In her op-ed in today’s NYT, Not Their Mother's Candidate, Susan Faludi begins by rightly taking to task the media for simplifying the statements of Madeleine Albright (there's “a special place in hell" for women who don’t help other women) and Gloria Steinem (millennial women are for Sanders because “the boys are with Bernie"). In his interview with Steinem, says Faludi, Bill Maher “persistently tried to provoke an old-lady outburst about girls-these-days.” She explains that older women like Albright and Steinem are not merely “millennial bashing,” but rather offering seasoned wisdom about the fallout from failed revolutions. Here’s what I take for the summa:
Knowing that, more seasoned voters may rightly consider a romantic Democratic insurrection the height of elitist privilege when what’s at stake are the lives of underprivileged women of all ages and races, women who will be the prime victims when social welfare programs are laid waste, Roe v. Wade overturned, Social Security gutted, and national health care shredded by whoever beats Mr. Sanders in November.
These thoughts echoes what some Kossacks argue viz. the most vulnerable Americans simply cannot afford the luxury of supporting an unelectable candidate. It’s a powerful and compelling argument, up to a point, but it also reinforces just what Sanders’s supporters say: we’ve been so focused since 1992 on defending what protections we’ve got that we haven’t played offense. We’ve put ourselves in a defensive crouch that renders unable to move boldly ahead. Of course we have moved ahead … via S-CHIP (thanks to HRC), and, more recently, Obamacare and Dodd-Frank. But it’s an incremental progress that has done nothing to redress the widening chasm of wealth disparity that this country has seen over the past few decades.
I am ardently a Sanders supporter, but I can’t say that Faludi is utterly wrong. Yes, betting on Sanders does involve a certain amount of risk. Betting on Hillary Clinton also involves risk (Faludi implies that a Clinton nomination will lead almost certainly to the presidency … which I think is a very dubious proposition). But what Sanders is offering is a broader coalition. He sacrifices nothing on civil rights or women’s rights. He does not (contrary to what some insist) say he’ll be “better than Hillary” on those fronts, though he does take a stronger stand than HRC on ending the carceral state and getting rid of the truly abominable death penalty. On top of that, he is telling us something that is far more realistic than what Clinton is offering. He tells us that we’re not going to make big progress unless we make a revolution. That is, we’re not going to make progress until we create a larger coalition, one that brings in women, blacks, Latinos, working-class whites, and young people. That’s a coalition that will bring real change. That’s the coalition that will let us go on the offensive, rather than struggle to protect the incremental gains we’ve made.
As several Clinton supporters have argued here on DKos, even if we solve the economic inequality problem by raising taxes, creating single-payer health care, and instituting a 21st-century version of Glass-Steagall, we’ll still be left with racism and sexism (what they don’t say is that the reverse is equally true … solve racism and sexism, and you’ll still have economic inequality). But here’s the thing: Sanders isn’t trading one set of social justice issues for another set. He’s fighting on all fronts simultaneously, and building a bigger and better party by doing so. If we ignore, or downplay, the inequality issue, we’ll be forever stuck in 1992, accommodating and bargaining with Republicans instead of remaking America.
Sanders isn't asking us to return to the party of FDR (though he is asking us to make economic inequality an issue in just the way Roosevelt did). Nor is he asking us to recreate the youthful but weak party of George McGovern (God bless that man, by the way … he may have lost to a scoundrel, but he was a great Democrat all the same). Sander is asking us to create a new Democratic Party for the twenty-first century, one that will fight corruption, sexism, racism, and economic inequality all at the same time.
If Hillary Clinton receives the nomination fairly (without leveraging super delegates), I will almost certainly vote for her (though I will expect her to mend fences). But I will never, ever stop believing in Bernie Sanders’s vision for a bigger, better, more progressive Democratic Party. I will never, ever think it’s okay for Wall Street, fossil fuels, and for-profit prisons to choose our nominees by writing their checks. And I will never, ever support a crouched defensive posture over a boldly progressive one.
Viva Bernie!