"One does not find anything as damaging as the carceral state in the Sanders platform, but the dissonance between name and action is the same."
There's your smoking gun. There's your classic ultra-left opportunism claim. Supporting mass incarceration of black people is the same as not supporting it. I wonder if one could find any consecutive 500 words of Coates writing on this topic that doesn't make such a claim. A is the same as not A. Robert Naiman Policy Director Just Foreign Policy www.justforeignpolicy.org [email protected] (202) 448-2898 x1 On Tue, Jan 26, 2016 at 10:23 AM, raghu <[email protected]> wrote: > Coates directly addresses the stupid claim that anyone criticizing Sanders > is a Clinton stooge: > > http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/01/bernie-sanders-liberal-imagination/425022/ > -----------------------------------snip > What candidates name themselves is generally believed to be important. > Many Sanders supporters, for instance, correctly point out that Clinton > handprints are all over America’s sprawling carceral state. I agree with > them and have said so at length. Voters, and black voters particularly, > should never forget that Bill Clinton passed arguably the most immoral > “anti-crime” bill in American history, and that Hillary Clinton aided its > passage through her invocation of the super-predator myth. A defense of > Clinton rooted in the claim that “Jeb Bush held the same position” would > not be exculpatory. (“Law and order conservative embraces law and order” > would surprise no one.) That is because the anger over the Clintons’ > actions isn’t simply based on their having been wrong, but on their craven > embrace of law and order Republicanism in the Democratic Party’s name. > > One does not find anything as damaging as the carceral state in the > Sanders platform, but the dissonance between name and action is the same. > Sanders’s basic approach is to ameliorate the effects of racism through > broad, mostly class-based policies—doubling the minimum wage, offering > single-payer health-care, delivering free higher education. This is the > same “A rising tide lifts all boats” thinking that has dominated Democratic > anti-racist policy for a generation. Sanders proposes to intensify this > approach. But Sanders’s actual approach is really no different than > President Obama’s. I have repeatedly stated my problem with the “rising > tide” philosophy when embraced by Obama and liberals in general. (See here, > here, here, and here.) Again, briefly, treating a racist injury solely with > class-based remedies is like treating a gun-shot wound solely with > bandages. The bandages help, but they will not suffice. > > There is no need to be theoretical about this. Across Europe, the kind of > robust welfare state Sanders supports—higher minimum wage, single-payer > health-care, low-cost higher education—has been embraced. Have these > policies vanquished racism? Or has race become another rubric for asserting > who should benefit from the state’s largesse and who should not? And if > class-based policy alone is insufficient to banish racism in Europe, why > would it prove to be sufficient in a country founded on white supremacy? > And if it is not sufficient, what does it mean that even on the left wing > of the Democratic party, the consideration of radical, directly anti-racist > solutions has disappeared? And if radical, directly anti-racist remedies > have disappeared from the left-wing of the Democratic Party, by what right > does one expect them to appear in the platform of an avowed moderate like > Clinton? > > > _______________________________________________ > pen-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l > >
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