Progressives — Don’t Be Fooled by Elizabeth Warren
Elizabeth Warren deserves a lot of credit, but that doesn’t mean we can ignore the major flaws in her candidacy.
Elizabeth Warren is getting a lot of attention. I saw three separate pro-Warren stories on Medium just this morning, and with good reason. She has a long history of fighting against big money interests, which is no small victory in a political system controlled by money. Examples of her work include the reintroduction of the Glass-Steagall Act, a modern version of the 1933 regulatory banking act. She also pushed for the criminal prosecution of HSBC after their tax evasion scandal. She’s been impressively consistent on the importance of banking reform. As a presidential candidate she’s proposed a number of excellent progressive policies including a sweeping student loan forgiveness program, universal childcare, a plan to improve abortion access, and Medicare for All, among other things.
Unfortunately, most of the articles I’ve seen supporting Warren ignore her environmentally destructive pro-war policies. In 2017, she voted in favor of raising the defense budget to $700 billion dollars, including an additional $60 billion for military operations in countries such as Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The bill increased military spending by $80 billion in total, and even surpassed the $54 billion increase requested by President Trump.
How can this be?
Why would Warren give Trump, the Commander and Chief, a greater arsenal with which to maim and kill civilians and our military service members if he’s as dangerous and criminally unstable as she claims? Trump asked for a $54 billion increase in military spending and she agreed with Republicans that, “No, $80 billion is better.”
To be fair, this isn’t really so surprising. As a senator for Massachusetts she’s been known to meet regularly with defense contractors from her state, including Raytheon, which is headquartered there. She’s fought to stop the Army from shifting funds away from military communications products made in her state, lobbied in favor of poorly-graded General Dynamics-made products, and promised to protect Massachusetts military bases and facilities from defense cuts.
Warren also recently proposed a plan that would make the military more environmentally friendly. She cites military readiness as being under threat from climate change. Let’s be clear, with a military budget larger than the next ten countries’ militaries combined, America’s military is not under threat from anything. The military itself is a major producer of greenhouse gas emissions.
It’s impossible to know the military’s exact emissions thanks to the UN’s military emissions data collection exemption, but in 2012 a U.S. congressperson said that the Department of Defense consumed about 117 million barrels of oil in 2011, only a fraction less than the fuel used by all of the cars in Great Britain that same year. Warren’s proposal completely ignores that many of the military’s most greenhouse gas emitting activities have no environmentally friendly alternatives. With this bill, Warren is attempting to use climate change as way to benefit the military industrial complex, but really a massive defunding of the military is the only way to make it environmentally friendly.
Warren recently referred to our military budget as “bloated”, but one has to wonder how she can support this statement while also claiming that our military’s readiness in under threat. It’s both too large and too threatened? She’s also said that we need to maintain a strong military with the hope of never having to use it, but history has proven this sentiment to be an irresponsible assumption. If we have a strong military, we will use it. That’s why America’s founding fathers didn’t want any standing army at all.
Recent polls show that Warren is a distant third among Democratic primary candidates, but it’s worth noting that CNN’s poll included a statistically insignificant number of millennial and Gen-X Democrats, thereby calling its validity into question. But even if Elizabeth Warren can improve her national support during the primary season, she won’t be able to win the general election against Donald Trump. She guaranteed this when she refused to participate in a Fox News town hall. Her criticisms of Fox News are well founded, but the only thing her refusal accomplishes is denying Fox News viewers the chance to hear her policy messages. According to the Pew Research Center, 24% of Americans get their news from only Fox News. Despite asking to lead 100% of Americans, Warren is unwilling to even communicate with almost 25% of them. Can we call someone a progressive leader if they won’t communicate with a quarter of the population, thereby failing to further their own progressive platform?
Elizabeth Warren deserves a lot of credit, but that doesn’t mean we can ignore the major flaws in her candidacy.
Meanwhile, Fox News viewers have proven that they’re supportive of progressive policies when exposed to them. If you haven’t seen the video of the overwhelming applause Bernie Sanders received during his Fox News town hall, I highly recommend it. But really, this isn’t surprising. 52% of Republicans support Medicare for All. The Democratic primaries can’t only be about appealing to long-term Democrats. They also have to be about convincing Republicans and Independents that it’s worth voting in the primaries, even if that means registering as a Democrat for the first time ever. That’s the only way we’ll get a candidate who can beat Donald Trump in 2020. In 22 states, where at least one party already has open primaries or caucuses, they may not have to register for anything at all.
Can we call someone a progressive if they continually support the military industrial complex, which routinely makes homeless and murders civilians?
Elizabeth Warren deserves a lot of credit, but that doesn’t mean we should ignore the major flaws in her candidacy. It’s worth noting that she voted against the National Defense Authorization Act of 2019, so maybe she’s beginning to come to her senses. But it remains the responsibility of anti-war progressives to ask what took her so long to come around on such an obvious issue, and if the meetings she’s held with defense contractors or her regular interactions with Raytheon staff had anything to do with her inexcusable tardiness. If we don’t have an explicit answer to this question how can we trust that she’ll be an anti-war president? Can we trust her to oversee a major defunding of the military apparatus even while citing concerns about military readiness?
Given the outsized global problem of the military industrial complex, we need to hold her accountable for her problematic ideological inconsistencies. We need to demand answers about her recent support for the military industrial complex, and her willingness to play into disingenuous concerns about military readiness. This rhetoric and voting history matters. Otherwise, we’re saying that progressive policies and human rights only matter in the United States. Can we call someone a progressive if they support the military industrial complex, which routinely makes homeless and murders civilians? Is it alright to support a candidate who wants to make universal childcare available in the United States while also funding the deaths and homelessness of children abroad? And for once, this isn’t about a lack of options.
No candidate is perfect, but there are at least three more progressive candidates in the running, Gabbard, Gravel, and Sanders. Neither Gabbard nor Sanders voted to increase Trump’s military budget in 2017. And as the most anti-war candidate in the primaries, Gravel surely wouldn’t have if he’d been a sitting congressperson at the time. Warren often says that defeating Donald Trump is the most important thing in 2020, but her actions simply don’t support that. If they did, then she’d be a progressive leader, fighting to win over Trump supporters who only watch Fox News. Either that, or she’d drop out to endorse a progressive Democrat who will.
