How “realistic" is Bernie Sanders to expect that his single payer healthcare and other sweeping reform proposals would ever be adopted by Congress if he were elected President?
Critics on both his left and right have assumed this is Sanders’ expectation, and have scoffed at it. But as John Cassidy of the New Yorker notes (see link below), Sanders has on several occasions indicated he is under no such illusion, and appears to recognize that only the sustained pressure of a powerful mass movement can induce legislation to curb the corporations, redistribute wealth, create jobs, provide debt relief and expand the welfare state. Sanders’ program has been rightly compared to FDR’s 1930’s New Deal, and he is essentially trying to recreate the mass working class movement which underpinned it. Like US social democrats of that period, he is working through the Democrat Party to reform rather than replace capitalism. His aim may have little appeal on the far left, but at the present time the process which Sanders has set in motion inside and outside the party is drawing millions of Americans into the orbit of the left around the idea that the US system is a plutocracy which requires a “political revolution” to democratize it. If he loses, Sanders will undoubtedly endorse Clinton. His supporters are likely to follow suit. Most dissident Democrats have remained loyal to the party when their efforts to change its direction have been thwarted. Whether the latest insurgency endures and fundamentally reshapes American politics will depend much less on what Sanders does than it will on a continuing decline in living standards and failure of the Democratic Party to address US working class needs. http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/bernie-sanders-and-the-realists?mbid=nl_TNY%20Template%20-%20With%20Photo%20(9)&CNDID=39951347&spMailingID=8464149&spUserID=MTE3OTEwOTgxMDc2S0&spJobID=842475623&spReportId=ODQyNDc1NjIzS0 _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
