RUN, BERNIE, RUN | Ben Beckett
Hamilton Nolan is
one of the few
class-struggle-oriented
journalists writing for a
mainstream publication in the U.S.
today. For that reason, it is surprising and disappointing to see him use his column to write an
anti-endorsement of Bernie Sanders, the only class-struggle candidate for president with a real shot at winning in generations — arguably ever.
Nolan’s main argument is that Bernie Sanders is an old white man, and that he can better serve his own ideals by playing kingmaker rather than running himself. (In a
follow-up piece, he acknowledged that “if a year from now the whole field is completely disappointing, I would still vote for Bernie.”)
But as a
growing number of
organizers are
arguing, it is incredibly important that Sanders himself run and that the Left rally to support him right away.
Nolan
writes, “Now the time is ripe for us to try left wing solutions that mainstream pundits normally dismiss as being out of bounds. Universal health care? Free college? Stronger regulation of Wall Street? Forceful downward redistribution of wealth? A true “Green New Deal?” None of these things are implausible now. And all of them are ideas that Bernie Sanders stands for.”
In other words, Nolan likes all of Sanders’s ideas, but opposes him running on pragmatic grounds.
Given the history of the office, it’s an odd sort of pragmatic argument that being an old white man
decreases someone’s chances of becoming president. But setting that aside, Sanders has much higher levels of support among
voters under 50 and among
people of color than he does among older voters or white voters.
A 2017
poll showed Sanders had a 73 percent approval rating among African Americans, 68 percent among Latinos, and 62 percent among Asian Americans. And a
January 2018 poll found that 59 percent of voters of all races under 34 view Sanders favorably while 55 percent of them would be inclined to vote for him for president. If young voters and voters of color are supposed to be unwilling to support Bernie because he is old and white, it appears no one has informed these voters themselves.
In contrast, among the three “
young blood” alternatives to Sanders that Nolan names, Elizabeth Warren gets as about half as much support as Sanders overall, Kamala Harris gets about a third of Sanders’s overall support, and Sherrod Brown’s name was not polled, in a November 2018
national poll. These young bloods are 69, 54, and 66 years old, respectively.
But let’s allow for a moment that Sanders shouldn’t run. Can Sanders simply transfer all of his ideas and all of his support among voters to another candidate? He cannot.
That is because no other Democrat at a national level support Sanders’s priorities and strategy to the same extent or with the same conviction. If politicians like Warren, Harris, and Brown did earnestly support Sanders’s platform, they would endorse him now, since he is plainly the most popular candidate in the race who will advance such redistributive policies and a class-struggle strategy. The fact that they are instead planning to run against him suggests they do not believe Sanders’s path is the correct one.
Much of Sanders’s popularity comes precisely from the fact that he is not like Warren, Harris, or other Democrats.
Elizabeth Warren, who was a
Republican most of her life, has been campaigning
specifically on the virtues of
capitalism. During her tenure as California Attorney General, Kamala Harris defended
convictions obtained with
false evidence, fought federal supervision after courts ruled
overcrowded California prisons a form of cruel and unusual punishment, and
dragged her feet on releasing a man ruled actually innocent in federal court.
In contrast, voters trust Sanders because he has maintained the same class-struggle message for
forty years. And this leads to the most important reason Sanders must run and the Left must support him: no other candidate has either the desire or the ability to polarize the country along
class lines....
