion classes and from the community. Stupid Wars NO Greed NO Corruption NO Treating people badly NO
It’s really not that complicated.
While we may not have initially recognized that Bernie had been advocating our goals for decades, nor adopted him as standard-bearer right away, he did (to his great credit) recognize that, seized the moment and rode the wave to immense success, if not ultimate victory (though that arguably remains to be seen — not referring to actual nomination here).
As I’ve suggested here before, it was the momentous change in the national conversation achieved by Occupy that prepared the way for Bernie’s candidacy (and the degree of success that it did have).
“And he proved that you can now say things in American politics and get taken seriously when only a few years ago you would have been laughed out of town.”
“I’m just not sure it will actually deserve a whole lot of credit for anything other than being timely.”
I this is more than timeliness. Otherwise why did O’Malley never gain traction? That said I think a lot of Bernies support is because you can trust him. Thats quite rare.
The primary encapsulated:
January in Iowa.
Don’t expect neoliberalism to be egalitarian. Always those hoops to jump through.
The story may well be apocryphal, but what it does for me is illustrate Hillary Clinton’s compulsive wonkiness, which manifests as the inability to give straightforward answers to simple questions. She’s always hemming and hawing, talking about this or that contingency. I recall watching a Clinton/Sanders debate on Univision (Spanish language station, although the debate was in English) when the moderator–the guy who got kicked out of a Trump event–asked, “If you become president, would you deport children?”. Clinton said “no, but,” and droned on about legalistic stuff. The moderator came back to her a couple of more times and kept getting the same response. He then asked Sanders, whose answer was “no”. One word.
really reminds me of this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85dKvletfSo
No, it’s that she’s a neoliberal who wants to means test benefits as opposed to supporting universal ones. Not the same thing as being a wonky bureaucrat.
She could frame the argument any other way. Instead she goes on about not wanting to pay for trump’s kids. Take this gun control piece of shit that might become law: keeping people on the terrorist watch list (or is it the no fly list? Depends on who you ask and which proposal) from purchasing a weapon. Might be a political winner. It’s a huge loser for the American people and due process. Leave it to liberals to putting me, self-described gun grabber, on the side of the NRA.
Increase the power of the Security State is surely the answer. Sheesh.
Hmm, no opportunity missed, is there?
n 2013 and 2014, a bipartisan amendment to limit surveillance by the National Security Agency and protect encryption was passed with increasingly wide margins in the House of Representatives, but later stripped out in a Senate conference committee. This Wednesday the amendment, sponsored again by Democratic Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California and Republican Reps. Tom Massie of Kentucky and Ted Poe of Texas, was defeated in the wake of the Orlando massacre committed by Omar Mateen.
The amendment to the Defense Appropriations bill, as in the past, would have prohibited funds being allocated for the NSA to continue warrantless searches of Americans’ data authorized under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act. It also would have barred the Defense Department from spending on projects designed to make software or hardware vulnerable to security breaches.
Essentially, it was a move to reinforce the much-battered Fourth Amendment.
http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/6/16/1539489/-Shadow-of-Orlando-helps-defeat-amendment-to-bar-N
SA-backdoor-searches-and-undermining-encryption
Everything about Hillary says “too rich.” Just look at her. And the speeches and the Foundation. The summers in the Hamptons. Davos and Jackson Hole. And it’s Chelsea at Stanford and Oxford and McKinsey and NBC and her investment banker husband and her $10 million condo in Manhattan. I fucking hate Chelsea.
Everything about Bernie says “ordinary guy.” He may not be presidential material, but boy, there’s no way to resent him.
Oh goodie, the hatred has been passed along to the next generation.
You forgot to mention that Chelsea’s spouse is a Jew. You know, Jewish banker (close enough). That would have provided a convenient entry point for some other irrelevant comments.
Or maybe you just a troll. Who knows?
Nowhere in the Milky Way is a Senator an ordinary guy.
Hillary would’ve ended up wealthy without public office due to her talent and educational background. If you’re Yale educated and your Ivy League Rhode’s Scholar spouse can’t make it happen, there needs to be an FBI investigation.
In a word, no — Sanders does not prove that the left is back. Like the Democrats, leftists had not the faintest idea a year ago that a successful challenge could be mounted against Clinton from the left. Like the Democrats, a year later we’re scrambling to figure out what Sanders’ campaign means. We’re also trying to assess the threats and possibilities facing us in the leadup to the election and after.
Because this is the left we’re talking about there’s no consensus view on this of course. But one way to look at our present situation is as a moment in an organizing project that began in 1999 at the WTO demonstrations in Seattle, got beaten down in the aftermath of 9/11, came roaring back in the wake of 2007-2008, Occupy Wall St., the Ferguson resistance, Fight for 15, BLM. In this context the Sanders campaign is just a tactical skirmish, one that’s drawing to a close. So we need to do the usual things we do at the end of every tactical skirmish, win or lose: consolidate the gains we’ve made and look to the next opportunity.
To point to just two gains that came out of the Sanders campaign — huge numbers of people are in motion. That’s a new development. And though Clinton won the nomination she did so at the price of losing the last shred of credibility she had among everyone who’s not a diehard neoliberal (those people would be the liberals, who don’t even recognize neoliberalism as a philosophical concept any more than fish recognize water as a philosophical concept). Everyone else sees that the empress is naked. We’ve got the Sanders campaign to thank for both of those and they’re important.
And of course on the other hand we have Trump, marching at the head of a mass-based, rightwing populist, white supremacist movement and tearing the Republican Party apart. If he wins these folks are incredibly dangerous. If he even comes close to winning they’re still incredibly dangerous, they’ll recommit to the guerrilla war they’ve been fighting for the last 8 (or 40 if you count that way) years.
But they could be crushed, utterly humiliated and repudiated — and that would be the biggest victory over white supremacy since 1865. That’s our next opportunity.
To take advantage of it and consolidate those gains, ideally we need to start very soon to put together a coalition of people who would:
1. Understand the importance of getting out and voting against Trump in November for all the reasons and all the things he stands for.
2. Start right away to mobilize against the most objectionably neoliberal elements of the agenda that Clinton will be trying to put into place once she’s elected. Getting elected is one thing, governing is another.
This implies figuring out some kind of a formulation that grasps that Clinton is the lesser of the two evils while at the same time grasping why she’s an evil. And it implies some kind of a permanent organization (more realistically a network of local organizations) persisting after the election and outside the control of the Democratic Party. The people who would make up this coalition are out there in large numbers but they’re totally disorganized. The window of opportunity here is not large, all that energy will dissipate quickly unless the organizing problem is addressed.
That’s an incredibly tall order, I can’t think of any precedents and the forces that would put it together are scattered, weak, and untested. I won’t minimize the organizational problems involved here.
But, if we can come close to pulling this off then yeah, the left is back.