So, over at Mano’s house there’s a thread that baffles me and makes me sad. The post itself details dynamics largely within the Democratic party (Sanders being the notable exception, we’ll get to that) and praises progressives at the expense of neoliberals.
The comments, however, take a very weird turn. Mano had made a simple (and common) error in the main post:
The progressive wing of the Democratic party, represented by people like Bernie Sanders
It’s not much of an error, but Bernie is apparently as of this moment an independent, not a registered Democrat. It would be more of an error if Mano had come right out and asserted Sanders’ registration, but instead he only asserted that Sanders “represented” progressive democrats. It is possible to represent a group to which you don’t actually belong, of course. So it’s a relatively small thing. But it was enough for Tabby Lavalamp to snark in the first comment:
Oh, that’s right. It’s primary season and he wants to be president so he’s a Democrat again.
Consciousness Razor responds, defending Sanders from Tabby Lavalamp’s brief statement largely through questions rather than rebutting what Tabby has said (since it can’t be rebutted that Sanders has changed his registration). So Tabby adds a few things, including:
I’m Canadian so I don’t have a horse in this race. But you’re mistaken if you don’t think there are Democratic voters who are also annoyed by this.
Well, I too follow the election from Canada, but having US citizenship I do have a horse in this race. I’m not registered as a Democrat and thus, importantly, don’t have a horse (or a vote) in the primary race, but I do have a stake and a vote in the general election after the nominations are decided. And I am annoyed by this. Since I’ve never once in my life had to decide to vote, or not, for Sanders, I don’t know a whole lot about him. I think I can say that this registration-switching thing is the only thing about him that I both know for sure and don’t like. But since the thread wasn’t a general let’s list all the pros and cons about Bernie thread, I spoke up merely to echo that part of Tabby’s statement (to the extent that a non-Democrat could):
Me, I like that he was independent. I don’t want the Democratic brand name forced on anyone. So why is Sanders pushing the Democratic brand name? No one forced him to leave behind his independent registration for the democratic party when he ran for the nomination 4 years ago, and no one is forcing him to leave behind his independent registration now.
All of this is, of course, indisputably true. There are political dynamics which make it vastly more likely for Sanders to win the presidency if he first runs for the Democratic nomination, but no one is forcing him. I went on:
What worries me is the inherent dishonesty of registering as an independent right up until the moment you want the power of the democratic party apparatus behind you. He’s run — successfully! — as an independent for Senator. He’s rejected the democratic party in hugely high-profile ways for decades. But when he wants more power, he slinks over to the democrats for their endorsement, nomination, and especially their money.
I later clarified this a bit, but ultimately I think it stands fairly well on its own as an explanation of why Sanders registration switching bothers me – and remember, this comes from someone who doesn’t like the Democratic national party and isn’t registered with them.
I concluded:
If you’re a democrat because you actually believe in the democratic party, there are problems with that. But if you’re a democrat only for a few months every four years because you want power and money more than you want to stick to your principles, there are also problems with that! … but the fact that [Sanders is] only a democrat when he wants money and power is of great concern to me.
There is apparently some confusion introduced later by some who think I’m saying he wants money for his personal bank account. This isn’t true – though my wording leaves open that interpretation. For clarity, I’m saying he wants the campaign cash from Democrats to be spent on ads and efforts that benefit his run.
This comment of mine is decidedly unflattering to Sanders, but I didn’t bring up the topic of conversation. I only said that, yes, this particular aspect of Sanders political career bothers me. And nothing in what I said is actually untrue or wrong. And that’s why the response was so baffling.
CR actually has a good point in the first response:
I know you understand why victim-blaming is problematic. Is Sanders responsible for the system we’re stuck with in the current political climate? No, he’s not.
And I didn’t respond at the time because this reasonable statement was overwhelmed with unreasonable ones. But it should be noted before we move on to the next comment, by Pierce R. Butler:
As if Sanders seeks the presidency only to become another palace-building tyrant, not to overthrow one. Do you expect him to follow the paths of Mobutu and Pol Pot and the Ceaușescus and Ríos_Montt and Stalin and Mao?
Now, I don’t know who Ríos_Montt is, but I know the rest of the names and can parse “palace building tyrant” just fine. But the entire tone is ridiculous and over the top. I said i don’t like something about Sanders. Did I say or remotely imply that I thought he was a tyrant? Of course not. This is the first indication that Sanders defenders are going to overreact, and quite badly. PRR continues:
If you disagree with particulars of Sanders’s agenda, pls specify. If you disbelieve him, disprove his claims.
And that right there stopped me cold. Imagine:
Random Person 1: I don’t like Bernie Sanders’ tie.
Me: Oh, hey, yeah. I didn’t like that tie either.
Bernie Defender: Oh yeah?? Why don’t you say exactly what you dislike about his health care policy.
Me: I said I didn’t like his tie. I didn’t say I don’t like his health care policy.
Bernie Defender: Well, if you don’t believe him, disprove him!
Me: I said I didn’t like his tie.
I didn’t say Sanders was evil in my comment. I said one thing concerns me. That one thing didn’t happen to be any of “the particulars of Sanders agenda”, and so PRR’s comment is a non-sequitur. It doesn’t address what I’ve said or acknowledge that it’s possible for someone to honestly dislike this one thing about Sanders’ political career. PRR adds:
His agenda in fact demands a takeover of the Democratic Party®. He seems to have better footing to do so than that of any of the “reform-it-from-inside” candidates
Which may in fact be true. That doesn’t mean I have to like switching party registration back and forth. I’d prefer that he either maintain a Democratic registration while executing that takeover or maintain an independent registration while executing that takeover. And while it’s theoretically possible that it might be strategically advantageous to switch back and forth in service of a good cause, that doesn’t mean that I think the registration-switching itself is a good thing or inspires confidence.
Rather, in the specific context where he only becomes a democrat when he wants their campaign cash, it weakens my confidence. Really, the argument is much like the argument about the reliability of any politician whose financial viability for campaigning relies too much on a single source. If he puts himself in debt to the Democratic party, then they have leverage over him. How much? I don’t really know. That’s not an easy mathematical calculation. I would imagine it’s somewhere between minuscule and moderate, but the worry comes not from quantifying the leverage at a high value, but rather from not being able to quantify it.
Holms jumps in to say that running as an independent
is all well and good for a Senate race, but is literally a campaign death sentence in a presidential. Where is the dishonesty?
But this confuses two concepts: campaign viability and honesty. It might be a campaign death sentence to be honest, but does that mean that dishonesty is now suddenly honesty because of political science? Of course not. Moreover, I’ve been clear that it’s switching back and forth only for the primaries which bothers me. If Sanders had switched once, in 2015 or 2016, when he realized that he had a chance to make a run for the presidency and do some good, then stayed a Democrat, I wouldn’t have my concern at all, and I certainly wouldn’t be making the argument I’m making.
Holms explicitly and Sanders implicitly are arguing that it is necessary to use the Democratic party to make a better country. That’s fine. With all its flaws, Holms and Sanders feel joining the Dems is a reasonable option. But if that’s the judgement, why not stay with the Dems? And if they’re so bad that you have to flee from your temporary membership by re-registering independent, why is it that you want their obviously corrupted cash in your next campaign?
CR answers Holms question, “Where is the dishonesty” by locating the dishonesty within me:
The dishonesty is where the Democratic party establishment is not obsessed with money and power, but Sanders is. Obviously.
Pfft. Where did I claim that the Dem establishment wasn’t obsessed with money and power? I’ve already said in this very thread that I dislike the Ds and won’t register with them. This isn’t necessarily dishonest on CR’s part, but if it’s not then CR clearly isn’t reading what I’m actually writing…
… and that’s actually my main problem with the Sanders supporters’ comments. They don’t seem to be replying to me at all. In addition to PRR’s weird statement suggesting that in order to defend my statement that I don’t like repeated party-switching I have to cite differences in political agenda, there’s no acknowledgement at all that I said that loyalty to the Democratic party is itself a source of distrust to me. Remember?
If you’re a democrat because you actually believe in the democratic party, there are problems with that.
Needless to say, I’ve been perfectly honest that I have one concern with Sanders and what that concern is, so it struck me as rather significant that CR would imply that I’m dishonestly implying that the D establishment isn’t interested in money or power – something that I’d clearly never asserted. My comment at #14 is largely redundant in this post given the way I’ve woven responses in between my quotes of the Bernie supporters, but it’s relevant that I did say in that comment:
when arguments are made that he’s been consistent in his politics for X years I have to wonder just how much he’d be willing to give up were he to be elected. He regularly gives up his opposition to the Dem party every 4 years. …
Personally I think he would be more independent and left-wing than most other dems we might elect, but I don’t buy the argument that he’s a sure bet, that there’s no risk, that his willingness to shuttle back and forth to the party registration of convenience says absolutely nothing about his willingness to compromise with the powerful status quo.
Holms #15 merely repeats the argument Holms had previously made, that doing what it takes to win absolves concerns with integrity:
What then is untrustworthy or worrying about registering as D for presidential elections when this is literally the only way he could possibly have a shot at winning?
[emphasis in the original]
CR chimes in again to make the previous intimations that I, personally, am being dishonest into explicit accusations:
I don’t see anything worrying. I’d like to believe you’re being honest and fair-minded, but I strongly doubt it, unfortunately.
This was very weird to me. Why would I lie about having a concern? Why would I lie about what that concern is? I’ve made it very clear that it’s not some outsized, Sanders-as-tyrant concern. I’ve made it very clear that I have parallel concerns with other candidates for different reasons that are nonetheless relevant to this conversation (e.g. being “loyal” to the party when the party has terrible leadership). What could I possibly be dishonest about?
Apparently it’s my statement earlier in comment #7 that
[Sanders has] rejected the democratic party in hugely high-profile ways for decades. But when he wants more power, he slinks over to the democrats for their endorsement, nomination, and especially their money.
CR provided information after I made that statement that Sanders had previously run for the Democratic nomination for senator in Vermont before running as an independent in the general. Here’s CR’s #17, quoting wikipedia then continuing on in CR’s own words:
Sanders represented Vermont’s at-large House district as an independent, won the Democratic primary and then dropped out to run as an independent. Many Democratic politicians across the country endorsed Sanders, and no Democrat was on the ballot. The state committee of the Vermont Democratic Party voted unanimously to endorse Sanders.
A couple of things to note:
1) He was replacing another Independent Vermont Senator. This is apparently a feature of Vermont politics. Maybe they happen to like their “independent” politicians in Vermont. Nothing wrong with that, and there’s no need for that to be true of the country as a whole.
2) He was backed by Democrats in this race, locally and nationally.
CR is apparently confused about the chronological order of these statements, thinking that I knew the information about Vermont senate races when I wrote that, even though CR provided the information later. To that end, CR asks,
Do you think [what you wrote in #7] is consistent with the facts I mentioned in #17?
I could note that I was talking about the presidential election, but I won’t even try. His history in Vermont does place his presidential race choices in a different context than I had thought, but remember the context isn’t that CR is arguing that I was wrong about some specific thing. It’s that I was lying about some specific thing. Providing evidence that I was given information in 2019 is no proof that I was being deliberately dishonest when I failed to reference that information while talking about the subject in 2009.
Really, the whole thread is full of these things, where people seem to entirely lose track of what they’re saying. Holms labels me “pissy” (apparently labeling me “shrill” would be too obvious) for objecting to the non-sequitur of demanding disagreements on points of Sanders’ political agenda without ever noting that my concerns had nothing to do with any disagreements on points of Sanders’ political agenda. CR thinks that a mismatch between what I said in #7 and information provided in #17 is some kind of gotcha. PRR tells me,
We don’t get to get politicians who never have to compromise. You continue to assert an implied premise that Sanders seeks power for his own aggrandizement and profit, rather than for the agenda he has explicitly pursued for all his adult life: citation desperately needed.
I mean, wow. So much wrong! By fucking definition* going from senator to president is an aggrandizement and the bit about “profit” is not at all synonymous with seeking campaign cash, which was always my statement and is indisputably true. But that first point, “we don’t get to get politicians who never have to compromise” is also bizarre, since I’d said several times in the conversation that other candidates also have problems. I’ve not been comparing Sanders to some other candidate. I’ve been comparing Sanders to a hypothetical Sanders who stuck with one political registration either for an entire career or, just as reasonably, stuck with one registration up until deciding to run for president and then changed once. I’ve certainly never asserted that no other candidates would compromise.
More than anything, I’m extremely disappointed because these people who probably know some good things about Sanders didn’t bother to provide any. The arguments were bizarre, were non-sequiturs, and were hostile to me personally for suggesting that compromising for campaign cash has unknown but non-positive implications for how a candidate will respond to the pressures of holding office.
If we can’t agree that money corrupts US politics and the things that candidates do to get that money – yes, including manipulating the political party system – are a reasonable basis for worry, then we are much farther apart than I ever imagined.
*aggrandizement, n. an increase in the power or importance of a person or country
I blame Bernie for splitting the vote, being a whiny sexist loser, and creating this swamp of sexist douchebaggery in the first place. Warren and some guy will do nicely, but no to the old white men who have done nothing but serve themselves.
You’ve spelled out exactly why I have given up trying to have discussions through comments….
I’m not sure who they were fighting, but it wasn’t you or certainly not what you had written, it was bizzare reading the thread before you posted this highlighting specific odd points.
Am just not in the mood tonight for splitting hairs and parsing how they curl.
It seems this boils down to a relative interpretation of the importance of party registration – particularly of Democratic party registration, which I for one consider about as meaningless as the Democratic agenda itself (re-elect incumbent Dems, mostly, sfaict).
With most parties, registration does at least imply agreement with a platform: knowing someone is a Green or a Libertarian tells you something about them and their political goals. Bouncing in and out of the Dems means about as much as wearing different colored-socks on different days – it’s not even as if Sanders were abandoning staunch Socialist comrades with his tactical opportunism. Why the wrath?
@Pierce R. Butler:
And it’s exactly this that perfectly characterizes the weird-ass bullshit in that thread.
There. Was. No. Wrath.
I said a very reasonable thing: his willingness to duck in & out of the democratic party makes me trust him less than I would if he didn’t do that.
In response, you demanded I spell out my disagreements with Sanders’ political agenda and “prove him wrong”.
You’re just not even responding to what’s being said. If changes in registration don’t bother you, then they don’t bother you. That doesn’t mean that they don’t bother me. No do changes in registration have fuck all to do with health care policies. They’re different things. I can like both. I can dislike both. I can like one and not the other. And none of those statements are “wrath”.
It strikes me that there’s some context I don’t know about where it’s impossible (or very difficult) for Bernie supporters to hear that there’s anything at all that anyone doesn’t like about Bernie ever without assuming that the surface criticism is just cover for some other, secret criticism. Drinking Fiji water does not mean that I think Bernie axe-murders trans* people. Saying I trust him less because of this one thing is not code for 17 hideous accusations. It’s one thing.
My statement was so mild, “I trust him less because of X” (not even, “everyone else should trust him less because of X”), and was in response to a conversation thread I didn’t start (I merely agreed “some people are annoyed by X” and then added the minor point that for me it’s a matter of trust), I’m surprised that there was anyone who would bother to respond to my comment at all.
And yet now I’m being described as wrathful. It is truly bizarre.
And so we return to the parsing of split hairs [sigh].
Your characterization of Sanders reads almost entirely denunciatory:
No nuance, no acknowledgment of any positive attributes, just loaded words from a verbal shotgun. Yet somehow your gast got flabbered from responses in kind? At FtB?!?
Thanks at least for not making the present headline another condescending slap at Bernie “Bros”. G’nite!
PRB @#6
But they weren’t “responses in kind”, yours and others comments were far more emotionally heated than CD’s comments. You accused her of “wrath” when I saw uneasiness due to distrust, it’s just not the same level of response.
I have only the interest that the rest of the world has in who is going to be in charge of the US and how they will fuck us up – because it seems they all do, admittedly some far worse than others. I understand people leaving a party on a point of principle, if that point was either party policy when they joined which has since been reversed or in an area the party did not have policy when they joined which might be the case with climate change. I can see that in order to have a real chance of winning the USA predential election you need serious money and in practise that means being attached to one of the main parties. What I don’t understand is the ins and outs that Sanders has done over the years, particulary when as far as policies go he has always been to the left of the elected Democratic party. I dislike the same behaviour from Winston Churchill.
Oh and nice job on the tone policing re split hairs.
Regarding Sanders switching back and forth between Democratic and Independant:
Can you imagine the screams from the Democratic Party if Sanders decided to run as a third party candidate for the Presidency rather than as a Democrat?
Some people did a lot of screaming about him not doing enough to support Clinton. At least he didn’t go and run against her as a third party candidate. Be careful what you wish for.
robertbaden – the fact that Bernie chose not to be totally shitty does not mean he can’t be criticized for what he did end up doing. (I caucused for him, but now have options I like better. Might end up voting for him anyway if I decide it makes strategic sense.)
An-n-n-nd … this is why we can’t have nice things.
(Is there one of those meme GIF’s with that on it?)
Politics is the art of working (civilly) together with people you can’t stand. What does it say when people can’t be civil and fair with people who are (apparently) working for the same cause but disagree with on small points?
Jazzlet @ # 7: … yours and others comments were far more emotionally heated …
Pls re-read: Consciousness Razor in particular got personal and aggro, I did not.
… people leaving a party on a point of principle…
By which yardstick continuing membership in the “Grand Old” party counts as indictment, evidence, and felony conviction in comparison with the not-even-misdemeanor gambit of revolving-door Democratism.
… I don’t understand is the ins and outs that Sanders has done over the years…
I couldn’t give you a dance chart of each do-si-do, but recognize the certain consequences of losing independence by the network of obligations inherent in big-party membership (e.g., fund-raising…). So long as Vermont Democrats still put “Bernie!” signs in their yards & windows, I surmise nobody credible has yelled “Dolchstoss!” among those most affected.
Jazzlet @ # 8: … tone policing re split hairs.
By which I hoped to express the word-by-word dissection of previous comments (see above, this comment). Tone as such comprises only part of that.
Crip Dyke, hold on tight. It’s going to be a long campaign.
Maybe interesting to read someone else’s take on Bernie being/not being a Democrat: Aphra Behn over at Shakesville, writing back in May of 2016:
[emphasis in the original]
Note: Sorry, this is long so I’ll divide it into sections so you can read what interests you.
I read the original post but didn’t think to wade into the comments. I did give money to both the Bernie 2016 campaign and the DCCC during that race. But by the time the general election came around I felt like the DCCC had been exposed as wanting to be the party of my checkbook but not my ideas, no matter what the electorate might want. So while my take-away was more about them being completely untrustworthy, I can see how your main concern was not having an elected official beholden to that circus of greed and incompetence. So basically I’m a Bernie supporter.
Party Shuffle:
I looked at the senate and the presidential races as being different. I honestly don’t know what you’re talking about with Bernie rejecting the democratic party in high-profile ways (for clarity: I’m expressing ignorance here, not incredulity). I don’t think he’s snubbed them in any big way that I’m aware of? I gather that he mostly caucases with the Democrats but doesn’t take their money for getting elected to the senate (and yes, there are advantages to taking that approach). During the 2016 race he helped increase the turn-out among younger voters but I think the the party’s cynical antics alienated some of them by the time the general election came around. Bernie helped push to get Hillary Clinton elected, it just didn’t work. It looked to me as though he were putting in a lot of earnest effort in that direction, more than I’d heard about from other campaigns that did not win their primaries. If you supported Bernie in the primaries you got a steady stream of messages from him and his campaign afterward urging you to support Hillary Clinton.
I’m no political insider, not by a long shot. So I have questions, not answers for you. Did the money spent on the Sanders campaign by the Democratic party generate enough additional voters to be worth it? Is there a big substantive difference for the Democrats when Bernie wins his senate seat as an independent? One of the consequences of the fiasco with the 2016 primary was Bernie did not turn over funds to the party leadership but instead chose himself which Democratic candidates to support. Was this a reasonable response or was it going too far?
Ultimately I guess I see these as interactions not tribes to join or not join. Others may well feel differently.
Good things about Bernie (to me anyway):
The 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign simply exposed a deep fault in the Democratic party. There’s what I believe to be a minority of the party which is propped up by money and self-serving rules. This minority is actually fairly conservative. They’re blue dog democrats, centrists, or moderates. They’re primarily alike not necessarily in the particulars of the policies they promote but in how they fund themselves. They basically run the party but I don’t think it’s because they have widespread support. A fair amount of the base is considerably more progressive-leaning than the leadership but up until recently, they’ve successfully labelled more progressive candidates as unelectable visionaries with pretty but impractical ideas. Once the choices were whittled down to candidates that were acceptable, the party didn’t care if they talked about progressive ideas; they’d never implement them*. That changed with the 2016 presidential primary. Bernie Sanders has promoted progressive ideas since before it was fashionable. He isn’t the only one who’s been effective in this area, but a lot of the candidates out now seem like people who are mostly just supplying progressive talking points without necessarily having a background of doing them.
What we need for the future:
Our politics in action right now are pure right wing extremism. We’re at war everywhere and shopping for more, eugenics isn’t a term you’ll hear but there’s political will to quietly ignore police brutality and death by pregnancy for poor and non-white people, we’re actively courting a border massacre where our army shoots unarmed women and children simply because they’re poor refugees from violent situations we’ve helped create, money and corruption in politics is way up even though convictions for it are skyrocketing, and female healthcare is debated as though it were some consequence-free political football rather than the heatlh of half the nation. A centrist will possibly get some traction on one, maybe two of these issues. The rest will just get a facelift with all the underlying issues ignored. This doesn’t quiet the conservative crazies, it tells them that they’ve won and they get to redefine everything about politics on their terms. If we just sweep the visible problems under the rug they’ll be there waiting for the next conservative scumbag in power to push on and they’ll push for even more extremism. The only way to change things is to actually push for that change on all fronts, to redefine the debate.
I don’t think candidates who are just coming to progressive ideas now are capable of doing that. They’re following what they think is the easy path now but once they start dealing with conservatives in congress what’s easy will change. We need people who have been willing to push for progressive ideas even in the current political climate to take office. I think we need someone willing to fight for change because we need someone who’s willing to do that. Bernie isn’t the only person in the race now who qualifies but he’s one of the stronger candidates who does. If you think the current mess is as awful as I do, please supoprt someone who will fight the new status-quo for real change.
* Obama’s “Hope & Change” message is a good example. He promoted peace, rights and a path toward citizenship for undocumented immigrants brought to the country as infants, and transparency during his candidacy but littlle was done in any of these areas. I’m sure there are other similar issues I’m forgetting as well. You could say he pushed for the Affordable Care Act but that was a pretty conservative version of healthcare reform. So much so it literally came from his 2012 conservative opponent. By the time Hillary Clinton ran for president in 2016 these sorts of people were apparently so confident that more progressive voters would line up behind them that they didn’t even bother with messaging. I still think Hillary Clinton’s campaign messaging can largely be summed up as “Hope for No Change”.
You said that what you don’t like was “inherently dishonest” and was “of great concern” to you. That isn’t a small thing to me, and it’s hard for me to make sense of that. I don’t think a rational and informed person would react that way to this particular series of events (Sanders being an Independent Senatorial candidate and a Democratic Presidential candidate, at different times/places and in different circumstances).
I did figure that either you’ve got other concerns that you’re not expressing, or you’re not rational and informed about the topic. It’s more charitable to assume rationality, so I went with uninformed. The information apparently didn’t help to change your thought process in any appreciable way. That supports the hypothesis that your genuine concerns lie elsewhere: if such evidence doesn’t affect your conclusions, it is evidently about something else which was left unsaid.
Anyway, it’s unreasonable to expand this to what’s “impossible (or very difficult) for Bernie supporters” in general, or to “anything at all that anyone doesn’t like about Bernie ever.” I mean, suppose I’m just horribly mistaken about something here…. You’re ready to take this one conversation and paint with such a large brush? Where did that come from?
On this basis, you speculated that he might change policies if elected – not in 17 ways (or less) but in an unspecified number of ways. You didn’t specify one particular policy change, so the effect wasn’t one thing and may be much greater than 17, with any degree of hideousness. Where exactly you think these concerns come to an end was left as an exercise for the reader.
In any case, you’re confused, if you think you can make that kind of inference from what you know (that is, from Sanders being both an Independent Senatorial candidate and a Democratic Presidential candidate). But that didn’t stop you, and I can only guess why you would make that leap.
@lanir:
He has in the past said that he would not accept the Democratic party nomination for Senate in his Vermont races. There’s nothing illegal about being nominated by multiple parties (e.g., Socialists and Democrats). There’s nothing wrong with having people you disagree with nonetheless think you’re the best available candidate and still support you. However, Sanders, in specifically saying he wouldn’t accept the democratic nomination even though there’s nothing wrong with being nominated by 2 parties or being supported by someone who agrees with you only 80%, represented himself as the outsider to the 2-party system and that this “outsiderness” was an important part of insuring that he is not corrupted.
if Sanders himself thinks it’s important to avoid entanglement with the Democratic party to avoid being corrupted, and then Sanders starts joining the Dems (and leaving the Dems) in time with his need for campaign cash and other support systems to make his runs for president, then why not at least consider the possibility that Sanders is correct that he would be corrupted by too close an association with the Dems?
In my view, this is perfectly analogous (as I think I’ve said) to a local politician bad mouthing the largest employer in the area in order to prove his ethics and independence … and then for a few months every four years going to that employer to get a hunk of campaign cash, more than that local politician could get from anyone else. It’s not disqualifying, but it raises red flags and there’s nothing good you can say about this particular behavior by this hypothetical local politician, even if you can say great things about the politicians other behaviors (or policies).
Sanders has rejected the Dem nomination in the past. He has campaigned repeatedly on being an “independent” and “an outsider”. these things were important to him. Now, being president is a big step up in power and allows him to accomplish a lot more (if he were to win). It may be that he’s willing to sacrifice his independence from the Dems and nothing else in order to gain the presidency. But it may be that he’s willing to sacrifice more. I don’t know what he’s willing to sacrifice, but he’s said in the past that his independence was important and he’s obviously willing to sacrifice that. So I’m left with uncertainty, and that concerns me greatly.
@consciousness razor
I did. You’re right about that. I’ve also thought a lot about that since and decided that “inherently dishonest” is probably wrong. I think what I mean is “inherently lacking in integrity”. The difference may be subtle to you – heck, it’s probably just subtle which is how I allowed myself to make the mistake in the first place – but I think it helps make it more clear where I’m coming from. It’s not that Sanders is lying, which is what “inherent dishonesty” would imply. It’s that Sanders’ repeated insistence that he would not accept the Democratic nomination for Senate because it would compromise him is impossible to reconcile with the choice to run for president as a Democrat.
Now, if he had changed his registration once, from independent or Socialist or whatever he is/was in 2015 to Democratic for the purposes of the 2016 presidential race, that could be fine. He might have decided that running as a Dem wasn’t corrupting to him. He might have decided he didn’t need to be an outsider. He might have decided any number of things that would explain that one time change.
But switching back and now running again as a Dem makes it clear that this wasn’t some decision that came from changing his old ways of thinking about the necessity of being an outsider to maintain his integrity. Whatever drives his refusal to accept the Dem nomination for Senate is still active … but he registers as a Dem anyway.
These things are impossible to integrate. They speak to his integrity because he himself has said that running as a Dem would speak to his integrity.
I wish I had data on presidents who had switched parties repeatedly before becoming president and how closely they adhered to their pre-election agenda once in office (compared to how other presidents did, they all deviate from their pre-election agendas). I don’t. So I have a concern that’s unresolved and not resolvable by data.
I don’t remember you providing any information that directly addresses my concern (that it may not indicate good things when he’s publicly turning his back on Dems as not good enough and a corrupting force before making a play for Dem support and money before publicly turning his back on Dems as not good enough and a corrupting force before making a play for Dem support and money). I remember a lot of opining, but not any fact-based argument that 1) Sanders didn’t publicly reject the Dems as not good enough and a corrupting force from which it was good that Sanders was independent (he has in fact publicly rejected them and he has in fact said that his trustworthiness should be judged higher because he’s a political independent), or 2) that the Dems are not, in fact, a corrupting force (I’d laugh if you tried to present evidence for this, but I suppose I would also read it), or 3) someone who goes against their (at least stated) principles to join with establishment money & power on the way to the presidency (and only in the presidential campaign) is no more likely to vary from their stated agenda than someone who remains independent.
Yeah, I don’t think you could have statistically significant results on #3 because i don’t think there’s enough data. But that’s not a problem for my position. That IS my position (or at least part of it): in the absence of data, caution is warranted. If you provide information that doesn’t relate to numbers 1-3 then it’s very probably you aren’t addressing my position, and so you should expect that my position wouldn’t change. In fact, a change after information that doesn’t address any of those things would be better evidence that I have some “genuine concern” that is yet unstated than a lack of a change does.
Separately: let’s not change the facts. You’re now asserting that you tested the hypothesis that my “genuine concern” was something other than what I actually said: I don’t like Bernie’s party-switching.
In fact, after my first comment and before I could write anything further, much less something specifically incorporating any new information you might have presented, you wrote a comment slamming my honesty. You didn’t provide information and gauge my reaction before making your judgement. Your very first sentence in your comment #13 was,
Note that I posted once and you, without any evidence “support[ing] the hypothesis”, branded me a liar who believed that the Democratic party doesn’t care about money and power.
Please, don’t make things worse by now claiming you went through some rigorous process of gauging my response to new information before you decided that my “real concerns” were something else unwritten. You had quite obviously decided that before I’d ever even had a chance to read anything you’d written in reply to me, and certainly before I could reply in such a way that you could judge whether or not I had properly addressed your additional information.
Also, too, I specifically spelled out in that very first comment that although party switching creates concerns for me, so does loyalty to the Democratic establishment. From my first comment, #7:
So when you said that bit about how the real lie was pretending the Dems don’t care about money or power, you already knew – or should have known – that I was calling out loyalty to the Dem establishment as its own problem for which other candidates must answer.
The idea that you were carefully hypothesis testing when,
1) you didn’t actually give me a chance to respond and thus had no chance at all to test your hypothesis, and
2) even without hypothesis testing, the specific form of your “rebuttal” contradicted the evidence you did have,
is quite obviously unsupported. That wasn’t careful, rational argument on your part. I don’t give a fuck if your language is strong or harsh or antagonistic, but let’s do deal with the actual facts, shall we?
Well, that conclusion is certainly true, but you could have asked follow up questions at that point rather than assuming (contrary to the evidence) that I supported the Dem establishment as non-corrupt, and unconcerned with money and power.
But while it’s true I’m worried about how things might change once in office and have no idea what might change or how much, integrity still is only one issue. The fact that one issue affects others doesn’t make it not one issue. Tax policy is one issue on which one might judge a candidate, but how much money an administration has available can then affect how one implements (or doesn’t) education policy, health care policy, housing policy, and any number of other policies (except military policy, because Its Noodliness knows that no one with power gives a shit whether or not we have the money to bomb another country).
Sure, issues are tied together in complex ways because of certain interdependencies, but when I was talking about that “one issue” bit I was talking about the irrational non-sequitur of Pierce R. Butler who asked me to list specific policy disagreements and to “prove [Sanders] wrong” (on what I have no idea). It’s entirely possible to consider Sanders’ integrity suspect while agreeing with Sanders health policy (for example). In fact, if you hate his policies then you’d be more worried if he had the strongest possible integrity than the weakest – at least with the weakest integrity a hypothetical secret-conservative might say they’re for Single Payer and then privatize the VA system.
As I’ve said, I haven’t read heavily into candidates’ policies at this point because I’m not voting until next fucking November. Both circumstances and policy specifics will have changed a great deal by then. Maybe Sanders is the candidate whose policies most reflect what I would want to see in a President’s agenda. I don’t know. But i do know that whatever you think of specific policies, those policies are still issues on which a candidate can be judged separate from that candidate’s honesty, integrity or general character.
As a last note, I’ll say I agree with much of lanir’s #16. I don’t know the answers to those questions either, but i agree wholeheartedly with lanir’s statement:
I would love for this to inform the voting of Democratic primary voters, but i doubt that enough of them will care. As an alternative project, voting in progressive new Reps in the house will make a difference. With the majority of the House passing bills that are actually, substantively progressive, the conversation does change, and maybe we can drag a president along. Who knows?
You’re referring to my reply to Holms, a thoroughly sarcastic comment which tried to tie the shitty pieces together in a blatantly absurdist fashion, since I found nothing better to do with them. I did not call you a liar and was not even addressing you.
I propose that the simplest explanation says nothing nefarious about Sanders and requires none of your speculation or conspiracy-mongering. It’s much easier to explain his relationship with the Democratic party that way, and you have a job to do if you think there’s more to it than that.
Let’s circle back to this for a moment:
I’m not your information provider. I think it’s your responsibility to get appropriate information and use it. In that thread on Mano’s blog, you also made a big deal about not being a time traveler, as if that were the only way for you to know the obvious points I had raised. It was common knowledge, straight from wikipedia, and anyone with your concerns could have gone to the trouble of learning it, whether or not I had ever said anything.
I think an honest and fair consideration of the relevant circumstances would have changed how you approached the topic from the beginning, but you apparently felt like you should weigh in before bothering to do that. Instead, Holms, Pierce, and I got your greatly concerned hot take, and I think it’s understandable that we weren’t terribly enamored with that.
It’s true that, even from the beginning, I could not make sense of your first comment. I had already said the whole party label thing was “asinine,” then read your comment which treated it very differently to say the least. I did suspect that perhaps something else was motivating you, and I don’t intend to apologize for that. More things that you’ve said in the meantime have supported that suspicion.
I’ll repeat that it was a snarky comment to Holms, just riffing on the bullshittiness of the thread while also expressing my agreement with him. That’s what it was, in actual fact.
You were already busy not answering most of my questions. I don’t get what kind of follow-up questions you’re talking about. But frankly, I don’t care about which questions you’d rather address, instead of the ones that were originally asked and ignored.
And if you want the whole fucking story, I was short on time, since I was traveling for Mother’s Day and to visit a dying relative. This was not my top priority, and again, I have no apologies for you.
Consciousness razor, the pompous and long-winded pseudointellectual, refuses to apologize for his bigotry? What a surprise! The day I don’t get to see posts by this person in Freethoughtblogs as a whole it will be a wonderful day for lurking. Same goes for Holms, Pierce R. Butler, John Morales and so many others… The list of commenters on this network whose disappearance I eagerly await is almost as long as that of the people I love to read from.
@consciousness razor:
What the fuck?
Do I have to point out ONCE AGAIN, that this was your comment #13 which came before any second comment of mine? How could I be “busy not answering” questions I did not yet know existed? You keep affecting this pose that I had commented multiple times (at the very least twice) before you made up your mind. That’s not what happened and the entire world can see it.
Yeah, the only reason that was relevant was because you asserted here that you provided me with information before watching me ignore your information and as a result concluded that I was hiding my “genuine concerns” behind untrue bluster about disliking Sanders’ registration-switching.
You’re the one who made your provision of information relevant. Not me. For the record though I completely agree that you don’t have any responsibility to provide me with information.
First, you don’t need to address someone to call them a liar. You can call me a liar to Holms and that’s still calling me a liar.
Second, you can call someone a liar without using the word “liar” as we both know. And, really, I don’t give much of a fuck about that except that you’re trying to claim in this thread, contrary to evidence in the original thread, that you provided information and waited for a response before judging whether to take my original comment at face value or whether to conclude that some hidden “genuine reasons” were responsible for my feelings of mistrust.
Your statement directed at Holms (whether you pedantically insist you’re just sarcastically highlighting my dishonesty through pointing out the absurdity of embracing the Dem establishment as unconcerned with money and power or whether you’re willing to agree that this meets the common definition of the idiomatic phrase “calling someone a liar”) clearly shows that you did not wait until you got a response from me before coming to your conclusions about whether or not my original comment could be taken at face value.
Thus your statements here in this thread that you waited to test your hypothesis are, to use a word, bullshit. Maybe you’ll want to protest that just as you protested that you didn’t literally call me a liar by pointing out that your words above aren’t literal products of bovine digestion. But I don’t much care.
We all know that in this thread you asserted that you waited for a response from me before using the evidence provided by that response (or those responses) to conclude that I was being less than truthful in my first comment.
We all can see from your comment #13 that you didn’t wait.
I don’t know why you would even bother trying to assert something so wrongheaded, but here we are.
Have I asked for an apology? Nope.
Do I give a fuck about an apology? Nope.
And, of course, it should go without saying that I’m quite glad that commenting on a blog post isn’t your top priority.
It all comes down to simply this: I, personally, think that Sanders party-switching reflects poorly on him. (I also thought Hillary’s loyalty to the Democratic party reflected poorly on her, but she wasn’t the topic of conversation.)
I still think that Sanders party-switching reflects poorly on him.
You are convinced, you have made it quite clear, that you think that I don’t actually believe his party-switching reflects poorly on him. You are convinced you have evidence of this. Thus you wrote as you did.
My original post isn’t an assertion that this confluence of events deserves an apology made by one or both of us to the other. My OP was an assertion that it’s just fucking bizarre that anyone would think that I don’t actually think that Sanders’ party-switching reflects badly on him while also making comments about the general lack of basic rationality (such as Pierce’s request that I “prove [Sanders] wrong” without ever specifying anything that might be proven wrong or that I have any disagreement with any factual statement Sanders has ever made, and without even an attempt to relate how “proving Sanders wrong” on some factual issue has anything to do with whether or not I should be uncomfortable with party-switching).
If you even asserted, “I really think you believe that party switching reflects badly on Sanders, but the X and Y connotations of your statements lead me to believe that you ALSO hold other negative beliefs about Sanders,” that would at least be marginally rational. Pick your X and Y carefully, it could even potentially be rationally justified.
But on what basis could you possibly conclude that I don’t, in fact, believe that Sanders’ party-switching reflects badly on him?
Your position is, frankly, bizarre.
Okay, I just noticed HateLurker’s comment in the approval queue. I almost didn’t approve it – not merely because it’s hostile, but because it doesn’t add much to the conversation while it also happens to be hostile. Hostility in service of a good argument is welcome here. Venting is fine as long as it doesn’t get out of hand. Repeated hostility to the point where it appears to me to be hostility for hostility’s sake isn’t welcome. I’d love to have everyone’s first comment be positive, but I’m not making that a requirement and HateLurker’s honest opinion is welcome here up until I subjectively decided it’s hostility for hostility’s sake. I read HateLurker as venting and put the comment up. If anyone else disagrees, well, I guess you can ban HateLurker on your own blog.
But I’m also a bit concerned. So I’ll mention now that I’ve never closed a thread before, but if this stops being a conversation, I guess I’ll make this the first.
And for the record, while CR and I have had many disagreements, even strong disagreements, in the past, CR is probably the person with whom I have clashed most that I still respect. In this episode I can cite the need to reframe my problem with Sanders from “inherent dishonesty” to “inherent lack of integrity”. If not for CR’s pushback I wouldn’t have had to rethink my position enough to realize that “dishonesty” was a poor word choice, even if it was fairly close to what I was trying to say.
Your opinion is yours, HateLurker, and you’re welcome to it, but I’m actually of the opinion that CR does contribute net value (unlike, e.g. Holms whose positive contributions are, IMO overwhelmed by the negative ones), even if I think CR has gone off the rails this time (as I’m sure CR does of me).
Sorry if this got muddled somehow, but I’m not disputing the fact that I did form an initial judgement, which I consider unproblematic. I did not say (and do not claim now) that I waited until later to have this impression. It’s just the impression I had, and there’s nothing I can do about that.
Getting into your head and saying what you do or don’t believe is difficult. But let me put it in terms of a few relevant things that you could be aware of. Whether or not you did know them and did draw reasonable conclusions from them is something I can’t easily determine. I doubt repeating it will be very useful; but this is the bizarre part to you, so I’m trying to cooperate as best I can.
1) Vermont is the second smallest state in the US. For that reason alone, a Senate race there is relatively more easy to win for an independent. A politician with “integrity” can and should try to win their elections, using a strategy that makes sense in those specific circumstances.
2) The VT Progressive party and the VT Liberty Union party are fairly well-established, and a Sanders with “integrity” can align with them as well as with the Vermont Democratic party. Being independent allows for a degree of recognition and cooperation among those left-wing factions (also the Green party, etc.), and against the right-wing ones (primarily Republicans).
3) The Senator that Sanders was replacing was Jim Jeffords, also an independent, after being a sort of moderate Republican and leaving that party. So, an independent Senator was already a somewhat familiar or comfortable option to VT voters. This bears on the question of whether or not this type of campaign strategy is likely to be successful, which is something candidates with “integrity” should consider.
4) The presidential race (in 2016 or 2020) is a different affair, for the reasons mentioned above (among others). A person with “integrity” does not need to look at two different situations and use the same strategy in both. I said this in my first comment to you (at Mano’s blog), with respect to “honesty,” but it applies just as well with regard to “integrity.” You never responded to that. My sarcastic comment to Holms did get your attention, but this comment was directly quoting and replying to you, trying to explain very briefly how I thought your comment was mistaken.
5) It’s also true that Democrats were supporting Sanders in the 2006 VT Senate race, despite the fact he was nominally “independent.” You claimed otherwise. And this doesn’t seem to be about him slinking around, just to get money and power, as you suggested. They were pretty tightly aligned at least since 2006, when Democrats widely endorsed him, didn’t run against him with a (D) candidate “inside” their party, and so forth.
It’s not clear what kind of path you think Sanders should have taken to try to win his various elections. I get that you don’t favor him being outside the Democratic party (while aligning with them politically), joining it, leaving again, joining again, etc. But it’s not clear how you think should have acted instead, given the things I mentioned above (or given other considerations that could reasonably be considered relevant).
Perhaps you simply disfavor it because it’s a little confusing. I don’t know, but if so that’s completely understandable. It’s not as simple of a story to tell, compared to a person remaining in the same party, and maybe you don’t know why certain decisions were made at certain times. So maybe it’s fair to say it raises questions, which you might not have asked about a person who stays in the same party (although you should be questioning them as well.) But this is a long way from saying that it’s lacking in integrity and he should have instead done X, then Y, then Z, in order to maintain his integrity.
—
I don’t know what bigotry HateLurker is talking about. Although it seems like trolling, I will just listen and apologize if appropriate.
Thanks, CR, for your cooperation.
I think I understood #1 as well as is necessary for our purposes (I didn’t know that it was exactly 49th in pop, but I knew it was small)
I did not know anything about the party structures, including those independent parties, in Vermont, but I do know that independents are rather more popular there than in other states/territories.
I remembered that there had been previous independent senators from VT, but I didn’t know whether or not Sanders was replacing a retiring independent or a retiring someone else.
I agree that the presidential race is a different political animal than a senate race anywhere, and a very different pa than a senate race in VT.
Umm, I don’t think I made claims about specific years at all, maybe I made a claim that somehow implied this. But this isn’t really what gets me. It’s not whether or not Dems choose to support Sanders, (for me) it’s about whether Sanders consistently supports the Dems.
Sanders has in at least some races explicitly said he would not accept the Democratic nomination. There were efforts not sponsored by him in at least one race to place him on the ballot by signature gathering in the Dem primary. He specifically said he would not accept the nomination when asked.
Not necessarily at the same time, but connected in my head, he has very frequently said we can and should trust him more because of his political independence.
If he explicitly rejects that Dems and makes statements (at the same time or at other times, I’m not sure) that we should trust him more when he rejects the dems, doesn’t that mean by his own logic we should trust him less when he embraces the dems? If he himself overtly ties his integrity to his political party independence, shouldn’t we at least consider that, yes, questions about his integrity might be informed by his political party registration/independence? This, for me, is the crucial part that’s not in your timeline, though I certainly don’t doubt anything that’s in your timeline.
Certainly true. And I maintain that when you have unanswered questions, you should be wary.
Exactly so. This is very much what I was saying.
This too. This is exactly why, in that very first comment, I said:
I absolutely believe that you have to question both Bernie and those people who joined the Dems seemingly without question or challenge and remained loyal Dems. Actually, I believe you have to question everyone, but I don’t really know of anyone running who actually has been questioning and challenging the party. If there’s a third category (or fourth, etc.) I’m open to being educated about that. Maybe Warren previously ran as an independent at the local level or something? I don’t know much personal history for these candidates.
I also believe that the questions are different: If you’re loyal to the Dems, why the fuck is that so? There’s so much manifest evidence that the Dems are terrible. On the other hand, Sanders wasn’t all, “Meh,” about his party registration. He himself didn’t paint it as some reasonable tactical move in a state that likes independents. He himself seemed to me to paint it as a matter of principle. I’m thinking particularly of when the Clinton impeachment was a thing and he wanted everyone in the world to know that he wasn’t a democrat and how all the democrats were compromised in their ability to address the issue and that all the republicans were deranged, but that he was going to be the one person you could trust in this mess because he had his independence. I just don’t see you acknowledging that registering independent has ever been more than a political tactic for Sanders. While I don’t know a lot about Sanders, I sure as hell remember the Clinton impeachment days and from that period I remember Sanders’ posturing.
I think I understand how you can say that, but for me it matters a lot that he has personally touted his party-independence as a reason to trust him. If he bases his reputation on his independence, and then he compromises his independence, then that choice to compromise his independence can’t be squared with his public declarations that his independence is the measure of his integrity IF we believe his integrity hasn’t changed.
Something doesn’t square here. Was his independence never the measure of his integrity (in which case why was he touting it)? Has his integrity changed? Is it possible (which I think you might be saying) that his independence was the measure of his integrity in Vermont, but that political circumstances are simply so different that that equation is simply not applicable anymore – like saying that the sum of the angles in a triangle is 180°…but not near a black hole because space itself is curved. In your telling, I don’t see any acknowledgement that Bernie has badmouthed joining the Dems. (For the record, I think he probably badmouths the Dems for good reasons: there’s a lot to dislike. Nevertheless, whether he’s right or wrong, can we agree he’s said that he’s a better person for not being a Dem?) Maybe the rules for judging his integrity in Vermont aren’t wrong, but don’t apply outside of it (like triangles and black holes). I guess I’d be sympathetic to that argument, certainly sympathetic enough to listen to it, but I haven’t seen that argument made. Looking back I guess it’s possible that you were arguing from that perspective, but what I saw was an argument that there’s not even a question to answer, not that there’s a legit question, but the answer is unexpectedly completely unrelated.
Again, the analogy to me is badmouthing a local company that is your region’s largest employer. Whether your criticisms are correct or not, it looks bad and raises questions if you get elected to a local gig by campaigning against TheCompany® but then get half or more of your campaign cash for your next election from that same company.
For me, there’s lots of good reasons to change once: maybe you’ve always liked the jobs that they provide, but they’ve been big polluters. Once they change their polluting, maybe you’re fine with them.That sort of thing. But switching back and forth on relatively short time scales always coinciding with the election would call into question one’s integrity. And maybe, as a parallel to the blackhole metaphor, one could imagine that TheCompany® has only one polluting plant, and it’s bad for SmallHomeTown, but that the business as a whole is great for the state and its other plants don’t pollute. Maybe then when you’re campaigning for promotion you don’t see taking the company’s cash as bad because on a state level there’s no conflict between the interests of TheCompany® and the interests of the State the way that there was between TheCompany® and SmallHomeTown. I mean, it’s possible, but the questions are still legitimate and until I’d actually heard the candidate provide that answer I’d be concerned for the candidate’s integrity.
Moving on, you have fair questions about what Bernie “should have done”. That’s tough, because I don’t know. Politics in the US is dirty and corrupt. It might be that no matter what his past I would have had some concerns from some of his behaviors. But I know that in this universe he himself has based his reputation on his independence, and he’s sacrificed that independence. I have significant concerns unless and until I come across an account of how he’s making these decisions that alleviates those concerns for me. (To be fair, he may have already written one, and I just haven’t seen it.)
Of course, like I’ve said many times, I have concerns about just about anyone that joins either of the USA’s current major parties (the Dems as I’ve said, but the Reps even more). That doesn’t stop me from voting Democratic in many elections. I consistently love Earl Blumenauer even though I wish he was something other than a Dem. Merkley was elected not long before I moved to Canada, IIRC, so I didn’t get to know him in the same way as I would have if I’d stayed, but I still get e-mails from him b/c I donated to him and he does good things. (OT: Whoah! While checking spelling I just looked at his picture for the first time in many years. He really looks kinda dopey. Droopy-Dog-ish, even.) I’ve voted for him twice.
It’s not that Bernie is uniquely awful, but that – of all the things I know about Bernie – this is the thing that worries me. And it does worry me. Honestly. Noodles know, not enough to sit out an election against trump, but yeah: I’m a demanding voter and I want to know this shit.
Let’s clarify what you mean by “consistently.” In one sense, just like you and many others, I don’t consistently support the Democrats. I don’t have a view that it’s “my party, right or wrong” [1] and nobody with any integrity should have to think that way.
In another sense, I am very often supportive of them; the support they get from me is consistent with what I think is true and what I think is the best choice available to me as a voter. I think they are consistently the best choice, even if they’re not consistently making the right choices all of the time, as sad as that may be.
So, does he always support the Dems? No, and he shouldn’t (if you ask me). If he supports the Dems when that happens to be the right thing to do, then you shouldn’t be worried. If you could show him supporting the Dems when there were better options available, that would be something to worry about.
I want to understand the context of these statements. Your paraphrases of them may not be giving the whole story. If he did mean something else, or perhaps a thought came out the wrong way in a particular speech, then you can’t assert that this is by his own logic and don’t have to conclude anything important from it. Unless it’s something genuinely damning, I would say that not much is riding on a careful interpretation of obscure statements he made years ago.
If anybody does qualify, Sanders does. It’s strange [2] for you to focus this particular criticism on him, when all of the other candidates are worse in this regard.
She was a Republican voter, until some time in the 1990s I think. I guess Newt and his goons turned her off. Or she just left Oklahoma and eventually learned something from the experience.
I agree that it’s mostly or entirely a political tactic. On the bright side, he was (arguably) doing it to unify the leftists in VT. That’s a good thing, not a bad one. If that works for them, because they were dissatisfied with the establishment Democratic choices for whatever reason, I certainly don’t have a problem with it.
Re: the Clinton impeachment … Sure, he was using that opportunity to make himself look better in comparison. But are you going to say that he wasn’t better or less corrupt? Or that he shouldn’t have used that particular opportunity to say so? “Too soon” or “not the right time”? I mean, it’s not hard to turn this around to Bill Clinton. It’s definitely not much of an achievement for a progressive to be better than him, but Sanders is one of the few who could credibly make that claim, even if being “independent” is a very flimsy piece of evidence to support it.
You can say he made a sloppy argument once, which almost nobody remembers…. Is that really such a big deal to you?
I get that. But you can’t expect an independent to win the Electoral College right now. What is a person in his situation to do? Seriously, give me Step 1, Step 2, Step 3, etc., and explain how it can win elections.
On top of that, many people have noted how he has been fairly successful in shifting the Democrats (and perhaps some Republicans) on several important issues. So even though that work is clearly not finished, we’re not talking about the same Democratic party that he railed against years ago. If he can continue to change it for the better as president, there is plenty of reason to think that is much more effective than complaining about it from the sidelines. A person with integrity should want to do their thing more effectively and not less.
It’s not like they’re mortal enemies who must be destroyed, and his honor/integrity is not at stake if he joins with them to do some good work. I don’t mean to strawman you with that, but he can be more constructive than antagonistic. The fact that he’s criticized them, sometimes harshly, but is now willing to work with them under their banner, doesn’t imply that he’s changed. Like I said, they’re ones who’ve evidently changed over the years, by becoming more progressive. He doesn’t need to cross over a line that he drew years ago, when they’re already moving toward him and he could move them even more. No? That dynamic picture seems more appropriate than your triangles in non-Euclidean geometry.
With all that said, this may not affect how he deals with voters in VT. They’ve apparently got some kind of leftist coalition that works for them, and Sanders has found a place in it. I would not fix that if it’s not broken. But the country as a whole isn’t like that, and it would just be foolish to take the same approach in the Presidential elections. If you’re not asking him to be foolish, then what do you expect him to do in both the elections for Senate and President?
[1] Or “my country, right or wrong” for that matter. Fuck that noise. I’m sure you agree with that sentiment.
[2] Trying hard not to say “evidence of a preexisting bias.” So it will just be “strange.”
I think that part of what caused the original dustup is that the only reason I “focused” this criticism on him was because it was brought up by someone else specifically in relation to Sanders. If anything my concerns about a Biden are much fucking stronger than my concerns about Sanders. Concerns about other candidates are extremely nebulous because I don’t know their political histories at all. I don’t have specific memories of them the way that I have specific memories of Sanders when he refused the democratic nomination in 1996(?) or when he was comparing himself to the democrats in the senate during the Clinton impeachment trial.
It’s just so fucking early … and I don’t get a vote in the Democratic primary anyway … that I wouldn’t have mentioned it if it hadn’t already been mentioned by someone else in that thread. No other candidate was mentioned in that thread, but if they had been, I probably would have said how I felt about them as well. Biden I’d feel much worse about. He seems completely part of the Dem establishment. Many other candidates I simply wouldn’t have known how to judge – but if they’d been brought up by name I would have (probably) at least made explicit that I don’t know how to judge them or if they’d be better or worse.
It was never my intention to “focus” attention on Sanders as if his behavior deserves more scrutiny. It was just an accident of fact that Sanders was the sole candidate mentioned in the comments when I chimed in.
And that’s very fair. TBH I don’t have word-for-word quotes in my head that could be parsed in that way. I know that he issued statements that if the Dem nomination was handed to him on a platter he would reject it. And while of course almost anyone on the Democratic side should have been reasonably portraying themselves as more trustworthy than Bill Clinton during the impeachment thing, I have a memory of my own reaction to Sanders talking about being better than Senate Democrats. While Newt obviously was worse than Clinton (for doing the same behavior, but insisting that it constituted grounds for removal from office, he’d made the case that he 100% must resign. Since he didn’t, he was obviously involved in the same behavior AND some additional condemnable behavior responsible for that disconnect), I didn’t see the justification for unilaterally declaring himself better than all other Democrats …
but again, I remember my reaction to Sanders’ statement more than I remember specific words. Maybe my memory isn’t good, or maybe I remember my reaction perfectly but if I parsed the quote with more neutrality I’d find that I must have interpreted it wrongly.
I could look up some quotes from the era if it was interesting to you to investigate that, but it would not be an honest picture of my decision making process if I presented a specific quote as some definitive basis for my unease with Sanders’ party-switching. The basis for my unease are
1. my own human memories of
a. Sanders declining the Democratic nomination if handed to him with no effort on his part,
b. a friend telling me that it was the second time he’d done that (I believed the friend, but I’ve also never verified that, so it could be wrong), and
c. a Sanders media appearance that made me feel that he was saying that merely being a registered Democrat was a reason to distrust all Democrats in the Senate, and that he should be trusted more than any Democrat OR any Republican (and, as I’ve said, it’s possible that my understanding was flawed, but it’s what I remember).
combined with
2. his willingness to join the Dems to seek the presidential nomination in 2015/2016
and
3. his switch back to independent (which made me think that his reasons for refusing to associate with the Dems hadn’t changed, because otherwise I would think that what he did & said in the 1990s was too long ago to matter)
and
4. his willingness to join the Dems again (which made me think that, if his reasons for refusing to associate with the Dems haven’t changed, then he’s probably joining them in violation of his principles).
The party switching wouldn’t matter much if I didn’t have my (imperfect) memories from the 1990s. The memories from the 1990s wouldn’t matter if the switch back to independent hadn’t happened at the end of 2016 or beginning of 2017 (whenever it was effective, I haven’t looked at the date).
So that’s the whole thing. I freely admit it’s not based on deep investigation, but I thought at the time I made comment #7 that wasn’t necessary since I was only chiming in to agree that yes, there exist people who find Sanders’ party-switching troubling.
I don’t know. I’m sure as hell not an expert on how to win friends and influence people. That much should be obvious from my blog and comments. I’m not even saying that he can’t win my vote. I’m saying that this is a barrier for me and that I want to see an explanation from Sanders himself. Although, yeah, I’m also saying it’s not URGENT for me to see that explanation since it’s only relevant to my voting for him and that is still many months away. I’ll certainly look for such an explanation if he’s on any ballot I have an opportunity to cast, but I don’t know of an explanation now and I hadn’t looked for one before that thread at Mano’s place (even though the concern had manifested for me) because with so many months left it just wasn’t a priority yet. (I did not predict my comment blowing things up the way it did or I might have prophylactically looked for such an explanation before I opened my keyboard’s mouth.)
But since you ask, I would say (and for utter clarity I don’t know that he hasn’t done this, I just know I haven’t seen it) that what I would like him to do, if he believes in his candidacy and wants to be president because he feels he can do some good, is take the time to talk to a staffer with writing talent about this and have that staffer cook up an explanation consistent with what Sanders said that tells us what he’s giving up by registering Dem, what he gains, why he thought it was good to switch back to independent in between his runs, and what else, if anything, Sanders feels we should know about his decision making process. Then Sanders should read the written explanation the staffer cooked up and make sure there’s nothing wrong or misleading in it, then order some other staffer to publish it.
Yeah, it would probably take him a bit of time, but not that much. And I think it’s highly likely (he seems an organized thinker) that he could narrate a reasonable account of his real motivations, priorities, and considerations in understandable language and in a relatively short time – certainly enough so to be the foundation for what the writing-staffer would need. I don’t know how many people are bothered in any way by Sanders’ party switching (and many of them might be establishment Dems who wouldn’t care about his explanation, they’ll just hate him anyway), but I’m sure it’s more than just me and it seems an obvious question for reporters to ask. So it’s at least plausible that having a prepared statement would ultimately save time.
It’s not much of a recommendation and it doesn’t come from an expert, but you asked so I gave it a go.
This is also a fair point. It’s also part of why I still wouldn’t give a fuck if he hadn’t switched back to independent for the 2017 congress. I have no certain knowledge, but it at least raises the question whether Bernie thinks the Dems have changed if he thought as recently as 2017 that he couldn’t (or didn’t want to) be a Dem.
But of course, that might be some regretfully necessary thing about keeping his Vermont senate seat, IDK.
It’s all down to I’m really willing to listen to an explanation, but yes I really do think there’s something there to explain.
Postscript:
Yeah, I completely agree with you.
I agree that questioning those in or aspiring to power is very important. One of the forms of corruption the Trump administration is using right now to it’s great advantage is the way the Republicans in Congress are treating him as though he were above reproach. But he’s not and frankly he can’t be or he can do whatever he pleases, trample anyone else or take any shortcut he likes to reach his goals. Trump is a somewhat extreme example (at least for the US), but any leader who cannot be questioned is going to slide into corruption. There’s not enough feedback to tell them their ideas aren’t the best or they should do things in a different fashion. You end up with the emperor’s new clothes.
This is definitely not a new idea and while I’m not a historian, it seems it was well known in the historical roots of our present democracy. “Caesar, thou art mortal.”