In a recent post on Monthly Review’s MRZine blog, which I highly recommend, Victor Wallis explained that the Trump phenomenon is historically symptomatic of deepening capitalist crisis whereby poor economic conditions coincide with a declining middle class, chronic stagnation and growing political instability. Middle class anger is misdirected at the usual scapegoats by the rantings of a demagogue such as Trump. The obvious danger of such a situation and what it means for the future stability of our democracy should be clear. We are on the precipice of an historic choice between the demagogic far right or the more rational and realistic social democratic left. I believe that Wallis sums up very succinctly why Bernie Sanders is simultaneously the antidote for both Trump’s tea party demagoguery and Hillary’s ineffectual “business as usual” approach to the current crisis. Wallis explains;
The Tea Party constituency makes up Trump's popular base, giving him electoral credibility in comparison not only with mainstream Republicans such as Jeb Bush, but also with the anointed candidate of the DP Establishment, Hillary Clinton, who, although looking to a more diverse and progressive base than the Republicans, has little in her record to excite its enthusiasm. Bernie Sanders embodies quite explicitly a revival of the Democrats' New Deal legacy. His personal definition of socialism, with his repeated invocations of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, thus encompasses not only the attractiveness but also the limitations of the New Deal agenda. Nevertheless, its attractive dimension makes him a potentially more formidable challenger than Hillary Clinton to the pretensions of Donald Trump, Trump represents the existing dominant agenda in all its chauvinistic and militarist dimensions. Any critique of him on Clinton's part is weakened by her identification with two decades of policies that have fed the popular discontent. To challenge Trump, one must be ready to call into question the right of such a phenomenon -- a billionaire "self"-financed candidate -- to exist.
Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting found that the vast majority of viewers of the October 13 debate though Sanders beat Hillary unequivocally despite the media pundits expected favoring of Hillary.
What the Times and these pundits failed to mention is the fact that every online poll we could find asking web visitors who won the debate cast Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders as the winner—and not just by a small margins, but by rather enormous ones. Seventy-one percent of participants in Slate’s online poll, for example, favored Sanders, while only 16 percent preferred Clinton. Time’s web poll of nearly 235,000 had Sanders at 56 percent and Clinton at 11 percent (Webb: 31 percent). At Daily Kos, which caters to hardcore partisan Dems, 56 percent of nearly 22,000 participants said that Sanders won, vs. 38 percent for Clinton. MSNBC’s poll of 18,000 had Sanders at 69 percent and Clinton at 12 percent. Sanders also showed appeal among the visitors to right-leaning sites: The conservative Drudge Report found that of more than 315,000 people, Sanders polled at 54 percent and Clinton at 9 percent (former Sen. Jim Webb got 25 percent). A poll by KSWB-TV, Fox’s San Diego affiliate, found that 78 percent of 45,000 respondents thought that Sanders won, as opposed to 15 percent who favored Clinton. The Street, a financial news website, found that 80 percent of 13,000 respondents dubbed Sanders the winner, while only 15 percent thought Clinton won.
A CNN article from early October pointed out that Bernie Sanders gets fewer negative responses than does Hillary despite her being deemed the more “electable” Democrat. In addition, the past thirty five years of anti-middle class policies may have gotten the voters over their fear of the S word. The article points out;
But Bernie Sanders is a socialist! No one would elect a socialist president, right? Not necessarily. This past June, Gallop found that almost half of Americans say they would vote for a socialist to be president. Plus once Americans learn more about what Sanders brand of socialism looks like, they may like him even more...Sanders embraces the "democratic socialism" practiced in Scandinavia, for instance, where the government guarantees paid sick leave, universal health care and free higher education. Think Americans won't go for that? Well actually, when social scientists polled Americans across political perspectives about whether they preferred the unequal income distribution at play in the United States (where the top 20% control 84% of the wealth) of a supposedly-hypothetical, infinitely more equal distribution that actually mirrored Sweden's, guess what -- 92% of Americans preferred the wealth distribution of Sweden.
Yes, America is indeed at the cross roads of a typically historic choice of a clear far right or social democratic left path out of the current seemingly intractable crisis. This is the type of choice faced by embattled middle classes all throughout modern times and often they’ve made the wrong choices by seccumbing to fear, xenaphobic hate and desperation. The outcome was disastrous! The political establishment clearly wants Hillary to stabilize the system by making some tepid reforms while not disturbing the status quo. The crisis of the system is far to advanced for this to work the way it did in the early 1990s when it was still possible to use financial bubbles and debt financed growth as a way of saving the system. Prof. Rick Wolff explains that by the 1990s, as in other periods of technological advancement in the history of capitalism that lowered demand for wage labor thus increasing average unemployment rates, wages declined and poverty grew. Wolff explains the post-welfare state path out of the crisis in the 1990s;
First, stagnant real wages and rising productivity sharply altered the distribution of income and wealth in favor of profits and the rich. Second, the working class responded by borrowing vast sums to postpone the end of rising consumption that would have happened had they relied on their wages. Third, employers and the rich lent back to the workers...a portion of the extra profits they made from real wage stagnation. For 30 years these interconnections generated sufficient satisfactions – rising debt-based consumption for the masses and rising wealth for the employers and the rich – to reproduce itself. But it did so on an unsustainable foundation.
Wolff’s succinct explanation tells the story perfectly of why corporate Democrats like Bill Clinton were able to bring a recovery through the private financial system without redistributing income or wealth. The “unstable foundation” that Wolff mentions refers both to the resulting potential instability of the financial system and to future possible limits on state action due to fiscal constraints and the political power of the rich as evidenced by post 2008 tea party attacks on federal spending and the welfare state. Clinton’s strategy allowed growth with class peace and political stability during the 1990s. But the contradictions of private debt financed growth along with stagnant real working class income ultimately became clear in the 2008 crash. Private debt grew faster than public debt as consumer spending dropped in the face of future uncertainty and economic growth slowed dramatically. The crisis deepened and unemployment shot up. By this time, the far right became so politically powerful so as to sharpen class tensions over the revival of welfare state Keynesian policies as a solution to the current crisis. Though the mass of voters chose the Keynesian way out of the crisis twice with the election of Barack Obama, the far right fought back fiercely all along putting severe limits on Obama’s (fairly successful) recovery policies even as inequality increased and the precariousness of the middle class worsened. The corporate Democratic option has now all but collapsed leaving only fascism and left social democracy as possible choices. Such polarization bodes ill for the future of US democracy which becomes more and more tenuous as a result of the deepening crisis of US capitalism. The working class now seems ready for socialism but it will be a real struggle to bring about needed socialist reforms through the electoral system.
Today monopoly capitalism cannot withstand another financial crisis and the working class seems ready for the socialist appeal as evidenced by Sanders’ often demonstrated popularity. The far right waits in the wings with a fascist option which though today is implausible may not be in the near future. The problem for the system is that inequality and poverty are at an all time high since the great depression. Since the 1940s, the New Deal policies of the Democratic Party saved the system through growth and a bridging of the income gap through social programs and labor union rights. Today social spending and unions have been dramatically reduced while the power of the rich has grown to where the class divide is as sharp as it was on the eve of the Great Depression in the 1930s. Deep reforms are needed to save the system that Hillary and other corporate Democrats are simply not prepared to make. Only the progressive left can save society from disaster.