Seeking to be very brief, for those unfamiliar with events in my city of residence, the city of Northampton, Massachusetts decided that this year, in honor of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, it would install a small banner with the slogan "Black Lives Matter" above the entrance to Northampton City Hall. For my part, I found nothing particularly controversial about its decision to do so. While I have not actively taken part in any local Black Lives Matter mobilizations to protest police brutality against African-American populations, I sympathize with the aims of the movement. In broader terms, government entities at the federal, state, and local levels need to engage in a thorough and evolving criticism of current organizational forms and operations in law enforcement and criminal justice/prisons in regard to the particular ways in which these processes both possess an implicit racial dynamic and contribute to our present understandings of race in the U.S. That is to say, the current problems with police brutality against African-American communities are not going to be resolved by a handful of indictments and/or firings of blatantly racist officers, or the wholesale shuffling of particular police departments to mirror the racial distribution of host communities. Rather, law enforcement and criminal justice need a more fundamental reconsideration concerning, in particular, the role of violence in policing practices.
Having said this, it is indisputable that the Black Lives Matter movement is significantly invested in such a criticism of law enforcement and criminal justice in the U.S. Placing a banner outside the Northampton City Hall absolutely advances a political statement with regard to the practices of law enforcement officers across the U.S., including the Northampton Police Department. Again, this is not a question of which departments are guilty of explicit racial discrimination in police practices, but how all police operations and organizational (e.g. hiring) practices may be inscribed with particular racialist ideas that effectively contribute to the subordination of African-Americans. In this manner, putting up a banner effectively suggests the need for a broader conversation about how law enforcement and criminal justice must evolve in order to support the full enfranchisement of African-Americans as coequal citizens and full-fledged human beings entitled to basic human rights. The fact that such a movement has arisen in the U.S. is symbolic of the fact that the proposition that Black Lives Matter is, in fact, open for debate - a plethora of police incidents, punctuated by numerous deaths of unarmed African-American assailants in police custody, constitute practical arguments to the contrary in the course of such a debate. As such, it is entirely true that, by installing a banner outside City Hall, the government of Northampton has palpably intervened in a debate of the value of African-American lives relative to the actions of law enforcement.
On the other hand, to the extent that we recognize the installation to be a contested political statement, we further need to take a minute to ponder the alternative. That is to say, supporters of the law enforcement community may be right to say that the placement of the banner in some way constitutes a criticism against police, but the only other alternative that I can contemplate is to explicitly argue that police violence against African-Americans, including lethal violence against unarmed individuals, is justifiable if only because Black Lives Don't Matter. If no one really wants to make this argument, then the notion that law enforcement practices do not need to be thoroughly examined and reformed in ways that both recognize the practical reality of race and make explicit provisions to redress recurring grievances within African-American communities amounts to the suggestion that it is acceptable to question the humanity of African-Americans. In this respect, I have no doubt that the Black Lives Matter banner is troubling to certain individuals in the Northampton community because of what it certainly implies with regard to law enforcement, but, in the absence of coming to some common recognition that Black Lives do indeed Matter and that we need to take proper actions in the reform of law enforcement and criminal justice to reflect such a reality, the actions of the city government certainly have merit as an incitement to engage in a discussion of what is to be done.
Friday, January 22, 2016
The Problem with Bernie?
This morning, I spent a bus ride down from Northampton to downtown Holyoke attempting to assuage my friend Scott's concerns regarding the rise of Bernie Sanders, particularly among his Democratic Party friends and online colleagues. In the end, my conclusion that it didn't really matter whether Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders won the Democratic Party's nomination seemed like it was less than satisfying for my friend - he spent most of the ride coming up with reasons why he thought a Sanders nomination, let alone a Sanders presidency, would be entirely futile and dangerous, not in the sense that it would portend the initiation of radical socialist policies that might be bad for the health of the U.S. economy, but because it would invite a Republican presidential victory, perhaps even by the likes of Donald Trump!! For some reason, Scott and many other otherwise Democratic and independent progressives can't fathom the idea that Sanders could win the Democratic nomination and, yet, further, cannot bear the idea of Sanders winning the Democratic nomination, in their certainty that no self-proclaimed socialist will ever win the U.S. presidency. The fact that I'm so confident that Senator Sanders' surge in the polls is neither dangerous nor indicative of any future radical turn in federal politics is probably suggestive of my broader cynicism toward the federal electoral process and the federal (Constitutional) project, per se, and my faith that, to whatever extent that Sanders' apparent rise within the Democratic primaries indicates a broader anti-institutional reaction among younger, progressive Democrats, the persistent rise of Trump and Cruz on the other side reflects a more important and more corrosive dynamic within the Republican Party, likely to promote mass defections from moderately conservative Republicans and independent voters to any Democratic candidate in the November general elections. With this in mind, I want to use this post to develop a few reasons why, as someone at least nominally progressive in his political views, I am neither terribly excited about Sanders' run for the Democratic nomination, nor frightened that he is turning over Hillary Clinton's onion cart in the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, nor terrified of the improbable image of Sanders' representing the Democratic Party in the general election.
1. In contests between policy nerds and realists, the realists typically win. If there is no other reason not to fear Bernie Sanders and his potential to overthrow of the Democratic Party's best chance to retain the White House in 2016 with Hillary Clinton, then it should be that, ultimately, the defenders of the best, most ideologically pure and most innovative, rationally conceived policy agendas typically lose elections against candidates who are better at selling tepid, ill-conceived, and generally unsatisfying compromise agendas as feasible solutions for a fractious democratic legislative process to the wider electorate. If elections in the U.S., either at the primary or general level, were contests exclusively decided among intellectuals with a sustained interest in rational, enlightened policy development, then the public policy process in the U.S. would be rigorously technocratic and the political process would manifest a transparent struggle between competing strategic partisan agendas ideally oriented toward achieving ideologically pure partisan goals. On the contrary, the electoral process is about appearances, about selling personalities and advancing vague, poorly conceived policy visions that, in the event of an electoral victory, will be eviscerated through legislative and administrative/bureaucratic rule-making processes, challenged against Constitutional standards enforced through judicial precedence, and, finally, subjected to the court of public opinion under the influence of partisan media coverage/propaganda - such is the history of the Affordable Care and Patient Protection Act, notwithstanding the best efforts of hundreds of legislators and governmental executives and thousands of well educated and well intentioned bureaucrats to envision a modest and rational reform of access to health insurance to a larger segment of the U.S. population. The broader electorate in the U.S. does not need to plead ignorance with respect to the specifics of public policy or the policy positions of candidates for public office when political campaign organizations, political action committees, and partisan mass media outlets do their best to obfuscate the stakes of the democratic process, from municipal mayoral elections to the federal presidential contest. As such, it would seem much more fortuitous to an electoral candidate to be an efficient manager of personality promotion, while the consummate elected public executive should not be a tireless advocate for an ideologically consistent policy agenda but an open and willing advocate of wishy-washy compromise solutions and coalition building with erstwhile opponents. Having no doubt that Bernie Sanders' policy slate enjoys a much more compelling appeal among young, progressive, intellectual (and overwhelmingly White!) Democrats and left-leaning independents, concerned with economic inequality, the power of big banks, the affordability of health care, and ecological sustainability, I further have no doubt that Hillary Clinton is much better at the old-time, pre-Obama, Washington game of compromise, and, if only because she can more readily convey herself as the one candidate who can get things done, she will appeal to a broader segment of both the Democratic Party primary electorate and the general electorate, who, by and large, are more likely to be put to sleep by an in depth consideration of the merits of her policy proposals in relation to those of Senator Sanders.
2. The notion that a Sanders win in both Iowa and New Hampshire will sustain a critical mass of support for Sanders against a Clinton nomination going into the Southern "Super Tuesday" primaries is overblown - Sanders needs a massive turnout of committed, young, progressive Democrats (especially in states that do not allow independents to vote in party primaries!) to close a range on Clinton in the Southern Democratic primaries. Returning to this post and this conclusion in the aftermath of Sanders' decisive win in New Hampshire, in which he carried several key demographics including women under 40 by significant margins against Clinton, I will maintain the same position regarding Sanders. The Nevada Democratic Party caucuses are closed to independents, and, apparently, the Nevada Democratic Party has a large proportion of Hispanic voters who may be less inclined to support Sanders. Why this should be the case for a state that experienced such a steep decline in economic activity and such a crisis in its housing markets during the last recession is not entirely clear - Hispanic voters have as much of an interest in many of the economic issues that Senator Sanders has emphasized as White Anglo Democratic voters in Nevada should have. Nothing from the results in Iowa and New Hampshire suggests that Sanders should lack appeal among Hispanic voters. In fact, in the most recent (2/8-2/10) TargetPoint/Washington Free Beacon poll from Nevada of 1,236 likely Democratic voters, Clinton and Sanders both stand at 45 percent (see HuffPost Pollster, "2016 Nevada Democratic Presidential Caucus - Clinton 45%, Sanders 45% (TargetPoint/Washington Free Beacon 2/8-2/10), at: http://elections.huffingtonpost.com/pollster/polls/targetpoint-r-washington-free-beacon-23746). On the other hand, the circumstances for South Carolina's open primaries on February 27, a state with a large percentage of Black Democratic voters, seem, at least for now, to favor Clinton decisively, even if, again, there is no apparent reason why this should be the case in regard to the Clintons' record with African-Americans relative to that of Sanders. Further, a string of additional Southern primaries are to follow on March 1 (Super Tuesday), which might be expected to mirror anticipated results from South Carolina. However, both Massachusetts and Vermont vote as well on Super Tuesday and both might, presumably, go to Sanders. At the present time, Southern Black Democrats seem key to Clinton's taking a significant share of Southern primaries, but so much of this will rely on Sanders' momentum from Iowa and New Hampshire falling off prior to South Carolina and Super Tuesday and, moreover, it assumes that Sanders cannot broaden his appeal to African-Americans by crafting a unique message targeting African-American voters, especially pursuing reform of law enforcement and criminal justice (if only through an especially active Justice Department) as key areas of interest in the Black Lives Matter movement. Notwithstanding his meeting with the Reverend Al Sharpton on Wednesday, Sanders has given no indication that he will alter his central economic message in any way, and this is a problem if he needs to extend a hand to African-Americans with something more than leftist economism. There are simply not enough young, White, progressive Democrats in the South to turn these states in Sanders' direction.
3. Sanders' policy agenda is not radical, his support for single-payer health insurance notwithstanding. His "socialist" platform embodies the controversial (and oddly backward-looking) notion that it would be a good thing for the U.S. to jump start the government-centric project of the New Deal in ways that merely reinforce existing institutions like Social Security.
Emphatically, Senator Sanders' agenda seeks to preserve and broaden the agenda of the Rooseveltean New Deal where the federal government left off with it in 1946. If, in the run up to the 1946 Republican/Southern Democratic conservative victory, such figures on the labor left as Walter Reuther of UAW envisioned a publicly financed national health insurance system as a legitimate goal for the splintering New Deal Congressional coalition and backed by President Truman, then the crushing defeat of progressives in the fall of 1946 set the federal government on a course toward moderation in the development of federal policies oriented toward economic equality and democratization. In this respect, I would not view President Johnson's "Great Society" as a substantial aberration in this longer transition toward conservatism. Reflecting on the formulation of economic policies in the period since the Reagan (counter-)revolution, it seems unlikely that a vast majority of the American electorate would amicably embrace a single payer health insurance system, even if we may be moving in that direction. More pointedly, it would seem impossible for any President to successfully push enabling legislation for such a system through a Congress that disproportionately reflects conservative interests across a broad range of regional constituencies where progressive interests are still not able to dislodge sitting incumbents given, among other things, Congressional districting. Any attempt to set up a single-payer system right now would certainly be dead on arrival. The same can also be said with regard to an initiative to make public higher education free to all college-bound students. Moreover, it is questionable that a Sanders administration would even be able to fiscally reinforce the finances of the Social Security Administration, for both retiree benefits and survivor/disability benefits. In my view, we have arrived at a crucial juncture in the war against the New Deal where the idea of attacking a project like the Social Security Act through the back door, by insisting we should "save" the system by privatizing it and leaving the solvency of a collective, pay-as-you-go retirement insurance system in the hands of individual contributors to invest as they see fit, has gone fully mainstream, in an era where private pensions have virtually disappeared and joint-contributory 401k plans have been shaken by wild fluctuations in equity and bond markets. With all this in mind, you have to wonder how it is even possible that initiatives that enjoyed broad public support three generations ago (if not the support of the powers that be) could now be considered off the deep end leftist radicalism.
In this regard, what would I consider truly radical, and what would I expect Senator Sanders to advance as an agenda for the next Presidency if he was an actual "radical?" What about the idea of guaranteeing every American a minimum yearly income through the tax system by means of aggressively expanding earned income tax credits to include virtually every individual with a job and with an income under $30,000 per year? What about the idea of fiscally supporting riskier alternative forms of entrepreneurship, especially workers' cooperatives, to generate a hybrid market-centric and non-market, non-capitalist subset of the broader U.S. economy without having to rely solely on the mechanisms of corporate banking and finance? What about reinstating and reinforcing the pre-clearance procedures of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, to ensure that new progressive voting blocs do not get locked out of the electoral process across broad regions where conservative forces have conspired to stay in power forever by stifling democracy? What about opening the nation's door and our arms to millions of refugees from the drug wars in Central America and from the battle between Assad and the Islamic State in Syria, and becoming more serious about collectively bearing the burden of being the world's super power to push for long term solutions in both of these foreign policy theaters, even if that might mean raising taxes to pay for more, not less, military spending and, possibly, reinstating an egalitarian institution of compulsory military service for both American men and women? What about making serious federal fiscal investments in renewable energy, enacting carbon taxes, and raising federal gasoline taxes substantially to pay for mass transit infrastructures in regions unable to tangibly make such investments? In all fairness, I like what Sanders has advanced as a policy agenda so far, certainly more than I like what I've heard from the Clinton campaign, even if I thoroughly doubt Sanders would be capable of enacting any of it. That stated, it is an agenda that looks backward to what might have been if only we had given the New Deal more time to restructure the American economy and the American way of life in a manner that would have made us look more like Western Europe has looked for the last half century. The present moment demands a different breed of radicalism more in tune with the problems our country faces right now, at home and abroad.
4. For all their great policy ideas, neither Clinton nor Sanders will be capable of enacting the most moderate of their ideas into law without a decisive Democratic seizure of both houses of Congress, an outcome that is distinctly unlikely even if the Republican Party advances a presidential candidate and a platform thoroughly out of touch with emerging influential electoral blocs.
I think my previous comments should have adequately conveyed the point that, while not being especially radical in the broader light of history in American domestic policy development, Senator Sanders' ideas on domestic policy are nonetheless too radical to secure a Congressional consensus to enact any of his agenda. Moreover, the tepid sort of Wall Street reforms (never mind reinstating the Glass-Steagall firewall between commercial and investment banks!) and gentle tweaking of the Affordable Care Act's administration suggested by the Clinton campaign appear similarly dead on arrival in the present context of Washington politics. I do not think that this is the case because the general American electorate has become unimpeachably conservative in its political outlook. In the end, I would absolutely hold to the conclusion that either Senator Sanders or Secretary Clinton is more electable than Senator Cruz, Donald Trump, or Jeb Bush. Furthermore, a Democratic seizure of control in the U.S. Senate is not entirely impossible if unlikely for 2016, with Republican seats in Illinois, New Hampshire, and Wisconsin conceivably up for grabs. Fundamentally, where statewide electorates are concerned, the Democratic Party and progressive constituencies are looking at least somewhat strong in 2016. The problem is that successive redistricting of House seats by Republican controlled legislatures at the state level have left numerous states largely closed to Democratic representation. Here again, judicial challenges to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and especially the elimination of pre-clearance procedures, loom very large in the reconstruction of the American electorate to favor control by conservative constituencies notwithstanding the larger leftward turn of the American electorate. Moreover, the last three Congresses have demonstrated that, in the course of defending its nominal stake in federal legislative and policy-making, the Republican Party has turned less and less amenable to compromise with progressives in order to address subjects of concern to the entire country, even to the point that certain Republican constituencies have been willing to countenance government shutdowns as preferable to not getting their way completely in policy matters. In certain respects, this unwillingness to compromise with even moderate Democrats evokes a larger commitment by the Republican establishment to satisfy the demands of its most active and vocal constituent minorities, constituting the lingering elements of the Tea Party movement and other sections of radical libertarian and religious conservatism. For my part, I maintain the position that the development of the Tea Party and the larger rise of the Republican Party rightist base has as much to do with the skin color of the man in the Oval Office as it does with any of his agenda. It is not likely that a Presidential victory either by a nominally feminist and ambiguously Christian woman with a long, controversial familial history in politics, or by secular, democratic socialist from a Jewish background would constitute a balm for the truculent nature of Republican Congressional politics. Neither of these candidates stand a chance to achieve any of their legislative agendas. In these respects, both need to configure larger strategies to mobilize a broader section of the American electorate to act in extra-electoral capacities on push legislators, on both the federal and state levels, to enact agendas favorable to their broader visions. It seems clear that politics at the federal level may remain thoroughly dysfunctional and out of step with the broader politics of the majority of Americans for some time to come, and each of the Democratic candidates has to acknowledge this and be ready to act pragmatically in order to deal with this situation.
5. The Democratic candidacies of both Clinton and Sanders must be understood in relation to the broader, evolving structure of the 2016 elections and, in particular, in relation to the struggle between the Republican Party establishment candidates and the Republican outsiders, especially Trump. In the absence of a major shift toward a mainstream Republican candidate, neither Trump nor Cruz can defeat either Clinton or Sanders in a general election. The Cruz victory in the Iowa caucuses (a state with substantial numbers of Republican evangelicals) and the Trump victory in the New Hampshire primary election (a state with large numbers of Republican libertarians and a broad segment of moderate independent voters) both suggest that this year's Republican primary contest is turning decisively toward the rightist flanks of the Party base, to the consternation of the Party's Washington establishment. This turn is, again, unabashedly to the favor of whoever the Democratic candidate turns out to be. It might be too much to say that neither Trump nor Cruz deserves to be taken seriously as a Republican candidate for the general election, but neither of these candidates appears to pose a serious threat to poach states out of the ensemble that enabled Obama to win two terms. Further, in swing states like Missouri, North Carolina, and Virginia, the presence of a Cruz or Trump on the Republican ballot might be sufficient to turn the vote in favor of the Democratic candidate. The picture only becomes murkier if we add a forty billion dollar independent gorilla to the contest, by whom I of course mean Michael Bloomberg, who I regard as a serious contender for the Presidency. I emphatically believe that Bloomberg will declare his intention to run before the end of February. When (not if) this happens, the potential for Sanders or Clinton to win the Presidency will become a steeper climb, especially steep for Sanders. On the other hand, it will utterly doom the chances of Trump or Cruz, as if their chances were not doomed from the beginning! Bloomberg will draw votes from both sides of the political spectrum, leaving a somewhat moderate or somewhat progressive Democratic candidate to call forth an expanding and more thoroughly heterogeneous Democratic base and challenge for moderate independent voters. The Republican candidate, by contrast, will be left to draw from a declining Republican base, with less appeal to moderates. In this situation, I cannot help but assert confidently that Bloomberg is likely to win, and we would be left to contemplate the consequences of having a corporate, pro-globalization moderate in the Oval Office (a fate that doesn't seem entirely unappealing to me!).
6. What is in a word? If the Democratic Party, by some freak outcome of primary contests, selects Bernie Sanders as its presidential candidate, the broader American electorate will have to reevaluate the meaning and significance of casting a ballot for a "socialist," and what a "socialist" agenda might mean in the American context. Having made the points that I seriously believe that Bloomberg will win a three-way contest for the Presidency in November and, further, that I still think that a Sanders victory in the Southern Democratic primaries and at numerous places in the Midwest against Clinton is unlikely, let us ponder the absolutely improbable. What if Bernie Sanders wins the Democratic Party's nomination, against a plethora of super-delegate commitments to Hillary Clinton and against the apparent incapacity of Sanders to appeal to non-White segments of the Obama electorate coalition? Will a plurality of American voters be able to fathom the possibility of democratic socialist as President? In my view, the answer to this question ultimately rests with the interpretation of socialism ultimately embedded within the minds of tens of millions of American voters. In this respect, two obvious readings of socialism spring into my mind. The first, and the one that Sanders obviously believes in and wants to convince the American electorate to believe in, involves the potential trajectory of the New Deal and the actual experience of countries like Sweden, Denmark, and, a lesser extent, France or Germany, countries that have embraced a decisive role for government in improving the lives of citizens through regulation of free market activity, active engagement in labor market practices, and public management of institutions, like universal access to health care, either by direct state provision or substantial state subsidization of private agents. The other image of socialism, and the one that the Republican candidate will obviously attempt to emphasize, conveys the image of a sterile, grey, cradle-to-grave, state-driven, centrally planned economic lethargy, devoid of entrepreneurial energy, market choice, and personal freedom, in relation to the overpowering will of state bureaucrats. In short, it is the image of the former Soviet system, with or without the presence of all encompassing totalitarian dictatorship of the proletariat! Notwithstanding the presence of socialist alternatives, and especially in view of recent retractions and setbacks in European welfare states, it seems probable that more Americans will embrace the latter imagery of socialism and ignore the hopeful potential that once motivated American working people to seek the involvement and protection of the federal government in their quest for a better life, both through the provision of retirement insurance and other social spending and through active protection of workers' rights to collectively bargain with employers to achieve reasonable compensation for their labors. Emphatically, at the present time, there are simply not enough American voters who believe in the potential for the federal government to have a positive role in improving their lives, if only because the Reagan (counter-)revolution since 1980 did so thorough a practical and ideological job of destroying the capacity of the federal government to do so. On the other hand, if the general American electorate is incapable of encapsulating within its imagination the potential for a thoroughly democratic socialism in Sanders' mold, then it might be the case that support for such ideas could resonate for diverse audiences at the state level. This is unambiguously the case in Vermont! It might also be the case, given the right candidates and the right organizations in Massachusetts or New York or even California. Maybe the best answer for democratic socialists like Sanders is to think smaller and, then, network between states.
Beyond the idea that Sanders' democratic socialism needs a smaller audience and a more intimate political canvas, I think such a socialist imagery is worth evaluating on its own merits as an alternative to the rigorously individualistic and anti-state portrait of the American economy and the regular lives of American citizens. In this regard, I am not sure that a backward looking return to the New Deal is precisely what I, as an American Marxist, am looking for, even if I think it is a more comfortable image than that of the winner take all, all against all society that seems to identify contemporary American life. As someone who was trained to be an economist, I like markets and think that, for the most part, they work well relatively unregulated. I am reasonably content to endure the existence of a (global) financial sector that is relatively unleashed from the Keynesian-inspired regulations of the New Deal. I can live with the collapse of numerous New Deal and Great Society institutions, including Social Security and Medicare. I have learned to live with the reality that I am never going to retire - I am going to work until I am dead or wholly incapacitated. Such are the trajectories of the market freedoms and the antipathy toward the welfare state that we Americans have nurtured since Reagan and which a Sanders administration could never change. Perhaps I have become an unqualified cynic with regard to the potentialities for a democratic socialism, but my images of positive, progressive change in the U.S. simply do not involve a reliance on state bureaucracies or state policy. In this respect, I remain committed to the idea that we need a more collectively oriented society, burgeoned by the presence of more privately organized cooperative organizations across broader segments of everyday life, and more collective support for the aspirations of all individuals to experience fulfilling lives. To me, this implies a lot more private entrepreneurial behavior by a much broader segment of the American population, undertaken as much or more with the intent of achieving broader progressive social change as with the intent to maximize profits. It is doubtless a more hands on and challenging road to supporting human development and economic democracy, but, at least at the present time, I think it is eminently more feasible than hoping for attitudes on social welfare expenditures by either federal or state governments to change in a radical way. We need to learn to be pragmatic and work around the impediments of disadvantageous state policy (or lack of progressive policies) and the slings and arrows of global capitalism!
1. In contests between policy nerds and realists, the realists typically win. If there is no other reason not to fear Bernie Sanders and his potential to overthrow of the Democratic Party's best chance to retain the White House in 2016 with Hillary Clinton, then it should be that, ultimately, the defenders of the best, most ideologically pure and most innovative, rationally conceived policy agendas typically lose elections against candidates who are better at selling tepid, ill-conceived, and generally unsatisfying compromise agendas as feasible solutions for a fractious democratic legislative process to the wider electorate. If elections in the U.S., either at the primary or general level, were contests exclusively decided among intellectuals with a sustained interest in rational, enlightened policy development, then the public policy process in the U.S. would be rigorously technocratic and the political process would manifest a transparent struggle between competing strategic partisan agendas ideally oriented toward achieving ideologically pure partisan goals. On the contrary, the electoral process is about appearances, about selling personalities and advancing vague, poorly conceived policy visions that, in the event of an electoral victory, will be eviscerated through legislative and administrative/bureaucratic rule-making processes, challenged against Constitutional standards enforced through judicial precedence, and, finally, subjected to the court of public opinion under the influence of partisan media coverage/propaganda - such is the history of the Affordable Care and Patient Protection Act, notwithstanding the best efforts of hundreds of legislators and governmental executives and thousands of well educated and well intentioned bureaucrats to envision a modest and rational reform of access to health insurance to a larger segment of the U.S. population. The broader electorate in the U.S. does not need to plead ignorance with respect to the specifics of public policy or the policy positions of candidates for public office when political campaign organizations, political action committees, and partisan mass media outlets do their best to obfuscate the stakes of the democratic process, from municipal mayoral elections to the federal presidential contest. As such, it would seem much more fortuitous to an electoral candidate to be an efficient manager of personality promotion, while the consummate elected public executive should not be a tireless advocate for an ideologically consistent policy agenda but an open and willing advocate of wishy-washy compromise solutions and coalition building with erstwhile opponents. Having no doubt that Bernie Sanders' policy slate enjoys a much more compelling appeal among young, progressive, intellectual (and overwhelmingly White!) Democrats and left-leaning independents, concerned with economic inequality, the power of big banks, the affordability of health care, and ecological sustainability, I further have no doubt that Hillary Clinton is much better at the old-time, pre-Obama, Washington game of compromise, and, if only because she can more readily convey herself as the one candidate who can get things done, she will appeal to a broader segment of both the Democratic Party primary electorate and the general electorate, who, by and large, are more likely to be put to sleep by an in depth consideration of the merits of her policy proposals in relation to those of Senator Sanders.
2. The notion that a Sanders win in both Iowa and New Hampshire will sustain a critical mass of support for Sanders against a Clinton nomination going into the Southern "Super Tuesday" primaries is overblown - Sanders needs a massive turnout of committed, young, progressive Democrats (especially in states that do not allow independents to vote in party primaries!) to close a range on Clinton in the Southern Democratic primaries. Returning to this post and this conclusion in the aftermath of Sanders' decisive win in New Hampshire, in which he carried several key demographics including women under 40 by significant margins against Clinton, I will maintain the same position regarding Sanders. The Nevada Democratic Party caucuses are closed to independents, and, apparently, the Nevada Democratic Party has a large proportion of Hispanic voters who may be less inclined to support Sanders. Why this should be the case for a state that experienced such a steep decline in economic activity and such a crisis in its housing markets during the last recession is not entirely clear - Hispanic voters have as much of an interest in many of the economic issues that Senator Sanders has emphasized as White Anglo Democratic voters in Nevada should have. Nothing from the results in Iowa and New Hampshire suggests that Sanders should lack appeal among Hispanic voters. In fact, in the most recent (2/8-2/10) TargetPoint/Washington Free Beacon poll from Nevada of 1,236 likely Democratic voters, Clinton and Sanders both stand at 45 percent (see HuffPost Pollster, "2016 Nevada Democratic Presidential Caucus - Clinton 45%, Sanders 45% (TargetPoint/Washington Free Beacon 2/8-2/10), at: http://elections.huffingtonpost.com/pollster/polls/targetpoint-r-washington-free-beacon-23746). On the other hand, the circumstances for South Carolina's open primaries on February 27, a state with a large percentage of Black Democratic voters, seem, at least for now, to favor Clinton decisively, even if, again, there is no apparent reason why this should be the case in regard to the Clintons' record with African-Americans relative to that of Sanders. Further, a string of additional Southern primaries are to follow on March 1 (Super Tuesday), which might be expected to mirror anticipated results from South Carolina. However, both Massachusetts and Vermont vote as well on Super Tuesday and both might, presumably, go to Sanders. At the present time, Southern Black Democrats seem key to Clinton's taking a significant share of Southern primaries, but so much of this will rely on Sanders' momentum from Iowa and New Hampshire falling off prior to South Carolina and Super Tuesday and, moreover, it assumes that Sanders cannot broaden his appeal to African-Americans by crafting a unique message targeting African-American voters, especially pursuing reform of law enforcement and criminal justice (if only through an especially active Justice Department) as key areas of interest in the Black Lives Matter movement. Notwithstanding his meeting with the Reverend Al Sharpton on Wednesday, Sanders has given no indication that he will alter his central economic message in any way, and this is a problem if he needs to extend a hand to African-Americans with something more than leftist economism. There are simply not enough young, White, progressive Democrats in the South to turn these states in Sanders' direction.
3. Sanders' policy agenda is not radical, his support for single-payer health insurance notwithstanding. His "socialist" platform embodies the controversial (and oddly backward-looking) notion that it would be a good thing for the U.S. to jump start the government-centric project of the New Deal in ways that merely reinforce existing institutions like Social Security.
Emphatically, Senator Sanders' agenda seeks to preserve and broaden the agenda of the Rooseveltean New Deal where the federal government left off with it in 1946. If, in the run up to the 1946 Republican/Southern Democratic conservative victory, such figures on the labor left as Walter Reuther of UAW envisioned a publicly financed national health insurance system as a legitimate goal for the splintering New Deal Congressional coalition and backed by President Truman, then the crushing defeat of progressives in the fall of 1946 set the federal government on a course toward moderation in the development of federal policies oriented toward economic equality and democratization. In this respect, I would not view President Johnson's "Great Society" as a substantial aberration in this longer transition toward conservatism. Reflecting on the formulation of economic policies in the period since the Reagan (counter-)revolution, it seems unlikely that a vast majority of the American electorate would amicably embrace a single payer health insurance system, even if we may be moving in that direction. More pointedly, it would seem impossible for any President to successfully push enabling legislation for such a system through a Congress that disproportionately reflects conservative interests across a broad range of regional constituencies where progressive interests are still not able to dislodge sitting incumbents given, among other things, Congressional districting. Any attempt to set up a single-payer system right now would certainly be dead on arrival. The same can also be said with regard to an initiative to make public higher education free to all college-bound students. Moreover, it is questionable that a Sanders administration would even be able to fiscally reinforce the finances of the Social Security Administration, for both retiree benefits and survivor/disability benefits. In my view, we have arrived at a crucial juncture in the war against the New Deal where the idea of attacking a project like the Social Security Act through the back door, by insisting we should "save" the system by privatizing it and leaving the solvency of a collective, pay-as-you-go retirement insurance system in the hands of individual contributors to invest as they see fit, has gone fully mainstream, in an era where private pensions have virtually disappeared and joint-contributory 401k plans have been shaken by wild fluctuations in equity and bond markets. With all this in mind, you have to wonder how it is even possible that initiatives that enjoyed broad public support three generations ago (if not the support of the powers that be) could now be considered off the deep end leftist radicalism.
In this regard, what would I consider truly radical, and what would I expect Senator Sanders to advance as an agenda for the next Presidency if he was an actual "radical?" What about the idea of guaranteeing every American a minimum yearly income through the tax system by means of aggressively expanding earned income tax credits to include virtually every individual with a job and with an income under $30,000 per year? What about the idea of fiscally supporting riskier alternative forms of entrepreneurship, especially workers' cooperatives, to generate a hybrid market-centric and non-market, non-capitalist subset of the broader U.S. economy without having to rely solely on the mechanisms of corporate banking and finance? What about reinstating and reinforcing the pre-clearance procedures of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, to ensure that new progressive voting blocs do not get locked out of the electoral process across broad regions where conservative forces have conspired to stay in power forever by stifling democracy? What about opening the nation's door and our arms to millions of refugees from the drug wars in Central America and from the battle between Assad and the Islamic State in Syria, and becoming more serious about collectively bearing the burden of being the world's super power to push for long term solutions in both of these foreign policy theaters, even if that might mean raising taxes to pay for more, not less, military spending and, possibly, reinstating an egalitarian institution of compulsory military service for both American men and women? What about making serious federal fiscal investments in renewable energy, enacting carbon taxes, and raising federal gasoline taxes substantially to pay for mass transit infrastructures in regions unable to tangibly make such investments? In all fairness, I like what Sanders has advanced as a policy agenda so far, certainly more than I like what I've heard from the Clinton campaign, even if I thoroughly doubt Sanders would be capable of enacting any of it. That stated, it is an agenda that looks backward to what might have been if only we had given the New Deal more time to restructure the American economy and the American way of life in a manner that would have made us look more like Western Europe has looked for the last half century. The present moment demands a different breed of radicalism more in tune with the problems our country faces right now, at home and abroad.
4. For all their great policy ideas, neither Clinton nor Sanders will be capable of enacting the most moderate of their ideas into law without a decisive Democratic seizure of both houses of Congress, an outcome that is distinctly unlikely even if the Republican Party advances a presidential candidate and a platform thoroughly out of touch with emerging influential electoral blocs.
I think my previous comments should have adequately conveyed the point that, while not being especially radical in the broader light of history in American domestic policy development, Senator Sanders' ideas on domestic policy are nonetheless too radical to secure a Congressional consensus to enact any of his agenda. Moreover, the tepid sort of Wall Street reforms (never mind reinstating the Glass-Steagall firewall between commercial and investment banks!) and gentle tweaking of the Affordable Care Act's administration suggested by the Clinton campaign appear similarly dead on arrival in the present context of Washington politics. I do not think that this is the case because the general American electorate has become unimpeachably conservative in its political outlook. In the end, I would absolutely hold to the conclusion that either Senator Sanders or Secretary Clinton is more electable than Senator Cruz, Donald Trump, or Jeb Bush. Furthermore, a Democratic seizure of control in the U.S. Senate is not entirely impossible if unlikely for 2016, with Republican seats in Illinois, New Hampshire, and Wisconsin conceivably up for grabs. Fundamentally, where statewide electorates are concerned, the Democratic Party and progressive constituencies are looking at least somewhat strong in 2016. The problem is that successive redistricting of House seats by Republican controlled legislatures at the state level have left numerous states largely closed to Democratic representation. Here again, judicial challenges to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and especially the elimination of pre-clearance procedures, loom very large in the reconstruction of the American electorate to favor control by conservative constituencies notwithstanding the larger leftward turn of the American electorate. Moreover, the last three Congresses have demonstrated that, in the course of defending its nominal stake in federal legislative and policy-making, the Republican Party has turned less and less amenable to compromise with progressives in order to address subjects of concern to the entire country, even to the point that certain Republican constituencies have been willing to countenance government shutdowns as preferable to not getting their way completely in policy matters. In certain respects, this unwillingness to compromise with even moderate Democrats evokes a larger commitment by the Republican establishment to satisfy the demands of its most active and vocal constituent minorities, constituting the lingering elements of the Tea Party movement and other sections of radical libertarian and religious conservatism. For my part, I maintain the position that the development of the Tea Party and the larger rise of the Republican Party rightist base has as much to do with the skin color of the man in the Oval Office as it does with any of his agenda. It is not likely that a Presidential victory either by a nominally feminist and ambiguously Christian woman with a long, controversial familial history in politics, or by secular, democratic socialist from a Jewish background would constitute a balm for the truculent nature of Republican Congressional politics. Neither of these candidates stand a chance to achieve any of their legislative agendas. In these respects, both need to configure larger strategies to mobilize a broader section of the American electorate to act in extra-electoral capacities on push legislators, on both the federal and state levels, to enact agendas favorable to their broader visions. It seems clear that politics at the federal level may remain thoroughly dysfunctional and out of step with the broader politics of the majority of Americans for some time to come, and each of the Democratic candidates has to acknowledge this and be ready to act pragmatically in order to deal with this situation.
5. The Democratic candidacies of both Clinton and Sanders must be understood in relation to the broader, evolving structure of the 2016 elections and, in particular, in relation to the struggle between the Republican Party establishment candidates and the Republican outsiders, especially Trump. In the absence of a major shift toward a mainstream Republican candidate, neither Trump nor Cruz can defeat either Clinton or Sanders in a general election. The Cruz victory in the Iowa caucuses (a state with substantial numbers of Republican evangelicals) and the Trump victory in the New Hampshire primary election (a state with large numbers of Republican libertarians and a broad segment of moderate independent voters) both suggest that this year's Republican primary contest is turning decisively toward the rightist flanks of the Party base, to the consternation of the Party's Washington establishment. This turn is, again, unabashedly to the favor of whoever the Democratic candidate turns out to be. It might be too much to say that neither Trump nor Cruz deserves to be taken seriously as a Republican candidate for the general election, but neither of these candidates appears to pose a serious threat to poach states out of the ensemble that enabled Obama to win two terms. Further, in swing states like Missouri, North Carolina, and Virginia, the presence of a Cruz or Trump on the Republican ballot might be sufficient to turn the vote in favor of the Democratic candidate. The picture only becomes murkier if we add a forty billion dollar independent gorilla to the contest, by whom I of course mean Michael Bloomberg, who I regard as a serious contender for the Presidency. I emphatically believe that Bloomberg will declare his intention to run before the end of February. When (not if) this happens, the potential for Sanders or Clinton to win the Presidency will become a steeper climb, especially steep for Sanders. On the other hand, it will utterly doom the chances of Trump or Cruz, as if their chances were not doomed from the beginning! Bloomberg will draw votes from both sides of the political spectrum, leaving a somewhat moderate or somewhat progressive Democratic candidate to call forth an expanding and more thoroughly heterogeneous Democratic base and challenge for moderate independent voters. The Republican candidate, by contrast, will be left to draw from a declining Republican base, with less appeal to moderates. In this situation, I cannot help but assert confidently that Bloomberg is likely to win, and we would be left to contemplate the consequences of having a corporate, pro-globalization moderate in the Oval Office (a fate that doesn't seem entirely unappealing to me!).
6. What is in a word? If the Democratic Party, by some freak outcome of primary contests, selects Bernie Sanders as its presidential candidate, the broader American electorate will have to reevaluate the meaning and significance of casting a ballot for a "socialist," and what a "socialist" agenda might mean in the American context. Having made the points that I seriously believe that Bloomberg will win a three-way contest for the Presidency in November and, further, that I still think that a Sanders victory in the Southern Democratic primaries and at numerous places in the Midwest against Clinton is unlikely, let us ponder the absolutely improbable. What if Bernie Sanders wins the Democratic Party's nomination, against a plethora of super-delegate commitments to Hillary Clinton and against the apparent incapacity of Sanders to appeal to non-White segments of the Obama electorate coalition? Will a plurality of American voters be able to fathom the possibility of democratic socialist as President? In my view, the answer to this question ultimately rests with the interpretation of socialism ultimately embedded within the minds of tens of millions of American voters. In this respect, two obvious readings of socialism spring into my mind. The first, and the one that Sanders obviously believes in and wants to convince the American electorate to believe in, involves the potential trajectory of the New Deal and the actual experience of countries like Sweden, Denmark, and, a lesser extent, France or Germany, countries that have embraced a decisive role for government in improving the lives of citizens through regulation of free market activity, active engagement in labor market practices, and public management of institutions, like universal access to health care, either by direct state provision or substantial state subsidization of private agents. The other image of socialism, and the one that the Republican candidate will obviously attempt to emphasize, conveys the image of a sterile, grey, cradle-to-grave, state-driven, centrally planned economic lethargy, devoid of entrepreneurial energy, market choice, and personal freedom, in relation to the overpowering will of state bureaucrats. In short, it is the image of the former Soviet system, with or without the presence of all encompassing totalitarian dictatorship of the proletariat! Notwithstanding the presence of socialist alternatives, and especially in view of recent retractions and setbacks in European welfare states, it seems probable that more Americans will embrace the latter imagery of socialism and ignore the hopeful potential that once motivated American working people to seek the involvement and protection of the federal government in their quest for a better life, both through the provision of retirement insurance and other social spending and through active protection of workers' rights to collectively bargain with employers to achieve reasonable compensation for their labors. Emphatically, at the present time, there are simply not enough American voters who believe in the potential for the federal government to have a positive role in improving their lives, if only because the Reagan (counter-)revolution since 1980 did so thorough a practical and ideological job of destroying the capacity of the federal government to do so. On the other hand, if the general American electorate is incapable of encapsulating within its imagination the potential for a thoroughly democratic socialism in Sanders' mold, then it might be the case that support for such ideas could resonate for diverse audiences at the state level. This is unambiguously the case in Vermont! It might also be the case, given the right candidates and the right organizations in Massachusetts or New York or even California. Maybe the best answer for democratic socialists like Sanders is to think smaller and, then, network between states.
Beyond the idea that Sanders' democratic socialism needs a smaller audience and a more intimate political canvas, I think such a socialist imagery is worth evaluating on its own merits as an alternative to the rigorously individualistic and anti-state portrait of the American economy and the regular lives of American citizens. In this regard, I am not sure that a backward looking return to the New Deal is precisely what I, as an American Marxist, am looking for, even if I think it is a more comfortable image than that of the winner take all, all against all society that seems to identify contemporary American life. As someone who was trained to be an economist, I like markets and think that, for the most part, they work well relatively unregulated. I am reasonably content to endure the existence of a (global) financial sector that is relatively unleashed from the Keynesian-inspired regulations of the New Deal. I can live with the collapse of numerous New Deal and Great Society institutions, including Social Security and Medicare. I have learned to live with the reality that I am never going to retire - I am going to work until I am dead or wholly incapacitated. Such are the trajectories of the market freedoms and the antipathy toward the welfare state that we Americans have nurtured since Reagan and which a Sanders administration could never change. Perhaps I have become an unqualified cynic with regard to the potentialities for a democratic socialism, but my images of positive, progressive change in the U.S. simply do not involve a reliance on state bureaucracies or state policy. In this respect, I remain committed to the idea that we need a more collectively oriented society, burgeoned by the presence of more privately organized cooperative organizations across broader segments of everyday life, and more collective support for the aspirations of all individuals to experience fulfilling lives. To me, this implies a lot more private entrepreneurial behavior by a much broader segment of the American population, undertaken as much or more with the intent of achieving broader progressive social change as with the intent to maximize profits. It is doubtless a more hands on and challenging road to supporting human development and economic democracy, but, at least at the present time, I think it is eminently more feasible than hoping for attitudes on social welfare expenditures by either federal or state governments to change in a radical way. We need to learn to be pragmatic and work around the impediments of disadvantageous state policy (or lack of progressive policies) and the slings and arrows of global capitalism!
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