Bernie Sanders says that team is a failure, even a fraud. It’s not truly “progressive.” It’s a bunch of sellouts. It hasn’t taken us to the promised land of Denmark. A large part of it supported the war in Iraq. It’s not willing to support the “political revolution” necessary to effect real change in American politics and society. The Netroots rebellion of a decade ago challenged the party to live up to its principles. Sanders and his voters are calling for a new set of principles.
.. Sanders is a critic not just of the Democratic party but of the thrust of 30 years of American politics. He’s hostile to the tradition of friendliness to markets at home and abroad, openness to foreign trade, and support for America’s role as guarantor of international security. The Democratic party has been open to an alliance with portions of Wall Street for decades. Sanders vehemently rejects that alliance. He doesn’t want to regulate the banks. He wants to break them up.
.. But I must admit a feeling of pleasure in the way Sanders has exposed the liberal Democratic establishment for what it is. These people are so self-absorbed and self-congratulatory that they do not even conceive of themselves as an establishment.
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/430875/bernie-sanders-hillary-clinton-didnt-expect-such-challenge
Hillary’s Sincerity Problem
For instance, whenever she’s asked an awkward question she laughs so artificially it makes my dogs bark at the TV screen. When asked if she “wiped” her server, she responded, “Like with a cloth or something?” No doubt she thought this was a clever retort, but the retort landed squarely in the land between sincerity and humor known as failed sarcasm. Almost all of her “jokes” and a lot of her “sincerity” land there because the only feeling she’s really in touch with is resentment at having to answer to all the little people. Bill Clinton could have sold the line about being “broke” coming out of the White House because Bill can fake sincerity the way a prostitute can fake enjoyment; he knows exactly what it’s supposed to sound like.
.. Anyway, back to Bernie and Brecht. My problem with Sanders is that he’s ultimately a coward. He talks a great game about being dedicated to a “political revolution,” but he is utterly unwilling to employ the means required to achieve the ends desired. For instance, Sanders is happy to denounce the political system as corrupt, but refuses — save by innuendo — to connect the corruption of the political system to the corruption of House Clinton.
.. It’s not artful and not a smear. At least by the standard of Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton is incredibly corrupt. The Clinton Foundation alone is a violation of everything Sanders stands for. It’s one giant access-selling enterprise masquerading as a charity.
.. The Clintons rented out the Lincoln bedroom, sold pardons — including to a shadowy fugitive billionaire! Talk about catering to the “billionaire class” — and drained so much money from foreign donors (some of it laundered through a Buddhist temple) that 94 people either fled the country, refused to testify, or pled the Fifth.
.. Bernie Sanders has to believe Hillary Clinton is part of the problem. But he won’t say so, save to prattle on about Clinton’s super PACs and speaking fees. That’s amateur-hour stuff. It’s academic-seminar-level griping, not revolution-fomenting. He wants to talk about the system, but he won’t do what is minimally required to change it. And right now, the first step on that long road is steamrolling Hillary Clinton. It’s like saying you want to do whatever it takes to fight malaria, but refusing to say much about the huge, sprawling, and fetid marshlands in the middle of downtown. The Clintons are swamp creatures, taking what they need and leaving in their retromingent wake the stench of corruption.
.. If he honestly believes the stakes are what he says they are, then surely it’s worth getting a little dirty. It’s not like the Clintons aren’t willing to get dirty.
.. Gaslighting is when you violate all sorts of norms of decent behavior and pretend that the people who notice or care are the weird ones. Hillary Clinton’s crimes are a thousand times worse than the accidental outing of Valerie Plame.
White America’s ‘Broken Heart’
On the left, the white vote was nearly evenly split in Iowa between Hillary Clinton, a pragmatist who believes that the system can be fixed, and Bernie Sanders, a revolutionary who believes that system must be dismantled. At least on the Democratic side, age, income and liberalism seemed to be the fault lines — older, wealthier, more moderate people preferred Clinton and younger, less wealthy and “very liberal” people preferred Sanders.
.. “Something startling is happening to middle-aged white Americans. Unlike every other age group, unlike every other racial and ethnic group, unlike their counterparts in other rich countries, death rates in this group have been rising, not falling.”
He rattled off the reasons for this rise — suicide, alcoholism and drug overdoses — and then concluded that these white Americans were dying of “a broken heart.”
.. “What the American people understand is this country was based and is based on fairness.” Nonwhite people in this country understand that as a matter of history and heritage this simply isn’t true, but it is a hallowed ideal for white America and one that centers the America ethos.
Indeed, the current urgency about inequality as an issue is really about how some white Americans are coming to live an experience that many minorities in this country have long lived — structural inequity has leapt the racial barrier — and that the legacy to which they fully assumed they were heirs is increasingly beyond their grasp.
.. Last month, the MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes tweeted: “This campaign is starting to feel more and more like a long, national nervous breakdown.” For white America, I believe this is true.
Trump, Sanders and the Revolt Against Decadence
.. the worst-case scenarios of the post-Great Recession era haven’t materialized. Obamacare is limping along without an imminent death spiral, and health care costs aren’t rising as fast as feared. The deficit has fallen a bit, and inflation is extraordinarily low. The stock market is wobbly, but we haven’t had a double-dip recession.
On the cultural front, out-of-wedlock births are no longer rising. Abortion rates have fallen. Illegal immigration rates are down.
.. But it resonates because the diagnosis resonates — especially with older Americans, who grew up amid the post-World War II boom, the vaulting optimism of the space age, the years when big government and big business were seen as effective and patriotic rather than sclerotic and corrupt. Trump is offering nostalgia, but it’s not a true reactionary’s lament. He wants to take us back to a time when the future seemed great, amazing, fantastic.
.. After Obamacare became law it seemed to many people that the welfare state project was basically complete, that the future of American liberalism mostly involved tweaking entitlements around the edges to keep them solvent. But Sanders is telling liberals, younger liberals especially, that the heroic age of liberalism isn’t over yet, that they can have a welfare state that’s far more amazing and fantastic than the one their forefathers constructed.
.. But the envy of more heroic moments, the desire to just do something to prove your society’s vitality — Invade Iraq to remake the Middle East! Open Germany’s borders! Elect Trump or Sanders president! — can be a very dangerous sensibility.