More on Warren and Sanders Editor’s Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall

More on Warren and Sanders

Editor’s Blog – Talking Points Memo / by Josh Marshall / 6h

Let me elaborate on my point below about differences between Warren and Sanders, ones of political ethos, strategy and culture, even as policies remain quite similar.

One basic, though seemingly trivial, aspect of the difference between Warren and Sander is in their relationship with and to the Democratic Party. Sanders, though running with Democratic support and caucusing with the Democrats for decades, famously refuses to actually become or run as a Democrat. His Democratic opponents routinely chide him for this. In practice it makes no real difference. He’s running for the Democratic nomination. That’s actually a much more meaningful and consequential affiliation than merely registering as a Democrat.

Yet the fact that he sticks to it so doggedly shows that it’s quite important to him and what you might call his “brand.” It is actually central to it, which as I noted earlier is essentially sectarian and anti-establishment. Sanders says clearly enough that Democrats are better than Republicans. But the core of his political message is that Democrats are fundamentally not on the side of working Americans and that their policies and politics for decades have been failures.

It’s been clear to me for some time that if Sanders were to win the Democratic nomination his general election campaign would be as much a campaign against the Democratic Party — its institutional structure, its past, its most celebrated leaders — as it would be of the GOP. Indeed, I don’t think many of his top supporters would even disagree with this. That is their diagnosis of American politics.

Warren used to be a Republican, albeit in an era when a very different kind of Republican than the kind we know today still existed. She has no real history or experience in counter cultural politics, either in its cultural or political dimensions. Crucially, most of her involvement in politics in the last two decades, until very recently, has been an insiders game. I don’t mean inside in terms of being an “insider” or part of the establishment, but focused on change by understanding and operating within the bureaucratic structures of power. The Consumer Finance Protection Board and her role both conceiving of it and bringing it to fruition is a good illustration of this.

To me these things about Warren are generally positives and, by my reading of politics, give her purchase on a larger potential political coalition. But many of Sanders’ top supporters are actually saying the same thing, just having a different read on the pluses and minuses. As Jacobin editor Bhaskar Sunkara put it in April, “For a layer of intellectuals, policy people, and other professionals, supporting Warren is a way to signal genuine concern with the U.S. and support broadly egalitarian fixes, while still not crossing the Rubicon. It’s understandable. For the rest of us, it’s Bernie.” He expanded on the theme in this column from October in The Guardian. As he explained, despite policy similarities, the sort of deep change America needs “won’t come from the politics of shared responsibility, or clever policy initiatives, it’ll come from the mobilization of people on the streets, and in their workplaces and communities. Sanders is the only candidate that can open up those possibilities.”

(If you’re not familiar with Sunkara, you really should be. Here’s an interview The New Yorker did with him in the Spring.)

What all this means in the present or how it has played out is that her platform and campaign make no demands on Democrats to admit the things and people they supported in the past were wrong or mistakes or that the Democratic Party itself is fundamentally corrupt — not in the venal sense but more fundamentally as an ally of corporations. When Warren proposes dramatic new expansions of government, regulations and higher taxes you can certainly argue that she is implicitly saying that. Same when she pledges not to do any high-dollar fundraisers.

But that’s not the message. It’s really all presented as next steps, next things to do. To put this in symbolic terms, you can easily imagine Warren campaigning with and embracing Barack Obama — as she has indeed done repeatedly in the past. Sanders doing the same thing is something between very awkward and unthinkable.

SHAREVISIT WEBSITE