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Uncle Joe

(58,111 posts)
Mon Jun 17, 2019, 01:53 PM Jun 2019

Why Bernie Sanders Isn't Afraid of 'Socialism'



(snip)

There’s another way to understand Sanders’s rhetoric around “democratic socialism.” For Harold Meyerson of The American Prospect, Sanders embodies the not-always-clear divide between liberals and the left. “In running as a democratic socialist who seeks to complete and update F.D.R.’s agenda,” he writes, “Sanders straddles the very fuzzy border between social democracy and American left liberalism.” In both traditions, democracy is an economic project as well as a political one. Perhaps Sanders is just trying to make that explicit — to once and for all marginalize the centrist Democratic Party politics of the past three decades, in which the economic rights of workers were subordinate to the demands of capital — as well as show Americans how good, effective governance can include left-wing politics. It is the political project of his entire career, from Burlington to the Capitol Building.

One last thought. At the beginning of his speech at George Washington, Sanders took note of the “growing movement toward oligarchy” in the United States and the world at large. He listed the leaders of several governments — Putin in Russia, Xi in China, Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Viktor Orban in Hungry — that “meld corporatist economics with xenophobia and authoritarianism.” I think this analysis, which I’ve written about in the past, can also help us make sense of Sanders’s idiosyncratic use of “democratic socialism.”

In a 1977 essay for Dissent magazine, “Socialism and Liberalism: Articles of Conciliation?,” the socialist writer Irving Howe addressed the “tacit collaboration of right and left extremes in undermining the social and moral foundations of liberalism,” which he described as “a great intellectual scandal of the age.” Those critics failed, he wrote, “to consider what the consequences might be of their intemperate attacks upon liberalism.” To assault the foundations of liberal democracy, he added, “meant to bring into play social forces the intellectuals of both right and left could not foresee.”

In straddling the two sides of the left-wing divide — in tying “democratic socialism” to the legacy of the most important figure in American liberalism — Sanders might be modeling a kind of pragmatism. Not the colloquial “pragmatism” of do what works, but something from the American philosophical tradition, where the truth of the matter is in the doing, not the definitions. He calls himself a “democratic socialist,” others call themselves “liberals,” but in the United States they’re part of a common project, fighting on a united front.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/17/opinion/bernie-sanders-socialism.html


If I were to vote in a presidential
primary today, I would vote for:
Undecided
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Why Bernie Sanders Isn't Afraid of 'Socialism' (Original Post) Uncle Joe Jun 2019 OP
Well, DownriverDem Jun 2019 #1
 

DownriverDem

(6,206 posts)
1. Well,
Mon Jun 17, 2019, 02:02 PM
Jun 2019

if I kept winning in Vermont, I wouldn't be afraid of it either.

If I were to vote in a presidential
primary today, I would vote for:
Joe Biden
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