At it's core the Bernie movement was founded on the misunderstanding that there was a groundswell of support for socialism in the American working class rather than a groundswell of hatred for Hillary Clinton. It's amazing how much of the wild changes American politics over the last 4 years was caused entirely by Clinton being allowed to lock up the invisible primary.
Yey Noah. I got my email notification this time. The only problem is I agree with everything you said, so commenting is boring.
Unlike Trump and his ilk who have no obvious successor, I do think AOC has a shot to directly assume Bernie's mantle.
My dirty little secret... I like AOC, despite thinking a certain percentage of her posts/comments are cringe worthy. She comes across as sincere, if not a bit misguided.
Bernie 2020 was doomed to fail, just like Corbyn 2019 was. The radical left cannot win elections, because their policies are fundamentally unpopular with most of the electorate.
The radical European left-wing have been advocating these policies for decades. They rarely get above 10% in parliamentary elections. If they get into power, it's always as junior coalition partners to center-left parties, who force them to abandon their most radical positions.
- Barring some material change in people from small state's life's, much of the center-left to left's power will continue to be stymied by the fact that power is not allocated proportional to votes. Under a different voting system, third parties might actually be productive, not "a useless and ultimately destructive adventure"; The USA is a big, diverse, growing country, so it seems like we should have a system of democracy that reflect this complexity.
Noah, check the recent comments on your last post, there's a comment you *really* will want to delete. Also, I'm unsure what the auto-mod functionality/settings are for Substack, but they probably ought to be upped some.
Noah, one correction from the other side of the Atlantic :)
You write "Only Britain’s NHS, which actually provides health services in addition to insuring the populace, is to the left of M4A.". Actually, it is the same also in Italy and all Scandinavian countries, and mostly so in Spain, Portugal and Ireland. It adds up to about half of western Europe directly providing health services to residents.
It is true on the other hand that most of these countries have co-pays or deductibles, as well as often not covering dental and mental health (or covering them in a very restricted way, so that in practice most people use private providers). But from here, M4A does not look radical, possibly a bit naive for eliminating co-pays that can be designed to avoid frivolous use and may be one reason why health care spending is lower here.
What is radical from an European point of view is that Sanders wanted to introduce european-style universal services (health and education) without increasing the taxes on the middle class, which here are higher because we pay for our own health insurance trough general taxation. This is probably what resulted in the insanely high wealth tax proposals (which may still not have been sufficient to plug the hole).
One thing I’d like to know is whether there have been studies on how media coverage affects outcomes in primaries. I am not a diehard Bernie fan (although I do like him) but I always felt like the media treated Bernie as a long-shot and that treatment affects votes. I’d like to know if media didn’t make presumptions about who was a front runner and who was a reach, whether that would affect outcomes at all.
That's the usual story, but it leaves out three important things.
1. Pre-2016 Trump
2. Clinton derangement syndrome
3. Post-2016 Trump.
1. Up to the day of the 2016 election itself, everyone thought that Trump would lose whoever ran (also, the rest of the Repug's primary candidates were uninspired in the extreme), and that it just didn't matter what we did. That turns out to have been incredibly stupid, but it's what everyone was saying.
(Everyone missed that Trump was putting on great shows, shows that were lots of fun for the fairly well-off rural demographic that got off their butts and voted. (The median family income of Trump voters in 2016 was substantially higher than that for non-Hispanic whites, i.e. far better off than the most affluent demographic in the US.))
2. The NYT (and quite a few other folks) hate the Clintons. It's nuts and sick, but it is what it is. The NYT did their level best to destroy Hillary, and succeeded. They ran more Clinton email stories than any other story in their history. (OK, maybe an exaggeration, but it's close to being right.) They ran two hit pieces by M. B.D. Dowd the Sunday before election. Being the NYC town newspaper, they should have known how important it was the Trump not become president and they should have acted that way. I will never, ever again, pay one red cent to the NYT. (And I didn't even mention the US' remaining sexism. Sigh.)
But the whole gestalt going into the 2016 election was that we couldn't possibly lose whatever we did, so we did Hillary vs. Bernie. In retrospect, that was pretty dumb.
3. Having seen what a disaster Trump was, we largely got our act together, and Bernie got ignored. (Bernie's weakness in the Black and other minority communities was also a contributing factor, i.e. in South Carolina.)
FWIW, 4. Bernie has spent his whole career insisting he isn't a Democrat, irritating many of us no end. And, by the way, every good thing the US has ever done (SS, Medicare, etc. etc. etc.) has been done by Dems against the rabid and violent opposition of the Repugs. We've always been the good guys. We don't need no whiny socialist from Vermont to tell us what's good/bad. (OK, that last bit's obnoxious, but it's what I think. (I'm old. Get off my lawn.))
Biden has absolutely no intention of undoing all his hard work ruining millions of young people's lives by saddling them with non-dischargeable student debt. Just like he has no intention to do anything to help the millions of poor black people in jail because of his insane crime bills.
Nothing is effectively moved to the left until Biden follows through on those proposal. There's a possibility that Biden's administration will just be a another working-with-conservatives bunch of centrists. I wouldn't be surprised at all.
Bernie can still make waves from the Senate, he has a bigger platform than ever. We need him to, and we shouldn't be calling the end of his influence.
Revolutions happen quickly or fail. But movements are slow and build over years.
Let's see how damaged the conservative party becomes as it splinters into post-trumpism. Progressives might end up with a more factional success than you think.
One can't seriously assess the relative success of an outsider campaign in the 2020 Dem primary divorced from the context in which it happened. Most significantly, an incumbent Donald Trump and the emergence of COVID-19. The abject fear of Trump being re-elected unquestionably drove voters toward a candidate they perceived (perhaps correctly) as the safe option. Couple that with the fact that Sanders' insurgent, people-powered campaign had one of its key advantages– face-to-face organizing –completely removed from its playbook.
What success Bernie did have, as well as Trump's win in 2016, show that there's a broad distrust of the establishment parties and disruptive alternatives have a strong appeal.
Observing that Bernie failed in the face of intense headwinds–some structural, some historical accidents–and concluding that people will now just resign themselves to incremental change through our system of electoral politics despite observing its near complete corporate capture, despite it continuing to enable finance capital to bilk the nation's wealth, and despite the ongoing devolution into a techno-feudal gig economy with ever more pervasive precarity… that's just burying your head in the sand.
1. Even if Bernie had gotten FDR like majorities (55% plus popular vote, more than 60 Senators, 55% supporters in the House) the most that could have been achieved was the next stage in the New Deal /Fair Deal/New Frontier/Great Society tradition and Bernie was aware of that and happy if that had been the outcome. Bernie himself defined his democratic socialism as the implementation of FDR's Second Bill of Rights.
The US would be more like Denmark or Norway but not more radical than that.
It's true that his platform was more radical in 2020 but that was to outflank Warren who had moved to where Bernie was in 2016.
2. People around Bernie in 2016 didn't really think he would win the nomination. They had to beg Bernie to run and the goal was that Hillary wouldn't move too far to the right and hopefully move the Dems a bit to the left.
The goal was the same in 2020 (anyone getting the Dem nomination not moving to the right and hopefully moving the Dem party a bit to the left.)
There was a moment in February where it really did seem like Bernie had a chance at getting the nomination but it was brief.
The future of the Bernie movement is Justice Dem types and the Squad. I know a lot of people who where talking about revolution in 2016 but are either running for office or supporting AOC type campaigns.
Just wanted to let you know that for some reason Protonmail deemed this article as fit for the spam folder. The rest of your articles aren't treated as such.
He failed. Good. The normalization of collectivism, and frankly, the abandonment of free markets by both parties is one of the great tragedies of our age, and all we can hope for now is that the Democrats begin to reflect more of the policies of the wealthy who are joining. I sympathize with Bernie supporters, and applaud their ends, but the means suggested would end up backfiring entirely.
" Only Britain’s NHS, which actually provides health services in addition to insuring the populace, is to the left of M4A."
And the Portuguese Serviço Nacional de Saúde (who is very similar to the NHS) - in Portugal, the "ADSE para todos" (a kind of "Medicare for All" - give to all people a kind of public health insurance that now is only to civil servants) is a slogan of the right-wing and the far-right.
At it's core the Bernie movement was founded on the misunderstanding that there was a groundswell of support for socialism in the American working class rather than a groundswell of hatred for Hillary Clinton. It's amazing how much of the wild changes American politics over the last 4 years was caused entirely by Clinton being allowed to lock up the invisible primary.
Yey Noah. I got my email notification this time. The only problem is I agree with everything you said, so commenting is boring.
Unlike Trump and his ilk who have no obvious successor, I do think AOC has a shot to directly assume Bernie's mantle.
My dirty little secret... I like AOC, despite thinking a certain percentage of her posts/comments are cringe worthy. She comes across as sincere, if not a bit misguided.
Bernie 2020 was doomed to fail, just like Corbyn 2019 was. The radical left cannot win elections, because their policies are fundamentally unpopular with most of the electorate.
The radical European left-wing have been advocating these policies for decades. They rarely get above 10% in parliamentary elections. If they get into power, it's always as junior coalition partners to center-left parties, who force them to abandon their most radical positions.
Two Things:
- Barring some material change in people from small state's life's, much of the center-left to left's power will continue to be stymied by the fact that power is not allocated proportional to votes. Under a different voting system, third parties might actually be productive, not "a useless and ultimately destructive adventure"; The USA is a big, diverse, growing country, so it seems like we should have a system of democracy that reflect this complexity.
- I'm not sure mapping onto Europe's left is always the best comparison. For example, universal health care (although not as expansive) was a major initiative pushed by Harry S. Truman, a man who was adamantly not a socialist: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/november-19-1945-harry-truman-calls-national-health-insurance-program.
Noah, check the recent comments on your last post, there's a comment you *really* will want to delete. Also, I'm unsure what the auto-mod functionality/settings are for Substack, but they probably ought to be upped some.
Noah, one correction from the other side of the Atlantic :)
You write "Only Britain’s NHS, which actually provides health services in addition to insuring the populace, is to the left of M4A.". Actually, it is the same also in Italy and all Scandinavian countries, and mostly so in Spain, Portugal and Ireland. It adds up to about half of western Europe directly providing health services to residents.
It is true on the other hand that most of these countries have co-pays or deductibles, as well as often not covering dental and mental health (or covering them in a very restricted way, so that in practice most people use private providers). But from here, M4A does not look radical, possibly a bit naive for eliminating co-pays that can be designed to avoid frivolous use and may be one reason why health care spending is lower here.
What is radical from an European point of view is that Sanders wanted to introduce european-style universal services (health and education) without increasing the taxes on the middle class, which here are higher because we pay for our own health insurance trough general taxation. This is probably what resulted in the insanely high wealth tax proposals (which may still not have been sufficient to plug the hole).
One thing I’d like to know is whether there have been studies on how media coverage affects outcomes in primaries. I am not a diehard Bernie fan (although I do like him) but I always felt like the media treated Bernie as a long-shot and that treatment affects votes. I’d like to know if media didn’t make presumptions about who was a front runner and who was a reach, whether that would affect outcomes at all.
That's the usual story, but it leaves out three important things.
1. Pre-2016 Trump
2. Clinton derangement syndrome
3. Post-2016 Trump.
1. Up to the day of the 2016 election itself, everyone thought that Trump would lose whoever ran (also, the rest of the Repug's primary candidates were uninspired in the extreme), and that it just didn't matter what we did. That turns out to have been incredibly stupid, but it's what everyone was saying.
(Everyone missed that Trump was putting on great shows, shows that were lots of fun for the fairly well-off rural demographic that got off their butts and voted. (The median family income of Trump voters in 2016 was substantially higher than that for non-Hispanic whites, i.e. far better off than the most affluent demographic in the US.))
2. The NYT (and quite a few other folks) hate the Clintons. It's nuts and sick, but it is what it is. The NYT did their level best to destroy Hillary, and succeeded. They ran more Clinton email stories than any other story in their history. (OK, maybe an exaggeration, but it's close to being right.) They ran two hit pieces by M. B.D. Dowd the Sunday before election. Being the NYC town newspaper, they should have known how important it was the Trump not become president and they should have acted that way. I will never, ever again, pay one red cent to the NYT. (And I didn't even mention the US' remaining sexism. Sigh.)
But the whole gestalt going into the 2016 election was that we couldn't possibly lose whatever we did, so we did Hillary vs. Bernie. In retrospect, that was pretty dumb.
3. Having seen what a disaster Trump was, we largely got our act together, and Bernie got ignored. (Bernie's weakness in the Black and other minority communities was also a contributing factor, i.e. in South Carolina.)
FWIW, 4. Bernie has spent his whole career insisting he isn't a Democrat, irritating many of us no end. And, by the way, every good thing the US has ever done (SS, Medicare, etc. etc. etc.) has been done by Dems against the rabid and violent opposition of the Repugs. We've always been the good guys. We don't need no whiny socialist from Vermont to tell us what's good/bad. (OK, that last bit's obnoxious, but it's what I think. (I'm old. Get off my lawn.))
Biden has absolutely no intention of undoing all his hard work ruining millions of young people's lives by saddling them with non-dischargeable student debt. Just like he has no intention to do anything to help the millions of poor black people in jail because of his insane crime bills.
Why do journalists act like anarchism is an ideology defined by opposition to windows?
Nothing is effectively moved to the left until Biden follows through on those proposal. There's a possibility that Biden's administration will just be a another working-with-conservatives bunch of centrists. I wouldn't be surprised at all.
Bernie can still make waves from the Senate, he has a bigger platform than ever. We need him to, and we shouldn't be calling the end of his influence.
Revolutions happen quickly or fail. But movements are slow and build over years.
Let's see how damaged the conservative party becomes as it splinters into post-trumpism. Progressives might end up with a more factional success than you think.
Buttigieg in the cabinet? No smokey rooms?
One can't seriously assess the relative success of an outsider campaign in the 2020 Dem primary divorced from the context in which it happened. Most significantly, an incumbent Donald Trump and the emergence of COVID-19. The abject fear of Trump being re-elected unquestionably drove voters toward a candidate they perceived (perhaps correctly) as the safe option. Couple that with the fact that Sanders' insurgent, people-powered campaign had one of its key advantages– face-to-face organizing –completely removed from its playbook.
What success Bernie did have, as well as Trump's win in 2016, show that there's a broad distrust of the establishment parties and disruptive alternatives have a strong appeal.
Observing that Bernie failed in the face of intense headwinds–some structural, some historical accidents–and concluding that people will now just resign themselves to incremental change through our system of electoral politics despite observing its near complete corporate capture, despite it continuing to enable finance capital to bilk the nation's wealth, and despite the ongoing devolution into a techno-feudal gig economy with ever more pervasive precarity… that's just burying your head in the sand.
Two things
1. Even if Bernie had gotten FDR like majorities (55% plus popular vote, more than 60 Senators, 55% supporters in the House) the most that could have been achieved was the next stage in the New Deal /Fair Deal/New Frontier/Great Society tradition and Bernie was aware of that and happy if that had been the outcome. Bernie himself defined his democratic socialism as the implementation of FDR's Second Bill of Rights.
The US would be more like Denmark or Norway but not more radical than that.
It's true that his platform was more radical in 2020 but that was to outflank Warren who had moved to where Bernie was in 2016.
2. People around Bernie in 2016 didn't really think he would win the nomination. They had to beg Bernie to run and the goal was that Hillary wouldn't move too far to the right and hopefully move the Dems a bit to the left.
The goal was the same in 2020 (anyone getting the Dem nomination not moving to the right and hopefully moving the Dem party a bit to the left.)
There was a moment in February where it really did seem like Bernie had a chance at getting the nomination but it was brief.
The future of the Bernie movement is Justice Dem types and the Squad. I know a lot of people who where talking about revolution in 2016 but are either running for office or supporting AOC type campaigns.
This is the way.
Just wanted to let you know that for some reason Protonmail deemed this article as fit for the spam folder. The rest of your articles aren't treated as such.
He failed. Good. The normalization of collectivism, and frankly, the abandonment of free markets by both parties is one of the great tragedies of our age, and all we can hope for now is that the Democrats begin to reflect more of the policies of the wealthy who are joining. I sympathize with Bernie supporters, and applaud their ends, but the means suggested would end up backfiring entirely.
" Only Britain’s NHS, which actually provides health services in addition to insuring the populace, is to the left of M4A."
And the Portuguese Serviço Nacional de Saúde (who is very similar to the NHS) - in Portugal, the "ADSE para todos" (a kind of "Medicare for All" - give to all people a kind of public health insurance that now is only to civil servants) is a slogan of the right-wing and the far-right.