Bernie Is Running, Thank God

By Meagan Day, Jacobin

21 February 19

Bernie Sanders is running for president again. His message is simple: there's a class war raging and working people need to win it.

t’s finally happening. Bernie Sanders just announced that he’ll be running for president again.

Judging from its early entrants, the politics of this upcoming Democratic presidential primary will be the most progressive in decades. All of the confirmed contenders claim to support Medicare for All, for example — an idea that most in the party ignored or outright rejected as recently as three years ago. Some candidates are also running on ideas like universal child care and a Green New Deal, a notable departure from the pro-corporate politics that have characterized the party’s program for years.

That leftward shift is a positive development, and there’s a reason for it. The reason is Bernie Sanders.

Now Sanders has announced that he’s throwing his hat in the ring with them. Some progressive voters may want to gravitate toward another candidate in the crowded field. But don’t be fooled — if you seek economic and social justice, you should support Bernie Sanders for president.

Why? Because there’s a class war raging, and Sanders is the only one running who sees it, and who wants to build working-class forces to fight back.

For four decades, neoliberal politicians in both parties have shamelessly and relentlessly deregulated corporations, cut taxes on the rich, stymied unions, starved social services, privatized public goods, and bailed out economic elites while imposing austerity on everyone else. The result for ordinary working people has been stagnating wages and ballooning debt, heightened anxiety and lowered expectations. All the while, there’s been a tacit prohibition on making sense of all this using the language of class conflict.

In 2016, Sanders violated that taboo — and found the American people remarkably receptive.

It turned out that many people were tired of having to choose between conservative pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps individualism and liberal meritocratic elitism to explain the economic inequality and hardship they experience every day. They heard what Bernie had to say: that the economy is rigged, and that aggressive action to democratize it is necessary and achievable. And they agreed.

By making this pervasive exploitation and egregious inequality central to his campaign, Sanders came out of left field to garner thirteen million votes against the party front-runner. By continuing to use his platform to push for ambitious redistributive policies and highlight working-class struggles, he graduated from the campaign to become the most popular politician in the country. The rise of Sanders represents an American awakening — incomplete but significant — to the failures of liberal bipartisanship, corporate accommodationism, and capitalism itself.

Sanders doesn’t just acknowledge the constant churn of class conflict: he picks a side. While other politicians know which way the wind is blowing and strike various progressive poses accordingly, Sanders is a storm that generates that wind.

He does this by standing up consistently for working people against capitalist interests. No other candidate for the Democratic Party nomination will have a comparable track record of fighting to put people over profits.

For example, no other candidate has been pushing for single-payer health care in Congress, on the basis that “health care should be a right of all Americans regardless of their income,” for decades. No other candidate has antagonized the world’s wealthiest man into giving a quarter of a million employees an immediate pay raise. No other candidate dares question the superiority of capitalism — only Sanders calls himself a democratic socialist.

And while other candidates may pick and choose progressive proposals to run on, Sanders will present the most ambitious and comprehensive program to make the country more equal, more democratic, and more humane. Expect him to run not on a handful of zeitgeisty ideas, but on a detailed roadmap out of hell: Medicare for All, free college tuition, and student debt relief, a Green New Deal with an ambitious jobs program, strong climate-conscious environmental regulations, universal child care, massive investment in public housing and education, a national $15 minimum wage, expanding Social Security, banning predatory lending, strong pro-union legislation, ending corporate tax giveaways, mandatory paid sick and family leave and vacation, gender pay equity laws, dismantling private detention centers, demilitarizing the police, banning for-profit prisons, ending the War on Drugs, ending voter suppression, stopping illegal bombings, ending the War on Terror, non-interventionist foreign policy, and on and on.

In a race where progressivism is in vogue, his platform will be hard to run against without changing the conversation. Other candidates and their proxies will argue that Sanders can’t represent the interests of women and people of color because he’s an old white guy. But whatever the importance of symbolic representation, the social-democratic reforms Sanders proposes would do incomparably more to materially transform the lives of hundreds of millions of ordinary women and people of color.

Antiracists should embrace the politician with the most serious plan to end problems like unemployment, low wages, underinsurance, student debt, underfunded public education, and housing disinvestment, given that these problems disproportionately affect people of color and are the material basis for the lived experience of racism. Similarly, feminists should back whichever politician, regardless of their gender, is most likely to guarantee quality universal health care, child care, and education — the social reproductive work that often falls uncompensated to women if it isn’t adequately provided by society — as well as general proposals for a more equitable economy in which women can flourish.

When it comes to US foreign policy, the other candidates in the Democratic Party presidential primary will, as usual, run the gamut from hawkish to oblivious. Sanders has an imperfect anti-imperialist track record, but is the only presidential candidate who suggests any hope of a new American foreign policy paradigm.

As a young man, Sanders applied to be a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War. He arranged a delegation from Burlington to visit the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, attended the inauguration of Nelson Mandela in South Africa, and visited Cuba. At times he toed the establishment line on foreign policy in Congress, but he has made a concerted effort to revisit and develop his approach in advance of the 2020 race. Last year, he even authored legislation to end US support for the war in Yemen — which, if it passes, will be the first ever successful invocation of the War Powers Resolution.

And then there’s climate change. The earth is on the brink of catastrophe, and time is running out. The primary obstacle to beating the clock is not individual consumption habits or insufficient ecological consciousness — it’s capitalism itself, which not only incentivizes humans to destroy the earth for profit, but empowers society’s wealthiest to control politics and shield themselves from interference or consequences.

To save the planet, we need a movement against capitalism that can force lawmakers’ hands with disruptive mass action. This task will be infinitely easier if the president sees one of his primary tasks as bringing the private sector to heel, and is willing to anger and alienate the most powerful people in the world because he recognizes that sustainability can only be achieved at the expense of profits.

Sanders is also our best shot at beating the Right. No one is better capable of defeating Donald Trump than a politician who speaks to the diverse working-class majority’s real needs in concrete terms, who meets their desire for change not with platitudes but with a positive vision for a radically fairer society.

Anyone skittish about a strong left-wing candidate’s chances against Trump need only remember 2016: running a centrist, corporate-friendly Democrat was justified because presumably only a moderate could defeat Trump. This turned out to be very wrong. For decades, establishment liberals have tried to persuade us that pragmatism means subordinating what’s right to what’s feasible. What we learned in 2016, or ought to have learned, is that compromise is no longer a winning strategy.

It appears that the sun is rising on working-class politics in the United States. But there are no guarantees. The 2020 Democratic presidential primary is a referendum and a test: have Americans finally awoken from our long neoliberal slumber? Are we ready to dispense with violence, scarcity, and greed, and build a new world on a foundation of solidarity and equality?

If you’re not ready for that new world, no problem — there are many more moderate candidates for you to choose from. But if you are, you have to back Bernie Sanders.

Lindsey Graham's Claims About an Anti-Trump 'Coup' Are Just Trolling

By Frank Rich, New York Magazine

21 February 19

Most weeks, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich speaks with contributor Alex Carp about the biggest stories in politics and culture. Today, the biggest revelations from Andrew McCabe’s book, Bernie’s 2020 prospects, and what to make of Roger Stone’s latest antics.

n a series of interviews promoting his new book, former acting FBI director Andrew McCabe has said that Trump erroneously believed that North Korea did not have the capability to launch nuclear missiles “because Vladimir Putin had told him so,” and that senior congressional Republicans raised no objection when McCabe briefed them on an open FBI investigation into the president. Do McCabe’s revelations change the way you understand any of the major actors of Trump’s presidency?

The two major indictments McCabe is leveling against Trump — that he is out to sabotage the rule of law and shows every sign of being a Russian asset — are hardly news. But his memoir, The Threat, does shed harsh new light on two major actors in the Trump orbit. The first is the former attorney general Jeff Sessions, who is presented not only as a hotheaded mental midget and racist consistent with Kate McKinnon’s SNL impersonation but also as a national-security risk: McCabe offers compelling evidence that Sessions never could be bothered to read the daily intelligence briefs that might require him to mobilize his resources in his role as the nation’s chief law-enforcement officer. (A side note: CNN announced yesterday that it had hired Sessions’s spokeswoman, Sarah Isgur Flores, to run its 2020 political coverage. Perhaps CNN should first have a prime-time town hall in which Flores is grilled by the network’s reporters on what she knew and when she knew it while serving in Sessions’s Justice Department.)

The Threat is also an implicit indictment of a Trump lackey whose name McCabe never cites: Senator Lindsey Graham. Graham has been trolling McCabe’s book tour this week threatening to hold hearings to expose the former acting FBI director as the ringleader of an alleged “coup” against the president. But the book’s most revealing passage offers further proof, if any were needed, that Graham’s intent in spinning such fictions is to whitewash Trump and Russia by portraying the FBI as the No. 1 threat to America. The passage in question is McCabe’s account of his detailed May 2017 briefing to the so-called congressional Gang of Eight on the fact that Trump had become the subject of a counterintelligence investigation less than four months after his inauguration. How did those at the meeting respond? “No one interrupted,” McCabe writes. “No one pushed back.” The investigation was free to proceed. Which means that if this was a coup, its participants included Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, and the Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Richard Burr — all of whom were members of the Gang of Eight, along with Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Adam Schiff, as the “coup” was given a green light. That Graham would so misrepresent the reality of what happened back then raises no questions about McCabe but leaves one wondering once more what Trump and/or Vladimir Putin have on Graham that would turn him almost overnight from a fierce Trump critic to a pawn in the White House cover-up of its Russian ties.

Even so, McCabe and his book are not the biggest news in Trumpland this week. That distinction goes to the Times, which yesterday reported the president’s failed attempt to use Sessions’s temporary successor, Matthew Whitaker, to muscle the Southern District of New York into curtailing its investigation of Michael Cohen. As Darren Samuelsohn wrote in an important Politico piece published just before the Times scoop, the SDNY poses at least as dangerous a threat to Trump as the Muller probe since it has jurisdiction over his businesses, his political apparatus, and the apparent money-laundering operation that he branded as his Inaugural Committee. Trump can’t try to evade its tentacles by citing executive privilege. And he has uncharacteristically failed to target the prosecutors leading the SDNY inquiry with the sort of smears he and his henchmen have used to try to discredit Robert Mueller and his team with the public.

Clearly Trump was tardy in realizing what may be the biggest legal threat to his bank account, his family, and himself — a slew of potential indictments in his hometown that do not require the political act of impeachment to be consummated. Is it any wonder that his Twitter finger has never left his phone since the weekend?

Bernie Sanders has announced another run for the White House. Will he be able to recapture his 2016 momentum in the more crowded 2020 field?

If measured by fund-raising from small donors, the answer would so far be yes. Fresh out of the gate, he dwarfs all his competitors in raking in non-PAC cash. But the most significant difference between 2020 and 2016 is not just that he is squaring off against a much larger field but that many in that field are running on the populist issues he championed last time, or at least marginal variations on them. And some of his competitors — notably Elizabeth Warren — make his arguments with greater specificity and more comprehensive plans for action. By contrast, Sanders’s sole serious opponent last time was a corporate Democrat who, among other things, had collected a fortune by speaking to Goldman Sachs. Arguably the only corporate Democrat this time is Cory Booker, unless you count Howard Schultz, whose independent run is hurtling toward oblivion.

I have to confess that if the Democrats want to run a septuagenarian for president in 2020, I wish it were Nancy Pelosi, not either Sanders or Joe Biden. She is at the peak of her powers as a master of governance and politics, not to mention a joy to watch as she brings Trump to his knees with her combination of legislative cunning and wit. Though there is zero chance she would run, she increasingly seems the gold standard against which all the other Democrats should be measured.

After an initial promise to “defeat” prosecutors in court, Roger Stone posted, then quickly removed, an Instagram photo of the judge presiding over his case with what was widely interpreted as crosshairs. Is this a sign that his confidence in his case is wavering?

Stone is both desperate and a clown. But a barely veiled call to assassinate a sitting federal judge in this political climate — only days after Trump brownshirts attacked a BBC cameraman at his last MAGA rally — is no joke. Nor, by the way, is Trump’s call for “retribution” against Alec Baldwin for committing comedy last weekend — or his repeated claims that McCabe and Rod Rosenstein are “treasonous,” a crime punishable by death. The former federal prosecutor Mimi Rocah had it right when she tweeted that “all those claims that Roger Stone shouldn’t have been arrested like other people who commit crimes seem particularly ridiculous now that he publicly threatened a federal judge with violence.”

Stone’s barrage of lies about his Instagram post were desperate. He variously called the crosshairs a “celtic symbol,” “a random photo selected from the Internet,” an “occult symbol,” and the “logo” of some spurious “organization.” He claimed the post was put up by a “volunteer.” Finally he had to retreat behind a laughable court filing asserting that he “had no intention of disrespecting the court” and professing to “humbly apologize.”

The fact is that Stone has followed his arrest by doing everything he can to undermine the court and the Mueller investigation. He, like Manafort and every other member of this crime syndicate, follows the Don’s lead in treating lying like a sport. The crazy thing is that Stone thinks of himself as some kind of mad evil genius when in reality he’s just a third-tier con man whose luck has finally run out.