Bernie Sanders and the New Populism
If you step back a bit, though, all of the players look more like pieces in a board game, whose rules and layout are predetermined. As Karl Marx famously remarked, in “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon,” “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”
Going into the 2016 Presidential election, our economic inheritance is forty years of income stagnation and rising inequality, which culminated, in 2007 and 2008, in a global financial crisis and a government rescue of bankers and other financial interests. Yes, this bailout has been followed by half a decade of modest G.D.P. growth and strong job growth, but the narrative of inequity, unfairness, and frustrated expectations remains fixed in the public consciousness.
As the Financial Times commentator Martin Wolf pointed out on Wednesday, Latin American-style income distribution leads to Latin American-style politics—populism of the left and the right.
.. In a January poll of likely voters in the Iowa Democratic primary, forty-three per cent of respondents described themselves as “socialist.” And it isn’t just Iowa. A 2011 study by the Pew Research Center found that forty-nine per cent of millennials—defined as Americans between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine—view socialism favorably, compared to forty-three per cent who view it unfavorably.
.. To my mind, the most striking thing about the Iowa poll wasn’t that virtually half of likely Democratic voters embraced the designation “socialist.” It was that eighty-eight per cent agreed that the word “optimist” described them.
.. In voting for Syriza and Podemos, the Greeks and Spanish weren’t indicating that they wanted to nationalize the means of production or bring back the Comintern. They were rejecting austerity policies imposed by a political system that seemed beholden to bureaucrats in Brussels and bankers in Frankfurt, and they were calling for a return to the Enlightenment ideals of popular sovereignty and popular participation.
.. For all his crankiness, Sanders is tapping into this optimism and providing an outlet for it.
.. If you look at the rise of populism in other countries, you will find that urging people to be realistic is a common reaction from establishment politicians and their supporters. It is a risky response, though. Trotted out too often, or too vehemently, it can make those who rely on it sound suspiciously like one of the “mothers and fathers” that Bob Dylan addressed back in 1964 ..