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Reality has endorsed Bernie Sanders: His policy proposals are especially apt now, when the coronavirus crisis is revealing an economy organized around production for the sake of profit, not need
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- Title
- Reality Has Endorsed Bernie Sanders
- Authors
- The New Yorker
- Word count
- 1431 words
The impression I sometimes get of the US' political community is that they seem to persistently believe they somehow have no control at all over the national conversation and so need to be constantly running after common talking points. So you get these weird, seemingly contradictory positions which seem incredibly disingenuous because there's no real through-line other than "we've followed the polls and the news cycle". It's like "the customer is always right" but for voters. If nothing else, a lesson you should be able to take away from the Republican strategies (culminating with Trump) and Sanders is you can have some kind of influence on the national conversation and dictate which topics people talk about.
I realize this isn't a binary, and that the Democratic strategy probably does include attempts to steer the conversation towards topics they know they can win on. But it still seems like a lot of moderate American politicians are more comfortable pretending to be answering everyone's concerns rather than presenting a more focused vision and insisting it, in and of itself, contains the answer to people's concerns.
I think there are a few reasons for this, mainly:
1: Private money in politics (Congresspeople spend more time fundraising than making actual legislative work) which makes them unable to actually endorse those proposals simply due to them not being good for their donors which will make reelection harder because most people don't actively search out their congressional district representatives and so they need to reach them by ads and the like. (And given gerrymandering, it probably doesn't matter in most districts either way.)
2: Cable news outlets who (usually subtly, see tactical framing) show their biases against welfare proposals or ignore them because of advertisers' (who very often are also donors) revenue, therefore forcing politicians to toe the line the media toes that large corporations create.
3: A lot of people just are well off enough to not care. People who owe student debt only make up 15%) of the adult population and people who have trouble paying medical debt is 26%. That means a majority of people in the US don't have these problems and no one ever said they would care about those who do. In that case, why would you bother with such a narrative at all?
IMO if it wasn't for these 3 things, American moderates wouldn't exist.
I wish this energy was focused less on Bernie Sanders and more on building the community bonds we need to make some of those ideas a reality. The primary's basically over.
Agreed. Bernie isn't the end all be all of the progressive movement, and while his skill set is helpful for turning heads and bearing torches, he never struck me as the one with the plan so much as the one who leads the charge of that makes any sense.
It's not clear to me that Sanders' policies would work on an emergency basis. Yang's signature policy (UBI) got some attention but was less practical politically than a one-time money drop, which is what we got. Has Sanders had any influence on the stimulus bill that Congress actually passed?
The idea is that we should fast-track the policies for emergency relief, then keep them.
It worked for the Patriot Act, why not something good?
I think the problem is the will of the current Administration and Congress is not inline with that goal.
He skipped the vote because his vote wasn't needed, the package required a 60 vote block to get passed. Voting against it has no effect on it if the yes votes can't reliably get to the 60 vote count.
There was no reason for him to be in the senate that day.