Most profiles of Bernie Sanders describe him as something like a “1930s-style radical.” They are correct, but underspecified. Sanders is neither strictly a New Dealer, in the lineage of those public-spirited men whom Felix Frankfurter sent down from Harvard to build the administrative state, nor a Popular Fronter. Instead Sanders still grapples, as we have not since, with the question of how much power the economic elite should hold in a democratic society. Sanders has spent his years in public life pushing against both the New Deal’s political settlement and its policy settlement. The former ardor has cooled. Sanders, like the right wing of the Socialist Party in 1936, has finally bowed to the inexorable logic of the electoral college and subordinated the third-party dream to the Democratic Party.
full: https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/the-sanders-phenomenon/ _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
