With the 2024 presidential race beginning to unfold, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont said he believes that President Joe Biden will again earn the Democratic nomination — and the president likely win reelection if he runs on a strong progressive campaign.
“I think at this moment … we have got to bring the progressive community together to say, you know what, we’re going to fight for a progressive agenda but we cannot have four more years of Donald Trump in the White House,” Sanders said Sunday on “Face the Nation.”
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Sanders endorsed Mr. Biden in April. Sanders referenced several of those issues in underscoring what he believes is the importance of building “a strong progressive agenda” to win the presidency in 2024.
They don’t like Joe Biden because he doesn’t pick losing fights on principle, in general, and because they don’t want to admit that the primary process on the left actually does select for the strongest candidates.
I get it. I feel the same way at least emotionally. But $1.3 trillion dollars towards climate change and what is almost certainly the most important climate bill ever passed in the world so far is really hard to argue with.
I would like him to stand up and advocate for court reform. We need to strike while the iron is hot and people are seeing the Supreme Court for the corrupt political institution it always has been. He’s backed down with very little fight on a couple of the things they’ve pulled lately when the Trump Administration would have just kept hammering on passing the exact same laws with tiny changes until they accept it. For example, the opinion on that student loan relief case made this incredibly idiotic argument about how the HEROES Act doesn’t give permission for partial waivers because it only allows a modification or a full waiver and the partial waiver apparently doesn’t count as either of those. I think you should have just come back and said well all right then, full waiver and total jubilee. That probably would also have been struck down but it would have really shown how vapid and hypocritical the court was.
The word neoliberal has basically lost most meaning. But everything they accuse Joe Biden of being are things that describe Joe Manchin. The guy who singularly keeps killing Progressive legislation put forward by the Biden administration.
Does it tho?
The 2016 general election was a contest between candidates with historically low favorables It took just 27.2% of eligible voters (in the right places) to put Trump in the White House Clinton underperformed Obama, while Trump over-performed Romney
If ‘Did not vote’ had been a candidate in the 2016 general, it would have won in a landslide https://brilliantmaps.com/did-not-vote/
If “did not vote” were a candidate in ANY modern US election it would win. The 2016 and 2020 elections both had historically high turnouts.
What is your counterfactual? Would Bernie have been able to get more votes than Biden, then follow it up by passing as much impactful legislation (e.g., the IRA) as Biden did? We can’t really know, but I am extraordinarily confident the answer is ‘no’. He’d be labeled a full commie by the likes of every GOP + Manchin/Sinema and fully blocked from doing anything, even appointing cabinet members.
2016’s turnout was 55% of eligible voters. That’s not historically high. Clinton underperformed Obama in total votes received.
2020’s turnout was historically high- it’s tough to say whether that was all anti-Trump energy (in which a ham sandwich with a (D) next to its name could have won, or if it was all pro-Biden energy that no other Democrat could have received (but TBH, I kinda suspect it’s more the former than the latter)
Probably not, given that centrists seem to prefer kneecapping progressives to supporting them.
As for things we “can’t really know”, we do know 100% that Clinton didn’t win in 2016, and that resulted in flipping SCOTUS rightward for a generation, the overturn of Roe, it meant that we’d have the pandemic under leadership that just wanted people to pretend it wasn’t there and sacrifice themselves for the economy, it was a terrible shit-show and the biggest thing we all got was ballooning debt so the billionaires could get their tax cuts and American foreign policy experienced setbacks from which it may never recover.
So was Biden. So was Obama. So was FDR. So was Kennedy. So was LBJ. They’ve called every Democrat to the left of Hoover a communist since Woodrow Wilson’s administration. This “oh no, we have to nominate people that republicans will accept or they’ll call us names” nonsense is quite possibly the worst sort of preemptive-surrender politics imaginable and I imagine it has something to do with why young people don’t vote
Counterfactuals. You can’t ignore counterfactuals.
The counterfactual to Biden is even less successful progressivism than we got. You yourself agreed with this and it is the most salient point.
You can and should demand more. You can and should advocate for change far beyond this. But my original points stand. By the time we reached the general election, Biden had proven he was the candidate to vote for to cause the most positive change possible. There was not a better way to spend your vote.
That’s all well and nice, but it wasn’t republicans holding up far more aggressive and progressive legislation. It was Sinema, Manchin, and the other “centrists” who at least are smart enough to see the GOP for the totally evil lunatics they are, even if their politics really isn’t much better.
Young people getting out and voting is WHY Biden won. He didn’t win in spite of them.
Yes, young people showing up tipped it that way. It worked out better for Biden than it did for Clinton and I’m really glad about that.
But did they show up because Biden earned their vote, or because a ham sandwich vs. Trump would have got their vote?
Certainly in the general he was vastly preferable to Trump, but was he really a better choice in the primary than, say, Sanders or Warren or Buttigieg? I see a lot of confident assertions and untestable claims about that, but I suspect we’d all do well to consider the Democratic primaries as first and foremost a money contest, as secondly a process by which the money people signal to the voters which candidates they will support or tolerate- and in which whoever designates “the candidates that can win” has leverage to get voters to give up on what they might really want in order to get someone who “can win”. In other words, are the primaries really a way of getting to know the will of the people, or are they a means of pressuring a critical mass of people to vote a way the donors will accept and then presenting that as the genuine will of the people?
There’s a certain begging-of-the-question involved when we use confident claims about who “can win” to influence the way people vote. After all,
I’m not really sure what to say.
To me, the best evidence of a candidate’s ability to get the most votes is their ability to get the most votes. And their ability to get the most votes from voters seems to be pretty damn predictive of their ability to get the most votes from members of congress.
I mean, I personally voted for Buttigieg and would’ve personally preferred Sanders or Warren. But I am also genuinely surprised at how much positive legislation Biden has gotten passed, especially the IRA, and am pretty dubious anyone else could’ve built that much consensus to do the same. Not to mention that I’m pretty disappointed in Buttigieg’s lack of massive change in the DOT so far, as much as I know it is an ultra-conservative and hard to change department…
The rest of your complaint here is just that you don’t like the way US politics works. Yeah, join the club. National popular vote and more ranked choice voting is probably the best first step to reform, but even they have serious drawbacks.
The smugness. Imma vote for Cornel West just to piss you off.
With all that projection I guess you really do have an apt username.
“If you want to pull the party to your thinking, you must show them that you are capable of not voting for them.”. You didn’t convince me to change my vote. Milquetoast liberalism will doom us all.
Primaries have a purpose. Vote in them.
Don’t go around telling progressives to throw away their votes and let conservatives win in the general elections. Do that and you’re a colossal piece of shit working for the big bad. I’m tired of people like you helping get Republicans elected because you think principles matter more than the things they exist to defend.
Linking to clips about an election where literally one of the more progressive democratic candidates of my lifetime lost to Bush thanks largely to progressives failing at the GOTV and a major third-party spoiler candidate. Fuck, man, at least have a sense of self-reflection.
Your principle is the status quo. My principle is egalitarianism. I’m tired of people like you telling us we can’t have democracy because it risks fascism. As if the Democratic Party wouldn’t go fascist to preserve their power. They’ve already proven they will.. Demand more for your vote! Join the dissidents at CornelWest24.org. Or https://beehaw.org/c/cornelwest2024@slrpnk.net
Your principle is idealism with no concessions to reality. Keep dreaming, old man.
Says the guy that would have been perturbed because people complained about King George before the Revolutionary War. People like you prevent progress from happening. Never change, literally.
It’s difficult to believe West is anything but an ivory tower academic trying to elevate his status on the national stage; I know he has a lot of opinion pieces (a lot I even agree with) but has he ever held any office at all? He’s not a real candidate, best case scenario he’s got his own angle he’s working.
That’s the best case. Worst case scenario he’s funded by some shady PACs looking to divide the (true) left vote and spoil 2024. You really think subconsciously racist white-America (think NIMBYs) are going to vote for a self-described “non Marxist socialist” that looks like this I have my doubts friend-o!
That being said, I support Dr. Wests voice in the conversation and hope he can be an intelligent advocate for thoughtful policies, even if he’s not ready for the presidency.
All that could be true, but that’s not what’s driving voters to his candidacy. This country needs a fundamental overhaul of its infrastructure to prepare for the climate to come. The duopoly will be over, it just hasn’t recognized it. The goal is to pull Biden and the corporate Dems as far left as possible to the needs of the citizens. We can do it by threatening the vote, not by falling in line to maintain this flawed electoral system. I understand it’s frightening, because the threat of fascism is real. But as Mark Watney says, “Fortune favors the brave.”
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