Recently Stephen Skinner, an attorney and former Shepherdstown--Harpers Ferry Delegate to the West Virginia House of Delegates, shared on Facebook a
about Bernie Sanders' backing from the NRA, at least in his early statewide campaigns in Vermont, and his "soft" votes on gun control. Since Stephen Skinner was an early and committed supporter of Hillary Clinton in West Virginia one might interpret this as a "slam from the Left" against Sanders. And, it is a slam in part -- at least insofar as it illuminates some hypocrisy in various progressive circles about the nature of compromise in government and in legislation, and in politics in general. Sanders won the democratic primary in West Virginia. His campaign for President was rightly viewed by more than a few in progressive circles as rare for its relatively "uncompromised" stance on key issues. His campaign's overall fundraising reflected his public values and broad small donor base. Namely, a base that could sustain a serious critique of Wall Street and Billionaire prerogatives in the Ages of Austerity..
Rebuked by some Facebook friends for perpetuating the Clinton - Bernie contests and disputes still roiling the Democratic Party, Skinner replied that criticizing Sanders was not his intent. Every politician, he said, "has to make compromises to assemble a winning majority, both in an election, and in legislating. But if you don't win, you don't DO anything."
I get his point. I can also testify, with respect to Vermont that the sportsmen's lobby and its constituencies in the legislature were sustained by broad working class support in many communities, from the machine tool unions to NRA members. The gun lobby is infested nationally, and in some local cases as well, with ultra-right forces and campaigns funded by arms manufacturers But it also has millions of working class, scouting, sports and family members and alliances, especially in rural Vermont, and the Connecticut River valley industrial machining and veteran populations had links to arms manufacture from the civil war onward. But for Bernie, the questions of class always trumped others. Go where the working people are has been at the top of his calendar, a tradition that that perhaps came naturally, but he picked up a lot of mojo from Jesse Jackson's early presidential campaigns via picket lines and protests, and continued. That stance has been ingrained in his version of socialism from the early days of his campaign for Mayor of Burlington, VT. His was a "socialism" very similar to that of Eleanor Roosevelt, and the "conscience" of FDR - a mixed economic system, democratic, with a shared prosperity social wealth contract implied. Bernie Sanders approaches political bargaining very much like a PROGRESSIVE trade unionist approaches collective bargaining --- to aggressively seek the rise of the working people in just proportion to the wealth they create. Following Sanders career over the years, Bernie's ideology, not unlike the Roosevelts, stresses pragmatic cooperation, but is not pacifist. It encompasses the possibility, even likelihood, of using revolutionary methods, not just parliamentary ones, to return to "Principles" of shared prosperity and enhanced democracy. Thus his deal with gun rights may be slightly more than opportune. Personally, I would ban all weapons in civil society. However I also think the horses have long left the barn on gun control. Forget about anything serious with the current levels of fear and paranoia -- and with real enemies and actual criminals in high places -- loose and armed in society. Warriors inevitably step in where peacemakers fail. Did Sanders choose right? There may be no answer. There may be a hidden cost. Like in the wake of a mass shootings. Or, the answer still lies down the road. But I share Bernie's priority focus on income and class inequalities, on the basics of health care, social security, wages, worker rights, racial and gender injustice, education, taxation, public works, veterans, and youth as the CORE foundation of broad working class unity. I fear all efforts to defend and protect democracy that put hot air and bullshit, instead of serious work and money, on the table -- will aggravate, not diminish, the fascist threat that now stalks the land.
Some have tried to taint Sanders message as "economic populism", as if talking about money was somehow a diversion from what working and poor families are talking about every night at dinner, if there is enough food for dinner, if there is a table and shelter around which to gather. Some think unity against the ultra-right, fascist factions leading the Republican Party trumps the economics which created the scrambling for crumbs economy for the 99, while the 1% thrive. As if the fascist authoritarian threats are not precisely the consequence of the 40 year corruption of democracy by austerity and aggravated inequality!! A corruption which has smashed the liberal/social-democratic alliance bequeathed by the Roosevelt/WW II generation AND its children of the Sixties too; a corruption which has captured all three branches of the US government, and which daily manifests a determined program to dismantle every remnant of the New Deal, Labor rights, women's rights, Civil Rights, the Great Society, the EPA, Federal Education, social security, Medicare, Medicaid and everything with Obama's name on it. How can Trump be stopped if the austerity corruption that created and sustains him is not reversed?
The critics of "economic populism" often hark back to the debates in Europe between Communist and Social Democratic factions of the labor movement and how splits between so-called "class conscious" and "opportunist" forces enabled Hitler to seize the German government. Hindsight, a "lesson of history" might be to avoid "class against class", "wishing for ponies" issues like single-payer health, progressive taxation, or free college, or a $15 minimum wage, or writing labor protections into trade bills, or walking picket lines against "good" corporations -- things that might prevent unity with high-income or billionaire liberals and moderates desperately needed to defeat Trump. But you can't remove the criticism of unjust wealth and income divisions from the defense of democracy. There are multiple motivations for the billionaire attacks on democracy, but top of the list is their knowledge that the working people enfranchised will vote forthwith to tax the rich for the zillions stolen from their pockets for 45 years. Plenty of motivation to invest in authoritarianism and voter suppression, by any means necessary.
By the time the labor based European parties and forces united, they were too late to prevent the worst of the fascist carnage and destruction. The real mobilization against Hitler was indeed a popular front: Note the composition of its leaders: Stalin, -- now judged a "criminal" and "murderer" of Russian socialism, but then the leader of the USSR and the Communist movement --- Churchill, a Conservative, and Roosevelt -- liberal on his own, a social democrat if you believe Eleanor really was his conscience. Everyone with an army.
Of course, I say all this from the stance of my own compromise with Bernie Sanders. His trade position has been nearly identical with that of the trade union movement. Most trade deals of the modern, sixties-onward era, if not all, were opposed because they lost union and manufacturing jobs to overseas colonies, neo-colonies (in short, independent but bribed governments), territories, or trading partners. This process was long underway before the NAFTA debates in the early Nineties made it a more prominent issue. The Clinton response was to add labor representatives to the NAFTA negotiating team, with the assignment to draw up a side agreement on labor rights. This effort largely failed. As has nearly every anti-trade campaign. The trade issue is a dangerous trap in nearly every labor movement in the world. If shared prosperity is abandoned, as it has been in the US, anti-trade agitation can fuel a nationalist, fascist, profoundly ANTI-worker agenda under a false patriotic cover, as Trump is doing. The anti-trade agitation fuels racist, ethnic and other sectarian divisions in labor. But the workforce of the future is more not less international, less not more sectarian. The solution is actually elementary in economics, if not so much in politics: pay the losers, enough to make them winners in changes wrought by structural economic change -- a handmaiden of the altered divisions of labor generated by trade stimulated production changes. Imagine looking forward toward new careers in solar, instead of McDonalds, or simply a livable retirement, in formerly strategic, but dying industries, like coal. It all depends on how the gains from trade are distributed. economics again. Unfortunately, pay the losers only works politically with a radically restructured, and re-legalized labor movement, with rights and responsibility to directly participate in distribution of gains. To the current labor movement, under current labor law, free trade in the private economy is a free ticket to extermination of collective bargaining power with any virtually any global enterprise.
2. Clinton Sells Out to Goldman Sachs and Globalization. Me too. But lets get clear about the deal....
Globalization is a nearly irresistible force. But there are many ways to adapt to it. Much, however, is dictated by the level of economic development, especially workforce development, along with some key geographical and demographic factors. The global scale of production, and the global mobilization of financial investment resources has created multinational enterprise and financial concentrations on a scale never before seen.There is no going back, probably, to small scale production in many industries, supply chains and their infrastructure, including energy, agriculture, and services. If nothing else, the world's people will increasingly aspire to and reach the world of educated and wealthier occupations and services. That requires a huge scale of automated production and services. This is not all going to be nationalized, even if the public stake in too big to fail corporations must increase in ways to minimize risk.
So, Compromises with the centers of finance, and other large scale sectors that, as an alternative to the dead end of fascism and authoritarianism, can be persuaded to return to a New New Deal -- a shared prosperity regime reconfigured for 21st Century economies and divisions of labor rather than the 19th, or 20th is of profound strategic importance. We have to learn how to do it, or fascism and war will teach us the hard way.
In short, to grossly oversimplify -- Bernie must learn to live, at a fair price, with globalization, and internationalism, and the Clintons must talk their friends into putting the turnaround on austerity at the top of the list. That's where we have to get. History's lessons imply we will probably be drowned in blood on the way, or the rising oceans, on the way. Maybe globalization, a curse through most of its imperial origins, may have established enough economic chains and links that keep us from revisiting the last big breakup due to imperial corruption: 1914. Maybe not.
John
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John Case
Harpers Ferry, WV
The Winners and Losers Radio Show
