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443794 |
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Date: November 06, 2024 at 20:21:42
From: old timer, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Sanders: Democratic Party ‘has abandoned working class people’ |
URL: Sanders: Democratic Party ‘has abandoned working class people’ |
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Sanders: Democratic Party ‘has abandoned working class people’
BY ALEXANDER BOLTON - 11/06/24 5:00 PM ET
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Wednesday accused the Democratic Party
of largely ignoring the priorities of the working class and pointed to that
as the biggest reason for why they lost control of the White House and
Senate.
“It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has
abandoned working class people would find that the working class has
abandoned them,” Sanders said in a statement about the results of
Tuesday’s election.
“While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American
people are angry and want change. And they’re right,” he said.
Sanders’s blistering statement is the harshest and most pointed criticism
of the Democratic leadership yet in the aftermath of the election, in which
Vice President Harris appears to have lost the popular vote by nearly 5
million votes and Democrats lost Senate seats in West Virginia, Montana
and Ohio.
Sanders, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, said “those
of us concerned about grassroots democracy and economic justice need
to have some very serious political discussions.”
He cited the huge growth in economic inequality in America in recent
decades, advanced technologies that threaten to put hundreds of
thousands of people out of work, the high cost of health care and U.S.
support for the war in Gaza, which has killed tens of thousands of people.
“Will the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the
Democratic Party learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign?
Will they understand the pain and political alienation that tens of millions
of Americans are experiencing? Do they have any ideas as to how we can
take on the increasingly powerful Oligarchy, which has so much economic
power?” Sanders asked.
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“Probably not,” he said in response to his own question.
Sanders, the chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions
Committee, was never able to get a vote this year on his proposal to raise
the federal minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $17 an hour by 2028.
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Sanders also failed in his effort as Senate Budget chair in 2021 and 2022
to advance a $6 trillion budget reconciliation proposal to expand Medicare
and address what he called a “housing crisis.”
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) later negotiated a scaled-
down version of President Biden’s “Build Back Better” agenda with
centrist Sen. Joe Manchin (I-W.Va.), but it fell short of the big ambitions
that Sanders and other progressives had at the start of Biden’s term.
Tensions between Sanders and Manchin erupted in October 2021, when
Sanders blew up at the West Virginia centrist at a leadership meeting
during which Manchin tried to put limits on what Democrats were trying to
pass, ruling out tuition-free community college.
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443798 |
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Date: November 06, 2024 at 21:26:39
From: akira, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Bernie Would Have Won |
URL: https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/bernie-would-have-won |
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excerpt
Bernie Would Have Won
By Krystal Ball
"There are a million surface-level reasons for Kamala Harris’s loss and systematic
underperformance in pretty much every county and among nearly every
demographic group. She is part of a deeply unpopular administration. Voters
believe the economy is bad and that the country is on the wrong track. She is a
woman and we still have some work to do as a nation to overcome long-held
biases.
But the real problems for the Democrats go much deeper and require a dramatic
course correction of a sort that, I suspect, Democrats are unlikely to embark upon.
The bottom line is this: Democrats are still trying to run a neoliberal campaign in a
post-neoliberal era. In other words, 2016 Bernie was right.
Let’s think a little bit about how we got here. The combination of the Iraq War and
the housing collapse exposed the failures and rot that were the inevitable result
of letting the needs of capital predominate over the needs of human beings. The
neoliberal ideology which was haltingly introduced by Jimmy Carter, embraced
fully by Ronald Reagan, and solidified across both parties with Bill Clinton
embraced a laissez-faire market logic that would supplant market will for national
will or human rights, but also raise incomes enough overall and create enough
dynamism that the other problems were in theory, worth the trade off. Clinton
after all ran with Reagan era tax cutting, social safety net slashing and free trade
radicalism with NAFTA being the most prominent example.
Ultimately, of course, this strategy fueled extreme wealth inequality. But for a
while this logic seemed to be working out. The Soviet Union collapsed and the
Cold War ended. Incomes did indeed rise and the internet fueled tech advances
contributing to a sense of cosmopolitan dynamism. America had a swaggering
confidence that these events really did represent a sort of end of history. We
believed that our brand of privatization, capitalism, and liberal democracy would
take over the world. We confidently wielded institutions like the World Bank, IMF,
and WTO to realize this global vision. We gave China most-favored nation trade
status.
Underneath the surface, the unchecked market forces we had unleashed were
devastating communities in the industrial Midwest and across the country. By the
neoliberal definition NAFTA was a roaring success contributing to GDP growth.
But if your job was shipped overseas and your town was shoved into economic
oblivion, the tradeoff didn’t seem like such a great deal.
The underlying forces of destruction came to a head with two major
catastrophes, the Iraq War and the housing collapse/Great Recession. The lie that
fueled the Iraq war destroyed confidence in the institutions that were the bedrock
of this neoliberal order and in the idea that the U.S. could or should remake the
world in our image. Even more devastating, the financial crisis left home owners
destitute while banks were bailed out, revealing that there was something deeply
unjust in a system that placed capital over people. How could it be that the
greedy villains who triggered a global economic calamity were made whole while
regular people were left to wither on the vine?
These events sparked social movements on both the right and the left. The Tea
Party churned out populist-sounding politicians like Sarah Palin and birtherist
conspiracies about Barack Obama, paving the way for the rise of Donald Trump.
The Tea Party and Trumpism are not identical, of course, but they share a cast of
villains: The corrupt bureaucrats or deep state. The immigrants supposedly
changing your community. The cultural elites telling you your beliefs are toxic.
Trump’s version of this program is also explicitly authoritarian. This
authoritarianism is a feature not a bug for some portion of the Trump coalition
which has been persuaded that democracy left to its own devices could pose an
existential threat to their way of life.
On the left, the organic response to the financial crisis was Occupy Wall Street,
which directly fueled the Bernie Sanders movement. Here, too, the villains were
clear. In the language of Occupy it was the 1% or as Bernie put it the millionaires
and billionaires. It was the economic elite and unfettered capitalism that had
made it so hard to get by. Turning homes into assets of financial speculation.
Wildly profiteering off of every element of our healthcare system. Busting unions
so that working people had no collective power. This movement was, in contrast
to the right, was explicitly pro-democracy, with a foundational view that in a
contest between the 99% and the 1%, the 99% would prevail. And that a win
would lead to universal programs like Medicare for All, free college, workplace
democracy, and a significant hike in the minimum wage.
These two movements traveled on separate tracks within their respective party
alliances and met wildly different fates. On the Republican side, Donald Trump
emerged as a political juggernaut at a time when the party was devastated and
rudderless, having lost to Obama twice in a row. This weakened state—and the
fact that the Trump alternatives were uncharismatic drips like Jeb Bush—created
a path for Trump to successfully execute a hostile takeover of the party.
Plus, right-wing populism embraces capital, and so it posed no real threat to the
monied interests that are so influential within the party structures. The uber-rich
are not among the villains of the populist right (see: Elon Musk, Bill Ackman, and
so on), except in so much as they overlap with cultural leftism. The Republican
donor class was not thrilled with Trump’s chaos and lack of decorum but they did
not view him as an existential threat to their class interests. This comfort with him
was affirmed after he cut their taxes and prioritized union busting and
deregulation in his first term in office.
Meanwhile, the Democratic Party put its thumb on the scales and marshaled
every bit of power they could, legitimate and illegitimate, to block Bernie Sanders
from a similar party takeover. The difference was that Bernie’s party takeover did
pose an existential threat—both to party elites who he openly antagonized and to
the party’s big money backers. The bottom line of the Wall Street financiers and
corporate titans was explicitly threatened. His rise would simply not be allowed.
Not in 2016 and not in 2020.
What’s more, Hillary Clinton and her allies launched a propaganda campaign to
posture as if they were actually to the left of Bernie by labeling him and his
supporters sexist and racist for centering class politics over identity politics. This
in turn spawned a hell cycle of woke word-policing and demographic slicing and
dicing and antagonism towards working class whites that only made the
Democratic party more repugnant to basically everyone.
This identity politics sword has also been wielded within the Democratic Party to
crush any possibility of a Bernie-inspired class focused movement in Congress
attempted by the Justice Democrats and the Squad in 2018. My colleague Ryan
Grim has written an entire book on this subject so I won’t belabor the point here.
But suffice it to say, the threat of the Squad to the Democratic Party’s ideology
and order has been thoroughly neutralized. The Squad members themselves,
perhaps out of ideology and perhaps out of fear of being smeared as racist,
leaned into identitarian politics which rendered them non-threatening in terms of
national popular appeal. They were also relentlessly attacked from within the
party, predominately by pro-Israel groups that an unprecedented tens of millions
of dollars in House primaries, which has led to the defeat of several members and
has served as a warning and threat to the rest.
That brings us to today where the Democratic Party stands in the ashes of a
Republican landslide which will sweep Donald Trumpback into the White House.
The path not taken in 2016 looms larger than ever. Bernie’s coalition was
filled with the exact type of voters who are now flocking to Donald Trump:
Working class voters of all races, young people, and, critically, the much-derided
bros. The top contributors to Bernie’s campaign often held jobs at places like
Amazon and Walmart. The unions loved him. And—never forget—he earned the
coveted Joe Rogan endorsement that Trump also received the day before the
election this year. It turns out, the Bernie-to-Trump pipeline is real! While that has
always been used as an epithet to smear Bernie and his movement, with the
implication that social democracy is just a cover for or gateway drug to right wing
authoritarianism, the truth is that this pipeline speaks to the power and appeal of
Bernie’s vision as an effective antidote to Trumpism. When these voters had a
choice between Trump and Bernie, they chose Bernie. For many of them now that
the choice is between Trump and the dried out husk of neoliberalism, they’re
going Trump.
I have always believed that Bernie would have defeated Trump in 2016, though of
course there is no way to know for sure. What we can say for sure is that the
brand of class-first social democracy Bernie ran on in 2016 has proven
successful in other countries because of course the crisis of neoliberalism is a
global phenomenon. Most notably, Bernie’s basic political ideology was wildly
successful electorally with Andrés Manuel López Obrador and now his successor
Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico, Lula Da Silva in Brazil, and Evo Morales in Bolivia.
AMLO, in fact, was one of the most popular leaders in the entire world and
dramatically improved the livelihoods of a majority of his countrymen. Bernie’s
basic ideology was also successful in our own history.
In the end, I got this election dead wrong. I thought between January 6th and the
roll back of human rights for women, it would be enough. I thought that the
overtly fascist tendencies of Donald Trump and the spectacle of the world’s
richest man bankrolling him would be enough strikes against him to overcome
the problems of the Democratic Party which I have spoken out about for years
now–problems Kamala Harris decided to lean into rather than confront. Elevating
Liz Cheney as a top surrogate was not just a slap in the face to all the victims of
American imperialism—past and ongoing; it was a broad signal to voters that
Democrats were the party of elites, playing directly into right-wing populist
tropes. While the media talked about it as a “tack to the center,” author and
organizer Jonathan Smucker more aptly described it as “a tack to the top.” And as
I write this now, I have zero hope or expectation that Democrats will look at the
Bernie bro coalition and realize why they screwed up. Cable news pundits are
already blaming the left once again for the failures of a party that has little to do
with the actual left and certainly not the populist left.
Instead, Trump’s victory represents a defeat of social democratic class-first
politics in America—not quite final, but not temporary either. The Democrats have
successfully smothered the movement, blocked the entranceways, salted the
earth. Instead they will, as Bill Clinton did in the ‘90s, embrace the fundamental
tenets of the Trumpist worldview.
They already are, in fact. Democrats have dropped their resistance to Trump’s
mass deportation policies and immigrant scapegoating. The most ambitious
politician in the Democratic coalition, Gavin Newsom, is making a big show of
being tough-on-crime and dehumanizing the homeless. Democrat-leaning
billionaires like Jeff Bezos who not only owns Amazon but the Washington Post
have already abandoned their resistance.
Maybe I will be just as wrong as I was about the election but it is my sense that
with this Trump victory, authoritarian right politics have won the ideological battle
for what will replace the neoliberal order in America. And yes, I think it will be ugly,
mean, and harmful—because it already is."
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Date: November 06, 2024 at 21:41:03
From: shadow, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: Bernie Would Have Won |
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Nah, he wouldn't have... They'd have set
upon his age just like Biden, and they'd
have picked him apart till he blew a
transformer at them...which he
would've...which they'd then call proof.
All the while, yes, ignoring screaming
evidence of DJTs dementia...
Nope...
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Date: November 07, 2024 at 09:34:18
From: Redhart, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: Bernie Would Have Won |
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Yes, I do not think he would have won this cycle,
either.
I like Bernie, don't get me wrong, but he has his own
set of baggage (age, as shadow mentioned for one, being
labeled a "socialist"..because most Americans don't
understand the difference between a Democratic
socialist and straight up socialist, health..he's had a
well known heart attack, anti-sematism (whether he
practices the faith or not) and being much further left
and being labeled a "radical", whether he is or not.
It's very easy to sit and say "Oh, so and so would have
won" when the race has never been run.
On the other hand, challenges he wouldn't have had:
he's male, his name was more well known, he would have
attracted more of the far left...but probably lost even
more latinos.
I'm looking at stuff and think misogyny is a big
reason..whether a conscious or unconscious bias. But,
let's hold on and wait for all the information.
But, we don't even have all the exit figures yet..those
are trickling out. It's been 36 hrs since the election.
Historians and analysts will be pouring over these
figures for years.
be careful of those hoping to use their own agenda-
driven frames to cast on it at this point.
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Date: November 07, 2024 at 08:23:12
From: akira, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: Bernie Would Have Won |
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Harris could have adopted his most popular positions as her own. I thought that
would have been an obvious implication of my post. She was more interested in
appealing to corporatists & republicans instead of working-class democrats...
HER BASE. Nothing in her platform of affordable health insurance for all, aka
medicare for all. No mention of increasing minimum wage.. etc. Democrats still
don't get why Trump won. No lessons learned from 2016.
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443822 |
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Date: November 07, 2024 at 07:59:22
From: mitra, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: Bernie Would Have Won |
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Responses:
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