Why vote for Sanders when you can have Elizabeth Warren instead? [View all]

[Soph0571]

In the 2016 primary, Democratic voters were presented with a choice: Sanders, who represented the potential of redistributive policy, and Clinton, who represented the possibility of shattering, as she put it, the last, highest glass ceiling. She dismissed his ideas as impractical; his supporters attacked her with a virulent misogyny that belied their nominal commitments to equality. For leftist women, to express enthusiasm for Sanders’ policy proposals was seen as condoning the sexist attacks on Clinton. To defend Clinton from sexism meant that we would be accused of condoning the worst choices of her history. This choice, between Sanders and Clinton, redistribution and representation, has been the central conflict of American progressive politics in the years since. You can have either redistribution or representation, the thinking goes, but not both.
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Why would Democratic voters choose Sanders when Warren is running? The two are not ideologically identical, but the differences between their major policy stances, on regulation of financial services and the need to extend the welfare state, are relatively minor, especially compared to the rest of the field. Warren calls herself a capitalist, the Sanders partisans point out, while Sanders is unafraid of the label “socialist”. That’s one thing. But this point has the quality of a post-hoc rationalization. It is cited by those seeking a politically acceptable reason to vote for a man and not for a woman – those who would vote for this man, and perhaps not any woman, no matter what.
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But Warren’s primary virtue over Sanders is that she seems to understand the inextricable binds between racial and gender discrimination and the economic injustice that both candidates abhor. She has made statements about the reality of racial discrimination, how it compounds with economic injustice to keep people of color from entering and staying in the middle class.

Sanders, meanwhile, speaks about the struggles of the working class in reductionist and retro ways; he seems to hold an anachronistic understanding of the American worker as white and male, oppressed only by his bosses and not at the same time by the structures of racism and sexism.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/feb/20/sanders-elizabeth-warren-feminism-identity

This is my number one frustration with old white male socialists - they have no understanding of and do not wish to understand that identity politics has a place if progressive agendas' are ever going to be successful. They come from a position of white male privilege, and however much they want to see change they will always see change through that prism. It is what it is. But in 2019 there are other, better choices.