Bernie’s Ideas are not the Future
Bernie Sanders held a rally in Chicago this weekend. At the People’s Summit, supporters begged Sanders to start his own third party, believing that the Democrats would never adopt their policies and were therefore beyond hope. In his address to the Summit, Sanders announced that the Democratic Party was “an absolute failure”, needed “fundamental change”, and must “open its doors to working people and young people… who are prepared to fight for social and economic justice.”
“Social and economic justice” in the Bernie camp, of course, is restricted to the set of policies he advocates, in their purest form, with no nuance or hesitation. Declaring support for a single-payer healthcare is a rite of passage for any candidate hoping to avoid the wrath of his supporters. Insufficient degree of anti-Wall-Street populist zeal, or having too many donations from employees of an industry perceived as corrupting, is grounds for a primary challenge to any Democratic politician. Democrats around the country have been forced to uncritically accept a $15 minimum wage, free college for all, and a variety of other Sanders tenets just to avoid a painful, expensive, and degrading battle with their own base.
“We may not have won the campaign in 2016, but there is no question that we have won the battle of ideas,” Sanders declared on stage, flush with ideological victory before a roaring crowd. “Ideas that, just a few years ago, seemed radical and unattainable, are now part of Main Street discussion.”
The position frequently adopted by Democrats these days is that the Bernie movement’s policies are a nice goal, and ultimately what everybody would like to implement, but sadly out of reach due to political reality that demands compromise. But this kind of appeasement is dishonest, counterproductive, and ultimately destructive to the party.
Poorly-considered, half-baked policy can have disastrous consequences when implemented. In Bernie’s own Vermont, for example, a “Medicare for all” single-payer plan was approved by the legislature. Yet the plan, called Green Mountain Care, imploded when financial projections revealed that it would have occupied 90% of the state’s budget and required a 10%+ increase in taxes to implement. Governor Shumlin, a former supporter, said that implementation was, in light of the projections, “unwise and untenable”, and terminated the process.
With this example in mind, it is important to examine the actual details of how Bernie plans to implement his policies beyond the rallying cries, lest all of America meet the same fate as his own state. Unfortunately, Bernie has never been forthcoming in offering those details. In interviews, when pressed for nuance, he typically reverts to a set of virtuous re-statements of the problems he hopes to solve and attacks on those he believes perpetrate those problems, and never delves into his solutions beyond simple repetition of his key phrases. Even after an examination of his website and career, it’s virtually impossible to find a plank of Bernie’s platform that has even the shallowest of roots beyond his slogans.
One of Bernie’s key rallying-cries, for example, is “break up the big banks.” Shattering the six largest banks in America (J.P Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley) is an enormous undertaking that requires division of nearly ten trillion dollars worth of assets. Even the slightest mistake in this process could have profound negative implications for the global economy. Yet when Bernie was asked about his plan for doing this by the New York Daily News, he revealed that he not only had no plan but was also lacking knowledge of basic details of the issue:
Daily News: I get that point. I’m just looking at the method because, actions have reactions, right? There are pluses and minuses. So, if you push here, you may get an unintended consequence that you don’t understand. So, what I’m asking is, how can we understand? If you look at JPMorgan just as an example, or you can do Citibank, or Bank of America. What would it be? What would that institution be? Would there be a consumer bank? Where would the investing go?
Sanders: I’m not running JPMorgan Chase or Citibank.
Daily News: No. But you’d be breaking it up.
Sanders: That’s right. And that is their decision as to what they want to do and how they want to reconfigure themselves. That’s not my decision. All I am saying is that I do not want to see this country be in a position where it was in 2008, where we have to bail them out. And, in addition, I oppose that kind of concentration of ownership entirely….So I can’t say, if you’re saying that we’re going to break up the banks, will it have a negative consequence on some people? I suspect that it will. Will it have a positive impact on the economy in general? Yes, I think it will.
a couple answers later:
Sanders: You would determine is that, if a bank is too big to fail, it is too big to exist. And then you have the secretary of treasury and some people who know a lot about this, making that determination. If the determination is that Goldman Sachs or JPMorgan Chase is too big to fail, yes, they will be broken up.
Daily News: Okay. You saw, I guess, what happened with Metropolitan Life. There was an attempt to bring them under the financial regulatory scheme, and the court said no. And what does that presage for your program?
Sanders: It’s something I have not studied, honestly, the legal implications of that.
In defense of this interview, many Sanders supporters have pointed to the fact that Bernie introduced a bill to break up the big banks. Bernie’s own website points to this bill as though it’s evidence of his expertise. The bill in question is barely 500 words in length, and contains only the following text with respect to how to actually break up the banks:
(a) IN GENERAL. — Notwithstanding any other provision of law, but not later than 1 year after the date of enactment of this Act, the Secretary of the Treasury shall break up entities included on the Too Big To Fail List, so that their failure would no longer cause a catastrophic effect on the United States or global economy without a taxpayer bailout.
(b) CONSULTATION WITH OTHER REGULATORS. — In carrying out the requirement of subsection (a), the Secretary of the Treasury shall consult with the primary financial regulatory agency of the entity to be broken up.
In other words, “They must be broken up. How? That’s the Secretary of the Treasury’s job to figure out.”
This is not in any way shape or form a serious proposal. This is like the two-page bill the GOP submitted to repeal Obamacare that just said “repeal Obamacare” with no details or expectation of actual implementation. It’s a policy statement disguised as a bill, created for one purpose only: So Bernie can say he introduced a bill to break up the big banks, but the corrupt corporate congressmen voted against it.
Sanders: Well, by the way, the idea of breaking up these banks is not an original idea. It’s an idea that some conservatives have also agreed to. You’ve got head of, I think it’s, the Kansas City Fed, some pretty conservative guys, who understands. Let’s talk about the merit of the issue, and then talk about how we get there.
Occasional well-read Bernie supporters, and Bernie himself, will point to Minneapolis (not Kansas City) Fed President Neel Kashkari’s Minneapolis Plan as proof that Bernie’s policies have some economic backing. But this plan also offers no vision for how to divide these banks or their assets, only a plan for how to encourage their break-up. This bears little resemblance to Bernie’s proposals as a break-up is merely a potential side-effect of the proposed regulatory changes, and Bernie has never demonstrated any familiarity with Mr. Kashkari’s plan beyond the “break up the big banks” tagline the media slapped on it.
Kashkari et al.: We advocate for much higher capital levels for large banks and a tax on leverage for shadow banks. We also believe our plan will lead covered banks to break themselves up to become non-systemically important while funded with much more capital.
The truth is that Bernie and his supporters have no plan to break up the big banks. Their “break up the big banks” slogan is not a serious policy proposal but a populist rallying cry for revenge against the perceived villains of the 2008 financial crisis. A populist rallying cry with no detail may fly on the campaign trail, but Bernie and his supporters are demanding that the party adopt his proposals as a legislative philosophy to earn their support. And that is the root of the problem.
Politics can not just be about winning. The Democratic Party must have a policy soul in addition to political muscle; if a party simply takes on whatever policies it thinks will earn it the most votes, without regard for their efficacy or potential effects when implemented, then that party has no right to govern. It is barely a party at that point, just a machine to win power at all costs. If the party moves to adopt the half-baked, poorly-though-out campaign-slogan-disguised-as-policy tenets demanded by Sanders and company, it will quickly find itself in the same place the GOP finds itself today with its Obamacare repeal effort: struggling desperately to implement a policy, any policy, that fulfills its promise, regardless of the disastrous consequences of that policy. This is not a party that deserves the vote of anyone.
So the Democratic Party and its leadership must think very carefully about their strategy and talking points when it comes to the demands of the Sanders army. It is true that Bernie suffers a complete lack of integrity and grace, that much of his base is conspiracy theorists raised on a diet of right-wing and Russian propaganda, and that the attitude of a hostile mob is no way to ingratiate yourself in a party. But character issues can not be the only thing preventing an ideological takeover. The Party must also stand firm in its belief in realistic, nuanced, well-developed liberal policy; the policy proposals of Bernie and company threaten that belief, and in doing so represent an existential threat to the integrity of the Democratic Party.
