Better, worse and worst

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By the combined rules of math and politics, there are a great number of self-described progressives who are in all likelihood going to vote for Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary and Hillary Clinton in the general election. By the combined rules of politics and the Internet, this mix of candidate preferences is often erased or discounted in progressive discourse.

Instead, the liberal wing of American politics is divided into BernieBros and HillaryBots. Because fights are interesting, and someone has to be bad and wrong.

The Bros are cast as the epitome of privilege: young, white, male and aggressively online. They hound users on Twitter and Reddit, declaring that Hillary is no different from her likely Republican opponents, so why bother voting in the general election if she’s the nominee? They are so earnest — and so very white and male — that non-white and non-male liberals have declared that these Bros are, in fact, Bernie Sanders’s biggest problem. The Bots say they don’t dislike Sanders because Sanders is bad, but rather because his supporters are annoying. And sexist. Even if Sanders himself isn’t. Or maybe is.

This has always struck me as a dodge, a willful ignorance of the very serious critique Sanders is levying against Clinton’s candidacy. Clinton is a product of the Third Way movement that pushed the progressive economic agenda out of the political mainstream. She is either a cynical panderer or a religious zealot. She is more hawkish on foreign policy than not-exactly-dovish President Obama. Perhaps most importantly, as Demos’s Matt Bruenig wrote after being dismissed as a sexist BernieBro by multiple high-profile liberal writers, she is an enemy of the poor:

Hillary Clinton in Cleveland, screenshot via YouTube

Since I am a big fan of the poor, I have not taken kindly to the suggestion in some camps that we should support Clinton for president because she is a woman. This is not because I disagree with the idea that, all things equal, having a woman president would be a positive thing. It’s because, with Hillary, all things are not equal, and I don’t weight whatever representational gains you’d get from having a woman in office over the fact that Hillary Clinton is an enemy of the poor.

…

In this debate (which I guess it is now), the participants actually agree on the basic principle that: you should support a woman over a man for president provided that her views aren’t really bad. The only thing we disagree on is whether the proviso at the end of that principle is satisfied here. I think Hillary’s actions and views about the poor are so egregious that they should disqualify her from our support (especially where there is a better candidate out there). Others don’t think they are egregious enough to warrant disqualification.

I have yet to see those frustrated with Bernie Sanders’s (supporters’) whiteness and masculinity make a serious attempt to address this point — especially not since Clinton recently reversed her leftward shift and started touting discredited right-wing talking points concerning Sanders’s domestic agenda. They have also struggled (as in, not even tried) to defend Clinton’s tax relief plans, which are designed to exclude the same low-income families Clinton claims to want to help.

All this is to say that Hillary Clinton really does need to, as she would say, take a backseat to Bernie Sanders when it comes to which candidate in the Democratic primary has a stronger progressive agenda. That seems to me to be a perfectly reasonable reason to vote for Sanders in the primary.

But that doesn’t excuse opposing Clinton in the general election as if she was just another Republican, as Walker Bragman did today in Salon. In his take, Bragman comes off as a caricature of a BernieBro, introducing himself to his audience with the following: “I am a 27-year-old, politically active, progressive millennial voter. I am a political junkie; my background is political science and American history. However, if Hillary Clinton gets the nomination (a big “if”), I will likely not vote for her, and will instead write in “Bernie Sanders” … and I encourage my readers to do so as well.” He then goes on to, over the course of nearly 3,500 words, make the same critique of Clinton that I outlined above.

There are a bunch of problems with Bragman’s post, which the liberal Twittersphere is having a field day with. First off, Clinton’s nomination is not a big if. She has always been, and remains, the prohibitive favorite for the Democratic nomination. You can make the argument that Bernie Sanders would do just fine in a general election were he the nominee, but you really can’t argue that he’s anywhere near as likely to be the nominee as Clinton if you hope to be taken seriously. (Also, a personal pet peeve: If you preface your take by describing yourself as a “political junkie,” it’s a sure sign that your political take is going to be junk.)

Going beyond that, however, Bragman dismisses and distorts just how much worse a Republican presidency — which would in all likelihood be either Trump, Cruz or Rubio — would be than Clinton’s. If the eventual Republican nominee wins the presidency, they will almost certainly hold both chambers of Congress and will be able to make at least two Supreme Court appointments. In other words, they will have total control of the federal government, save for Senate Democrats’ ability to filibuster. The social safety net? Somewhere between decimated and eliminated. Wall Street? Deregulated. Roe v. Wade and other Supreme Court victories? Overturned. Conservative fever dreams like the REINS Act and the Fair Tax? Legitimate possibilities. More war(s) in the Middle East? Absolute certainties.

The reverse does not hold true for the eventual Democratic nominee should they win the White House: Republicans are going to control at least one chamber in Congress no matter who wins the Electoral College. So while debt-free college and universal healthcare are great ideas, and Sanders’s advocacy for them makes me more likely to vote for him in the primary, but I’m under no illusions about his ability to make them a reality should he win both the primary and general elections.

Bragman writes that Clinton’s platform is “more about preserving what we have than it is about improving it,” to which I would say: yes, exactly, and that’s acceptable to me. I would think that the choice between keeping and losing Social Security, Medicare, Obamacare, Roe, the EPA and pretty much everything else progressives have accomplished over the course of the last century would be an easy one.

Believe it or not, you are allowed — even on the Internet! — to energetically support Bernie Sanders in the spring and Hillary Clinton in the fall. Sanders may be better and Clinton may be worse, but the Republican alternatives are the actual worst. To equate the likely Republican nominees with Clinton is to willfully dismiss the consequences of their prospective presidencies.

from AMERICAblog News http://ift.tt/1Ikbc3J