Sanders, Warren, & Sabotage
2016 Democratic Primary runner-up Bernie Sanders officially announced his candidacy for the office of the President of the United States. Beyond all of the usual hand-wringing and smearing done by more centrist elements of the Democratic party, a new and more worrying line of attack has ascended from American political hell and figures to be front and center for the foreseeable future. The general idea is that fellow 2020 Presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren is “just as left” as Sanders and that anyone who chooses Sanders over her should be viewed as sexist.
The sexism charge against Sanders (and his supporters in a broad sense) is one that was utterly baseless in 2016, just as it is now. The original sin that Sanders committed in the eyes of his detractors was the fact that he dared to challenge Hillary Clinton on her abysmal and blood-soaked record. Sanders endangering the monarchist coronation and restoration of the Clinton dynasty will never be forgiven by some (a vocal few, really) members of the Democratic coalition, and that is fine. What is worrying in this current political moment is the way that the anti-Sanders crowd is already creating false a choice and obscuring the truth in order to discredit Sanders and intimidate his supporters.
These people are looking to weaponize identity and are purposefully (or ignorantly) lying about the political orientation of both candidates in a Trumpian way. If it was true that Sanders and Warren are exactly the same ideologically, then maybe it would be fair to question the reasoning behind why someone would choose him over her. Thankfully, in our objective reality, this is not the case. Now I think it is time for me to come clean, before the 2016 campaign season started, Elizabeth Warren was actually my preferred choice for President. Then, I like most other young American leftists fell in love with and were politically mobilized the Sanders campaign. So these are both candidates that I have limitless admiration for and I would be ecstatic if either one of them won the Oval office, but that does not mean that they do not have clear differences.
Before I cover any other differences, one that I want to address is electability. The idea that Sanders is somehow “not electable” is a wretched falsehood that should get anyone laughed out of any serious political discussion. When it comes to popularity Sanders consistently polls as the most popular active politician in the country and often polls right behind Barack Obama and Joe Biden when it comes to favorability. In the case of Elizabeth Warren, She polls much worse against Trump than either Sanders or Biden and according to Rasmussen her unfavorable rating is higher than her favorable rating. Now, do these numbers really mean much this early on in the process? No, probably not, but it is important to point out how vapid and dishonest this “critique” of Sanders actually is.
Moving onto issues of substance, while it is true that Sanders and Warren are both part of the genuine left wing of the mainstream political spectrum, there are clear differences between both candidates. One of the differences is their stated positions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. While neither has taken a radical leftist position on the conflict, Sanders has run counter to the uncritically pro-Israeli Washington consensus on the conflict. His fearlessness in calling the Nakba the ethic cleansing that it was, challenging Israeli hawkishness towards Iran and calling for an end to the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza are huge steps towards turning the tide on this issue.
On Palestine, Warren has often been silent, but when she has spoken it has not been promising. In 2014 Warren made what can only be described as disheartening remarks defending the Israeli bombing of schools and hospitals in Gaza while parroting the “civilian casualties are the last thing Israel wants” line that you can find in run-of-the-mill Zionist propaganda. She went on to say that, “Israel lives in a very dangerous part of the world, and a part of the world where there aren’t many liberal democracies and democracies that are controlled by the rule of law” (failing to see the irony that she was defending a brutally enforced apartheid state). In fairness to Warren, Sanders himself has grown in leaps and bounds on this issue in recent years and Warren has plenty of time to correct the record, but she has not yet taken those steps and until she does it will be a stain on her record.
Turning our focus to economics, while I will be the first to admit that it is possible that in 2024 the work done domestically by a Sanders administration could look similar to the work done by a Warren administration, there is one key distinction that should give any progressive pause. The Green New Deal has been a hot topic recently and for the sake of relative brevity, I do not want to get into exact details, but there comes a point where we must reckon with the fact that the goals of such a project are practically impossible without nationalizing the energy industry.
An attempt to solve the climate crisis with a public-private partnership is one that would be doomed to fail. Warren, a proud Keynesian capitalist who has never embraced the socialist label (because she is not one), would be much more susceptible to fumbling this opportunity to solve the climate crisis by allowing the private sector to sabotage it under the guise of “cooperation”. While there is no guarantee that Sanders would nationalize the energy industry, it is difficult to not see the self-avowed socialist as being more trustworthy than anyone else on this monumentally important issue.
While this reads as a being very critical of Warren and overly-supportive of Bernie, this is not my intention. My goal is to give people a sliver of insight as to why people who are oriented on the political left may choose Sanders. Domestically Elizabeth Warren’s adversarial relationship to the financial sector, and her bold plans to tackle residential segregation and the dearth of child care services should undoubtedly be viewed as ideas that will move our country forward to a better place than it has ever been. Sanders and Warren are both excellent candidates that would signify a massive victory for the American left if either were to get elected, but those who seek to pretend as if supporting one over the other is driven by bigotry are only interested in maintaining an untenable status quo that both candidates are committed to doing away with.
