I really don’t think thats accurate. Sanders is more about pointing out severe issues with our current system while proposing meaningful changes to address these serious issues.
Sanders will not win the primary, but he could win 40% of the delegates. Not nearly enough to win, but enough to let the democrats know that him and his voters are seeking meaningful change.
The vast majority of Sanders supporters voted for Clinton in the 2016 election and most will vote for Biden in 2020. The % of Sanders supporters who didn’t and won’t support the general nominee is about the same as the % of primary voters who don’t support the candidate in other races (Clinton supporters who didn’t vote Obama in the general, Kasich and Rubio voters who didn’t support Trump, etc).
Fair enough. Then, this begs the question of why he thinks that running for President is the best way to effect those changes. Our most recent example of “Hope and Change” demonstrated just how little power the Executive Office actually has to make meaningful changes even when dedicated to them. As an example, every year of his presidency, President Obama vowed to close down the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp, and every single year his intentions were overruled by a bipartisan opposition in Congress despite the fact that nobody can really pose a good reason to maintain the camp other than we don’t know what to do with the occupants. In fact, the President has very little direct authority beyond the immediate power to give orders to the Executive branch (which can and often is overruled by the Supreme Court), and many presidents have had to go beyond their Constitutional and legal authority to pursue their agendas by using insider connections to engage in extralegal operations (e.g. the Iran-Contra affair, and various use of the ostensible intelligence apparatus to engage in direct action).
Bernie Sanders, the consummate ‘outsider’ even within the institutions he has been a part of for nearly three decades, has neither the political clout nor the negotiation skills to achieve even the least of his goals. Even if he could win the general vote (which is questionable; despite his vocal base, he does not have the broad appeal to pull the kind of typically indifferent voters out of the woodwork the way Obama did and Hillary totally failed to do) he can’t hope to influence the majority of Congress to support his agenda. He could use his vocal base to sway a more centrist candidate–even the milquetoast Joe Biden–to push at least some of the parts of his progressive agenda, and open the door to the voting public that ‘socialism’ isn’t some existential evil but is actually the basis for some of the most popular and effective programs that the federal government provides. But he is just an all-or-nothing personality in both policy and manner, and thus would not accomplish anything as President.
A good reason for Sanders staying in is seeing Biden’s cognitive decline clearly in free fall. Even his handler’s efforts at carefully managing his exposure to short bursts will not be able to hide the fact his brain is turning into mush. This will leave a vacuum, which the DNC will be more than happy to fill with ( another ) corporate puppet. They may well try to do this anyway via a brokered convention, but it’ll be all the more blatant with Sanders as the viable candidiate remaining.
Somebody here posted this recently, with a cite. Sorry, but I can’t find it:
Only 53 percent of Sanders voters say they will certainly support whoever is the Democratic nominee. This is no idle threat.
In 2016, in Pennsylvania, 117,000 Sanders primary voters went for Trump in the general, and Trump won the state by 44,292 ballots. In Michigan, 48,000 Sanders voters went for Trump, and Trump won the state by 10,704. In Wisconsin, 51,300 Sanders voters went for Trump, and Trump won the state by 22,748. In short, Sanders voters helped elect Trump.
And now in BrickBat’s post we have an example of the fact-free innuendo that Bernie boosters like to engage in to undercut anyone who challenges Bernie. Please show actual evidence that Joe Biden–who has long been known for tripping over his words–is actually showing evidence of cognitive decline. And while you’re at it, maybe you can come up with those “comprehensive medical records” Sanders said he was going to release post-heart attack.
Biden may have lost a step, but he was pretty sharp in the last debate. Whatever else we’re seeing, it’s not a “free-fall”.
That said, I had other preferences than either of these two, but vox populi and all that jazz. If Biden it is to be, then either get behind him or at least don’t get in the way of removing Trump. There are a non-negligible number of Sanders supporters who don’t want to do either.
You sure you don’t mean Sander’s cognitive decline, where he thinks he’s dealing with a fucking global crisis by being a Senator from a small northeastern state?
Sanders, and by extension his ardent supporters, live in a fantasy land where his wishes are horses and he can smash the banks with his mighty hammer, but then, he’s been like this for a long time. Not evidence of cognitive decline, either; just narcissistic egotism, which is a common condition among politicians.
Maybe some small fraction of his supporters believe this, but this isn’t how I see it.
Here’s the way I see it – Bernie (big ego and all) recognizes that this really is a broken system, hopelessly tilted towards the rich and powerful, and against working people, without revolutionary change. And he doesn’t think incremental change, which is all the present incarnation of the Democratic party is capable of, is nearly enough. I don’t think he has any illusions that this will be an easy task, but that doesn’t make it any less necessary to try.
My views are similar – this is a broken system, and we need massive change to fix it. I’ll still vote Democrat no matter what, since the alternative is so much worse, but I will support the Democrats that recognize how bad the system is, and how much it needs to change, over the Democrats that do not appear to recognize this.
EDIT: And adding to this, even if Bernie won, the likelihood of success in fixing the system is low. But someone who recognizes the reality of the broken system is more likely to fix it than someone who doesn’t, IMO.
On your first point you’re right. Much of his criticism is bang on, and his moral courage in sticking to it is admirable.
The second point is plainly wrong. Sanders would accomplish nothing as President; he is, proportional to the time he’s been in Congress, arguably the least accomplished legislator in there. He isn’t even really a Democrat and has few allies. He has little demonstrated ability to work with anyone on anything. He lacks political capital. Yelling isn’t legislation. Congress would ignore him more than they’ve ignored any President of modern times. The one thing I’d expect him to accomplish is not stumble into a war, and there’s something to be said for that, but in terms of progressive legislation he’d accomplish LESS than Joe Biden would.
As a legislator he’s compromised countless times – it’s his rhetoric that’s uncompromising, not his voting history. He voted for the ACA and pretty much every other incremental bit of progress, even as he’s advocated for far more.
But with the massive scale of the brokenness of our system, I’m going to support the guy who recognizes this over the guy who doesn’t. I see no reason to believe that Biden is more likely to fix this broken system when he doesn’t even recognize that it’s broken.
This is all academic at this point – Biden is almost certainly the nominee. But I’m just pointing out that there are very solid reasons for many of us to support Bernie.
The problem isn’t just that making this kind of “revolutionary change” isn’t easy; it is that it takes the skill of negotiation and politicking to get others to support any kind of change to the status quo. Good presidents, like Eisenhower, Obama, and (at least in this way) Reagan understood this, and could even sit down with political opponents and come to agreement, trading opposition to one effort into support for another. Sanders has never had to do this, and from everything he has shown in his behavior, he is temperamentally unsuited to to this.
Every time someone points out how Sanders is not astute at the art of negotiation, someone brings up his ‘compromise’ of voting for the Affordable Care Act. But this was a compromise with himself. He has not shown an ability to get other people to compromise their agendas or principles to support his initiatives. He has shown the ability to influence public opinion—and should get full credit for getting “Medicare for All” in the Democratic lexicon—but he’s done this as an outsider with his supporters prodding and pushing candidates to respond with their alternatives. As President, he loses both that “outsider” status and the ability to push candidates in competition with him into oft-reluctant agreement.
And let us be clear; the President has a limited authority to enact domestic policies via executive order, has a tiny discretionary budget, and requires a majority in Congress to enact any legislation. Bernie Sanders will never have that majority regardless of a hypothetical “blue wave”, and he does not have the temperament to bring non-supporters around to his views by persuasion. Much of the job of the President is actually relationship-building or ceremonial; rebuilding connections with allies we’d neglected or abandoned, persuading talented people to participate in the administration, and making it look like everything is firmly under control even in the middle of a fire tornado. In the last few years we’ve seen what bad leadership really looks like and how much damage a single ill-considered statement or ‘tweet’ (much less a constant diarrheatic stream of them) can do. It is crucial to not only have a president who has an acceptable agenda but can also look the part. Bernie Sanders looks and talks like, well, Larry David, and nobody wants to hire Larry David for anything other than to be a likable curmudgeon.
Joe Biden may be far from your ideal—he certainly isn’t mine—but he’s nothing if not fungible and at least open to influence from the progressive wing while still maintaining a broad appeal across and beyond the Democratic base. Bernie Sanders appeals to a vocal but limited number of whose supporters metaphorical idea of barn restoration is to burn it to the ground with the horses inside and start from scratch instead of rebuilding it from the outside in, one post and plank at a time. Such rebuilding from the ground up, throwing away all of the bad seems appealing at first blush, but a glance at the history book shows that it rarely produces the desired result even when it doesn’t result in total collapse.
Assuming the Republicans retain their Senate majority, and assuming humanity’s run of bad luck continues and Moscow Mitch doesn’t succumb to Covid-19, it’s highly unlikely Joe Biden would get anything passed either.
The difference between Biden and Bernie is that Bernie would fail at things that were meaningful. I doubt a President Sanders could ever get M4A passed. But he could get people talking about it. He could get people excited for it. He could get people marching, writing to Congress, and signing petitions in support of it. He could shine a spotlight on recalcitrant so-called moderate Senators and force them to explain to their constituents why they deserve to live without insurance, or without sufficient insurance, or with the crushing burdens of huge co-pays and deductibles. He could ask them how they can sleep at night knowing that the wealthy have all the healthcare they could possibly want, while the poorest have to beg for insulin money on the internet and he can make them answer!
Would President Bernie fail to pass M4A? Almost certainly. Getting anything done on healthcare in America is absurdly difficult. But the same is true for Biden, and whatever milquetoasty reforms he’s got in mind. The difference is that Bernie’s failure will change the conversation about healthcare, and that alone is valuable. Biden’s failure won’t change anything.
I plan to vote for the nominee no matter what, very likely to be Biden. I’m under no illusions that even if Bernie won things would go his way – I just think it’s slightly more likely that our broken system would become a bit less broken with Bernie as president rather than Biden.
That’s what we’re talking about here – a shitty system getting slightly less shitty, hopefully. I’ll vote for Biden if he’s the nominee, but I’d prefer someone who recognized how shitty the system was over someone who doesn’t appear to recognize this.
I don’t buy that Biden presents better as president, or negotiates better, or that stuff, necessarily. YMMV, but he presents as an absented minded grandpa to me. I find Bernie much sharper.
And none of this disputes the anti-war credentials of Bernie – I still hold that he’s significantly less likely to get us into another dumb war than Biden. That’s a huge, huge issue for me – maybe the most important one.
I don’t think any of the candidates in the Democratic field would be hawking for another war. But just wanting to avoid engaging in a war isn’t enough on its own; a president also has to be able to deal with world events and crises effectively using the available tools including the threat and action of military force when other measures will not serve in order to de-escalate potential conflict. None of the candidates in the field really has foreign policy experience (nor military experience above the field grade level), so Bernie Sanders doesn’t exactly fail out there, but the question remains whether he would be willing to recruit and listen to people experienced in these areas, or would he simply insist that America should stay out of world affairs regardless, leading to a situation in which an escalation leading to future global conflict is inevitable?
I honestly don’t know the answer to that because Sanders hasn’t really spoken in any depth into foreign policy any more than he has about virtually any topic outside of free college and free health care (and has provided no real plan on how he would fund these except some vague handwaving about an ill-advised “Wall Street speculation tax” of uncertain proportion.
I get that all the things Bernie Sanders is offering sound really appealing. And frankly, dealing with the college debt problem, making college education accessible (if not free) to those people who will gain value from it, and assuring that everyone has access to basic and preventative medical care are all crucial things that any future administration should hold as a priority. But while Sanders is pandering to the millennial generation with all the ‘free’ stuff (that still has be paid for in some fashion), there are deeper structural problems with financial regulation, as well as planning for a future that is coming fast down the pike where much of the intellectual labor that has employed the last couple of generations of white collar workers is going to be largely automated or at least streamlined, and I heard only a couple of candidates even begin to address the essential socioeconomic challenges that have to be met with sound policy decisions.
For what it is worth I don’t think Biden is particularly adroit in this area, either; the guy still talks about “record players”, for fluff’s sake, but again, he is at least fungible and open to different ideas within a hypothetical Cabinet and advisors. I can’t see Bernie Sanders hiring or keeping anyone who doesn’t toe the line with his agenda, which is essentially the flip side of the coin of what we’re dealing with now.
I find this philosophy of using the threat of force for foreign policy to be old-fashioned (or at least the frequency that the foreign policy establishment seems to have resorted to over the last few decades). I don’t think it works very well long-term (beyond MAD, which obviously has worked extremely well for decades). Blowback upon blowback upon blowback. I think it increases rather than decreases the chance of war, for the most part. Military action really should be an option of last resort, not a handy tool in our toolkit.
I like the “free stuff”, but it isn’t what really attracts me to Sanders. What really attracts me is the identification of the entrenched corporate and moneyed interests as the real villains, and real ones in control, and the real beneficiaries of all the unfairness in our system.
But it looks like Biden is who we’re stuck with. I hope he wins.