46
votes
Bernie Sanders - Trumpism can be defeated!
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- Title
- Can Trumpism be defeated? Absolutely. Here's how | Bernie Sanders
- Authors
- Bernie Sanders
- Published
- Feb 19 2025
- Word count
- 1068 words
Im glad to see Bernie is still fighting the good fight. His unbreakable spirit is inspiring and i think he just produced the demands a protest movement should focus on although i could think of a couple more drastic demands.
This one is not possible, and also maybe not a good goal. I instead propose that everyone should have all their basic needs-including a need for recreation and creativity-met, and met with dignity.
Why do you say it's not possible?
I mean fundementally, you can look around and see there's plenty of work that needs to be done. Infrastructure is crumbling, cities are filthy, people are dying of preventable diseases. There are also millions of people that are under, or unemployed. What's the real roadblock other than politics stopping us from making sure that everyone has a job available to them?
I see no reason to believe there is enough dignified, spirit affirming work for everyone who is un- and under- employed. I include in this number the many middle managers who do basically nothing, and the employees many startups who actually don’t add anything of value.
There’s a story about when Kissinger (?) visited China and witnessed a huge crew of folks grading the bed for a road using shovels. When he asked why they weren’t using a bulldozer, he was told it was for job creation. His response was, then they should be using spoons!
Better to use the bulldozer, and only require the operators to work one out of every 6 weeks, paid well enough to study flower arranging the other 5 weeks.
I would be interested to hear your examples of positions that don't meet this criteria.
There are people who work a variety of jobs that they would enjoy much more if the compensation was better. This includes "dirty jobs" like waste management (such as garbage pickup), "entry level" jobs like customer and food service positions (wait staff, cooks, cashiers, dishwashers), sanitation (janitorial staff), etc.
Pay these people a living wage and these jobs become much more "dignified," and they can then see the good they provide the world, making it "spirit affirming."
Not the person you replied to, but I also firmly believe there’s an absolutely vast amount of time spent on unnecessary work (taking “work” to mean paid employment within the current model, because I do agree with @papasquat that there’s plenty of useful and valuable labour to be done outside that, and I’d speculate that @NoblePath was perhaps thinking the same).
The jobs you mentioned are, by and large, extremely necessary - the fact that many of them are poorly paid and/or looked down upon is a perfect example of how far the “value” of a job is divorced from its importance.
To give a few throwaway examples of jobs that I’d consider wholly unnecessary: a significant percentage of the advertising and marketing industry, the profit making sections of the US health insurance industry, and a significant minority of financial services (core economic functionality is incredibly important - but I’ve seen and occasionally worked on enough high speed, big money trading stuff to know there’s also an awful lot of time and effort going into skimming tiny percentages off the top of huge numbers to make profit while creating no overall value).
Add to that the fact that even in jobs that are needed, the deal is you spend at least 40 hours there each week regardless of the current workload or you don’t get paid enough to live, and the fact that there are necessary jobs (food service, for example) that are oversaturated in pursuit of profit (how much is really lost if the McDonalds next to the Burger King across from the other McDonalds is shut down?), and you end up with a mind boggling number of human hours that could be redirected to something actually productive.
Work needs to be done to keep society functioning. Nothing I’ve seen suggests that the amount we’re doing now is optimal or well allocated.
I'm extremely lucky in that I've been able to have salaried jobs where I have gotten away with working much less than 40 hours in the office. That's part of the reason I don't care so much for remote work. It's perfectly acceptable as a software engineer in Silicon Valley to show up at 11am and leave at 5pm every day as long as you're doing a great job. This should absolutely be the standard, because when I worked non software jobs there was even more idle time. Most office workers could probably do like 4 hours in the office per day and have the same (or better) output.
I can’t improve upon @greg ‘s answer to your question.
To be clear, (@papsquat too) I’m considering the global population. My guess would be there’s probably enough “necessary” work for everyone to work maybe 10 hours a week. And that’s a good thing in my book. Pay them enough to live healthy (in every way that can be true) lives, so they can spend the rest of the time in building relationships, avocation, and recreation.
Flower arranging is a job too though. There's not, never has been, and never will be a shortage of useful work for people to do, and it doesn't mean that work needs to be done inefficiently. Grading roads is something that needs to be done, and if there aren't enough bulldozers to do the job efficiently, building bulldozers is another job that needs to be done.
There's no shortage of work, there's a shortage of jobs. That has to do with the way our economy works, it's not a fundemental law of nature. People's lives can always be improved through the efforts labor directed the right way though.
I’m genuinely not trying to argue with you, because I agree that part of The Problem is the insistence that all adults are “working” for some very specific definition of the word for most of their waking hours.
But I did have a thought pop into my head as soon as I read this. There are something like 4 million teachers in the USA. We could easily quadruple that number, creating 12 million new government jobs. That work could become considerably more varied and accessible to folks of different backgrounds if it didn’t require that a single adult be on their feet, managing the social interactions of dozens of children simultaneously, for 7-9 hours straight.
Now I’m sort of obsessed with the idea. Imagine a world where the average public school class size was ten kids. Imagine a world where most or all of those classes had two trained educators! Obviously I’m also imagining a world where we like… at least double the average public teacher salary, maybe more like quadruple in many places. But like 16 million teachers making $150k/year? $2.4 trillion? 10% of our GDP on employing millions of folks to directly support and reinvest in their communities? Seems worth it to me
Another alternative that could be very cool is making the standard "work week" ~20 hours, and then those people have the option to be involved in some form of education for ~5 hours a week (including prep/outside of class time). The specific hours in my example aren't firm, of course.
But it'd be great if people from all kinds of professions were able to share their passions and interests along with how they relate to a job in an educational setting. This could be anything from an elementary school presentation to some type of college course. (It probably wouldn't be enough for an entire college course, but I think you get the idea.)
that would be awesome. and double the number so teachers only have to work half the year.
I agree with most of your sentiment - that we shouldn't just make work to make it - but I would also contend that there is a potential future where labor is attractive and fulfilling. There are so many things that people can and would love to work at. We just don't value the things that we should/could. Imagine if outdoor ed in our national parts was prioritized and paid more than a poverty wage. What about the conservation corp? More than sub minimum wage would make it very enticing. Restoring the majority of our state parks is going to take a ton of work, but we don't currently want to put the money into doing so. You know how stoked I would be to help restore an area covered in invasive grass to a native bunch grass chaparral? Or expand riparian corridors in the central valley? Those jobs don't just have pleasurable value - getting to work with nature and restoring habitat - would help reduce propensity of wild fires (native grasses are evergreen and burn far less) and increase the carrying capacity of an ecosystem.
I think it's part of the narrative that gets lost. Work in and of itself isn't bad, in fact most folks enjoy it, hence why so many people volunteer. Imagine if you could take all those people, provide them with a real, livable salary and allow them to work at the things they love. Fuck efficiency and encouragement, if you let people self determine and remove the stress of financial instability people go fucking gangbusters.
I feel like most people should agree this is a bit excessive? Is Musk's goal to leverage a Trump presidency into him becoming the first trillionaire?
Could be, though knowing him it's more to stroke his tech-messiah fueled ego. "I need the power to save humanity" and all that.
I almost pity him for seemingly so invested in being above others when he's really shut down his potential of genuine human connections.
I'd be curious to learn about personality analogies throughout history whose approach mirrored his.
Was there some other leader so bent on their own version of altruism out there that they had no regard for their image? Did they remain focused on these goals or were they inevitably corrupted?
I suspect most of the modern great dictators that come to your mind were motivated by a similar belief that they were accomplishing what was both good and necessary, at the very least at the start of their careers.
Yeah, Porfirio Diaz is a great example of that. Look his use of slave labor to build their railroads that was justified by sacrificing for the "greater good". In reality most things, particularly when wedging in "the greater good", are subjective. I'm sure all these technocrats think they are helping the world, or they just think the majority of us are garbage people who don't warrant considering. Considering Mark's comments in the past when he was less detached than he is now, I'd guess the latter.
I would say this is a typical mindset of basically everyone who has ever been corrupted by power, to the point that you might even think of it as the definition thereof.
It's tempting to think of Nero due to the shitty quality of leadership but that feels very different to me. The weirdass bromance between Trump and Musk is really something else, as well as so much of a powerful government being steamrolled like this. Even if the oligarchy was already there this is really bizarre.
Additionally, the federal(almost confederal) structure of the US makes me doubt that their seizure of power can succeed in the long term but really, who knows. The US is already a bit of an odd country of which there are few parallels.
I often wonder what the 2016 election would have looked like had we all felt that Burn
There was even a slight window in the primary run up in 2020 that looked like we might feel the Bern. I was so excited and as per usual the wagons circled and he wasn't our man. I get why the Democratic leadership doesn't support him - he's an independent - but fuck, what an opportunity we had. I really miss that feeling of hope.
I really miss that brief window of time as well. I'm going off on a tangent/rant, but I still maintain he could've won the general election. This is usually denied by pointing out he lost the primary, which is factually true, but the people that vote in the Democratic primary are a small subset of the overall voting age population, and are generally those that are far more dedicated to Democratic Party. They will pretty much always vote for the Democratic candidate, and relying on them to decide the direction of the party was and is a serious mistake.
I grew up in a conservative area and was still living there at the time, and Bernie is the only politician that I saw have wide reaching appeal across the political spectrum, and especially amongst young and working class people. I believe he would've been a much more palatable alternative to Trump than Hilary was.
Sure, a large portion of the Trump fan base is racist/sexist/etc, but the biggest common threads I saw were a disillusionment with the existing political parties that offered only incremental or no real change, a desire for someone who felt their struggles and actually wanted to make significant changes, and a desire for a candidate that both gave them a target for their ire and promised that they would be held accountable in some form.
Obviously Trump is a blatant liar, but he appealed to a lot of people for the same reasons. Beyond that, I believe Bernie also would have inspired a good number of people who were otherwise disillusioned with the political system to at the very least vote. He was the only one that wasn't scared to call out billionaire elites (since he wasn't relying on their funding), and would've been a much more appealing alternative against Trump. Instead, we got a career establishment politician with decades of serious baggage, lack of charisma and relatability, and that did not seek to disrupt the status quo in any meaningful way. Hell, her campaign was even arrogant enough to promote Trump in the beginning, thinking it would be an easy win.
Man, writing this was depressing. What a different world we could have been living in.
Has the timeline divergence officially shifted from the 2000 election being the election with the most wide spreading consequences?
Depends on how far back you go, right?
Look at Reagan and all the stuff he rolled back, the vilification of Welfare, etc, etc. But go back further and we can see Reagan was a result of Nixo, his crimes and what's his bucket who has Nixon tattooed on his back (Roger Stone?) and beyond that? I'm not educated enough to say, but suffice to say, history echos even today.
I think the modern era stops with Reagan. Nixon was a mixed bag, and institutions more balanced. Nixon is responsible for the EPA after all.
Post Reagan we start to see the dnc move right and become less effevtive. Take a look at the mondale/ferraro campaign for effectiveness (and also Gore I think), clintons and even obama for the more right.
And everything thereafter...