Today's Elections-- In Both Parties-- Are Between The Establishment And Anti-Establishment. Gut Check: Which Side Are You On?

Yesterday, Ron Brownstein, writing for The Atlantic, had his corporate, anti-Bernie slant on full display. He wrote that Bernie's "entry into the 2020 race amounts to a big stone in a lake: It will generate ripples that touch every other candidate. But his own path to the nomination remains rocky unless he can attract a broader coalition than he did in 2016. Whether or not Sanders claims the nomination himself, his bid could have a big impact on which candidate eventually does. Sanders will hurt contenders whose support overlaps with his, reducing the pool of voters available for those who are targeting the same groups most drawn to him, particularly young people, the most liberal activists, and independents who participate in Democratic primaries. That dynamic would most obviously affect Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, but could also potentially weaken former Texas Representative Beto O’Rourke, who’s mulling a bid. Yet it could simultaneously benefit the candidates with the least demographic and ideological convergence, a list that ranges from African American Senators Kamala Harris and Cory Booker to such relative centrists as Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar and former Vice President Joe Biden, if he joins the field."

But for all of his influence, Sanders still faces huge obstacles in his second bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. Key among them is a history of resistance in 2016 from core groups in the party, including African Americans and voters who identify as partisan Democrats.

Sanders this week quickly demonstrated his greatest asset as a candidate: a passionate grassroots following that includes a massive base of small-dollar online donors. On Wednesday, he reported that, in the first 24 hours after his announcement, he raised nearly $6 million online, far more than any of his rivals did after entering the race. He’s in a stronger position than in 2016, too, in the internal party debate: As Sanders noted in his announcement-day interview with CBS, more of the Democratic Party’s leaders, including several of his 2020 competitors, have moved toward positions he took in the last presidential campaign, supporting a single-payer health-care system and free four-year public college. “All of those ideas and many more are now part of the political mainstream,” Sanders crowed during the interview.

It’s unquestionable that more Democrats are supporting those ideas than when Sanders aired them in 2016. But all of the policies remain contested: Klobuchar, for one, has already rejected both single-payer and free tuition. Other potential candidates targeting more moderate voters, such as Biden and several former governors eyeing the race, would be virtually certain to follow. (It’s also worth noting that the Democratic-controlled House is unlikely to pass legislation on either matter.) Even some of the candidates who have echoed Sanders’s overall goals are likely to challenge some of his specific proposals as unaffordable or excessive, as Booker has done by rejecting Sanders’s call to virtually eliminate private health insurance.

In other words, Sanders hasn’t won the war of ideas in the party nearly as much as he’s suggested. In fact, he’s virtually certain to face tougher scrutiny over his agenda than he did in 2016, when Clinton made the misguided strategic choice not to criticize his proposals as undesirable or unaffordable, but only as unlikely to pass Congress. Sanders probably won’t receive such deference again.

That's right, the corporate whores and careerists don't support Sanders. People do-- lots of them. The idea of someone like Amy Klobuchar or Status Quo Joe supporting Bernie's progressive positions is absurd. Browmnstein's whole perspective in his piece is absurd and can be summed up in one sentence: people who represent the status quo don't back revolutionaries. As I've said, people like Klobuchar and Biden wouldn't have supported the American War For Independence, free public education, the emancipation of the slaves, the minimum wage, Social Security... or anything else that was hard to pass and that upset the establishment.

John Nichols, in The Nation makes a far more salient point than Brownstein's corporatist carping: Two years into the presidency of Donald Trump, the nation is ready for radical change. Nichols begins by addressing people like Brownstein: "When Bernie Sanders launched his bid for the presidency in 2015, he was dismissed by political and media elites as an outsider with radical ideas that would prevent him from being taken seriously by Democratic primary and caucus voters. Now, as Sanders mounts his second bid for the presidency, the same political and media aristocrats speculate about whether Sanders will have a hard time distinguishing himself in a field of candidates who echo his stances on issues ranging from Medicare for All to wage hikes to tuition-free college and implementing a Green New Deal." Brownstein's biggest distortion is exactly what Nichols corrects: "Sanders won the ideas primary four years ago... As media and political elites misunderstood what made Sanders stand out in 2016, they are now misunderstanding what will make him stand out in 2020."

Sanders’s identification as a democratic socialist was not a liability in 2016. It was a strength. It made him an intellectually dynamic and exciting contender who addressed America’s anxieties and its hopes—not merely because with the solutions he proposed but in the way he put the pieces together by comfortably talking about doing battle with “oligarchy” and “plutocracy” and “the billionaire class.”

At a time when Americans were sick and tired of the political “competition” between right-wing dogma and centrist double talk, Sanders spoke a language that made sense. He focused on fundamental questions and provided fundamental answers: People who are ailing need affordable health care, and a single-payer national health-care program will get the care they need; people working 40 hours a week shouldn’t be living in poverty, and a $15-an-hour minimum wage will make ends meet; young people shouldn’t have to take on overwhelming debt in order to get an education, and free tuition will change the calculus. Ending austerity and addressing inequality costs money, and taxing the rich will help to balance the books.

...The moment will be just as ripe in 2020. The challenges that needed to be addressed four years ago remain unaddressed today, and in many cases have been made more daunting by the Robin-Hood-in-reverse approach of Trump and his billionaire-aligned Republican allies in Congress. Because of Trump’s racism and crude attacks on immigrants and refugees and women’s rights, there will be an even greater need to focus on an equity agenda that Sanders was sometimes criticized in 2016 for not emphasizing enough. In 2020, that agenda was central to an announcement of candidacy that declared: “I’m running for president because, now more than ever, we need leadership that brings us together-- not divides us up. Women and men, black, white, Latino, Native American, Asian American, gay and straight, young and old, native born and immigrant. Now is the time for us to stand together.”

In that same “complete the revolution” announcement on Tuesday, Sanders promised that “Together we can create a nation that leads the world in the struggle for peace and for economic, racial, social and environmental justice. And together we can defeat Donald Trump and repair the damage he has done to our country.”

Unlike most of the other candidates, who are evolving toward where Sanders is already at, the independent senator from Vermont simply has to be his own authentic self-- the guy who started working with the Young People’s Socialist League and civil-rights groups as a student at the University of Chicago and who joined the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom that Randolph and another democratic socialist, Bayard Rustin, organized in 1963.

The point here is not to suggest that the Democratic Party is about to go socialist, or that if Sanders is nominated and elected that America will suddenly be a socialist country. The point is that, after 30 years of globalization, 20 years of digital revolution, and 10 years of automation, with climate change posing an existential threat and with inequality surging in a new age of monopoly, the United States is at a critical juncture. The reactionary policies of the Trump administration will not meet the demands of this moment, but neither will the centrist “New Democrat” or “Third Way” approaches that have too frequently constrained Democratic administrations in the past four decades.

This is a potential New Deal moment, a potential Great Society moment. Bigger ideas, bolder approaches, better answers are needed if this country is going to respond in a meaningful way to climate change, to economic and racial injustice, to the dislocation caused by the collapse of the old economy, and to the monopolization of the new economy by a handful of tech giants.

Just as there was in the 1930s, and in the 1960s, there is now an opening for the Democratic Party to fill a void in our politics and policy-making. But to fill that void, the party must be willing to embrace at least some ideas that have been labeled as “socialist”-- and to maintain the embrace even when a Herbert Hoover or a Barry Goldwater or a Donald Trump attacks. Social Security was described as a “socialist” program, but FDR fought for and implemented it. Medicare was attacked as a “socialist” program, but LBJ fought for and implemented it. Major strides on behalf of racial justice, gender equity, disability rights, and environmental protection, to implement fair taxation and to provide a safety net, were often decried by the right as “socialist” initiatives-- as backers of a Green New Deal are now learning-- but, as these policies have been advanced, society has come to the point even centrists and some conservatives recognize their value.

It is not necessary to claim that democratic socialism has all the answers-- certainly Sanders does not do so-- but it is necessary to recognize that there are old socialist proposals that have always made sense and new socialist proposals that make sense in a moment of economic, environmental, and social disruption.

Sanders, to a far greater extent than the other 2020 contenders, is prepared to do this. He’s not doctrinaire or romantically idealistic. He’s practical and serious-minded. He’s a former mayor, who ran his state’s largest city ably. He’s been in the US House and the US Senate for almost three decades, compiling a record of getting things right when most Republicans and many Democrats got them wrong. He is a serious thinker and analyst of ideas, who is familiar with social democracy, as it has been practiced and as it now is being practiced in Scandinavian countries-- to such an extent that he once organized town meetings in Vermont with Denmark’s ambassador to the United States. And he is prepared to talk about how social-democratic programs have worked well for countries such as Norway, Sweden, Germany, and Canada.

It’s not a hard sell. Polling suggests the people are ready. Social-democratic responses to contemporary challenges-- like providing health care as a right, not a privilege; like taxing the rich to fund job creation and green infrastructure-- are popular, especially with young voters and with the historically dispossessed voters who must be mobilized to win in 2020. If Sanders runs as a more-ambitious version of who he was in 2016-- with comprehensive proposals for meeting the ancient need of equity in a new machine age of globalization, digital revolution, automation-- he will stand out from the field of Democratic contenders.

...What makes Bernie Sanders stand out is an ability to move the discussion forward by educating voters rather than trying to frighten or divide them. At the heart of that education is an understanding that is hardwired into the American experience.

“Let me define for you, simply and straightforwardly, what democratic socialism means to me. It builds on what Franklin Delano Roosevelt said when he fought for guaranteed economic rights for all Americans. And it builds on what Martin Luther King, Jr. said in 1968, when he stated that, ‘this country has socialism for the rich and rugged individualism for the poor,’” says Sanders. He went on:

It’s time we had democratic socialism for working families, not just Wall Street, billionaires and large corporations. It means that we should not be providing welfare for corporations, huge tax breaks for the very rich, or trade policies which would boost corporate profits as workers lose their jobs,” he said, echoing a line that he frequently repeats in his standard campaign speech across the country. It means that we create a government that works for all of us, not just powerful special interests. It means that economic rights must be an essential part of what American stands for. It means that health care should be a right of all people, not a privilege.

Brian Hanley penned a post on Medium this week, 20 Reasons Bernie Sanders Is The One To Beat Trump In 2020 and you really do have to click on the link and read the whole thing to get the full import of what he's saying. I'll just give you the headlines here:

1- He's on track to win the 2020 primaries.
2- He’s the most likely to win the Electoral College.
3. He’s the most popular politician in the country.
4. The kids are crazy about him.
5. He’s a savage on social media.
6. He’s the undisputed leader of the progressive movement.

7. His supporters are as passionate as anyone’s.
8. He’s the king of grassroots fundraising.
9. His message resonates with Trump voters.
10. He’s a leading voice on environmental justice.
11. He has more experience and organizational readiness than the rest of the field.
12. He has crossover appeal that his competitors lack.
13. He may not be a Dem, but he’s given Dems life.
14. He’s stronger than ever due to the DNC’s reforms.
15. He may be in his 70’s, but so too are his main competitors.
17. He may be a socialist, but so too are growing numbers of Americans.
18. He’s authentic.
19. He represents the change most Americans want.
20. His interest in running isn’t for the power, it’s for the people.