Bernie Sanders
Many supporters of either Sanders or Warren have become rather vicious to each other. The claim from the Warren supporters is that their candidate is the candidate of ideas, having put out tons of policy proposals. (Sanders has 25 last time I looked, so he’s not shy on this.) She’s younger, and it’s important to some people that she’s a woman.
But the basic thing is that Warren feels like a technocrat, and people who want a competent technocrat as President are drawn to her.
Sanders has ideas as well, and plans, but he’s different from Warren. Warren has said that she’s “capitalist to the bones” and that the problem isn’t capitalism, it is that capitalism needs rules (enforced rules.)
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Sanders is a democratic socialist. He believes that capitalism has its place, but he believes it is fundamentally flawed. He has harked back to FDR’s second bill of rights, which include rights to health, education, a home, and a good income, among others.
Matt Taibbi’s interview with Sanders makes this clear:
He goes on to elucidate probably the biggest difference between himself and Warren.
“In the words of Roosevelt,” he says, “the Republic at the beginning was built around the guarantee of political rights. But he came to believe that true individual freedom can’t exist without economic security.
Elizabeth Warren
To Sanders, capitalism isn’t a good system that we’ve managed badly, it’s a flawed system which needs to be heavily controlled. Nor does he believe that the problem with the left is a lack of ideas. It is a lack of power. The left has ideas, the left has not been able to implement those ideas for decades because the left was out of power.
So, what is required is not to just get good rules back in place. It is to completely subordinate markets to democratic control, and when they are not the best way to do something, remove them.
Leaving these domestic issues aside, Sanders is clearly superior to Warren on foreign affairs, though certainly nowhere near ideal. (Tulsi Gabbard is the only candidate who actually has good, clear, foreign policies, which oppose the US killing foreigners simply because it thinks it has the right to.)
I favor Sanders, overall. Warren or Gabbard would be fine. Foreign affairs do matter, because non-American lives matter. Even if you think they don’t, constant interference in other nations’ affairs costs the US far more than it’s worth, both politically and economically. A straight pragmatist would decide that the advantages of American hegemony, to Americans, are not worth the cost. (This is a longer article, and I’ll write it another day, as the end of hegemony does also have some costs.)
Probably an ideal ticket to me would be either Sanders/Warren, or Sanders/Gabbard. Sanders is old, and he needs a younger VP, not as a balance, but as someone who can be counted on to do much of what he would have done.
I hope, in particular, that neither Trump nor Biden becomes President.
As for the fights between Warren and Sanders followers: The differences are real, yes, but they are minor compared to the differences between either candidate and Biden. It would be good for people to remember that. It’s in the interest of no actual supporter of Sanders or Warren to make attacks on either candidate so damaging that it hurts them in the general.
I hope everyone will bear that in mind going forward.
The reason one should run for office is to act on one’s beliefs about what a good society is.
