There’s been a lot of interest lately in the question of whether we need a socialist party in the US. Perhaps to put this in a way people might ask it: Do we need a socialist party in our time, and, if so, what would it look like? In one sense, it’s a surprising question. We have a socialist party in the US! In fact, we have lots of them.
Category: Voting (Page 2 of 5)
These are posts on voting from the blog Base and Superstructure. These posts concern issues about who to vote for, particularly from a left-wing perspective.
Back in 2017, Bernie Sanders introduced a Senate bill on Medicare for All. It’s hardly the first version of this proposal. John Conyers introduced a less detailed version of it in the House each term since 2003. But Sanders has done more than anyone else to popularize the idea in US politics. So much, in fact, that just about all the major Democratic presidential contenders hopped on board. Literally co-sponsoring the bill in the case of the senators running for president.
And that’s no exaggeration. Here’s a list of Medicare for All co-sponsors who ran for president: Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, and Elizabeth Warren. Let’s not forget several others also endorsed the proposal: Pete Buttigieg (!), Julián Castro, Tulsi Gabbard, Tom Steyer, and Andrew Yang.
But times get tougher when you’re running for president. It’s one thing to announce a bold agenda, but it’s another to defend that agenda during the invisible primary. Consequently, it’s time to ask which ones chickened out. Who pulled a flip-flip on Medicare for All?
If you’re a long-time reader, you know I offered some friendly advice to each Democratic presidential campaign back in February. Let’s follow up on that. Now it’s time for some grading. Did the campaigns take my advice? Have they done what they need to do in the early stages?
The grades are in.
One of my first pieces of political writing I can still recall was a criticism of an allegedly socialist House member in the late 1990s for voting in favor of US intervention in Yugoslavia. That House member was, of course, Bernie Sanders. I still think there’s value in criticizing Bernie in some ways and in some circumstances. But let’s talk a bit more about that.
Twitter debate over the Bernie Sanders campaign degenerated into a dumpster fire a long time ago. Or, to put it more accurately, it degenerated twice. Once during the 2016 race against Hillary Clinton. And then a second time during the 2020 campaign. And so, I’m writing a post about criticizing Bernie in light of all this. Do people do it well or poorly? And how do we do it well?
