It’s
nearly a year and a half until the next presidential election, but I know who I
hope will win that election: Senator Bernie Sanders. For over 45 years, our
country has suffered from a refusal to face up to the causes and consequences
of an increasingly grotesque economic inequality. Our society and economy are now divided
between a handful of individuals and families who possess obscene amounts of
wealth, and the overwhelming majority of the middle and working class, who
struggle to find jobs, to provide for themselves and their families, and to
live in security and happiness.
Those
few wealthy individuals have increasingly hijacked our political system, using
their massive wealth to commandeer the loyalties of politicians, who not only
vote in fundamentalist lockstep with the wishes of their paymasters, but stack
the Supreme Court with justices prepared to privilege the rights of
corporations over those of citizens.
Most
politicians in the Democratic and Republican parties are singularly
ill-equipped to discuss economic inequality, and most members of the latter see
its increase as an indicator of a healthy, virtuous economy.
One
stand-out exception is Bernie Sanders, a democratic socialist and independent
Senator from Vermont. In an era when
politicians resemble contortionists more than they do ethical agents of change,
Sanders is unapologetic about his left-wing ideology, which positions him
diametrically opposite the right-wing consensus which has given so much power
to the super-rich and the financial sector at the expense of labor and the
overwhelming majority of our citizenry.
Many
Americans, having been trained since infancy to think of socialism as the stuff
of Stalinism and gulags, might balk at the thought of a democratic socialist
for President. Republicans will invoke
the spectre of a planned economy and fearmonger about the dangers of
redistributing wealth.
But
Americans should know that Bernie Sanders’ democratic socialism underpins the
political economies of many European countries where the quality of life for
the average citizen is far higher than in the United States, and where citizens
enjoy more political rights. Democratic
socialism would certainly require more substantial public investment, and
therefore taxes, particularly from the super-rich who, in the United States,
refuse to pay back their fair share. But
citizens in social democracies receive in exchange economic security, universal
access to healthcare, free university access, and a host of other benefits and
protections designed to shield people from misfortune, fear, and poverty.
Democratic
socialism also calls for the state to take a more active hand in managing the
economy. Sanders, for example, has
called for sustained investment in our country’s ramshackle infrastructure, a
move which could remake our energy sector, create a great many jobs, improve
transportation, and revitalize our economy.
It is this kind of ethical intervention—with an eye to making
investments that benefit a large number of people and advance the public
interest—that frightens the Republican Party when they talk about “big
government”, and which is spurned by the invertebrates in the Democratic Party
who recite the fairytale of “free trade” to comfort themselves.
But
make no mistake, we currently live in a planned economy. The difference between what we have now and
what Bernie Sanders advocates when he talks about higher, fairer taxes, and
investment in the public sector, is that our existing economy is planned in
places we can’t see, for the welfare of people who are ashamed to participate
openly in the democratic process, by people over whom we exercise no influence
and can’t hold accountable.
Sanders
is unapologetic in his rejection of this economy, just as he is staunch in his
support of organized labor. However
imperfect, labor is nonetheless the best protector of the welfare of not just
union members, but middle- and working-class citizens across our economy.
Sanders
was also a steadfast opponent of the Iraq war and of the secretive and unaccountable
security state that emerged after 9/11.
The Iraq war not only led to the deaths of thousands of Americans and
hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, but spread non-state terrorism across the
Middle East, destabilized the region, and created a new generation of threats
(including ISIS) with which we are contending today because of the
short-sightedness of most Republican and Democratic politicians.
The
American security state, defended and constructed by leaders from both parties,
has proved unaccountable and irresponsible, breaking the law as it swept up the
information of blameless citizens and created a climate of fear and political
intimidation, where democratic
citizens are surveilled with the connivance of corporate power.
Few
politicians had the guts to push back against the claims leveled by the Bush
administration as they launched their illegal, immoral, and ill-judged war of
aggression in Iraq, and few have pushed back against the security state.
Bernie
Sanders, in word and in deed, has defended those—whether working citizens,
veterans, the unemployed, or the victims of U.S. colonialism—who are preyed
upon by those with massive wealth and power.
Sanders’
only opponent in the Democratic primary is a deeply-unserious, dangerously
opportunistic, dreadfully flaky former Senator and Secretary of State.
Hillary
Clinton, who supported the war in Iraq, defended U.S. terrorism abroad, and
promotes Israeli colonialism has as many positions on any given issue as the
Koch Brothers have spent dollars on it. She
has dismissed grassroots protests against economic inequality in speeches to
Goldman Sachs, pledging to protect the financial sector that Sanders would
dramatically reform.
Bernie
Sanders has led opposition to the Trans Pacific Partnership, a “free trade”
agreement that would set back international and domestic human rights,
environmental, and labor legislation by decades, taking us to a state that
would resemble the nineteenth century, from whence the modern Republican Party
draws its inspiration. TPP is
inexplicably being pushed by the Obama administration, and Hillary Clinton was
a major supporter of the agreement, although in recent weeks (thanks to Sanders
and Elizabeth Warren), she has been forced to alter her position and retreat
into her sturdiest redoubt of dismissive silence.
That,
in essence, is the trouble with Clinton’s deeply unserious and irresponsible
bid for the presidency. Today, many of
her utterances will be closer to Sanders than one might suspect. The problem with Clinton’s professed concern
for the welfare of the working and middle classes in the U.S. is that if we
look back just a few months, she
was inevitably saying something quite difference. Her support for U.S. terrorism and neo-conservatism,
her defense of Wall Street and the economic inequality it creates, and her embrace
of the inequality at the heart of her husband’s version of globalization all
make the prospect of a Clinton presidency frightening, and suggest that she
might be more at home in a Republican primary.
There
are stylistic differences between Sanders and Clinton as well, which get to
something more fundamental, a kind of basic honesty. Clinton unilaterally deleted thousands of
e-mails which should have been archived, intentionally or otherwise subverting
the democratic process and accountability.
Her campaigns chase opinion polls and construct tortured positions on
policy matters of life and death, designed to appease Washington opinion makers
rather than benefit her constituents.
She hoovers up campaign cash from the super rich, who are clearly
expecting something in return, and wouldn’t keep giving if Clinton hadn’t
delivered in the past. She represents a
global foundation that is cosy
with some of the most despicable regimes on the planet.
Each Clintonian campaign pronouncement involves a hundred
hangers-on, laboring over its every contour.
But that’s the extent of Clinton’s promise for our beleaguered economy. Her sympathies do not align well with the
needs of our country’s economic majority.
Sanders is blunt in his desire to remake our country in a truly
revolutionary fashion. He eschews the
monarchical trappings that define the dynasties competing for high office, and
does not deign to cloak his ideology in the gibberish of unrealistic, dishonest
anti-politics.
A moment when our country is faced with daunting challenges is
no time for a morally and ideologically peripatetic lightweight like
Clinton. We need someone with Sanders’
character and someone with his views to take on the grab-bag of psychopaths
competing for the Republican nomination.
Carly Fiorina, a CEO famous for firing thousands of workers,
railed against a broken government in a video launching her campaign, minute
and a half whine, with all the substance of a Donald Trump monologue. Marco Rubio gave an acerebral speech at the
last GOP convention on “American exceptionalism”, ignoring all of the ways in
which a country this wealth is most exceptional for its failure to provide for
its citizens.
Scott Walker of Wisconsin has launched a series of savage
attacks on the working class, comparing
union members to ISIS in his bid to destroy the public sphere in his home
state.
Ted Cruz and Rand Paul celebrate economic inequality and have
sought to use the Senate as a forum to bring to life their pathological lie
that “Government doesn’t work”. Jeb Bush
won’t get the vote of his own mother, although his brother will likely
support him, since Jeb and Dick Cheney are the only other men left in America who think the Iraq war was a good thing.
Commentators have referred to the Republican primary as a “clown
car”, but these are people who pose a clear and serious threat to the future of
our country. Most of them have quite
openly pledged their allegiance to anti-tax fundamentalist groups, and many of
them embrace bigotry and discrimination.
Bernie Sanders offers a clear, ethical, democratic alternative
to the danger posed by the Republicans and Hillary Clinton. He is staunchly committed to addressing
economic inequality, firmly opposed to an imperial foreign policy, committed to
the welfare of the middle- and working-class, and unafraid to say as
much…loudly and consistently.
In the first day of his campaign, Sanders raised more money than
any of the Republican candidates and unlike
the Republicans and Hillary Clinton, his financial support is genuinely
grassroots, explaining why he is the most consistent candidate when it
comes to advocating the removal of toxic and undemocratic money from our
politics, and also indicating the breadth of support for his candidacy.
Sanders democratic socialism has the potential to capture not
only the imagination of the traditional left-wing of the Democratic Party. His views about what a moral, fair society
should look like speak profoundly to the discontent of the organized working
class, those who were drawn to the Tea Party only to find their movement
captured by the Koch Empire and its ilk, and anyone in the United States who,
through no fault of their own, has faced hard times and uncertainty while a
class of plutocrats amasses ever-greater wealth, and the political power that
accompanies such wealth.
Bernie
Sanders offers truly revolutionary politics: the opportunity to upend a system
that has endured far too long at the expense of far too many people. I’m supporting his campaign, have donated money, and will give my
time. I hope that others will take a
serious look at what he has to offer and consider doing the same.
