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Bernie Sanders and the New Populism


Bernie Sanders has tapped into a potent mix of skepticism and hopefulness, especially among young voters, in his run for the White House.
Credit PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN MINCHILLO / AP

By John Cassidy
February 3, 2016

From up close, election campaigns appear to be messy and contingent affairs that pivot around individual characters and tactics. Did Donald Trump make an error, after all, in skipping last week’s Fox News debate? Can Marco Rubio handle the spotlight? Will Hillary Clinton shift further left to counter Bernie Sanders?

If you step back a bit, though, all of the players look more like pieces in a board game, whose rules and layout are predetermined. As Karl Marx famously remarked, in “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon,” “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”

Going into the 2016 Presidential election, our economic inheritance is forty years of income stagnation and rising inequality, which culminated, in 2007 and 2008, in a global financial crisis and a government rescue of bankers and other financial interests. Yes, this bailout has been followed by half a decade of modest G.D.P. growth and strong job growth, but the narrative of inequity, unfairness, and frustrated expectations remains fixed in the public consciousness.

As the Financial Times commentator Martin Wolf pointed out on Wednesday [ http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/94176826-c8fc-11e5-be0b-b7ece4e953a0.html ], Latin American-style income distribution leads to Latin American-style politics—populism of the left and the right. Over the past few years, in Europe, we have seen new anti-establishment parties on the left, such as Syriza, in Greece, and Podemos, in Spain, enjoy great success, particularly among young voters. Older leftist groups, such as the Left Bloc, in Portugal, and the Bennite wing of the British Labour Party, have also made big gains. On the right, traditional conservative politicians have been outflanked by more extreme voices, such as Austria’s Freedom Party, Greece’s Golden Dawn, the United Kingdom Independence Party, and France’s National Front.

On this side of the Atlantic, in the years immediately following the crash and the bailout, Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party emerged. Both movements reflected a growing alienation from regular politicians, who were widely seen as too tight with corporate interests. Neither group was powerful enough to create a new political party or to seize full control of an old one, but they both left their mark. Now we have Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, who are tapping into many of the same popular sentiments.

This new populism, as it might be termed, connotes a deep suspicion of political, corporate, and media élites; an eagerness to mobilize people who are new to politics; and a willingness to embrace policies that have long seemed verboten. On the right, this has meant proposals to crack down on immigrants, Muslims, and outsiders of all kinds. On the left, it has meant demands to downsize big banks, crack down on tax-dodging multinationals, shift to a much more progressive tax system, and get serious about curbing carbon emissions.

Sanders says that he would take all of the latter steps. But what really sets him apart isn’t his policy platform, which can be fairly described as shifting the United States toward the Scandinavian model of social democracy more rapidly than Clinton and other Democrats would; it’s his fiery rhetoric. In calling for a “political revolution,” attacking the “billionaire class,” and embracing the label “democratic socialist,” Sanders is using language that has never been heard before in a Democratic Presidential primary. (Socialists such as Eugene Debs and Norman Thomas have run for President in the past, but on the ticket of the Socialist Party.)

Some political analysts seem taken aback that Sanders’s leftist language is resonating broadly among Democrats, particularly young ones, but they shouldn’t be surprised. A recent O.E.C.D. study showed that, between 1975 and 2012, nearly half of all the pre-tax income growth in the United States went to the richest one per cent of households. Another study [ http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/social-issues-migration-health/income-inequality_9789264246010-en;jsessionid=9rh791jfptfg2.x-oecd-live-02 ], by the economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, showed that the richest 0.1 per cent of households own almost a quarter of the country’s wealth, which is more than the bottom ninety per cent of households.

Thanks to the efforts of Sanders and others, such as the French economist Thomas Piketty [ http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/03/31/forces-of-divergence ], disturbing facts like these form part of the mental picture that voters, and particularly young voters, now have of the world. Partly for this reason, some old political labels are being reassessed. In a January poll [ http://media.bloomberg.com/bb/avfile/rgsikEKtNf30 ] of likely voters in the Iowa Democratic primary, forty-three per cent of respondents described themselves as “socialist.” And it isn’t just Iowa. A 2011 study [ http://www.people-press.org/2011/12/28/little-change-in-publics-response-to-capitalism-socialism/ ] by the Pew Research Center found that forty-nine per cent of millennials—defined as Americans between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine—view socialism favorably, compared to forty-three per cent who view it unfavorably. Asked about capitalism, forty-six per cent of the respondents said that they viewed it favorably, and forty-seven per cent said that they viewed it unfavorably.

This changing ideological environment is another of the “circumstances” shaping the Democratic contest. It reflects not merely the problems that global capitalism has encountered over the past few decades but the passage of time. The stigmatization of left-wing politicians and left-wing ideas dates back to the Cold War, which ended twenty-five years ago. That was before many Sanders supporters were born. In the absence of the Soviet Union and Mao’s China, the world “socialist” doesn’t have the same connotations that it once did.

So what does it mean, these days, to say that you view socialism positively? In voting for Syriza and Podemos, the Greeks and Spanish weren’t indicating that they wanted to nationalize the means of production or bring back the Comintern. They were rejecting austerity policies [ http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/what-austerity-looks-like-inside-greece ] imposed by a political system that seemed beholden to bureaucrats in Brussels and bankers in Frankfurt, and they were calling for a return to the Enlightenment ideals of popular sovereignty and popular participation. Something similar is true of Sanders’s supporters. When they attend his rallies and cheer his exhortations to “take back our government from a handful of billionaires,” they aren’t merely endorsing his class-based analysis: they are expressing hope—hope that, even now, at this late stage in the ossification of the American system, political mobilization can change things for the good.

To my mind, the most striking thing about the Iowa poll wasn’t that virtually half of likely Democratic voters embraced the designation “socialist.” It was that eighty-eight per cent agreed that the word “optimist” described them. Among younger Democratic voters, I would guess that the percentage of optimists is even higher. A 2014 Pew Research study [ http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/files/2014/03/2014-03-07_generations-report-version-for-web.pdf ] of millennials found them “burdened by debt, distrustful of people,” and “in no rush to marry.” But, despite all that, they were “optimistic about the future.”

For all his crankiness, Sanders is tapping into this optimism and providing an outlet for it. Other populist movements do the same thing. The English translation of the word “podemos” is “We can.” Clinton, although she retains a great deal of support in the Democratic Party, has so far failed to inspire the young. As I noted following the Iowa caucus, her response to the Sanders phenomenon [ http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/bernie-sanders-just-changed-the-democratic-party ] sometimes seems to be “No, we can’t.”

Appearing on MSNBC’s “Hardball” on Tuesday night, the former Secretary of State briefly tried to strike a more upbeat note. She said that it was a positive development that so many young people are getting involved in the political process. But then she altered course, warning about the danger of allowing the Republicans to regain the White House. Meanwhile, the host, Chris Matthews, bemoaned the failure of the “kids” to understand the realities of American politics.

If you look at the rise of populism in other countries, you will find that urging people to be realistic is a common reaction from establishment politicians and their supporters. It is a risky response, though. Trotted out too often, or too vehemently, it can make those who rely on it sound suspiciously like one of the “mothers and fathers” that Bob Dylan addressed back in 1964—those people whose “order is rapidly fadin’,” whose “old road is rapidly agin’,” and who, finally, are bid, “Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand.” That, of course, is something no politician wants to hear, especially one who came of age in the sixties.

© 2016 Condé Nast

http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/bernie-sanders-and-the-new-populism [and see (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=62008045 and preceding (and any future following)]


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Tea Party Patriots for Bernie Sanders in 2016


Political Organization
https://www.facebook.com/Tea-Party-Patriots-for-Bernie-Sanders-in-2016-517219105099552/


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Bernie Sanders, Public Menace


Revolutions cost more than money.
Photographer: Justin Sullivan/Gettiy Images

By Francis Wilkinson
time iconFeb 5, 2016 12:53 PM EST

Senator Bernie Sanders is a decent human being and a passionate politician. He is also a grave threat to the Democratic Party. Because the Democratic Party is currently the only major U.S. party devoted to moderation and rational empiricism, Sanders's robust campaign for president is consequently a threat [ http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-01-19/republican-operatives-are-trying-to-help-bernie-sanders (second item below)] to the U.S. as well.

The Republican Party has been debilitated, as a source of policies and as a governing party, by the ever more stringent ideological demands that the party's powerful and adamant fringe imposes on its diminished and enfeebled center. It has succumbed so thoroughly to the paranoid style of politics that the leading Republican presidential candidate from the so-called establishment wing routinely suggests [ http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/264627-rubio-obama-has-deliberately-weakened-america ] that President Barack Obama is a nefarious agent of the nation's doom. Delusional, rancid talk has become so commonplace on the right that it rarely merits notice anymore.

Sanders lacks the talent for sneering contempt that animates the candidacies of Ted Cruz, Chris Christie, Donald Trump and, often enough, Marco Rubio. But he shares other unwelcome attributes.

The American economy, a sprawling, $18 trillion behemoth stretching and contracting in more directions at once than anyone can possibly comprehend, much less control, is "rigged," Sanders says. This claim, too, owes much to a paranoid style. Who has rigged this giganotosaurus of disparate goods and endlessly varied services? Perhaps "Wall Street." Or maybe "corporations."

In politics, any force too spectral to wear a proper name is too elusive to be contained by government or law. Sanders all but admits as much. He posits that his election to the White House, where he would command the vast levers of the executive branch, would be insufficient to unrig things. A majority of electoral votes might suffice for a "moderate" like Hillary Clinton; Sanders, however, requires a "revolution [ http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc-quick-cuts/watch/sanders-we-need-a-political-revolution-616588867705 ]."

In Thursday's MSNBC debate in New Hampshire, Sanders exposed other troubling signs reminiscent of some of his right-wing counterparts. His preoccupation with who is and is not a true "progressive [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2016/02/04/this-one-moment-perfectly-captures-the-clinton-sanders-war-over-progressivism/ ]" is the mirror image of the right-wing obsession with doctrinal purity and the tedious, narcissistic battle over who is a "true conservative" and who is a compromising RINO.

More surprising, Sanders exhibited a lazy contempt for the rigors of the job he seeks. Confronted with actual policy questions, Ben Carson and Donald Trump stumble in the darkness, knocking over lamps and bumping into unfamiliar furniture. They want to be president but can't be bothered to learn information essential to the job.

Sanders is no Carson or Trump; he lacks their preening self-regard (in the form of false humility in Carson's case) and their casual contempt for voters. But Sanders is almost exclusively animated by economic inequality and injustice. His lack of preparation and mental agility [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2016/02/05/daily-202-bernie-sanders-trips-up-on-foreign-policy-during-democratic-debate/56b3e57a981b92a22df3af09 ] on foreign policy, apparent in the MSNBC debate, is alarming.

A president is the nation's commander in chief and lead diplomat. Sanders's failure to wrap his head around those responsibilities, nine months after he announced his bid for president, is inexcusable. "ISIS" is not the answer to every question about the Middle East. And there is more to foreign policy acumen than a vote against the Iraq War 14 years ago.

None of these problems is a hindrance to Sanders in the Senate, where he is one of 100. But Sanders is no longer content there. He is trying to build a movement to dominate the Democratic Party and go on to win the White House. Democrats can ill afford either outcome.

For more than two decades the GOP has veered deeper into disaster [ http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-10-14/thomas-mann-and-norman-ornstein-on-republicans-gone-wild ]. Unable to adapt to the rapid cultural, technological, economic and global changes thrust upon it, the party has fomented backlash and reaction [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2013/10/08/the-tea-party-is-better-understood-as-a-reactionary-conservative-force/ ]. The national Democratic Party, meanwhile, has left its 1970s dysfunction behind. Flexible and functional, it has displayed pragmatism (how much did Nancy Pelosi NOT want to bail out Wall Street in 2008?) and moderation (basing [ http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2013/nov/15/ellen-qualls/aca-gop-health-care-plan-1993/ ] its health-care reform on the plan of a conservative think tank) and knowing, most of the time, more or less, when to take half, or quarter, of a policy loaf when the whole is unobtainable.

Sanders threatens that. Should he wrench a sizable part of the party in his direction, and keep it, Democrats risk resembling Republicans in all their sorry ideological fixations, infighting and incompetence. If a large, radicalized faction emerges on the Democratic side, as it has within the GOP, the nation could truly become ungovernable, paralyzed by two fractured parties equally incapable of reconciling themselves to complex realities.

This is not the promise of Sanders's vision. But it is a potential consequence of it. Like others, Democrats have a lot of pent-up frustration. Many, no doubt, are eager to stick it to the man. But the man, and even the stick, are metaphors, and pretty shallow ones at that. The Democratic Party's hard-won successes -- on health care, climate, financial regulation and more -- are, by contrast, both real and profound. Which is the sturdier political foundation for a just future?

©2016 Bloomberg L.P.

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2016-02-05/bernie-sanders-is-a-menace-to-the-democrats [with comments]


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I'm a Tea Party Republican considering Bernie Sanders and I do not believe I'm alone.
Jul 16, 2015
https://www.reddit.com/r/SandersForPresident/comments/3djn72/im_a_tea_party_republican_considering_bernie/ [with comments]


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Republican Operatives Try to Help Bernie Sanders


Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders participates in a debate on Jan. 17, 2016, in Charleston, South Carolina.
Photographer: Andrew Burton/Getty Images

“Picking your opponent” is an age-old political manipulation tactic.

By Sahil Kapur
January 18, 2016 — 6:03 PM CST
Updated on January 18, 2016 — 10:38 PM CST

Republican operatives are having a [not at all] strange crush on Bernie Sanders.

During Sunday night’s Democratic debate, the Republican National Committee made the unusual move of sending no fewer than four real-time e-mails to reporters defending the self-described democratic socialist from attacks by Hillary Clinton or echoing his message against her. Based on their content, one could be forgiven for thinking the RNC communiques came from the Sanders campaign.

One RNC e-mail, which was titled “Clinton’s Misleading Health Care Attack,” defended the Vermont senator from what it described as “the Clinton campaign’s inaccurate remarks on Sanders’ single-payer plan,” and quoted news articles that featured rebuttals of her arguments. A second message countered Clinton’s attacks on Sanders over gun control by pointing out her gun-friendly statements in the past. Two other e-mails sought to bolster Sanders’ case that Clinton is too close to Wall Street and the drug industry.

Sean Spicer, the chief strategist and spokesman for the RNC, spent much of the evening tweeting Sanders-friendly commentary on the debate, often with the pro-Sanders hashtag #FeelTheBern. At one point, Spicer gently chided Sanders for what he deemed a poor response to a question and added [ https://twitter.com/seanspicer/status/688923373464895488 ], “come on we are trying to help u.”

After the debate, the Republican political action committee America Rising promoted the narrative that Sanders won the debate. “Clinton needed a win last night. Instead, everyone is talking about how well Bernie Sanders, her chief rival, did,” spokesman Jeff Bechdel wrote to reporters.

Meanwhile, American Crossroads, a group co-founded by Karl Rove, is airing an ad in Iowa bolstering a core tenet of Sanders’s case against Clinton: that she has received large sums of campaign contributions from Wall Street, and therefore can't be trusted to crack down on big banks. “Hillary rewarded Wall Street with a $700 billion bailout, then Wall Street made her a multi-millionaire,” a narrator in the ad [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5j6EQ1DJcg (below, as embedded; with comments)] says. “Does Iowa really want Wall Street in the White House?”

These Republican operatives are attempting to pick their Democratic opponent in the general election, and they’re making clear they’d rather face Sanders than Clinton. It is age-old political manipulation tactic, typically used with some subtlety. It comes as recent polls show Sanders as competitive in Iowa and leading in New Hampshire, where back-to-back Sanders victories could endanger Clinton's national lead.

“In Iowa, American Crossroads is helping Bernie Sanders by depicting Hillary Clinton as a Wall Street insider,” Jack Pitney, a political science professor at Claremont McKenna College, wrote [ http://www.epicjourney2008.com/2016/01/in-iowa-american-crossroads-v-insider.html ] on his blog.

“My guess is that Republican operatives know that Clinton is likely to win the nomination even if Sanders upsets her in Iowa and New Hampshire. But an extended challenge will force her to use up money too early, and nudge her farther to the left,” Pitney said in an e-mail. Whether it will work remains to be seen, he said. “But at this stage, campaigns will grab for every advantage they can get.”

Priorities USA, a group backing Clinton, said the ad was designed by Republicans to “interfere with our primary process” in an “attempt to clear their path to the White House.”

At Sunday night's debate, Clinton made a note of the ad, too. “I’m the one they don’t want to be up against,” she said, referring to the financial sector.

The efforts indicate that Republicans aren't buying recent polls that show Sanders out-performing Clinton in hypothetical head-to-head match-ups against GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump. One reason may be that, unlike Sanders, Clinton has been through the wringer of Republican attacks. While a spokesman for Sanders didn't immediately return a request for comment on the Republican attempts to boost him, the senator went out of his way in Sunday's debate to invoke recent surveys to make the case that he's electable.

“In terms of polling, guess what? We are running ahead of Secretary Clinton in terms of taking on my taking on my good friend, Donald Trump,” Sanders said. An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll finds him leading Trump nationally by 15 points, while Clinton leads Trump by 10 points.

Republican candidate John Kasich indicated in a debate last week that he'd love to face Sanders. “We're going to win every state,” he said, “if Bernie Sanders is the nominee.”

©2016 Bloomberg L.P.

http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-01-19/republican-operatives-are-trying-to-help-bernie-sanders


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Bernie Sanders Fires Back at Bill Clinton After Tea Party Comparison

Video [embedded]:
Sanders: I Am Telling People What They Want to Hear

The Vermont senator said the former president should not be "making silly remarks" to try and help his wife win the Democratic nomination.

By Ben Brody
February 16, 2016 — 1:48 PM CST

Bill Clinton's latest comments [e.g. "Bill Clinton Says Bernie Sanders Supporters Are Like The Left-Wing Tea Party, Warns Not To "Reward" Them", http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2016/02/16/bill_clinton_says_bernie_sanders_supporters_are_the_left-wing_tea_party_warns_not_to_reward_them.html (with embedded video, and comments): "BILL CLINTON: It's not altogether mysterious that there are a lot of people that say, well, the Republican party rewarded the Tea Party. Just tell people what they want to hear, move them to the right, and we'll be rewarded, except they didn't get anything done.
Then that's going on now in our party. If you don't deal with the fact that we are too politically polarized and we keep rewarding people who tell us things we know they can't do because it pushes our hot button, we can't go forward together."] on the race for the Democratic nomination were widely interpreted as a criticism directly aimed at Bernie Sanders, who minced few words when given a chance to respond.

"I do understand—obviously—he’s trying to do his best to get his wife to win the nomination," Sanders told Bloomberg's With All Due Respect. "But we should not be making silly remarks."

At a rally for Hillary Clinton in Palm Beach on Monday, Bill Clinton never mentioned the Vermont senator by name. But he said the Tea Party succeeded at the ballot box by deciding to "just tell people what they want to hear," before quickly adding that Democrats have also began "rewarding people who tell us things we know they can't do because it pushes our hot button."

Sanders, who won the New Hampshire primary by a large margin and is gaining on Hillary Clinton in early polling of the next contest in Nevada, rejected the comparison between the Tea Party and the rise of his candidacy during an exchange with Mark Halperin, the co-managing editor of Bloomberg Politics.

"Is there a comparison?" Halperin asked.

"No," Sanders shot back. "There’s no comparison."

Halperin followed up: "Just on the question, and we've discussed this with you before this, on the skepticism that you are telling people things that they want to hear."

Sanders' voice intensified. "Yeah, I am telling people what they want to hear! People want jobs. They want health care. They want educational opportunities for their kids. They want to deal with climate change. They want the wealthiest people to pay their fair share of taxes. Yeah, that’s what I’m telling people. And on every one of those issues, that is exactly what the American people want."

To watch the full interview, watch With All Due Respect at 5 p.m. Eastern time on Bloomberg Television and 6 p.m. on MSNBC.

©2016 Bloomberg L.P.

http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-02-16/bernie-sanders-rejects-bill-clinton-s-tea-party-comparison-as-silly


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Bernie Sanders: 'Don't Be Surprised If We Do Well With a Number of Republicans'

October 8, 2015
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/susan-jones/bernie-sanders-dont-be-surprised-if-we-do-well-number-repbulicans [with embedded video, and comments]


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Why this Tea Party Democrat is going to #FeelTheBern in primary

January 28, 2016
http://legalinsurrection.com/2016/01/why-this-tea-party-democrat-is-going-to-feelthebern-in-primary/ [with comments]


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