For instance: Last week, political scientist Mark Schmitt, writing for the New York Times, offered up a critique of the Sanders campaign that, upon examination, is ultimately as baseless as the poisonous, speculative takes that have dominated major newspapers and media outlets over the last several months.
Schmitt's beef with Sanders is that the Vermont senator is "still running the Windows 95 version of progressive politics," and that his proposals are "consistently out of step with the ideas that have been emerging from progressive think tanks like Demos or the Center for American Progress or championed by his own congressional colleagues."
First, it is fascinating that Sanders, despite, in Schmitt's view, "running the Windows 95 version of progressive politics," has been able to bring overwhelming numbers of young people into the political process, winning their support -- by large margins -- over his opponent, Hillary Clinton.
Perhaps Schmitt, not Sanders, is the prisoner of an outmoded ideological framework, one guided by the missives of progressive think tanks rather than the needs of the population.
Further, as Matt Bruenig thoroughly demonstrates, Schmitt's objections to the Sanders platform don't hold weight from an individual policy perspective, either.
The fundamental problem is laid bare in Schmitt's criticism of Sanders's support for single-payer healthcare.
"Schmitt paints Sanders's interest in single-payer healthcare as quaint and out of touch with modern progressivism," Bruenig notes. "But this is only true if you equate modern progressivism with the foundations that set the priorities of liberal think tanks. The largest union of nurses in the country, National Nurses United, aggressively promotes single-payer health care, and the AFL-CIO unanimously endorsed single-payer a few years ago."
The problem, Bruenig concludes, is not that Sanders is "behind the times"; rather, it is that Sanders is "in line with different modern progressive constituencies than Schmitt is."
This gets at the more subtle point that underlies Schmitt's disagreement with Sanders, one that Schmitt, himself, does a fantastic job uncovering: Self-styled progressives are willing to go to great lengths to defend status quo liberalism -- represented by think tanks like the Center for American Progress -- from its critics on the left, often resorting to misrepresentations, baseless character assaults, and outright falsehoods in the process.
Democratic Party loyalists cannot bring themselves to admit that the so-called pragmatic liberalism (otherwise known as centrism) of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama has been inadequate and ineffective in its attempts to address growing inequality and corporate plunder.
In fact, this form of liberalism -- one that has, over the past several decades, moved ever closer to the open arms of business -- has often made these problems worse.
Today, as a result, the Democratic Party is overrun with what Doug Henwood calls "doom and gloom," a philosophical attitude that has led Democrats to abandon ambitious policy goals -- along with their blue-collar base -- in favor of a meager, unappetizing, and often actively harmful platform.
"Hillary Democrats," Henwood contends, "are running against hope."
A great strength of the Sanders campaign has been its ability to expose this thinly-veiled rift between the left and the Democratic Party, thus differentiating between "doom and gloom" liberalism and the revolutionary goals of the Vermont senator and the progressive movements that have coalesced around his successes.
"Unlike fortress liberals or professional elites," writes Matt Karp, "Sanders and his young backers recognize that the vital element in any progressive struggle is the ability to generate energy from the bottom up."
Far from running on an outdated version of progressivism, the Sanders campaign has broken through the barriers set by the Democratic Party, raised the expectations and ambitions of voters, and motivated them to reverse "the atrophy of political imagination" that has, over the past several decades, infected the Democratic agenda.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1
1
