There’s a lot of fretting — both well meaning and cynical — out there about whether Sanders can win.
Here’s the deal, people. For the last decade and a half, we’ve been treated to lecture after lecture from on high about how if you want things to change, you have to build from below. Well, that process has been going on for some time.
Unlike purists of the Left and purists of the center (who are the most insufferable purists of all, precisely because they think they’re not), I look at the various fits and starts of the last fifteen years — from Seattle to the Nader campaign to the Iraq War protests to the Dean campaign to the Obama campaign to Occupy to the various student debt campaigns to Black Lives Matter — as part of a continuum, where men and women, young and old, slowly relearn the art of politics.
Whose first rule is: if you want x, shoot for 1,000x, and whose second rule is: it’s not whether you fail (you probably will), but how you fail, whether you and your comrades are still there afterward to pick up the pieces and learn from your mistakes.
Category Archives: Politics
Thought for the Day
Paul Krugman wrote the other day:
But as Mr. Obama himself found out as soon as he took office, transformational rhetoric isn’t how change happens.
Sure, but name a major political transformation since the start of the 20th century which hasn’t been accompanied by transformational rhetoric.
Thought for the Presidential Election
If people want to tell me that Hillary would be a less horrid option than whatever profound ghastliness the Republicans throw up, I’ll listen to them respectfully. If they try to tell me there’s something inspiring or transformative about her, I’ll have to wonder what planet they’re on.
Thought for the Night – December 15, 2015
On this evening’s GOP debate:
I’ve watched these debates since 1976. We have hit rock bottom in info-content and common sense. Reagan-Mondale was like Lincoln-Douglas.
Sadly, it’s always darkest before it turns pitch black.
Sanders voters
From John Judis’, The Bern Supremacy (boldface mine):
But who are the voters flocking to [Bernie Sanders’] message? Sanders often uses the term “working people” to refer to the constituency he wants to lead. It’s a term that conjures guys in overalls; yet the bulk of the people at the rallies I attended were college students, recent college graduates, or white-collar professionals who have the types of jobs that require a college or even a post-graduate degree.
At the Sanders rally in Las Vegas, I interviewed about 30 people and also circulated around the crowd. I did talk to a janitor from Las Vegas’s militant culinary union and to a retired auto mechanic from Idaho who had moved to Las Vegas, but the rest of the people I encountered were students, teachers, scientists, civil servants, and social workers. At a Sanders rally at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, I found a similar crowd, with government consultants, IT administrators, and engineers also thrown into the mix.
These Sanders supporters are part of a stratum of the American labor force that the census designates as “professionals.” They most often work for a wage or salary. They produce ideas and sophisticated services rather than physical goods. They work in hospitals and clinics, schools and colleges, and, above all, offices. Unlike routine service workers, they make decent or even very good money. In White Collar, which appeared in 1951, C. Wright Mills labeled this group “the new middle class.” The French sociologist Serge Mallet called them the “new working class.” At the socialist journal I helped edit in the early 1970s, we called them “educated labor” and part of a new “diversified proletariat.”
Thought for the Day – November 27, 2015
I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we begin by declaring that “all men are created equal.” We now practically read it “all men are created equal, except negroes.” When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read “all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.” When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty-to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy.
The Geometric Mean Theory of Executive Leadership
Unofficial Benghazi hearing transcript released
It’s about being able to control your own destiny
(From Bill Moyers’ show last year – some background here. Bernie tries to do right by people. Imagine if even half of our elected representatives were committed to doing right by people? We need more like him.)
In the event you were under the impression that Russia gives a rat’s ass about Syrians
From today’s New York Times:
Some Russian analysts say the Kremlin is using the conflict in Syria to test a new generation of weaponry from a major procurement program that military officials began in 2010 after years of oil-boom profits.
“There are radars and all sorts of new control systems, and of course we need a firing range,” Konstantin V. Remchukov, the editor of Nezavisimaya Gazeta, told the Echo of Moscow radio station this week.
“We carried out a lot of exercises,” Mr. Remchukov said. “But a firing range like that opening before us in Syria, with these bombing sorties, with drones and other objects of the new generation, this is, of course, a favorable place for fine-tuning all our new weaponry.”