Here’s Why I Never Warmed Up to Bernie Sanders
Unemployment? Yes, 2 or 3 percent of the working-age population has dropped out of the labor force, but the headline unemployment rate is 5 percent. Wages? They’ve been stagnant since the turn of the century, but the average family still makes close to $70,000, more than nearly any other country in the world. Health care? Our system is a mess, but 90 percent of the country has insurance coverage. Dissatisfaction with the system? According to Gallup, even among those with incomes under $30,000, only 27 percent are dissatisfied with their personal lives.
Like it or not, you don’t build a revolution on top of an economy like this. Period. If you want to get anything done, you’re going to have to do it the old-fashioned way: through the slow boring of hard wood.
Why do I care about this? Because if you want to make a difference in this country, you need to be prepared for a very long, very frustrating slog. You have to buy off interest groups, compromise your ideals, and settle for half loaves—all the things that Bernie disdains as part of the corrupt mainstream establishment. In place of this he promises his followers we can get everything we want via a revolution that’s never going to happen. And when that revolution inevitably fails, where do all his impressionable young followers go? Do they join up with the corrupt establishment and commit themselves to the slow boring of hard wood? Or do they give up?
Read: Here’s Why I Never Warmed Up to Bernie Sanders | Mother Jones
Agreed. A couple things. What seems clear from looking at what the repubs/tea party have accomplished in teh last 7 years is on some big things they care about they have lost bad and some issues they are slowly boring at hard wood. Revolutions sound great but are either bloody and messy or fizzle and don’t deliver. It is about slow changes and long hard work.
The other thing that has left me feel meh about Bernie at times is the righteous insistence about how he is free from special interests. First “special interest” are groups you don’t’ like. They may be rich people/groups, who i think have to much power, but special interest itself has little meaning other then saying someone is a bad guy. Every prez needs the support of various interest groups, all of which can be called a special interest by someone. Hills doesn’t’ need to be prez to swim in money; she can serve on boards and make anodyne speeches around the world and rake in the dough. The groups that support her and donate are the same kind of people she has always been partial to based on her ideology.Report
Hillary has an ideology?
Doubtful.Report
Yeah, we should settle like we did in 68 when we settled for HH and got five more years of bloody stupid war and a million dead Vietnamese, dead presidents in foreign countries that were democratically elected and a US president that tried to over throw the constitution.
This time we will have to settle for another neocon who will coddle the banks and thinks the idea man for Nixon’s foreign policy was a great secretary of state. So we will get more Libya and Honduras fiascos. I am so looking forward to it.
Or we could settle for a racist misogynist individual that really believes that all undocumented people working here are raping murderers. Trump is a really gross human being.Report
Do you really think tha Humphrey would have been worse on Vietnam than Nixon? Nixon’s handling and expansion of Vietnam allowed Pol Pot to take over Cambodia. He also intentionally hampered peace negotiations to win the Presidency.
On the domestic issues, Humphrey would have continued the Great Society more than Nixon. He would have also appointed liberals to the Supreme Court.
There also would be no Watergate.Report
@leeesq, I think Hubert “light at the end of the tunnel” Humphrey would have been vastly superior to Richard “peace with honor” Nixon. But I think McCarthy would have been vastly superior to HH. That’s all I am saying. I hate Nixon and Kissinger with the heat of seven O stars.
I don’t think Clinton will lose to Trump, but I would prefer Sanders and don’t think we should settle. Clinton’s ideas are just more neocon pretend to be democrat while bombing places we have no business bombing.Report
@dexter
This is a fair point. Drum’s article focuses on economic policy, and on that front he makes a good point – for Sanders to implement his economic polices he would need the cooperation of a lot of people who have no inclination or incentive to cooperate with him.
But on foreign policy he would have a lot more autonomy, theoretically Congress could force his hand by declaring war, but Congress reasserting its war powers would at least be a step in the right direction.
Basically, if you want Sanders to start an economic revolution Drum is right, you’re not going to get it. But if you want a less belligerent foreign policy, then I can see why the prospect of President Sanders would be appealing.Report
I think the premise of your own point (which is correct) is what proves Drum’s ultimate argument here wrong. Constitutionally Clinton and Sanders would be under the same constraints when it comes to domestic policy. Neither of them is likely to have a friendly Congress and even if they did neither of them are going to be able to implement their domestic economic policies in anything remotely resembling what they say they want.
For some reason we insist on pretending during presidential elections that we’re picking a king who with the wave if a hand can make anything happen but that’s not the case. On those matters where the president has most control (like foreign policy) Sanders is an infinitely superior candidate. The criticisms Drum makes of Sanders’ economic policy preferences apply equally to Clinton but he, like the rest of the non-conservative media, is invested in a Clinton victory so of course he lacks that type of perspective.Report
@james-k, I don’t expect a revolution or do I really want one, but a different attitude about fraud would be a bonus. The new president could appoint an AG that would not settle multi-billion dollar fraud cases by fining the miscreants pennies on the dollar of profit. It would make my day to see some of those masters of the universe doing hard time in Leavenworth and serving tea to 400 pound serial killers.
The government just made another case against a bank and they fined them less than half of years net and let the bank use the fine as a tax write off. That is not right and a good president could put an end to some of that.
Holder settled a case about laundering money for the drug cartels. He fined them and said America can’t put them in jail because that would hurt business. Then he went to work for the banks.Report
fining the miscreants pennies on the dollar of profit.
Correction: fining the miscreants’ employers pennies on the dollar of profit. The miscreants themselves didn’t have to pay a dime.Report
So have we reached this point for you yet?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4v7XXSt9XRMReport
@burt-likko, I did vote for Nader in 2000, but only because I live in a state where the blues have as much chance of winning an election as I do beating Lebron James one on one. If I lived in Florida I would have voted for Gore.
I sincerely hope that Sanders does not run as a third party candidate.Report
By the time California votes, just getting on the ballot in most states would be a difficult to impossible challenge.
Worst he could do is play “a pox upon both your houses, my supporters should say screw you to both parties and stay home!” which I don’t see him doing.
Unlike, say, Trump, Sanders can’t really convince himself that he got screwed out of the election.Report
Also, let us be clear, Bernie has been pretty up front in saying that he will support the eventual nominee and he’s run his campaign from the getgo in a manner designed to minimize self inflicted wounds. I’d be utterly astonished if he refused to pull with the Dems once the contest is over; his entire MO this campaign has been suggesting the opposite.Report
Disagreed. I think that was maybe true in March, but it certainly isn’t true today. I think his campaign has done a lot of damage to Clinton.
The problem is, Bernie’s only real selling point was the illegitimacy of Clinton. His suggestions that his specific policy ideas were better was always pretty flimsy. It was always about how Hillary is the kind of candidate to take money from Goldman Sachs, and Bernie isn’t. That someone engaged in the political system and the political status quo wasn’t able to do the job in ways that actually help the American people. He got slapped when he actually used the words, but his entire selling point was that Hillary was unqualified to be president. And the longer he stayed in the race, the more he had to lean on that, because he didn’t have anything else that worked.
Was he polite when he said it? Sure. But no amount of politeness in the phrasing heals the rifts caused by the idea.Report
Just b/c Bernie may support the nominee doesn’t mean his supporters will. He was on NPR saying that it’s up to Hillary to convince them to vote for her, not him.Report
Years ago.Report
It’s very unfair that Tina Fey had to spend an hour in hair and makeup to do Sarah Palin, but Larry David didn’t even have to change his voice to be Bernie.Report
It’s an expression of male privilege, no doubt.Report
(Something seems off with the formatting here, though damned if I know what to do about it!)Report
He made the excerpt a link instead of a blockquote.
Multi-paragraph links are a disruptive new technology.Report
For the record, that was my foul-up and not Saul’s.Report
Oh, I didn’t mean to criticize. Just wanted to point it out. I’d have cleaned it up if I knew how. And I know sometimes after I post something I primarily follow it through comment-update emails or just the comments section itself, so figured there was a chance the OP body wasn’t looked at again.Report