Sanders town hall spotlighted the type of politics we need to beat Trump
Power and Persuasion
Bernie Sanders’s nationally televised town hall spotlighted the type of politics we need to beat Trump.
Jedediah Purdy
Jacobin Magazine
Most people, unlike academics and political professionals, tend not to have stable sets of policy views that line them up for or against what Sanders calls democratic socialism (or any other ideology, for that matter). They have experiences — frequently of frustration, often of disrespect. They have, too, a sense of friends and enemies.
At the first cut, what Sanders’s interlocutors thought about social spending depended on whether it would serve their enemies, as Gail Sparks seemed to start out suspecting, or make their enemies pay their fair share, as she concluded when Sanders brought her around to “it’s time they put back.”
Sanders’s comfort with the languages of friends and enemies doesn’t mean he descended into a Trumpist festival of enmity. (Trump rallies were rhetorical first-person-shooter games in which the candidate smoked a series of internal and external enemies.) Over and over, Sanders posed principles, often as questions or as expressions of his own conviction. Do you think Medicare and Social Security should not be cut? Do you think it’s unfair to ask the wealthy to pay more in taxes? “I think it’s grossly unfair that working-class kids do not have the income to pay for college.”
Sanders was striving to bring the Kenosha audience into a principled discussion, but he clearly knew that, to make that happen, he had to convince people of the principles they might share. These were not abstract points of political theory, but concrete demands on the state and other citizens, rooted in a sense of what you need, and where you might get it.
The core point of universalist programs is to turn legitimate self-interest into a common interest, and, through the expansion of social rights (housing, education, health care), to relax the paranoiac worry that someone else, probably less deserving, is sneaking off with your share.
= new reply since forum marked as read
