Vote for Sanders
Don’t believe the Clinton machine, Hillary is the only one trying to make this about gender
One should as a matter of course be wary of people encouraging strategic voting. There is something undeniably sinister about the ‘lesser of two evils’ argument, recently used to promote Hillary as the only viable Democratic presidential candidate. It is precisely the kind of logic one used to hear about Bill Clinton in the mid-1990’s (at the height of triangulation), one which herded the majority of Democrats to passivity while policies drifted to the right. Not only is this what capitulation sounds like, but it corrupts the entire idea of voting (one can never really vote against a candidate, only for!), effectively instructing the electorate to support those they don’t agree with. Now what does that say about the proponent’s position?
Mind you, urging people to vote for Bernie Sanders simply because of Hillary’s tragic defects does seem to play in a similar tune. Therefore, to invoke a positive spirit (or some such), we will start you on an easy, but oddly not oft-repeated, pro-Sanders argument. Fun stuff:
Even at his worse, Bernie Sanders is far better than any other candidate
Why, you may ask (an image of grumpy Bernie dismissing special interests no doubt present somewhere in that question)? Because he is right on the most important issue. If inequality, institutional racism, and financial regulation are arguably the three most important problems facing this country today, one has to understand that they can only be properly fixed by getting rid of the enormous influence of corporate interests on the political system. There is simply no way around it.
The “dictatorship of moneyed interests in politics”, as it was already identified some 20 years ago (and so even before Citizens United), is without doubt what corrodes the United States’s political system. It is what allowed a bill like the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act (restricting individual rights to file for bankruptcy, favoring credit card companies in the process) to pass in 2005 with support from Democrats like Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and Chris Dodd; it is what turned the Dodd-Frank financial regulation act of 2010 into feeble, inadequate legislation (none of the regulations put in place after the Great Depression and destroyed in the 1980’s, 1990’s, and early 2000’s ever made it back); it is what stopped the FTC from pursuing Google on antitrust charges in 2013. To these one could add a myriad of other examples, safe in the knowledge that their causes are always the same: the head of the FTC is appointed by the president, and the second biggest contributor to Obama’s presidential campaigns was Google; Senator Dodd had during his senate years received tens of millions of dollars from Wall Street, and became a lobbyist following his retirement in 2010; etc…
This is precisely what corruption looks like — legal, yes, but corruption nonetheless. The process is of course varied, going from direct lobbying (where, at best, moneyed interests can represent and argue for their side without any opposition present to counteract their proposals) to campaign financing, and passing by the practice of ‘cashing out’, whereby retiring officials are guaranteed lucrative contracts. As George Packer writes in The Unwinding, “between 1998 and 2004, 42 percent of congresspersons and half the senators who left office went on to lobby their former colleagues”. And this is only lobbying (an industry worth more than $3 billion in lobbyist fees in 2009, and god knows how much in PR), never mind the influence of campaign donations…
The profound legislative changes required to tackle any of the graver issues affecting the country would necessarily go against entrenched corporate interests. If one can ever hope to properly redress the terrible ills of inequality and institutional racism (you know, the fact that the top 1 percent of the population own 40 percent of the nation’s wealth, while the bottom 80 barely have 7 ; or that a typical African-American household has just 6 percent of the wealth of its typical white counterpart!), one needs to make make the investments necessary to guarantee that every community is both awarded the same opportunities and protected from the dangers of absolute poverty. For this to happen, arrangements have to be made to reign in money from the undeserving: the hereditary rich, the criminal corporations, and the parasitic financial institutions. As you’ve probably realized, none of these necessary improvements can be made without first addressing our political system… they simply depend on it. Progressive changes of any sort, now and in the future, can only be guaranteed by separating special interests from politics; money alone should not dictate legislative debates.
Identity Politics and the Clinton Machine
If anything, Barack Obama’s election has only served to prove what should’ve been clear from the very beginning: that social issues cannot be mended solely by talking about them. And therein lies the problem of identity politics — that while his election proved to be an undeniable symbol of change, change itself couldn’t materialize as a result of it. A symbol is ultimately all it was, and the African-American community, hit hardest by the Great Recession (more aptly named as a depression, mind you), is still reeling from historical bias… to put it mildly.
And here is where we arrive at Hillary Clinton. As things currently stand, the former First Lady still has the overwhelming support of both African-American and women voters. There is absolutely no logical reason why this should be so. Let me be clear, then, if I can:
As for the former, one should make no mistake: portraying Hillary Clinton as a lifelong defender of minority rights is obscene… about as obscene as Toni Morrison calling Bill Clinton “the first black president” in 1998, in fact. While we may choose to overlook the Clinton administration’s embrace of the war on drugs, mass incarceration, and welfare destruction (although we probably shouldn’t, since her supporters are so keen to remind us that she was the most active First Lady in history), one little mention of the last campaign, and her oh-so-judicious use of the race card against Obama, ought to be convincing. If not, all one has to do is watch the debates, really, since Bernie Sanders is the only candidate even willing to refer to such a thing as institutional racism.
When it comes to gender issues, the argument against Hillary is slightly more complicated, granted, but nonetheless important. While at first glance Bernie is almost certainly at a disadvantage — being, you know, a successful man facing a very, very successful woman — two things help make the picture a bit blurrier. First, the realization that the only candidate who’s so far brought gender into the fold is Mrs. Clinton herself, subtly attempting to portray Sanders as sexist, and so on gun control, of all issues. Second, that Bernie’s record on gender is as good as Hillary’s, and even quite a bit better, when one considers her contemptible role in the smear campaigns Bill ran against his past extramarital associations (way back in the 1990’s). I defer the judgment of such conduct to your good senses.
Ultimately, this electoral campaign is a competition between system and anti-system candidates, not just an ideological contest — a phenomenon which appears on both political sides, and can be largely attributed to the dissatisfaction of large swathes of the population with, well… the economy. Yes, one ought to remember that both extremes are responding to what is essentially the same problem: the amazing, unaddressed inequality revealed after the 2008 crisis (remember the Tea Party, and why it came to exist?). Of course, the American political spectrum being what it is, the outsider candidate on the Right is a Know-Nothing (crypto-fascist?) demagogue who appeals to those who hold government wholly responsible, apparently succeeding in making everyone forget that he’s been part of the political establishment for decades. Meanwhile, the one on the Left is a populist, European-style social democrat, who appeals to those who blame government for not doing enough to stop large companies from creating this mess. A small, but hugely influential, difference.
So vote for Sanders, if you can: he’s the only candidate willing to address the most important problem. And if you, like me, hold foreign policy in high regard, and have noticed that Hillary Clinton is the more knowledgeable there (as she should after years as Secretary of State), then remember that international relations is more than anything a question of character, and an ability to think in terms of long-term strategy. In these matters ideology just doesn’t seem to ever stick… Didn’t George W. Bush run his 2000 campaign on a more ‘humble’ foreign policy line? Yes, yes he did.
