The Chris Moeller Archives

The non-negotiable

Bernie Sanders, the only Democratic Socialist in either the United States Senate or House of Representatives and the most popular politician in the country, is hearing it from the Hillary-bots, who are not slinking away quietly or ashamedly, as the future demands. Sanders' concerted effort to bring economic justice back to the forefront of interest for one of the two corporate national parties has now been extended to include his support for… gasp… an anti-choice mayoral candidate in Nebraska.

For Hillary’s most loyal supporters, this outrage informs us that the goal posts have been moved considerably-- and in less than a year’s time. The endorsement creates an opportunity to further defame the motives of Sanders, a politician actually so pure in spirit and in public record, and so fundamentally different than the slimy Clintons that her long-time supporters seem to find it impossible to trust him in the slightest. Omaha’s Democratic mayoral candidate, Heath Mello, for whom Sanders and new DNC chair Tom Perez both campaigned this week, has said that he personally opposes abortion, and, as a Nebraska state senator, supported a 20-week ban on aborted pregnancies, but has said he would not work to limit the right of access to abortion as mayor. This is almost precisely the same position on the abortion topic staked out by Virginia’s U.S. Senator Tim Kaine when he was tabbed as Clinton’s running mate last summer. Clinton’s supporters at that time promised us though that Kaine had been painstakingly vetted and could be trusted on abortion rights despite his clearly-expressed anti-abortion religious beliefs and his voting record in limiting access to the procedure.

As Bernie Sanders has staked out a most popular, but politically-uncommon position against economic inequality, an issue Clinton cares not at all about, that clean contrast presents an opportunity for David Brock and the hatchet men on Clinton’s team to exact their knifing skills-- honed on Anita Hill-- upon Mr. Sanders. Because the Vermont Senator is so committed to this one particular issue, they argue, he must be willing to sacrifice any other socio-political cause that you might possibly care about, whether that be LGBTQ legal protections, gun control initiatives, or abortion rights. Again, that public record of Sanders sets the lie to all such attacks. He championed gay rights decades before Clinton came around on them. Her conversion on gay marriage didn’t take place until the exact same week that it took place on-air for television’s Bill O’Reilly. He strongly opposed the Defense of Marriage Act when Bill Clinton signed it into law in 1996. Bernie’s NRA voting record is less than 5%, and he has never been daunted in his full-throated vocal and voting support for women’s autonomy over their own bodies.

The “Bernie Bro” political invention-- that is, the supposed backlash last year by angry white men on the left against Secretary Clinton-- is actually diametrically opposed from reality. Sanders’ highest approval ratings, among his sky-high approvals, are with women, millennials, African-Americans, and Hispanics. He fares lowest in surveys with white men. These attacks from the protected self-interest of others continue to be a by-product of Bernie’s selfless, yet daunting and presumably-exhausting efforts to reform a political party that I have argued repeatedly could be more easily replaced than reformed. The apologists, like Salon’s Anna March, continue to argue that the Democratic Party platform is a progressive one, forgetting that neither the platforms of the Democratic Party nor the Republican Party actually mean anything. It’s only the votes that are cast, the actions upon those platforms, that matter. Indeed, Sanders is a divisive force in the party. If he wasn’t, he wouldn’t be worth shit in the role. He’s attacking a cancer. Aggressiveness is required. Egos get bruised. The Clintons and President Obama were apparently not divisive to the Democratic Party, except so far as they hemorrhaged legislative seats at both the federal and state levels to such an extent that the party has been left an empty shell. But hey, they kept the party together. The party leadership apparatus, anyway. It’s true that that has never been challenged before now.

You still read it all over the comment sections of these news articles. Clinton got legitimately more votes than Sanders. He only won caucus states. Okay, let’s grant those. Hillary was more popular with Democrats. That wasn’t-- and still isn’t-- the point. The point is that he was more popular with Americans, and would have performed better in a head-to-head race against Donald Trump, the one-on-one conflict that the Clinton team claimed was too important to be entrusted to a Socialist with unkempt hair. Most Americans sit out the caucuses and primaries-- most of us precisely because they are electoral events sponsored by the two deeply unpopular major political parties. On election day, though, the independents come out, and of course, they looked at Hillary in 2016-- a personality they never particularly liked anyway, and then saw being chosen via coronation by her party-- and they went running in the opposite direction. They were denied a Bernie Revolution so they defaulted to a Trump one.

Then and now, Hillary’s supporters-- the once-proud center-right triangulators who now tar their opponents with that same insult (when they’re not busy calling them sexists, racists, or traitors) accuse Bernie of owning the unmitigated gall to define all by himself what is a progressive and what is not. In their next breath, they declare, as March does directly, that you cannot be a progressive if you are not pro-choice. It's a controvertible sentiment anyway, but one that misrepresents Bernie’s message in any case as he makes the wholehearted and unappreciated effort to go state by state, city by city, town by town, and save the Democratic Party from itself. March argues that this is no time for the Democrats to “(take) us girls for granted,” but who exactly is doing that? It's a faulty premise. African-Americans are taken for granted by the Democrats, if anybody is. They vote for Democrats at a clip of better than 90%. Meanwhile, a majority of white women (53%) voted for Trump. If they’re being taken for granted by Democrats, the phenomenon didn’t start with Bernie Sanders, and they've already left.

Reproductive rights are non-negotiable, they say, yet they let slide countless other social and economic issues that negatively and disproportionately impact women-- notably, yes, income disparity. Abortion rights absolutely is an economic issue. The only proven cure in the world for poverty is a woman's control over her own body, but do the second wave feminists still standing behind Hillary, who are clearly gassed at this point, even care about these other economic issues? They do seem to care about the pay scale difference between men and women, but not the one between rich and poor. If they did, they wouldn’t cozy up anywhere near the Clintons, who blew up the vital line of demarcation between traditional banks and investment banks while championing NAFTA into law and driving down wages in a “free trade” race to the bottom. They may claim to care about any other women’s rights issue that's out there, but support for abortion access, as this dustup confirms, is still the only one used as a litmus test for the Democratic Party.

posted by CM @ 6:04 PM