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The Sanders-Clinton distinction: Running to do, not to be something
From today's Raleigh News and Observer:
.....
The first reason is obvious. Sanders and Clinton have dramatically different visions of politics.
Sanders is potently ideological. He has pressed the same economically egalitarian agenda for decades. He runs to do something, not to be it. If someone else could trigger a populist revolt as effectively, he’d likely have given way. I doubt he’s “berned” to be president. He has, though, I’m sure, longed to help create a different kind of society. Forever.
Clinton, like her husband and probably most politicians, has had her eye on the levers of power. She’d say she’s pragmatic, she’s effective, she knows how to get things done. This has meant, for decades, that she has been as flexible and shape-shifting as the desert sand.
She’s one of America’s leading globalists, until, reportedly, she’s not. She hawks international pipelines until she’s horrified by them. She votes for war, then declaims for peace. She demands mass incarceration until she’s appalled by it. She’s Wall Street’s best friend until she detests it. She sells the Lincoln bedroom and embraces super PACs, as she commits to strain money out of politics. It’s a different approach.
So different, in fact, that its rejection comprises a core component of the Sanders revolution. The intense loathing of chameleon politics is, perhaps, the main procedural plank of the platform. Clinton and her cadre seemingly believe this to be naïve, unschooled – saying one thing while doing another is, after all, politics. Maybe so, the Sandersistas reply. If it is, it’s like a bath in warm creosote. They want nothing to do with it.
.....
In fact, concern for those at the bottom was standard Democratic fare until … the Clintons. They were triangulating, third way, deregulating, corporatist, New Democrats – famously “ending” big government, crushing welfare, demanding NAFTA, linking the party to a marriage with Wall Street and Hollywood that mirrored Republican economic policy and removed the interests of the bottom third from the American political agenda.
In this sense, Clinton is a more pointed and specific adversary of the Sanders’ movement than even Republicans like Mitt Romney and, now, Donald Trump.
.....
The Clintons, on the other hand, are likely more responsible for the Democratic Party’s modern drift than any other humans. They looked hard at a traditional party commitment to low-income people, concluded it jeopardized their electoral fortunes and determined to abandon it.
It’s understandably nauseating, therefore, for the Sanders folks to be told it is their obligation to make the nomination process easier for Clinton. When that includes lectures about the high ground, it is more than activists ought be asked to bear.
The first reason is obvious. Sanders and Clinton have dramatically different visions of politics.
Sanders is potently ideological. He has pressed the same economically egalitarian agenda for decades. He runs to do something, not to be it. If someone else could trigger a populist revolt as effectively, he’d likely have given way. I doubt he’s “berned” to be president. He has, though, I’m sure, longed to help create a different kind of society. Forever.
Clinton, like her husband and probably most politicians, has had her eye on the levers of power. She’d say she’s pragmatic, she’s effective, she knows how to get things done. This has meant, for decades, that she has been as flexible and shape-shifting as the desert sand.
She’s one of America’s leading globalists, until, reportedly, she’s not. She hawks international pipelines until she’s horrified by them. She votes for war, then declaims for peace. She demands mass incarceration until she’s appalled by it. She’s Wall Street’s best friend until she detests it. She sells the Lincoln bedroom and embraces super PACs, as she commits to strain money out of politics. It’s a different approach.
So different, in fact, that its rejection comprises a core component of the Sanders revolution. The intense loathing of chameleon politics is, perhaps, the main procedural plank of the platform. Clinton and her cadre seemingly believe this to be naïve, unschooled – saying one thing while doing another is, after all, politics. Maybe so, the Sandersistas reply. If it is, it’s like a bath in warm creosote. They want nothing to do with it.
.....
In fact, concern for those at the bottom was standard Democratic fare until … the Clintons. They were triangulating, third way, deregulating, corporatist, New Democrats – famously “ending” big government, crushing welfare, demanding NAFTA, linking the party to a marriage with Wall Street and Hollywood that mirrored Republican economic policy and removed the interests of the bottom third from the American political agenda.
In this sense, Clinton is a more pointed and specific adversary of the Sanders’ movement than even Republicans like Mitt Romney and, now, Donald Trump.
.....
The Clintons, on the other hand, are likely more responsible for the Democratic Party’s modern drift than any other humans. They looked hard at a traditional party commitment to low-income people, concluded it jeopardized their electoral fortunes and determined to abandon it.
It’s understandably nauseating, therefore, for the Sanders folks to be told it is their obligation to make the nomination process easier for Clinton. When that includes lectures about the high ground, it is more than activists ought be asked to bear.
North Carolinians may be in the jaws of GOP governance, but they see clearly what is afoot.
26 replies
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Many of the Republicans and conservatives that I know believe that the Clintons are communists trying to remake our society into some sort of Marxist utopia. It takes all kinds, I guess.
Anyone who thinks that the Clintons sold their souls (I'm picturing Robert Johnson at the Crossroads) is not likely to be interested in my views. 
I am sure you mean well but it's just my policy. 
Yes, that is a great line from the op-ed piece. Bernie Sanders is fighting to restore it.
Another piece I ran across gets into the gritty details even more:
.....
How openly perverse a mockery of democracy is it that a significant portion of Hillary’s convention delegate lead over Sanders – enough to give her the nomination without a contest on the convention floor – derives from the 525 explicitly unelected and so-called superdelegates pledged to her before Sanders even declared his candidacy?
Adding more insult to insult and injury, Hillary plays the timeworn elite Democratic game of fake-progressive and pseudo-populist posing, trying to steal Sanders’ rhetorical thunder on her left while smilingly knifing him in the back.
.....
Why are the Hillary campaign and its allies in the DNC so arrogantly disrespectful towards Sanders and his followers, even as the Senator from Vermont continues to rack up primary victories and come in with more than 40 percent of the vote? Don’t they worry that their contempt will make it more difficult for them to garner votes from Bernie’s millions of followers in the general election? (By some polling estimates, close to a third of Bernie’s backers won’t vote for her). “Unless Clinton is able to convince a large proportion of Sanders supporters to vote for her,” a progressive Democrat writes in the liberal weekly The Nation, “she’s unlikely to win in November.”
The Clintonites are calculating, I think, that identity politics and Trump’s related high negatives will hold the day. They expect The Donald to be so toxic to female, nonwhite, and immigrant voters as to make his victory impossible. They are banking also on lots of crossover votes and funding from Republicans who can’t stand Trump. They are counting on enough Bernie supporters acting in accord with Sanders’ advance promise to deliver his voters to the party’s eventual nominee (Hillary) in the name of blocking the horrible Republican Party (recently described by Noam Chomsky as possibly “the most dangerous organization in human history”) – a promise they expect Sanders to deliver on soon and during the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia this summer. And they expect the ugliness they’ve spewed at Sanders and his supporters and the related hostility that many progressive Democrats feel for the Clintons and the DNC to slip down Orwell’s memory hole once the quadrennial extravaganza boils down to either Hillary or Donald (two of the most widely disliked people in the nation and on Earth).
But don’t forget the hate – the sheer unmitigated contempt that elite corporate Democrats from the Clintons on down feel for progressives in the ranks of “their” party, and indeed for anyone who challenges their superior wisdom and right to rule. As Ron Fournier noted in The Atlantic last February, “there has always been a (dark) side of the Clintons. They can’t fathom why anybody would challenge their motives, doubt their veracity, or criticize their policies. The Clintons’ self-conceptions are yoked to their sense of public service and joint commitment to making lives better—and they believe their ends justify their means…If you’re not for them, you’re not just an opponent—you’re beneath contempt.”
(Making lives better? As the economist Robert Pollin noted in the progressive Democratic journal The Nation earlier this year: “Clintonomics was a disaster for most Americans…Under Bill Clinton, Wall Street created a ruinous bubble, while workers lost wages and power… Bill Clinton’s presidency accomplished almost nothing to improve conditions for working people and the poor on a sustained basis. Gestures to the poor and working class were slight and back-handed, while wages for the majority remained below their level of a generation prior. Wealth at the top exploded with the Wall Street bubble. But the stratospheric rise in stock prices and the debt-financed consumption and investment booms produced a mortgaged legacy. The financial unraveling began even as Clinton was basking in praise for his economic stewardship.”)
.....
That toxic, viciously circular, and self-fulfilling game is part of how to we got in current big tangle of a situation wherein the top 1 percent owns more than 90 percent of the nation’s wealth along with most of government and the media while their soulless and cancerous profits system (capitalism) pushes humans and other living things over the edge of economic, military, authoritarian, racist, sexist and (last but not least) ecological catastrophe. “If voting changed anything,” the great American anarchist Emma Goldman once said, “they’d make it illegal.”
.....
How openly perverse a mockery of democracy is it that a significant portion of Hillary’s convention delegate lead over Sanders – enough to give her the nomination without a contest on the convention floor – derives from the 525 explicitly unelected and so-called superdelegates pledged to her before Sanders even declared his candidacy?
Adding more insult to insult and injury, Hillary plays the timeworn elite Democratic game of fake-progressive and pseudo-populist posing, trying to steal Sanders’ rhetorical thunder on her left while smilingly knifing him in the back.
.....
Why are the Hillary campaign and its allies in the DNC so arrogantly disrespectful towards Sanders and his followers, even as the Senator from Vermont continues to rack up primary victories and come in with more than 40 percent of the vote? Don’t they worry that their contempt will make it more difficult for them to garner votes from Bernie’s millions of followers in the general election? (By some polling estimates, close to a third of Bernie’s backers won’t vote for her). “Unless Clinton is able to convince a large proportion of Sanders supporters to vote for her,” a progressive Democrat writes in the liberal weekly The Nation, “she’s unlikely to win in November.”
The Clintonites are calculating, I think, that identity politics and Trump’s related high negatives will hold the day. They expect The Donald to be so toxic to female, nonwhite, and immigrant voters as to make his victory impossible. They are banking also on lots of crossover votes and funding from Republicans who can’t stand Trump. They are counting on enough Bernie supporters acting in accord with Sanders’ advance promise to deliver his voters to the party’s eventual nominee (Hillary) in the name of blocking the horrible Republican Party (recently described by Noam Chomsky as possibly “the most dangerous organization in human history”) – a promise they expect Sanders to deliver on soon and during the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia this summer. And they expect the ugliness they’ve spewed at Sanders and his supporters and the related hostility that many progressive Democrats feel for the Clintons and the DNC to slip down Orwell’s memory hole once the quadrennial extravaganza boils down to either Hillary or Donald (two of the most widely disliked people in the nation and on Earth).
But don’t forget the hate – the sheer unmitigated contempt that elite corporate Democrats from the Clintons on down feel for progressives in the ranks of “their” party, and indeed for anyone who challenges their superior wisdom and right to rule. As Ron Fournier noted in The Atlantic last February, “there has always been a (dark) side of the Clintons. They can’t fathom why anybody would challenge their motives, doubt their veracity, or criticize their policies. The Clintons’ self-conceptions are yoked to their sense of public service and joint commitment to making lives better—and they believe their ends justify their means…If you’re not for them, you’re not just an opponent—you’re beneath contempt.”
(Making lives better? As the economist Robert Pollin noted in the progressive Democratic journal The Nation earlier this year: “Clintonomics was a disaster for most Americans…Under Bill Clinton, Wall Street created a ruinous bubble, while workers lost wages and power… Bill Clinton’s presidency accomplished almost nothing to improve conditions for working people and the poor on a sustained basis. Gestures to the poor and working class were slight and back-handed, while wages for the majority remained below their level of a generation prior. Wealth at the top exploded with the Wall Street bubble. But the stratospheric rise in stock prices and the debt-financed consumption and investment booms produced a mortgaged legacy. The financial unraveling began even as Clinton was basking in praise for his economic stewardship.”)
.....
That toxic, viciously circular, and self-fulfilling game is part of how to we got in current big tangle of a situation wherein the top 1 percent owns more than 90 percent of the nation’s wealth along with most of government and the media while their soulless and cancerous profits system (capitalism) pushes humans and other living things over the edge of economic, military, authoritarian, racist, sexist and (last but not least) ecological catastrophe. “If voting changed anything,” the great American anarchist Emma Goldman once said, “they’d make it illegal.”
.....
'We welcome their hatred.'
The Sanders Revolution is just beginning.
Ouch, I haven't heard that one before, it about covers it though. 
Give him a Pulitzer...and a 
K & R to the galaxy.
