Who remembers this from October 2008?
Bernie in the cut @ 4:15
Bernie in the cut @ 4:15
No.except economics doesn't work that way. $15 and hour would crush poor communities like that
Whether the enthusiasm generated by the Sanders campaign will survive the recent election is difficult to say. But it requires a historical perspective to understand its roots and possibilities. Although in some ways a complete surprise, Sanders’s challenge did not spring from the void: Its emergence was foretold by the Seattle demonstrations against the World Trade Organization in 1999 and, more recently, by Occupy Wall Street and similar protests around the country; the movement for a $15 minimum wage; the remarkable success of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century; and the movements against the deportation of immigrants, mass incarceration, and police mistreatment of people of color. As it unfolded, Bernie’s campaign offered me numerous opportunities to link the past and the present. The day The New York Times endorsed Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination on the grounds that Sanders wasn’t pragmatic enough, my students discussed the antislavery movement. “What exactly constitutes political practicality?” I asked them. For much of the 1850s and the first two years of the Civil War, Lincoln—widely considered the model of a pragmatic politician—advocated a plan to end slavery that involved gradual emancipation, monetary compensation for slave owners, and setting up colonies of freed blacks outside the United States. This harebrained scheme had no possibility of enactment. It was the abolitionists, still viewed by some historians as irresponsible fanatics, who put forward the program—an immediate and uncompensated end to slavery, with black people becoming US citizens—that came to pass (with Lincoln’s eventual help, of course).
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The great achievement of the Sanders campaign was to step into the vacuum and begin to offer a new vision. The election of Donald Trump, while disastrous in so many ways, is yet another illustration of the bankruptcy of neoliberalism. It is also an opportunity for the left to forge a new set of policies to promote political, social, and economic equality.
Any new radicalism needs to learn from the past, but not simply to reenact it. The new American radicalism must be open and multifaceted, speaking the language of American society but receptive to insights from an increasingly interconnected world. One thing I think we’ve learned is that pinning one’s hopes on a single individual (including Obama and Sanders) is a recipe for disappointment. Maintaining the energy of popular mobilizations takes precedence over devotion to any individual. Nor is there a need for a single “party line”: Abolitionists and feminists both divided into a host of small groups. Following different, even contradictory paths may well produce greater strength rather than fragmentation and weakness. At the same time, single-focus organizations, which have proliferated in the last generation, need to recapture the sense of being part of a larger movement for social change that addresses diverse groups and interests—something that the Socialist Party before World War I went at least part of the way toward embodying.
On the first page of the course syllabus, I always included the words of Max Weber, a rebuke to those who believe that critics of society should set their sights only on “practical” measures: “What is possible would never have been achieved if, in this world, people had not repeatedly reached for the impossible.”
No?
No?
No, what?
A lot of people in parts of Baltimore can afford to pay employees 15 an hour.
You want more unemployment?