Progressives need to focus on the prize
I live in a small bubble in a blue state. And although I travel and meet with people from purple and some red states, my immediate circle is mostly made up of people who identify as progressives or center-left. Virtually all of the people in my blue bubble assert that no matter what happens they are ready to vote for a cardboard if that is the candidate running against President Trump.
Yet, over the past few weeks, as Senator Sanders’ candidacy has gained more traction, especially among young people, I have been reading a slew of articles warning us of how a Sanders candidacy would be a disaster for Democrats. However, what is of greater concerns to me are the conversations that are taking within my circle about the electability of the Democratic front runners. These debates often echo the same arguments push forward by the punditacrocy against Sanders, which is that he is a “socialist,” therefore unelectable.
The human mind has an amazing capacity to hold contradictory views, which is why I felt the need to pen this cautionary article to ask (beg!) my friends to reflect on these contradictions and their impact on their circle of friends in the upcoming elections. It is important for us to ask ourselves the following: how it is that, on the one hand, we are prepared to vote for anybody -- a "cardboard" though others have other more colorful analogies-- to get rid of Trump (one would assume that this, ipso facto, means ANYBODY; yet, we are criticizing the Democratic front runners. This assumes that our preference is not just “anybody but Trump" but someone other than the candidate from the Ds if that person is a progressive.
At the root of these contradictions, I believe, is the press, which plays all of us like fiddles. As we step back and objectively assess those journalists, pundits and, of course, Wall Street Democrats who are raising concerns about senator Sanders and other progressive candidates, we can notice two things.
First, they consistently parrot concerns about any Democratic front runner who promotes progressive policies. Today, it is Senator Sanders but only a few weeks ago, it was Senator Warren who, parenthetically, I support in this race because I believe she is competent, smart, passionate and a fighter. But in the end, I will vote for the democratic nominee.
Second, the pundits’ criticisms are in fact a window into their preference for the status quo. They are the well-connected ones who benefit from policies that have created the highest level of inequality that the United States has ever seen. This is eroding the people’s trust in this still-young democratic experiment. They support a system in which the uber rich billionaire can pay less in taxes than his maid.
While this conversation is taking place in the punditry and sadly even within progressive circles, many wealthy people are themselves starting to recognize the insidiousness nature of the system and the ways in which it is eroding our democracy. They are starting to speak out but oddly enough, their voices are drowned out. For example, Jamie Dimon, the billionaire CEO of Chase Manhattan bank, who two years was singing the praises of President Trump’s tax cuts, has had a change of heart. Last year, he stated in a Bloomberg news interview that “individuals earning the most can afford to pay more, and I have no problems paying higher taxes to address some of the fundamental challenges and inequities of our society.”
Another billionaire, Salesforce chairman and cofounder Marc Benioff recently published an op-ed in the NY Times, in which he stated that “increasing taxes on high-income individuals like myself would help generate the trillions of dollars that we desperately need to improve education and health care and fight climate change.” Others like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, the No. 2 and 3 wealthiest Americans have been “the biggest proponent of having the estate tax collect more money.”
Clearly, Dimon, Benioff, Gates and Buffet are neither crazy nor are they the kind of people that we would consider raging socialists. However, what they all know is that America, despite its flaws, is a country of promise and this promise is slipping away for too many citizens. They understand that for far too many people the American dream has turned into a nightmare and created a trust gap with government. The corrupt politicians have sharpened the division in the country and used it for short-term personal wins at the expense of our long-term social cohesion. This erosion in our democratic ideals, values and systems has resulted in voter apathy, low elections turnout. And who can argue against that reaction. Indeed, it is only rational for voters to conclude that it is pointless to vote. They watch company profits soar (yay for Wall Street!) as their quality of life proportionally decline and their perspectives for the future get grimmer.
As we, democrats [including those who hold democratic values] read and listen to the pundits explain why Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are akin to communists (as Michael Bloomberg recently stated of Sanders policy proposals), the arguments among us grow more acerbic. In the last debate in Nevada, Senator Sanders referred to a recent Yale Study (https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(19)33019-3/fulltext), which shows that Medicare for All will can:
- prevent 68,000 unnecessary deaths
- save $450 billion - each and every year and
- eliminate 530,000 bankruptcies in 2019 from healthcare debt.
Yale is not known as bastion for progressives but we must take heed of their findings. They note in the first paragraph of the report that
"Although health care expenditure per capita is higher in the USA than in any other country, more than 37 million Americans do not have health insurance, and 41 million more have inadequate access to care."
They looked at the data and found that "Taking into account both the costs of coverage expansion and the savings that would be achieved through the Medicare for All Act, we calculate that a single-payer, universal health-care system is likely to lead to a 13% savings in national health-care expenditure, equivalent to more than US$450 billion annually (based on the value of the US$ in 2017)."
We live in a country where the wealthiest three families now own more wealth than the bottom half of the country. This is simply abhorrent and pointing out this fact is not hating capitalism as the pundits want us to believe. Indeed, by working to reverse the course of this concentration of wealth and power, we are working to save our democracy in the search for a more perfect union.
My suggestion for progressives is to focus on the prize. We all know who President Trump is by now and what his policies will mean for those among us who are poor, black and brown, or immigrants.
I will close by highlighting the following. The next elections will be in nine months, and while we argue with each other, despite agreeing that we would vote a “cardboard,” the Republicans are hard at work. The Supreme Court has undone campaign finance laws to make it easier for faceless donors and campaign organizations to buy elections.
They [the Republicans] are being systematic and focused!
After having redrawn districts after districts in states like Georgia and Wisconsin, they are going about the business of purging voter rolls. Where the courts have stopped them; in states like Texas, Mississippi, Arkansas, and North Carolina, they are creating barriers to make it harder for Americans to vote. They close or move voting sites away from minority areas. We all know this strategy but our party, and worst, progressives are engaging in internal disputes and mutual recrimination. President Obama recently stated “One of the things I do worry about sometimes among progressives in the United States,” .... we start sometimes creating what’s called a ‘circular firing squad’, where you start shooting at your allies because one of them has strayed from purity on the issues." He continues,
“And when that happens, typically the overall effort and movement weakens.”
Lest we forget what is at stakes, here is quick reminder. In this election cycle, there will be more than the President on the ballot. There will be 35 senate seats, 11 gubernatorial as well as all 435 congressional districts that will be up for elections. There will also be numerous other state and local elections taking place, and I would argue they are even more important that the Presidential or congressional elections.
We have all agreed to vote for a cardboard at the Presidential level. We need to move on from there and focus our efforts on strengthening our grassroots machine to prepare for the coming tsunami. The pundits will continue to pontificate but our eyes must stay focus on the prize, which is about saving our very democratic system for the next generation.