Benjamin Wallace Wells, writing in the New Yorker, raises the question about whether Bernie Sanders is off-track, in a losing mode. Hillary Clinton has picked up, rather loudly, on the horror raised by daughter Chelsea: Sanders' proposed "dismantling of Obamacare." Hmmm. Even Obama has talked about changes in Obamacare.
In the debate last night, this tactic looked clearer, and more effective, than it had before. Sanders’s ideology is an imperfect fit with the institutional progressivism that Democratic primary voters have spent years working for; perhaps, in certain ways, it even undermines it. Clinton’s bet is that the political compass for her party’s primary voters does not point true left, to the Scandinavian social projects that Sanders so admires, but to the tangible gains that Democrats have won. She came to praise Barack Obama. Norway be damned. ...Wells,NewYorker
Hmm. "Institutional progressivism". Just how does that differ from what I'd call "lively" or "active" progressivism. "Institutional progressivism" gives off sly, stinky odors of permissible, DNC-style 'progressivism'." Don't want that stuff. Want the real thing. Or maybe attaching another word -- "pragmatic" to "socialism"? And hey, even Obama wants to reform Obamacare.
Seems pretty obvious: Many Dems are dismayed at the general hard-right shift of the US and more particularly the contemporary Democratic party which Clinton (m.) threw to the right in the 1990's. No more of that slick Clinton stuff, please. Give us Dems some fresh air and freedom from institutionalism. Freedom from government dominated by "military" and "industrial."
When, over here on the left, we express a desire to dump institutionalist politics, how close are we to that crowd in the right who bemoan "fedral gubment"? Maybe we have some friends in enemy territory.
“What this is really about is not the rational way to go forward,” Sanders said. “It is whether we have the guts to stand up to the private insurance companies and all their money, and the pharmaceutical industry. That’s what this debate should be about.”
More directly than anything else, this showed the political vein that Sanders has found. That is the power of his insistence that even Obama has made only halting progress toward a progressive ideal, and that to go further requires a more fundamental challenge to the system, and that will take bravery and guts. It is a language of 2006. ...Wells,NewYorker
I'm all for bravery and guts and not their imitation, a mockery displayed in the picture of George W. Bush on that carrier, standing in front of the "mission accomplished" banner. We've paid heavily over the years for costly, lethal missions we wish we'd never been on. Progress -- or progressivism -- is long overdue.
