Category: Elections

Bernie Sanders’s Presidential Bid Represents a Long Tradition of American Socialism

Long deployed by the right as an epithet, this form of left-wing populism is as American as apple pie.

By Peter Dreier
Progressive America Rising via American Prospect

Now that Bernie Sanders has entered the contest for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, Americans are going to hearing a lot about socialism, because the 73-year old U.S. senator from Vermont describes himself as a “democratic socialist.”

“Ever since I was a kid I never liked to see people without money or connections get put down or pushed around,” Sanders explained in making his announcement. “When I came to Congress I tried to be a voice for people who did not have a voice—the elderly, the children, the sick, and the poor. And that is what I will be doing as a candidate for president.”

We can expect the right-wing echo chamber—including Fox News hosts, Tea Party politicians, and Rush Limbaugh—to attack Sanders for espousing an ideology that they’ll likely describe as foreign, European, and un-American.

But Sanders’s views are in sync with a longstanding American socialist tradition. Throughout our history, some of the nation’s most influential activists and thinkers, such as Jane Addams, John Dewey, Helen Keller, W.E.B. DuBois, Albert Einstein, Walter Reuther, Martin Luther King, and Gloria Steinem, embraced socialism.  

Of course, America’s right-wingers say there’s already a socialist in the White House. For the past seven years, Barack Obama’s opponents—the Republican Party, the Tea Party, the right-wing blogosphere, , and conservative media gurus like Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and Rush Limbaugh—labeled anything Obama proposed, including his modest health-care reforms and his efforts to restore regulations on Wall Street, as “socialism.”

In March 2009, two months after Obama took office, the ultra-conservative National Review put a picture of the new president on its cover over the headline, “Our Socialist Future.” In 2010, Newt Gingrich authored To Save America: Stopping Obama’s Secular-Socialist Machine. Stanley Kurtz, a regular contributor to conservative publications and frequent guest on Fox News, published Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism.  These are only a few of the many right-wingers fulminating against Obama’s alleged socialist views.

Obama joked about this in his recent speech at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.  “I like Bernie. Bernie’s an interesting guy,” said Obama, referring to Sanders. “Apparently, some folks want to see a pot-smoking socialist in the White House. We could get a third Obama term after all.”

President Franklin Roosevelt faced similar allegations. His conservative enemies, including some members of Congress, consistently called him a socialist. In a speech defending his New Deal goals, FDR said: “A few timid people, who fear progress, will try to give you new and strange names for what we are doing. Sometimes they will call it ‘Fascism’, sometimes ‘Communism’, sometimes ‘Regimentation’, sometimes ‘Socialism’. But, in so doing, they are trying to make very complex and theoretical something that is really very simple and very practical.”  (Continued)

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Playing the Rightwing Populism Card

Enter Scott Walker, Stage Right

Thomas B. Edsall
Progressive America Rising via New York Times

April 29, 2015 – As Scott Walker has transformed himself from a three-time statewide winner in blue-leaning Wisconsin to a hard-right Republican primary candidate, he has jumped to the head of the pack in Iowa and New Hampshire.

Walker’s re-creation of his political identity is a test of whether a Republican presidential candidate can win on the basis of decisive margins among whites (while getting crushed among minority voters).

Walker hopes to stand apart from Jeb Bush, a former Florida governor, and Marco Rubio, a Florida senator, who are both taking a more centrist approach. Walker intends to stake out the right side of the Republican spectrum and trump competitors for this niche like Senator Ted Cruz of Texas.

Even as he shifts to the right, however, Walker, a preternaturally careful candidate, is avoiding any explicit suggestion that he is the champion of disaffected white voters. Still, key policy positions — particularly his changing stance on immigration and his attacks on public sector unions — reveal a thoughtfully directed appeal. In 2011, Walker successfully sponsored legislation repealing most collective bargaining rights for government employees. Walker’s anti-union initiative has made him a folk hero to conservatives concerned about what they see as the expanding power of government.

In a recent paper, “The Whiteness of Wisconsin’s Wages,” Dylan Bennett, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin, and Hannah Walker, a doctoral candidate in political science at the University of Washington, argue that “Governor Walker and his allies activated the racial animus of white workers.”

Bennett and Walker contend that gutting the power of public sector unions serves as a vehicle to disempower African-American workers, “for whom the public sector is the single most important source of employment.” (Continued)

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A Populist Challenge to Hillary Clinton

By Katrina vanden Heuvel

Washington Post

April 14, 2015 – Hillary Clinton’s decision to “go small” by formally announcing her presidential campaign in a video, before heading off for “intimate” meetings in Iowa, touched off saturation national press coverage that other contenders can only envy. The former first lady, former senator, former presidential contender, former secretary of state has been in the public eye for nearly a quarter of a century. She’s the prohibitive favorite to get the Democratic Party nomination this time, and odds-on to win the presidency.

Yet hurdles remain. Clinton’s biggest challenge probably isn’t in capturing the middle from the Republican nominee. Republicans have already virtually ceded that. Her challenge is to inspire the Obama majority coalition to vote in large numbers, not only to guarantee her election but also to help Democrats take back the Senate, gain seats in the House and capture a clear mandate.This won’t be easy. Historically, after eight years of one party in the White House, voters are ready for change. The Republican base will be roused by venom toward Clinton that is almost as poisonous as that directed at President Obama. In contrast, many Democrats are discouraged by the disappointments of the Obama years. Key parts of Obama’s base — African Americans, Latinos, millennials — haven’t exactly thrived during his presidency. The election of 2014 took place in a low-turnout, by-election year, but it showed how destructive a lack of enthusiasm could be on the Democratic side.

Some pundits suggest 2016 will be a foreign policy election. Some Democrats are tempted to turn it into a culture clash, since Republicans are now on the wrong side of a growing range of concerns — gays, women, immigrants, voting rights and global warming. But as Clinton’s campaign acknowledges, the central question is still about the economy: how to make this economy work for working people once more, to rebuild a broad middle class, increase wages and reduce income inequality. Here, although Clinton has been in the public eye for decades, her views are largely unknown, if not unformed.

And on these questions, a populist temper is building in the party — symbolized by the split between the “Warren” and Wall Street wings of the party, and by the spread of the movement to draft Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) to run for the presidency. And Clinton will find that this movement will force her to decide where she stands early and often. (Continued)

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