Bernie Sanders deserves a great deal of credit for moving the Overton Window on progressive policies—particularly Medicare For All—and in demonstrating that it was possible to fund a credible Presidential campaign without support from special interests. These two things are obviously related: for example, you can’t run on M4A if you’re relying on support from the insurance industry. Sanders is a pioneer.
For that reason, his supporters insist that he’s the only authentic progressive running. "People have to decide do they want originals or do they want copies," Nina Turner, co-chair of the Sanders campaign, told CNN. The difference between Sanders and Warren, claim Sanders’ supporters, is the difference between revolution and reform. Our Revolution is the title of Bernie’s book—and his PAC.
These distinctions have an intuitive appeal. Sanders was running as a progressive before it was cool. And maybe thinking in terms of a revolution—as opposed to mere reform—is what made that possible in the first place. Even if Warren’s platform is similar, is she more likely to compromise where Sanders would hold fast? For example, Warren’s Medicare For All plan starts with a public option, an approach Sanders’ supporters claim is, at best, an unnecessary concession to moderates and, at worst, a thinly disguised way to backtrack away from Medicare For All. In other words, by embracing compromise, Warren isn’t really running on a progressive agenda at all.
Of course, the distinction between revolution and reform is meaningless unless something gets done. Sanders, and his advocates, are mistaking Warren’s pragmatism for centrism. Warren’s M4A plan starts with a public option, not as a concession, but because the President already has the authority to extend Medicare coverage as part of the budgeting process. This is why it’s included as part of her plan for her first 100 days in office. In contrast, Sanders’ plan runs the significant risk of depriving millions of people of healthcare until he’s able to coax Congress to pass his Medicare For All bill, presuming he’s able to do that at all.
For Sanders, the revolution is all-or-nothing: incremental reforms put the revolution at risk. In contrast, Warren brings a sense of urgency: people are suffering right now, and we need to help them. Sanders skepticism of half-measures is understandable, given the way such measures are often used to forestall substantive reform. But it turns out that Warren is not offering incremental reform, she’s offering emergency relief in a crisis. This is why all of her plans specifically address what can be done by the exercise of executive power alone. Not at the expense of more comprehensive reform, but as a step toward it. For example, the expansion of Medicare For All can help sell it:
By this point, the American people will have experienced the full benefits of a true Medicare for All option, and they can see for themselves how that experience stacks up against high-priced care that requires them to fight tooth-and-nail against their insurance company.
This is same reason Warren was so adamant that Medicare For All not be burdened with a middle-class tax hike. Instead, she proposed an additional wealth tax to pay for it. Meanwhile, Sanders insists that middle-class taxes will ultimately need to go up, effectively tying his Medicare For All plan to a middle-class tax hike. This gives opponents of Medicare For All the ammunition they desperately need—because Medicare For All is popular—to attack it. Thanks to the insurance and healthcare lobby, it’s already going to be difficult to pass Medicare For All as it is. But Sanders insists on making it more difficult by also demanding that Congress get behind a middle-class tax hike. Meanwhile, Warren not only ditched the tax hike, but instead tied her proposal to an additional wealth tax, which is even more popular than Medicare For All. She not only removed a key weakness in the plan, but turned it into a strength. All while helping as many people as possible in the near term.
This difference in philosophy is not merely theoretical, it’s reflected in Sanders and Warren’s legislative record in the Senate. The last time a bill for which Sanders was the primary sponsor became law was back in 2014. That bill renamed a post office. Since then, Warren has sponsored nine bills that were ultimately enacted, the last one in March of 2019. In 2017 alone—in the wake of Trump’s inauguration, with the Republicans controlling both the House and Senate—Warren got laws enacted making hearing aids available over the counter while dramatically reducing their cost and providing financial protections to veterans. In 2018, Warren introduced 80 bills to 31 for Sanders. She got 13 out of committee: Sanders got 1. Warren isn’t waiting for the revolution to make hearing aids more affordable or protect veterans from predatory financial institutions, just as she isn’t waiting to get Medicare to as many Americans as possible, as soon as possible. Sanders wants a revolution, someday. Warren wants to help people—the sick, the impoverished, the vulnerable—right now.
This reflects their underlying approach to intersectionality. When Sanders launched his campaign, in response to a question about whether he was the best person to represent the Democratic party, he told VPR radio:
We have got to look at candidates, you know, not by the color of their skin, not by their sexual orientation or their gender and not by their age. I mean, I think we have got to try to move us toward a non-discriminatory society which looks at people based on their abilities, based on what they stand for.
Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and Julián Castro would like a word. I’m sure they, too, would like to live in a world where race, gender, and orientation, among other things, didn’t matter. Where no one is marginalized and we see everyone as human beings, with the same rights. But we clearly don’t live in that world.
To his credit, Sanders appears to have made an effort to include the voices of marginalized groups in his campaign. Yet he continues to define the revolution in terms of class struggle. In response to Obama’s remark that women “indisputably” make better leaders than men and that the world’s problems are caused by “old men not getting out of the way,” Sanders replied, “The issue is where power resides in America, and it’s not white or black or male or female.” Sanders is saying this at a moment when a white supremacist is occupying the highest office in the land. He can reconcile those two statements because he sees white supremacy as incidental, not intrinsic, to power and class conflict, as merely a weapon wielded by capitalists to divide and thereby oppress working people.
Warren inverts this formulation: the oppression of Black people, and marginalized groups, in general, are intrinsic to the exercise of power, inseparable from the failures of capitalism. This may be due to her experience studying the causes of bankruptcy and setting up the Consumer Finance Protect Bureau. Or it may be due to her decision early in her campaign to invite marginalized groups to help formula her plans. It’s why her plans emphasize the impact of policy on marginalized groups. For example, her universal childcare plan not only seeks to cover the cost of childcare for millions of families, but raise the wages for childcare workers, who are predominantly Black and Latinx women. Sanders’ plan, which is basically refers to a bill he sponsored in 2011, proposes a ten year grant to ten states to develop a model for universal childcare, and makes no mention of raising wages for childcare workers. Warren’s plan is far more comprehensive, in scope, detail, and inclusivity. And it doesn’t take ten years. If Warren’s plan is the “copy,” to paraphrase Turner, this is an example of where the copy is, in fact, better than the original.
In general Warren’s plans seek to leverage executive power on behalf of marginalized people from day one. That’s not some bargain with the devil, because no bargain need even be struck. Warren is merely proposing to use the existing authority of the Presidency to provide badly needed relief to millions of Americans, particularly those most oppressed. Sanders is uninterested in this approach because he sees everything in terms class conflict, not racism, gender bias, homophobia, or transphobia. Warren believes reform—or revolution—must start with human rights, or it will always be subverted, much the way the Civil Rights movement has been subverted by the the incarceration of Black men and the erosion of voting rights. This is why she has a Black woman (Rep. Ayanna Pressley) and a Native American woman (Rep. Deb Haaland) as campaign co-chairs. It’s why Julián Castro endorsed her immediately after ending his own campaign. It’s why she has endorsements from hundreds of former Obama alumni, Black women activists, Latinx activists, and LGBTQ+ activists.
Progressives tend to see Warren and Sanders as natural allies, but they’re on opposite ends of the spectrum along this particular axis. Blaming capitalism for society’s ills is appealing in its simplicity, but ignores America’s history. It’s like saying that slavery was merely a consequence of capitalism rather than the belief in white supremacy. And in getting the diagnosis wrong, Sanders gets the treatment wrong.
Warren and Sanders are both progressives, but are on opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to intersectionality.
Warren’s approach is to confront marginalization head on, to use the power of Presidency to assert, in no uncertain terms, that America prioritizes human rights, from her first day in office. She is not waiting for Congress to say it’s okay. She is not waiting for a revolution. In pursuing immediate reforms, she will immediately provide aid to millions of Americans whose well-being is threatened by structural inequalities. And, in the process, she will demonstrate what is possible. Far from being a compromise that threatens more sweeping reforms, Warren’s approach is likely to increase popular support for them to the point where Congress will have little choice but to go along if they want to keep their seats.
Warren is no copy of Sanders: her platform borrows elements from Sanders, but her approach is wholly original and unprecedented in American history. Even FDR’s New Deal didn’t tackle Jim Crow. If you believe that capitalism is truly the root of America’s ills, Sanders may still be the right choice for you—although Warren has arguably accomplished more than Sanders even then. But if you think it’s more complicated than that, and that we need to embrace comprehensive solutions with both compassion and urgency, Warren is the only real choice.
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