NB Books via Kos.



The opening teaser.

I’m guessing that by now, most Kossaks know that the success of the Sanders 2020 campaign so far has provoked a — strong, shall we say — reaction from some media pundits and Democratic Party “leaders.”

What I think is interesting is that some thought leaders are beginning to push back against the anti-Bernie hand wringing. Most notable is Paul Krugman, who wrote on Feb. 13, 2020, Bernie Sanders Isn’t a Socialist.

Republicans have a long, disreputable history of conflating any attempt to improve American lives with the evils of “socialism.”

[. . .]

Hopefully, more anti-Berners will follow Krugman’s lead. After all, it’s been almost a full year since former deputy assistant secretary of the Treasury for economic policy in the Clinton administration Brad DeLong, now at the University of California-Berkeley, tweeted “the baton rightly passes to our colleagues on our left.“ DeLong explained to Zack Beauchamp of Vox that

“Barack Obama rolls into office with Mitt Romney’s health care policy, with John McCain’s climate policy, with Bill Clinton’s tax policy, and George H.W. Bush’s foreign policy,” DeLong notes. “And did George H.W. Bush, did Mitt Romney, did John McCain say a single good word about anything Barack Obama ever did over the course of eight solid years? No, they fucking did not.”

The result, he argues, is the nature of the Democratic Party needs to shift. Rather than being a center-left coalition dominated by market-friendly ideas designed to attract conservative support, the energy of the coalition should come from the left and its broad, sweeping ideas. Market-friendly neoliberals, rather than pushing their own ideology, should work to improve ideas on the left.

[. . .]

Though Sanders reacts to how economic power has corrupted our political process by calling for a political revolution, Palley points out that “Sanders is no revolutionary.” In fact, Sanders’ “political program harks back to the framing of the US constitution.”

A fundamental concern of the founding fathers was excessive political power, be it via monarchy or plutocracy. Two hundred and fifty years ago the problem was monarchy. Today, the problem is plutocracy.
Here, I want to amplify and expand on Palley’s argument by including a reference to the 2017 book, The Crisis of the Middle-class Constitution: Why Economic Inequality Threatens Our Republic. It was written by an adviser to Senator Elizabeth Warren, Vanderbilt Law professor Ganesh Sitaraman, who recounts the history of early republics and democracies that the Founders examined as they carefully structured the new national government. (I included a fuller review of Sitaraman’s book, and a link to a YouTube video of Sitaraman, in the bottom half of my New Years day post.) Sitaraman has a powerful insight into how World War Two and the Cold War shifted Americans’ conception of who their enemies were, which I think goes a long way in explaining why we today do not fully appreciate the threat posed by plutocrats such as Donald Trump and Mike Bloomberg, even when they brazenly engage in buying control of the political process.

[. . .]

'Course you can't use such language in Pol Ads, etc. That demands reading skills and some sort of contact with books--early on .
But maybe some of the above could be rendered in Comics-graphics? as seem occasiobally to get past the illiteracy #1-Problem.
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Fuck-all: maybe you just can't get There ..from Here.