President Sanders and a Republican Congress
Republicans haven't had to deal with anyone remotely like Bernie Sanders on a national level in a long, long time. Now, from out of virtually nowhere it must seem to them, he could well be their opponent in the upcoming Presidential election, and possibly the POTUS they must welcome into Congress to deliver the next State of the Union Address. Conventional wisdom dictates that any agenda President Sanders may propose, should that scenario come to pass, will be Dead On Arrival in any chamber controlled by the GOP. Unless, that is, Sanders sees the pragmatic light, converts, and bows down to establishment sanctioned incrementalism. Conventional wisdom has been having a tough slog of it this year though, and is beginning to show its age. Some say insanity is repeating the exact same thing and expecting a different result. What is it called though to keep advancing the exact same game plan expecting favorable results ad infinitum? Foolish comes to mind, and that in a nut shell is the Republican blind spot, mirrored by most of the media. The shifting sands of the American electorate are undermining a conventional wisdom built on the edifice of a prior generation's political reality. Blinded by the past, few can see what now is coming.
At the height of the Reagan years, most Democrats turned tail and ran away from ideological tags any further to the left than “moderate”, thereby relegating “liberal” to a status not so dissimilar from “pinko” in the American political lexicon. Actually liberal soon became more of a slur than pinko had ever been since the fifties. There were several reasons for that, some more obvious than others. For one thing pinko was dated – the Kennedy and Johnson presidencies cast the McCarthy era in a distinctly negative retro light – despite the ongoing efforts of the John Birch Society and their fellow travelers. Then there was the Vietnam War which the America public ultimately turned staunchly against. Turns out all those young pinko protesters were right bout that all along.
Actually many of those who the Right sought to tar as pinkos elicited genuine sympathy and support from broad segments of the public that the Republican Party needed to court. Pinkos fought to “Ban the Bomb”, but they weren't exactly out of step in being terrified at the prospect of a nuclear war. The Cuban Missile Crisis proved that point. Pinkos also worked hard for Labor rights at a time when Unions were still strong and respected by many blue collar workers, back when there were a lot of blue collar workers benefiting from Unions. Slandering the American Democratic Left as “pinkos” failed to adequately further the revised Class War narrative that the Republican Party began drafting as it moved to secure their eagerly anticipated “New Republican Majority”. “Liberals” turned out to be a better foil for that purpose. Unlike steel workers, liberals were said to work in ivory towers. They didn't wear hard hats, how could they? Liberal intellectuals were pointy headed. They weren't real Americans.
Soon the Right began railing against Latte Liberals and Limousine Liberals and all the rest of the so called Liberal Elites – living in their own detached reality. Liberals, to hear Republicans describe them, were the true architects of class warfare, engineering a massive redistribution of wealth – from the Middle Class to the Poor. Tax and Spend Liberals were handing over the hard earned wages of America's Middle Class to shiftless lazy poor folks so the latter could live like Welfare Queens on other people's dimes. And why would liberals steel from hard working Americans like that? Because ordinary bleeding heart liberal voters were conned by unscrupulous limousine liberal politicians into letting them buy the votes they needed to entrench themselves in office by giving away “free stuff” - paid for by struggling tax payers to people who refuse to lift a finger to help themselves.
And so “Liberal” became a toxic word. Democrats offered very little resistance. In time some began trying to dodge that bullet by re-branding themselves as progressives instead. And while political scientists can draw some honest distinctions between those terms – for many of those who started calling themselves progressive it was more of a tacit acknowledgment that they didn't want to politically risk being labeled as a liberal. Recently though the tide began to turn as all tides are want to do, and in a time honored youth contrarian dance – buttressed by critical thinking, millennial voters began shedding the negative connotations assigned to the word “liberal”. And then along comes 74 year old Bernie Sanders, self identified as a Democratic Socialist, running to become President.
“Socialist” had for decades been reserved by the Republican Party as their EXTRA STRENTH version of “Liberal”. They long suggested that behind any good liberal, somewhere, that is who you will find; pulling strings, undermining our precious freedoms. Problem was they were hard pressed to ever produce any actual socialists in American national electoral politics, aside from one obscure congressman from the small state of Vermont who even the rabid right understood failed miserably to fit their casting call for a plausible left wing boogyman. So finally, out of an abundance of caustic exuberance, they took to calling the 44th President of the United States, Barack Obama, a “Socialist”.
Here is where the plot begins to thicken, and the past begins to come back to bite the Republicans in the ass. For starters it turns out that Barack Obama is a fairly popular president who was handily elected to a second term in office. When our financial system cratered he didn't nationalize the banks, and the stock market rebounded fully from the pit it was mired in when Obama first took office. Is that how an American socialist acts when one finally comes into power? How scary is that? And if Obama isn't really a socialist then who the hell is, and what is it exactly that he or she stands for? And then along comes Bernie, 74 year old Democratic Socialist running for President, answering the question and redefining American politics in the process.
One thing's clear, Bernie doesn't come across as a limousine liberal, and he's absolutely no one's idea of an elitist. Equally significant, he doesn't flinch at being called liberal. Instead of running he digs in, breaking through the labels and going for the substance. After decades of Democrats twisting themselves into knots avoiding being called leftist, Bernie Sanders lays out his “leftist agenda” and says, “What's wrong with that?” And then he turns the tables on right wing propaganda and exposes real class warfare in America, except that it isn't the poor stealing from the middle class, it's the super rich stealing from virtually all of us. What Bernie says rings true to folks because, unlike Reagan’s 1980's fantasy, it's not Morning in America, and this time everybody knows it.
The vaulted supposedly impregnable Republican line of defense spanning decades now could be called 100 shades of red baiting. It is their hardened battle ready position, it is their Maginot Line; so formidable, so unyielding, so entrenched - and so built on lessons learned during previous eras of combat. Like concrete embedded cannons, it is obsolete. It's been trending that way for years, obscured by conventional wisdom, until somebody finally called the question; Whose side are you on?
Bernie Sanders may literally be a Democratic Socialist but his appeal is to economic populism. Populists by nature occupy an opposite pole from establishment privileged elites. Populism ferments at the base of a society and is often a potent force against those seen as opposing the interests of the vast majority. Not all populism is economic at root: some is religious, some is cultural, some is xenophobic. During the Great Depression under FDR, the Democratic Party aligned firmly with economic populism. During the late 1960's, under Richard Nixon, Republicans began to channel populism's darker sides. By the 1980's our Middle Class began to ebb and ramped up cultural wars were needed to eclipse any attention paid to an ongoing class war that consolidated the wealth of our nation into the hands of a concentrated oligarchy.
In the process the Democratic Party was defanged by the perceived need of it's political class to court political and personal sustenance directly from the hands of the wealthy donor class. It is difficult to expose thievery while your hands are outstretched to the robbers for your stipend. The political rules were tacitly set: Cultural warfare and debates over social issues were allowable, challenging an economic system rigged to enhance an oligarchy was not. Over time the strain of economic populism was slowly bred out of National Democrats through the process of financial selection. Then along came Bernie Sanders.
What the Right has been slow to wake up to is that populism is a double edged sword, it's been so long since it has effectively been wielded against them they've almost forgotten what that looks like when it happens. In the face of an economic populist tide, red baiting labels tossed at a populist land with the impact of confetti. They all once were thrown at FDR, but with America then caught in the teeth of the Great Depression they did not hold any bite. Not when it was obvious to average Americans who was on their side.
It's been a long time since the Democratic Party offered a full throated defense of progressive taxation, but there once was a time when a clear majority of Americans understood the concept well and adamantly supported it, and Democrats proudly embraced it. That support slowly eroded as generations of Democratic leaders, increasingly beholden to large monied interests, obediently held their tongues while right wing activists like Grover Norquist pushed their goal “to shrink government to the size where we can drown it in a bathtub.”
It is a myth that Americans only care about lowering their taxes: We just don't want to pay more than our fair share, and we want our taxes spent in sensible ways that produce tangible benefits to society. When a bridge is in danger of collapsing most folks are willing to raise money to replace it. The right created the strawman of “tax and spend liberals who don't really care about people like you”. Using that for cover, at the behest of an emboldened oligarchy, Republicans have systematical rolled back progressive taxation and expanded tax loopholes for the super wealthy in the largest government engineered transfer of wealth in American history. The rich are still getting richer and the America Dream is dead. It should be no surprise then that more Americans are getting angry, and anger is the fuel that allows populism to grow,
Yes, there are few so blind as those who refuse to see. All summer long the voices who dictate conventional wisdom couldn't see Bernie Sanders coming, not even when tens of thousands of Americans repeatedly came out for rallies to see him speak in person. The media only had eyes for Trump, viewing him mostly as entertainment, a passing summer fad. Well Donald Trump wasn't just a fad, and Bernie Sanders wasn't just a fringe candidate, but conventional wisdom had its script. Precisely because Sanders represents the greater threat to the establishment, they have been slowest to recognize him for who he is, because even the act of recognizing Bernie Sanders increases the threat he poses them.
Despite the best efforts of those who cynically try to channel it, social populism can't be inoculated against incursions by economic strains. The Middle Class is shrinking, and most Americans feel insecure about their futures. Bernie Sanders is an unvarnished truth teller, not a slick spin doctor, and that has broad populist appeal. The establishment keeps underestimating Sanders, and no doubt they'll start out doing the same if he is elected as our next President. But there are reasons why some of Bernie's biggest fans are in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom, the poorest and most conservative part of the state. There are reasons why Bernie Sanders polls so strongly among Independents now nationally. There are reasons why he has the highest favorability ratings of anyone running for President on either side of the partisan divide, and why so many Trump supporter admit that they “kind of like Bernie too.”
It doesn't surprise me that some Republican strategists think that Hillary Clinton would be much harder to defeat than Bernie Sanders. That, again, represents the thinking of conventional wisdom, in a year when conventional wisdom has been spectacularly wrong. And should a President Sanders next year stand before a Congress partially controlled by Republicans, to deliver his agenda for America, I suspect conventional wisdom will still be in denial of what would happen next. Today's Republican Party has lost control of its populist base, and it keeps scrambling to keep up with them. When President Bernie Sanders addresses the assembled Republican leaders in Congress, he will be talking over their heads directly to the American people, including that Republican populist base. Like no Democrat before him in recent history, many of those in that Republican base will know exactly whose side President Sanders is on. It won't be with the super rich. It won't be with the Wall Street Banks and hedge fund managers. It won't be with the multinational corporations who are outsourcing our childcare’s future.
The shifting sands of the American electorate are undermining conventional wisdom. Blinded by the past, few can see what now is coming.
= new reply since forum marked as read
We need a smiley version of that 
Thanks for the thread, Tom Rinaldo.
The vaulted supposedly impregnable Republican line of defense spanning decades now could be called 100 shades of red baiting. It is their hardened battle ready position, it is their Maginot Line; so formidable, so unyielding, so entrenched - and so built on lessons learned during previous eras of combat. Like concrete embedded cannons, it is obsolete. It's been trending that way for years, obscured by conventional wisdom, until somebody finally called the question; Whose side are you on?
