Bernie Is Not the New Barack -- And That's a Good Thing
Bernie Sanders' surge in recent national polls, and hints he might win both the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primaries, have brought inevitable comparisons to an insurgent candidate whose enthusiastic young supporters took Hillary Clinton by surprise eight years ago. But Barak Obama's 2008 campaign is not the right comparison. Sanders's campaign is a very different kind, with deeper potential and a different measure of success.
Sanders is running on ideas and policies. Deep, institutionalized inequality is the country's biggest problem in his view -- from gaps in wealth and income to racialized policing and incarceration. The responses are policies that buttress and expand the middle class, protect workers from insecurity and exploitation, and open learning and training to everyone. Sanders argues that economic power and political power are closely linked, and that both need to be widely shared for democracy to work. This means, he argues, a redistribution of effective citizenship from organized money to organized people.
Sanders calls this socialism. It's extraordinary to older heads that a majority of Democrats and young people now report a positive attitude toward this idea, but maybe it shouldn't be so surprising. For most of the last 100-plus years in much of the developed world, the parties of democratic socialism have stood for economic security, the dignity of work and the need to understand the link between economic power and political power. They have offered the most robust and convincing definition of citizenship in a complex economy. In the U.S., the word was anathema mainly because it was associated with the Soviets' undemocratic, unequal and frequently brutal regime, and the copies that the Russians imposed on their communist empire. In Western Europe, though, democratic socialism remained a great tradition. As Cold War memories fade and economic inequality grows, it isn't so strange that the U.S. should catch up with the rest of the North Atlantic. Anyway, as anyone who listens to Sanders knows, much of his "socialism" is updated New Deal and Great Society liberalism -- a comfortably American tradition that has been under attack for four decades and badly needs a full-throated revival.
The Sanders campaign, if it succeeds, will build both a movement and a cohort -- a political generation -- around the ideas and policies of this new American socialism. The voters, the networks and above all, the ideas that the campaign is cultivating will remain for other candidates to tap and develop, at all levels of government, from city councils and state legislatures to presidential elections.
This is very different from anything Barak Obama did. The first Obama campaign was an instant mass movement. In Durham, North Carolina, to take one example, there was an active local Obama group, canvassing and registering voters, well before the official campaign showed up. Anyone who participated in the 2008 campaign can remember the heartfelt sense of being part of something, of moving history a little.
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jedediah-purdy/the-sanders-difference_b_9005332.html?utm_hp_ref=politics
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