Too young to get the job done | Is Bernie Sanders vicious?
Let’s assume either Sen. Bernie Sanders or Sen. Cory Booker could be elected president on a platform to pass Medicare-for-all. Who would be more likely to pass it?
To certain people on the left, the simple answer may be that Sanders actually believes in single-payer health care and Booker has only backed the plan as an opportunist, and, as a corollary, that Sanders would gun for it, while Booker would put it on the backburner or drop it upon entering the White House.
After all, Sanders has been a socialist since his college days, and made Medicare-for-all a real policy possibility through his 2016 insurgency. He’s a true believer. By contrast, Booker is a neoliberal Democrat with past ties to Big Pharma who decided to back Medicare-for-all in late 2017 only after calculating that the base was moving to the left and it would not spark controversy. His position seems less sincere.
I don't think that's quite the right way to look at it. The question is not whether they would pursue it, but how they would do so.
As much as politicians lie, they generally make a good faith effort to fulfill most of their major campaign pledges. Regardless of their personal convictions, they rarely lose sight of the specific mandate generated by their election, and enacting their promised proposals is the simplest way for a politician to maintain credibility and ensure reelection.
Political science data based on historical trends overwhelmingly bears that out. And a contemporary reminder of the phenomenon is our current president. Trump is exceptionally dishonest, bored by governance, has the attention span of a goldfish, and his main constituency is his ego. And yet he has consistently attempted to fulfill his campaign promises on immigration, trade, taxes, a border wall, Obamcare and so on, believing that he must cater to the base that swept him into office. (The chart below is courtesy of FiveThirtyEight.)
So I don’t doubt that Booker — or many other establishment 2020 hopefuls like Kirsten Gillibrand or Kamala Harris — would really attempt Medicare-for-all if he made it a tier 1 issue in his campaign.
I just think that he might be too young to pull it off.
I don’t mean that he’s inexperienced. Rather, I mean to point out that Booker’s generation of politicians is handicapped by a kind of political education that’s ill-equipped to handle something like Medicare-for-all.
As Cambridge scholar Benjamin Studebaker put it in a recent essay, many prominent Democrats between the age of 40 and 60, who came up in the 90s and the 00s, are “a lost generation” from the perspective of the left. They were groomed as New Democrats — compassionate Reaganites — and are students of the Clintons and Obama. Their learned instincts dictate that in order to take and maintain power they must apologize for being overtly progressive, retreat swiftly to the center, fixate on incremental gains, and never stray too far from the free market.
A push for Medicare-for-all will spark a war with capital, and those instincts will be like heading into battle with a rusty bayonet. Booker is more likely to make major game-changing concessions (think: Obama giving up the crucial public option when passing the Affordable Care Act). And his past ties to the pharmaceutical industry mean that during tense negotiations he may end up be sitting across the table from someone who used to fund him; even if he foregoes election funding from Big Pharma, he’ll face off against people whose worldview he has generally been receptive to — and thus will be more likely to accede to their arguments. Ultimately he’s significantly more likely to be overly cautious while making the case for Medicare-for-all and to concede more when the going gets tough.
Sanders, by contrast, is too old for this shit. His political socialization took place during the radical 60s. He grew up at a time when liberalism was far less apologetic, the welfare state was expanding, and leftist radicals were able to shift the national conversation. Sanders doesn’t avoid conflict — he views it as politically productive. While in many scenarios it would be a liability that he doesn’t have experience compromising, in this kind of war it’s an asset. Sanders brings the heavy artillery — no finesse, potential for friendly fire, but lots of power.
Not everyone in Sanders’ generation shares his worldview of course, but the point is that he grew up at a time when liberal/left politics were far more ideologically and strategically diverse than during the Reagan era, and he has a sensibility more naturally suited to its decline.
There are of course huge limitations to the bully pulpit. It’s not enough to be fierce, to be better at rhetorical framing — at the end of the day, the most conservative Democrats in the Senate either sign on to Medicare-for-all or they don’t. The White House alone can only do much to persuade them.
But there’s one more weapon in Sanders’ arsenal that could help with that: an allied social movement. Sanders doesn’t just come from an organizing background in social movements, he generates them. In 2016, he was able to break grassroots fundraising records, mobilize huge number of young voters and volunteers, fill up stadiums, go viral online effortlessly, and contribute to a historic boom in membership in the Democratic Socialists of America. There’s a significant chance that if he won in 2020, he’d build an army of volunteers and small donors even larger than Obama did in 2008.
But while Obama made the profound mistake of folding his grassroots operation Obama for America into the Democratic National Committee —immediately defanging it and relinquishing his ability to pressure moderate Democrats — it's inconceivable that Sanders would make that move. Instead, Sanders would relish the opportunity to use millions of supporters to apply pressure to members of his party in order to pass an ambitious legislative agenda. And his instinct would be to capitalize on protests and direct action on behalf of his vision, not subdue them.
Could Booker be a movement candidate? Perhaps, but that ability is unproven, and it's much harder to envision him using a movement as leverage against his own party in the way a Sanders-type candidate would.
None of this is to say that Sanders should be president, or that Booker shouldn't be. It's just meant to be an exercise in how to think about candidates in a crowded field where policy platforms are going to overlap quite a bit in the left lane.
Revisionist history on Bernie Sanders
This hit job by writer Sady Doyle on Bernie Sanders' campaigning style is so sloppy that I'm reluctant to engage with it, but it captures a real sentiment among the anti-Bernie crowd, and it's a narrative that's quite likely to come up in the future, so it's worth making a few points in response.
Doyle's main argument is that Sanders' campaign style in 2016 was exceptional for its "viciousness"; that he does not know how to campaign "in any other way than going negative"; and that unless he reforms himself, he could be poised to "destroy" his 2020 rivals the way he did Clinton in 2016, and do damage to the Democrats' prospects against Trump.
This essay feels like it was written on another planet. Or, more likely, by someone who thinks Twitter constitutes all of political reality.
Sanders has often said that he doesn’t believe in running negative ads and ran a famously positive campaign that focused almost entirely on policy and encouraging people to see the world through a social democratic lens. He not only declined to attack her over her email scandal — a major point of vulnerability for her — but he actually actively dismissed the idea that it was a problem altogether. The only villain of his campaign was the 1 percent. In fact, he was so upbeat that as the primaries progressed and his chances grew slimmer political analysts wondered if he may have sabotaged himself by refusing to go negative.
Doyle suggests that Sanders persistently called Clinton “unqualified” to be the nominee “long after he knew he’d lost.” But the one memorable instance of Sanders calling Clinton unqualified came in the run-up to the New York primary in April 2016‚ widely considered to be his final shot at staying in the game. Sanders said she wasn’t qualified during a fiery speech — in response to recent remarks by Clinton during an interview in which she declined to answer whether she thought Sanders was qualified to be president, and instead said that he hadn’t “done his homework.” It was a harsh barb, but he walked it back a few days later, saying she was “of course” qualified to be president. Doyle also says Sanders accused Clinton of being “the head of a massive conspiracy,” by which I assume she means Sanders pointed out that Clinton had close, material ties to Wall Street and represented the face of the Democratic establishment. That was …. correct. And fair.
Doyle’s essay offers virtually no specifics on what made Sanders so diabolical, but her main piece of evidence about its disastrous effects are the 1 in 10 Sanders voters who ultimately went for Trump in the general election. She acknowledges that back in 2008 Clinton primary voters also went for McCain over Obama, but she doesn’t get specific, probably because it’s damning: around 25 percent of Clinton voters went for McCain! That’s 2 and a half times the amount of Democratic defections from the Sanders crowd.
I’m not going to get into all the reasons that happened but it’s worth noting that it came after a primary season in which Clinton, her husband, and her surrogates used heinous racially-tinged messaging on dozens of occasions to cast doubt on Obama’s credibility and electability. From leaking photos of Obama intended to make him look foreign to boasting that she had more support from “hard-working Americans, white Americans” to manufacturing controversy around his past drug use and much much more, Clinton employed racist tropes to dehumanize her opponent. Clinton’s campaign was far more vicious and morally abhorrent than Sanders ever got close to being, and yet somehow Sanders is depicted as the one out to “destroy” rivals.
I suspect that Doyle gets harassed by a lot of obnoxious Bernie Sanders supporters online, and that’s unfortunate. But that experience can’t be used to paint a false picture of the politician they support.
Editor's note
Since there's a surprising amount of Bernie Content in this newsletter, I just want to note for new subscribers that I have no specific candidate preference for 2020 — as past newsletters make clear!
What I'm reading
How The Apprentice paved the way for Trump's path to the White House
Pushback on Marie Kondo's tidying religion when it comes to books: "Unread books are imagined reading futures, not an indication of failure."
Emily Stewart explains how Trump could probably use a national emergency to fund the border wall
The founder of Blackwater is diving deep into finding valuable metals in Africa
David Klion on why Bernie Sanders isn't just another while male candidate
Return of the neocons
Eric Levitz on why Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's 70 percent top tax rate is moderate and evidence-based
The Saudis are using child soldiers from Darfur in Yemen.
Matt Yglesias: The skills gap was a lie.
Long read
From Arizona to Yemen: the journey of an American bomb. The remarkable introductory section of this piece is reminiscent of Daniyal Mueenuddin's In Other Rooms, Other Wonders.
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