|
FOCUS: Pete Buttigieg Is Like Joe Biden Without the Black Friends |
 |
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=53319"><span class="small">Malaika Jabali, Guardian UK</span></a>
|
|
Friday, 14 February 2020 12:51 |
|
Jabali writes: “While Pete Buttigieg might feel pretty good about effectively tying with Bernie Sanders in Iowa – the votes are still being counted – and landing in second place in New Hampshire, Democrats can count his relative success as a spectacular loss."
‘None of Buttigieg’s South Carolina offices are in a majority black city, even though the primary importance of South Carolina is to appeal to black Democratic voters.’ (photo: Jim Bourg/Reuters)
Pete Buttigieg Is Like Joe Biden Without the Black Friends
By Malaika Jabali, Guardian UK
14 February 20
Buttigieg’s abysmal poll numbers with black voters aren’t a coincidence. He has made almost no effort to reach them
 hile Pete Buttigieg might feel pretty good about effectively tying with Bernie Sanders in Iowa – the votes are still being counted – and landing in second place in New Hampshire, Democrats can count his relative success as a spectacular loss. The problem with the current Democratic primary system is that it doesn’t prove candidates’ viability in a general election; it just proves how good they are at winning Iowa and New Hampshire. Buttigieg is representative of this problem.
Buttigieg’s difficulty attracting black Democratic voters – who are important in March’s Super Tuesday contests – is well documented. A November Quinnipiac poll showed he had essentially zero support from black South Carolina voters. Since then, that support has grown to 2%. Buttigieg’s donor base is richer and whiter than the bases of the other Democratic candidates. And of course there are issues with his treatment of racism and inequality in South Bend, Indiana, where he served as mayor and where racial inequality is more stark than the US on average.
These failures alone don’t rule him out. Hypothetically, there’s still time for him to try to gain ground. But based on his campaign’s current engagement levels with black voters it is tough to believe he will catch up. Reports from Buttigieg’s southern campaign trail indicate that black voters haven’t really gotten to know him; he has emphasized the fact that he’s an upstart with whom black voters simply aren’t familiar. However, his campaign doesn’t seem especially committed to overcoming the problem.
This can be measured, in part, by ground game. Although Buttigieg has made some personal stops in South Carolina, he has the fewest field offices there of any Democratic frontrunner, with just four in the state. (Even Joe Biden, who has longstanding name recognition and doesn’t especially need South Carolina field offices, has more.) None of Buttigieg’s offices are in majority black cities, even though the primary importance of South Carolina is to appeal to black Democratic voters.
Instead of tackling this gap head-on, Buttigieg exorbitantly front-loaded his field presence in Iowa and New Hampshire. He had more field offices in Iowa (33) than in all other states combined (28). Iowa and New Hampshire also happen to be among the five whitest states in the country and wholly unreflective of who actually supports Democrats in general elections. Black Americans made up 25% of the Democratic party’s 2016 primary voters. They are a mere 1.7% of the population in New Hampshire and 4% in Iowa.
The implied contrast, of course, is Biden. Biden polls well with black voters, benefits from strong name recognition from the Obama years, and frequently visits South Carolina, often in the company of the African American congressman Jim Clyburn. While Biden’s political policies have often been terrible for black Americans, he is, on average, their most popular choice.
But Buttigieg straddles the worst of neoliberal worlds. He appeals to the Democratic party’s elite donors – alienating him from some working-class voters – without having done even the minimal and purely performative outreach to people of color expected of any Democratic candidate. Basically, he’s Biden without the black friends.
Most other Democratic candidates have struggled to attract black support and support among voters of color more generally, though Sanders’ popularity with people of color has markedly improved.
Yet Buttigieg’s failures are particularly problematic when you consider the other candidates. Warren, whose donor base is almost as white and affluent as Buttigieg’s, has had multiple roundtables to earn the support of progressive black women organizers, like the Black Womxn For coalition. Sanders has over twice the field staff as Buttigieg in South Carolina, including in the vastly majority black city of Orangeburg. He has also launched a number of tours across historically black colleges and universities, and he has over a dozen field offices in California.
Buttigieg, meanwhile, does not have a single field office in California, according to his campaign website, which grossly hinders his ground game with Latino voters. His campaign has touted black support where it doesn’t exist, including by falsely claiming that certain black leaders had endorsed his Douglass Plan for Black America. Further, the campaign underplayed how much the plan was buttressed by white endorsers.
Buttigieg’s success reveals both the abject uselessness of focusing on early states that don’t reflect the Democratic party’s diversity and the essential hollowness of his campaign. Like his political career, it allows him to collect accomplishments without much sense that he is particularly qualified.
 |
|
New Hampshire 2020: In Supreme Irony, the Horse Race Favors Bernie Sanders |
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=51548"><span class="small">Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone</span></a>
|
|
Friday, 14 February 2020 09:42 |
|
Taibbi writes: "Bernie Sanders won the New Hampshire primary Tuesday night. Second-place finisher Pete Buttigieg earned 24.4 percent of the vote, while Amy Klobuchar, not long ago polling in single digits, came out of nowhere with 19.8 percent, a classic New Hampshire outlier result."
Sen. Bernie Sanders. (photo: Salwan Georges/Getty Images)
New Hampshire 2020: In Supreme Irony, the Horse Race Favors Bernie Sanders
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
14 February 20
Sanders and Trump are political opposites, but they’re on the same path to victory
 ernie Sanders won the New Hampshire primary Tuesday night. Second-place finisher Pete Buttigieg earned 24.4 percent of the vote, while Amy Klobuchar, not long ago polling in single digits, came out of nowhere with 19.8 percent, a classic New Hampshire outlier result.
The words “eked” and “narrowly” are getting a workout in headlines today. There is a Yeah, but… passage in nearly every major media write-up of Bernie’s win. “Sanders cements his front-runner status, but his narrow margins… show how volatile this race is,” is how The New York Times put it.
In reality, the results for Sanders cut both ways. On one hand, it’s amazing he can win any state after years of propaganda depicting him as a half-dead cross of Hitler and Stalin (MSNBC before New Hampshire outdid itself with Looney Tunes commentary about “executions in Central Park” and a “digital brownshirt brigade”).
On the other hand, there are signs after New Hampshire that some of the relentless corporate messaging against Sanders is landing. This will inspire orgies of excitement — it’s already happening — as pundits revel in every storyline suggesting Democratic voters are scrambling to find an “electable” alternative.
Good. Let them. I saw this movie in 2016 and have a fair idea of how it ends. It just won’t be horrifying this time.
Four years ago, after New Hampshire, it was crystal clear that Donald Trump was not only going to win his party’s nomination, but that his path was being actively cleared by the Republican Party establishment and the national news media, whose half-baked efforts to stop him were working in reverse. I wrote this in February 2016:
The [Republicans] sent forth to take on Trump have been so incompetent, they can’t even lose properly. One GOP strategist put it this way: “Maybe 34 [percent] is Trump’s ceiling. But 34 in a five-person race wins…” The numbers simply don’t work, unless the field unexpectedly narrows before March.
Early mixed results guaranteed that Ted Cruz, John Kasich, Jeb Bush, and Marco Rubio would not drop out soon enough to give any of the others a chance. As a result, the following was obvious at this time four years ago: “Trump will probably enjoy at least a five-horse race through Super Tuesday.”
In hindsight, those Republican challengers were so villainously terrible that none would have beaten Trump in a two-person race. Still, Bush’s backers knew their man was roadkill by New Hampshire, yet didn’t pull the plug. Kasich, who in a rare moment of self-awareness was ready to bail after Iowa (“If we get smoked up there, I’m going back to Ohio,” he fumed in New Hampshire), let himself be fooled by one surprise second-place finish.
All pledged to be committed to stopping Trump but accelerated his victory by staying in too long. Popular disgust was also enhanced by delusional news-media hype surrounding a succession of would-be “real” candidates.
All of this is happening all over again, only this time it’s Democrats who are committing ritualistic self-abuse, seemingly in a conspiracy with one another and the news media to push as many votes as possible to a hated outsider. I thought this outcome might be possible for Bernie nearly a year ago:
The 30,000-foot pundit view on Sanders’ chances should be that he, of course, has a chance, one rooted in the same logic that saw Trump win. He is an unconventional candidate with an at least somewhat insoluble base of support, running in an overlarge field of mostly traditional politicians, many of whom will take votes from one another.
Still, no one could have predicted that even the idiosyncratic particulars of the 2016 and 2020 races would be so alike.
In 2016, Iowa’s Republican caucus was won by Cruz, but press wizards gushed over the “Marcomentum” of third-place Rubio, who acted like he’d won with a soaringly pompous address that somehow evoked both Obama and Henry V:
They told me that we have no chance because my hair wasn’t gray enough and my boots were too high… But tonight, tonight here in Iowa, the people of this great state have sent a very clear message.
Four days before the New Hampshire vote, Rubio stepped on a rake in a debate, repeating the “let’s dispel with the fiction that Barack Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing” schtick four times in a viral fiasco. The New York Times declared “the End of Marcomentum” roughly 10 days after it began.
This year the standout haughty victory declaration in Iowa was given by a different human haircut, Pete Buttigieg, who told Iowans “you have shocked the nation,” with zero percent of the vote in.
Unlike Rubio, Pete could argue he technically won, but otherwise, the story was the same. Press swooned – “#Pete-mentum is no joke,” declared the Daily News – only to watch as the Great Electable Hope stepped on a rake in the New Hampshire debate, with Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar both kicking him in the balls on his race record.
Like clockwork, Pete was no longer the new hotness. With about 10 percent of the results in Tuesday night, Gloria Borger on CNN opened the floodgates on the inevitable next gambit.
“Klomentum?” she asked Anderson Cooper. The latter responded, correctly, that the horrible word sounded like something he took for his sciatica.
Klomentum was instantly a thing. “[Cory] Booker and [Kamala] Harris looking at #Klomentum tonight,” tweeted Dave Weigel of The Washington Post, over a pop-art cartoon of a woman thinking, “It should have been me…” “When #Klomentum is more than a Twitter joke,” tweeted Edward Isaac-Dovere of the Atlantic.
Klobuchar spokeswoman Carlie Waibel actually “confirmed” to The New York Times that “it’s Klomentum, not Klobmentum.”
One of the lessons of 2016 was that cheeseball clichés like “the Big Mo,” “straight talk,” and the “beer test” no longer had traction. Voter calculations were about rage and nihilism: They were done with catchphrases. Like amputees who still feel a leg is there, pundits continued speaking in this dead language, which widened the credibility gap further.
Four years later, they’re still doing it. Kasich of all people was on CNN Tuesday night talking about “the Big Mo.” Van Jones wondered about the “beer lane.” “Klomentum” is the relic being flogged this morning. The “firewall” might be next.
The hapless Joe Biden, 2020’s clear answer to 2016 establishment Hindenburg Jeb Bush, finished a disastrous fifth in New Hampshire. Joe should drop out. The world knows it. The man shouldn’t be driving, much less running for president.
Nonetheless, because Biden is perceived to have a “firewall” in the South — the “firewall” of minority voters enjoyed by this or that corporate-funded candidate is one of the more vile campaign clichés — he will certainly not drop out. His campaign, even before Tuesday, was directing reporters to ignore New Hampshire and look to Nevada, South Carolina, and Super Tuesday.
This means once again, it will likely be (at least) a five-person race through Super Tuesday, this time between Buttigieg, Klobuchar, Biden, Sanders, and Mike Bloomberg, the detestable oligarch who has not even test-driven his eleventy-gazillion election-buying dollars yet. If Elizabeth Warren stays in [checks Twitter], the pie will be split in at least six big parts.
The Democratic Party’s argument against Sanders for years has been his alleged inability to grow beyond his base. Now, things have been arranged so that he may not have to dispel these notions before Super Tuesday. This may or may not be a good thing — beating Trump is important and the Democratic nominee should have to demonstrate the widest appeal — but the brutal irony of Bernie Sanders boosted by horse-race luck and conventional-wisdom miscalculation is difficult to miss.
As with Republicans in 2016, the defining characteristic of the 2020 Democratic race has been the unwieldy size of the field. The same identity crisis lurking under the Republican clown car afflicted this year’s Democratic contest: Because neither donors nor party leaders nor pundits could figure out what they should be pretending to stand for, they couldn’t coalesce around any one candidate.
These constant mercurial shifts in “momentum” — it’s Pete! It’s Amy! Paging Mike Bloomberg! — have eroded the kingmaking power of the Democratic leadership. They are eating the party from within, and seem poised to continue doing so.
For Sanders supporters, the calculation has always been simpler: Are you bought off, or not? Just by keeping to the right side of that one principle, Sanders will hold his 20-to-30 percent and keep grinding toward victory, “narrow” wins or not. It’s a classic tortoise-and-hare story. When you know where you’re going, you tend to get there.
|
|
|
How AIPAC Is Losing the Support of Democrats |
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=47847"><span class="small">Ali Harb, Middle East Eye</span></a>
|
|
Friday, 14 February 2020 09:42 |
|
Harb writes: “’A true friend of Israel.’ These were the words Barack Obama used when describing himself to AIPAC, a day after he secured the Democratic party nomination in 2008.”
'AIPAC's language is intended to demonize, not elevate a policy debate,' Congresswoman Betty McCollum said. (photo: AFP)
How AIPAC Is Losing the Support of Democrats
By Ali Harb, Middle East Eye
14 February 20
It was once described as the 'most effective' lobbying group in Washington, but AIPAC is beginning to lose support as it turns on critics - most of whom are Democrats
  true friend of Israel." These were the words Barack Obama used when describing himself to AIPAC, a day after he secured the Democratic party nomination in 2008.
Standing in front of thousands of attendees in Washington, Obama, who was only 47 at the time, went on to thank the pro-Israel lobby for helping advance "bipartisan consensus to support and defend our ally - Israel".
Those comments were a far cry from the latter stages of his presidency, when the interest group rebuked America's first black president and spearheaded efforts to derail his signature foreign policy accomplishment - the Iran nuclear deal.
AIPAC, short for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, has always presented itself as a bipartisan organisation aiming to maintain support for Israel from across the US political spectrum.
Republican and Democratic presidents have praised the group, and some of the measures it has pushed have gained unanimous bipartisan support in Congress.
But times are changing. Once dubbed "the most effective general interest group" by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, AIPAC was called a "hate group" by a senior Democratic congresswoman on Wednesday.
"Hate is used as a weapon to incite and silence dissent. Unfortunately, this is my recent experience with AIPAC – the American Israel Public Affairs Committee," Congresswoman Betty McCollum said in a blistering statement.
Her photo had been featured - along with fellow House members Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar - in AIPAC ads accusing "radicals in the Democratic Party" of pushing antisemitic and anti-Israel policies "down the throats of the American people".
The posts, which have since been deleted, went as far as likening Congress members critical of Israel to the Islamic State (IS) group, also known as ISIS.
McCollum, who had introduced a bill aiming to prevent US assistance to Israel from contributing to the imprisonment and abuse of Palestinian children, was having none of it.
"AIPAC wants its followers to believe that my bill, H.R. 2407, to protect Palestinian children from being interrogated, abused, and even tortured in Israeli military prisons is a threat more sinister than ISIS," she said.
"This is not empty political rhetoric. It is hate speech."
The response came days after AIPAC took down the ads and half-heartedly apologised for them. But the episode highlighted that the erosion of that bipartisan consensus over Israel that Obama cited in 2008.
AIPAC's conundrum
Three months after Democrats assumed the majority in the US House of Representatives last year, their top leaders appeared at the annual conference of AIPAC, assuring the group that Congress will maintain its steadfast support for Israel.
There had been warning signs that the bipartisan consensus in favour of Israel may be eroding. Left-wing progressives had been increasing their clout in Democratic politics, shifting the conversation about Israel and Palestine amongst Democrats in the process.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer have kept their word to AIPAC in pushing pro-Israel measures in the congressional chambers that they control - including a resolution condemning the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.
But with President Donald Trump giving the right-wing Israeli government everything that it wants and then some, top Democrats have found it difficult to fully back the White House's policies.
In fact, many of them forcefully rejected the president's AIPAC-backed plan to end the conflict, which would allow Israel to annex all of its settlements in the West Bank. Meanwhile, progressives' criticism of Israel became more vocal.
That has created a conundrum for AIPAC - how to favour the policies of one political party without alienating the other?
"AIPAC is dealing with a fundamental contradiction. They are promoting a policy of no accountability for Israel - a carte blanche for whatever Israel does; and they want to be bipartisan," said Omar Baddar, deputy director of the Arab American Institute, a Washington-based advocacy group.
"There's a problem here. The reality of our political discourse is that no accountability for Israel is not a bipartisan issue."
The ads against Democrats and McCollum's forceful condemnation of the group expose that contradiction, he added.
"I really suspect it's really a matter of time before we see the next outburst," Baddar told MEE.
Beth Miller, government affairs manager at JVP Action, a political advocacy group linked to Jewish Voice for Peace, echoed Baddar's comments, saying the American progressives are adopting the Palestinian cause as a core issue on their agenda.
"It used to be true that AIPAC had bipartisan support, but that is strongly waning… As the left progressive flank of the Democratic Party grows, which it clearly is, that means that there's also going to be less support for groups like AIPAC," Miller said.
She added that advocacy for Palestinian human rights is becoming a "natural part" of the push against Trump's agenda.
"The more we as Americans learn about what is happening in Israel, the more people are supporting Palestinian human rights," Miller told MEE.
"And so, we are in a moment where groups like AIPAC that are strongly trying to push anti-Palestinian policies and anti-Palestinian rhetoric are finding themselves in an increasingly partisan space."
The presidential race
With Democrats moving to pick their nominee who will try to unseat Trump, that schism between the pro-Israel lobby and the party is likely to become sharper.
AIPAC will not merely be torn between unconditionally supportive Republicans and Democrats more critical of Israel. Trump himself will be on the ballot, facing an opponent who will likely draw distinctions with him on foreign policy.
Moreover, Bernie Sanders, the frontrunner in the Democratic race, has called for an even-handed approach to the Middle East conflict, where US policy would not only be pro-Israel, but also "pro-Palestinian". The Vermont senator is also proposing conditioning US aid to Israel if it does not work to end the occupation and the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
"I imagine that relationship is going to become more and more antagonistic," Baddar said.
"As time goes on, that contrast will be sharpened. I do envision a scenario in which AIPAC is going all out in attack against candidate Bernie Sanders if his lead continues."
In fact, an AIPAC-linked group has been running negative ads against Sanders, centering on his health and electability - not foreign policy.
Columnist Jonathan Tobin argued earlier this week that it was no longer feasible for AIPAC in 2020 to deliver on its mission of defending Israel in a bipartisan way.
"At a time of unprecedented hyper-partisanship, and with the possibility that support for Israel will be a point of partisan contention in the fall presidential campaign - especially if the Democrats nominate Bernie Sanders, it’s hard to see how AIPAC can continue to navigate between the parties," he wrote in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
"It just isn’t possible to attack Democrats who are anti-Israel without sounding pro-Trump."
'Vile attacks'
The rise of Sanders in the polls and the AIPAC ads attacking Democratic Congress members point to an indisputable shift in support of Palestinians within the party.
Yet, many - if not most - Democrats in Congress have maintained their strong commitment to the US relationship with Israel and ties with AIPAC.
In fact on Thursday, the pro-Israel lobby posted several tweets thanking top Democratic legislators for denouncing the UN Human Rights Council over publishing a list of businesses with ties to West Bank settlements considered illegal by most of the international community.
McCollum had called on the Democratic Party to "take a stand" in support of human rights.
"AIPAC's language is intended to demonise, not elevate a policy debate. Vile attacks such as this may be commonplace in the Trump era, but they should never be normalised."
In her statement, McCollum challenged AIPAC's claims of being a bipartisan group.
"AIPAC claims to be a bipartisan organisation, but its use of hate speech actually makes it a hate group," the congresswoman said.
"By weaponising antisemitism and hate to silence debate, AIPAC is taunting Democrats and mocking our core values.
"I hope Democrats understand what is at stake and take a stand because working to advance peace, human rights, and justice is not sinister - it is righteous."
For her part, Congresswoman Tlaib, who is Palestinian American, praised McCollum for calling out AIPAC.
"I commend the courage and leadership of my colleague, Congresswoman Betty McCollum. She's right, hate speech incites violence and seeks to silence dissent," Tlaib told MEE in an email.
"In the fight for peace, equality, dignity and human rights, we must push back and call out any attempt to stop us on the path toward justice for Palestinians, Israelis, and people across the world."
AIPAC did not return MEE's request for comment.
|
|
The Night Socialism Went Mainstream |
|
|
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=35592"><span class="small">Russell Berman, The Atlantic</span></a>
|
|
Thursday, 13 February 2020 14:02 |
|
Berman writes: "It has taken a single week for Senator Bernie Sanders to achieve a distinction that eluded him for the entirety of his underdog campaign four years ago: The 78-year-old democratic socialist from Vermont is now, at least for the moment, the front-runner for the Democratic nomination for president."
Sen. Bernie Sanders. (photo: Getty/The Atlantic)
The Night Socialism Went Mainstream
By Russell Berman, The Atlantic
13 February 20
Bernie Sanders’s victory in the New Hampshire primary marks a turning point for Democratic politics.
 t has taken a single week for Senator Bernie Sanders to achieve a distinction that eluded him for the entirety of his underdog campaign four years ago: The 78-year-old democratic socialist from Vermont is now, at least for the moment, the front-runner for the Democratic nomination for president.
Sanders’s victory tonight in the New Hampshire primary, combined with his strong finish last week in Iowa and a bounce in national polling, places him firmly at the top of the Democratic field as the nomination race heads to Nevada and South Carolina. He has benefited from a split in the moderate vote, as a late surge from Senator Amy Klobuchar slowed the momentum of Sanders’s closest New Hampshire rival, former Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana. Former Vice President Joe Biden’s second consecutive lackluster result could threaten his firewall in South Carolina, where Sanders was on the rise and cutting into Biden’s lead among its crucial constituency of African American voters.
But the significance of Sanders’s standing in the race goes far beyond the next round of primaries. In the modern history of American politics, no candidate so firmly planted on the left has been so well positioned to capture the nomination of the Democratic Party. Sanders has won election after election in Vermont as an independent, regularly declining the label of the party he now seeks to lead. His rise to the top of a field filled with more mainstream candidates could point to an important shift in the electorate. In Iowa and New Hampshire, Sanders’s talk of revolution overtook Biden’s pleas for a return to normalcy in the age of Donald Trump, and with his platform representing a kind of untainted progressive purity, the oldest white candidate on the ballot prevailed—albeit narrowly—over a plethora of younger, more diverse options.
Yet none of the transformative policies Sanders has proposed—a Green New Deal, Medicare for All, and debt-free college the most notable among them—embody the change he represents as much as the label he proudly carries: democratic socialist. It’s a term Republicans have weaponized against liberals so frequently that most Democratic politicians simply reject the tag out of hand. Sanders does not, and his success frightens establishment Democrats who worry that the socialism label remains a potent pejorative among the swing voters they’ll need to defeat President Trump in key battlegrounds this fall. On the day after Iowa’s caucuses, Trump devoted an entire section of his State of the Union address to a warning against the advance of socialism, while Biden spent his final days in New Hampshire cautioning that Sanders’s “democratic socialist” label would bring down Democrats running alongside him on November’s ballot.
Neither attack worked, and to Sanders’s supporters, his surge to the top is evidence that socialism as an epithet has lost its sting. “If you look at the history of this country and the left, there have been times when our ideas have been popular and millions of working people have stood up for them,” Maria Svart, the national director of the Sanders-backing Democratic Socialists of America, told me. “And I think the time is coming again for us to do that.
“The socialist bogeyman idea,” she continued, “has been used for decades to prevent people from bringing up alternative ideas, and Bernie winning validates our ideas and demonstrates that people, especially young people, are willing to confront capitalism.”
The recent evidence for whether Sanders’s identity as a democratic socialist would hurt him in a general-election matchup with Trump is mixed. He fared no worse against the president when pollsters identified him as a socialist in a survey conducted by the progressive group Data for Progress. But socialism remained broadly unpopular in a poll released last month by NBC News and The Wall Street Journal: Just 19 percent of respondents said they had a positive view of socialism, compared with 53 percent who held a negative view. That was roughly the inverse of how people in the poll felt about capitalism.
Rather than renounce the term, he has sought in both of his presidential campaigns to define it as part of a “quintessentially American” tradition, a descendant of mainstream liberals such as Franklin D. Roosevelt, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Martin Luther King Jr. (who were also demonized by their opponents as socialists while they were alive). “We must recognize that in the 21st century, in the wealthiest country in the history of the world, economic rights are human rights,” Sanders said in a speech in June. “That is what I mean by democratic socialism.”
More recently, Sanders has argued that the U.S. is already “a socialist society” that redistributes national wealth to corporations through tax breaks and subsidies. “The difference between my socialism and Trump’s socialism is, I believe the government should help working families, not billionaires,” he said on Fox News Sunday.
In claiming his victory on Tuesday night, Sanders made no mention of democratic socialism. Still, it’s clear that Sanders is more comfortable with the term than even some of his top backers, who wonder whether its time as a political liability has actually passed. “He can call himself whatever he wants. For most of his supporters, we are not democratic socialists,” Larry Cohen, the chairman of Our Revolution, the progressive organization that spun out of Sanders’s 2016 campaign, told me. “We don’t use the term, and we don’t use the term because it doesn’t do any good. Again, my friends in DSA would disagree with that. I don’t think the term is helpful.”
When I asked Cohen whether Sanders should disavow the phrase, he replied: “I think that would come off as disingenuous.”
Republicans have indicated that they plan to target Sanders’s socialist label aggressively if he’s the nominee. They’ve already begun attacking Democratic congressional candidates whom they lump together with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, another progressive who has identified as a democratic socialist. Trump, however, has already gone a step further in trying to tar Sanders’s ideology as fundamentally un-American. “I think he’s a communist,” the president told Fox News’s Sean Hannity in a pre–Super Bowl interview. “I think of communism when I think of Bernie. You could say socialist, but didn’t he get married in Moscow?” (Sanders did not get married in Moscow, but he and Jane Sanders did take their honeymoon in the Soviet Union in 1988.)
While some Republicans, including the president, may salivate at the prospect of facing Sanders in November, his rise within the Democratic Party is alarming to conservatives who fear that the concept they have spent their entire professional life trying to discredit is suddenly catching hold again. “I view it as really dangerous,” David McIntosh, the president of the conservative Club for Growth, told me about the prospect of Sanders winning the nomination. “Don’t assume that if Bernie gets the nomination, it’s a layup and you’re going to beat him. All of us have to redouble our efforts.”
In 2016, many Democrats were rooting for Trump to win the GOP nomination on the grounds that he would be an easy opponent in the fall. Conservatives should not make the same mistake with Sanders, McIntosh told me. As for socialism, he acknowledged that the term was not as resonant with voters as it was during the height of the Cold War. “Is it enough to just say socialism is bad?” he asked. “We do have to explain to the American people why it’s bad, why we think freedom is a better alternative. We need to do a better job of that. Bernie hopefully will be a wake-up call to all of us on the conservative side as well.”
Sanders and his supporters point out that conservatives will try to affix the socialism label to any Democratic nominee, no matter how centrist the person is. But to people like Cohen, the battle to reclaim socialism isn’t worth the fight in 2020. “We can’t afford to lose voters based on labels,” he told me.
He likes to instead call the Sanders campaign “a democratic popular movement” with a new New Deal for the economy at its core. Sanders, Cohen noted, isn’t calling for the nationalization of banks, the railroads, or other major industries—the kinds of proposals that many people might associate with socialism.
Sanders’s early victories, Cohen suggested, aren’t a verdict on democratic socialism—however you define it—or whether its time has come in America. It’s a far simpler message, he said, aimed at “the Democratic naysayers” who say that the senator from Vermont’s ideas are impractical. “You’re not standing for what people want to see,” Cohen said. “People actually are hurting. They’re not at death’s door. But they can imagine a better America, and that’s what’s winning tonight—that vision of a better America.”
|
|
onald Trump has finally found his new Roy Cohn. That crooked fixer’s name is William Barr.
