Politics

Bernie Sanders versus the progressive left

Bernie Sanders Rally: Photo by Melissa Fossum

When Bernie Sanders made his entry into the Democratic field, few people would had imagine that he could become a real challenger to Hillary Clinton, but now he is the champion for the liberal wing of the party. Bernie Sanders, the 73 years old self-described socialist elected as an independent to the House and Senate representing Vermont, wasn’t as popular as liberal firebrand Elizabeth Warren but he had a good record of siding with the unions and bashing income inequality. So one would assume that the progressive left would be on board with him, but there are exceptions, both in and out of the party.

From the independent left their major distrust for Sanders is his foreign policy, which is relatively hawkish. The Green Party had mixed feelings about Sanders, but there were some that last year were trying to convince Bernie to run as a Green. Now the feeling is of distrust toward Sanders, most greens and independent progressives fear that an endorsement of Hillary Clinton from Bernie would siphon progressive votes into a militarist and corporatist candidate. Green Party members and allies said that Bernie Sanders isn’t Eugene Debs and they are right, but some on the Trotskyist left think otherwise. Some on the independent left might prefer the Green Party nominee Jill Stein over Sanders but still say some good things about him, while others basically called him a neocon of the left.

If people on the independent left, the Green Party or some Trotskyist outlet distrust Bernie is because he isn’t one them. But why the progressive left in the Democratic Party be against the most progressive candidate of this election cycle. The answer is #BlackLivesMatter and the recent Netroots conference prove that. Bernie Sanders is considered by black and brown liberal activists to be soft on the issue of racial inequality — that’s why they interrupted his speech. His answer that he was active in the Civil Rights movement and that he marched with MLK didn’t calm the angry crowd, neither the fact that his other answer for solving racial tensions was to speak about economics. The hashtag #BernieSoBlack mocked a campaign supposedly out of touch with racial justice topics. The criticism of Sanders has even been made about his white supporters.

I’m a socialist and for me the fight against racism is vital part of politics, but I feel deeply troubled by the attitude of the protesters. Matt Bruenig had alredy made the case that Bernie Sanders had already spoke on issues like racial justice so why are the activists so against the old socialist, but mute about Hillary Clinton, who supported the racist tough on crime legislation of his husband. I’m not by any standard a fan of Bernie, my libertarian socialist tendencies made doubt about his bureaucratic social democrat ideals, but I think than if they want to talk about racism why not to question the role of Hillary Clinton in the Libyan War which prompted a humanitarian crisis that affects mostly poor black Africans?

I was surprised to known that even the two time presidential candidate of the Socialist Party and longtime antiwar activist David McReynolds was disgusted with protesters over the Netroots event. It would be wise bring back to discussion of police unions, which Bernie Sanders and most progressives are usually in favor of. And the fact that he represents a mostly white state doesn’t excuse him from the responsibility of talking about these issues. But even with that said, Sanders is not a Nazi or any kind of racist, and if Sanders hasn’t been the best friend to black communities, is Hillary Clinton any better? She may have a more diverse campaign team, but is a staunch supporter of the racist War on Drugs.

I wonder who the black and brown liberal protesters are going to vote for, the man who had been active in the civil rights movement his entire life, or for the wife of a governor that honored the Confederate Flag. I wrote that liberal identity politics were responsible for the death of the New Left ideals of decentralism and anti-imperialism. Liberal identity politics today is a powerful ally to the neoliberal status quo, because it is very difficult to find a perfect progressive. Liberals are in large part responsible for building the racist Prison Industrial Complex, and with self-defeating strategies like those favored by some activists their cause will be lost. Stop wasting the time attacking a man relatively good on the issue of race and confront the fact that a racist Empire should be the subject in question.

Recently in an interview, Ron Paul said that Muhammed Ali inspired him, and that he would have liked to be as brave as him for resisting the draft. Ron Paul is right, Ali was a brave man but it wasn’t only his refusal of being part of the Army — he talked about an Empire abroad and at home whose victims are mostly people of color.

The hipsters and the Iran deal

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The Iran Deal was signed last week. It is supposed to be one of the signature accomplishments of the Obama administration, and I think as a non-interventionist the deal is positive for making the option of war less viable. It caused some predictable reactions, Ron Paul is for it and the neocons against it; but it has also generated some less predictable reactions like the opposition of Rand Paul, which in could end any even remote possibility of winning the GOP nomination, and Jim Webb expressing his doubts, which could complicate his search for Democratic nomination. The most likely is that Senate Republicans wouldn’t be able to get enough votes to block the deal even if some Pro-Israel Democrats vote with them, although I think it would be more difficult than expected get the deal. But I think Obama has a secret weapon: the hipsters.

Iran is a country with a particular interesting film history, an emerging fashion industry and an exciting rock scene. For years the press and pundits were confused when trying to describe the hipsters as a particular political group. They had cataloged hipsters as progressives, conservatives, libertarians and everything in between. I don’t know how much the average hipster thinks of foreign policy, but I’m sure he should know more about Iran than the other Middle Eastern countries because of its celebrated culture.

But if that’s not enough last year two films by Iranian-American filmmakers hit the film festival circuit with success. A Girl Walks Alone at Night was black and white film of Iranian vampires in the desert of California; a story full of indie music, skates and love. Appropriate Behavior is a self-portrait comedy based on the life of actress and director Desiree Akhavan, the film was aptly described as a movie that Woody would do if he was a bisexual Iranian girl. Both films were very different portraits of Iranian-Americans but both portrayed Iranian-Americans more as Americans than exotic foreigners, just like that it also seems that young Iranians love America.

It is true that the government of Iran is repressive, but the sanctions are worse for the civilian population than for the well-connected rulers. The Iranian youth had a lot in common with the American youth, and if it matters with the global hipster youth, if they want a revolution it is one in which they can dance, like Emma Goldman used to say. A hipster perspective on Iran sees that Muslim country as having more similarities to the West than even American allies like Saudi Arabia. How you can hate a country with such great art? If not impossible, one had only to learn to love peace. If culture can be vital to diplomacy one has to wonder why a deal like that was never reached before. Maybe this is a good start of the fall of the neocons and the rise of hipster approved realism.

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The history of left-libertarianism

It’s not easy to talk about left-libertarianism. These days most people still associate libertarianism with the right, and the fact that most left-libertarians identify as anarchist must confuse those not too aware of political philosophy; one might think that think left-libertarians are another kind of collectivist anarchists. I would to start by quoting perhaps the most well-known left-libertarian alive, Sheldon Richman, who was a fellow at several libertarian think-tanks and whose articles are reprinted by both Reason and CounterPunch. Curiously enough his most didactic article on left-libertarianism appeared at The American Conservative:

Left-libertarians favor worker solidarity vis-à-vis bosses, support poor people’s squatting on government or abandoned property, and prefer that corporate privileges be repealed before the regulatory restrictions on how those privileges may be exercised. They see Walmart as a symbol of corporate favoritism—supported by highway subsidies and eminent domain—view the fictive personhood of the limited-liability corporation with suspicion, and doubt that Third World sweatshops would be the “best alternative” in the absence of government manipulation.

Obviously radical statements like that don’t sound like the usual “free market” reforms that some people promote in the GOP, not even something that one could hear from libertarian institutions like the Cato Institute. It’s is probably the complex history of the libertarian movement that is most useful in explaining left-libertarianism. The libertarian story is long and had a particular relation to American history. I still recommend the marvelous Radicals for Capitalism of Brian Doherty, to these the day the most complete history of the American libertarian movement, readers could be surprised to know that despite its name, Doherty devoted a long part of the book to the left-libertarian writer Karl Hess. Another very interesting work is History of the Libertarian Movement by Samuel Edward Konkin, obviously like all of his writings it was from a more left-libertarian perspective.

The most common point of origin left-libertarians point to is the precursors of libertarianism, sometimes called proto-libertarianism. The nineteen century had several radical individualist anarchists that were in favor of free markets, including thinkers like Lysander Spooner, Benjamin Tucker and Voltarine de Cleyre. Then in twentieth century the New Left-Old Right alliance that Murray Rothbard proposed in the context of the opposition to the Vietnam War was vital for the development of left-libertarianism. Probably the most known left-libertarians of this period is Karl Hess, the Goldwater speechwriter turned Black Panther ally, the National Review founder who wrote legendary manifesto The Death of Politics at Playboy, the man that leave the American Enterprise Institute for the Institute of Policy Studies, from working for the RNC to be an SDS activist.

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The socialist case for gun rights

The surprise of this primary season is probably Bernie Sanders. The independent Senator from Vermont who calls himself as a democratic socialist and is running for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination is doing very well in polls, drawing large crowds to his events, and has even raised considerable funds for a politician who relies on small donors. Some might say Hillary Clinton should be worried. In the beginning no one bet anything on him, and some think that his support for gun rights would affect support from his liberal base, but that doesn’t seem to have happened.

In America, people usually assume that everyone on the left supports gun control. Outside America, not many people speak about gun rights. As a Peruvian lefty, I never thought about guns. The exception was when I saw Bowling for Columbine, after that I supported gun control even if in my own country buying guns is actually very complex. I think that non-American leftists tend to sympathize with Michel Moore and other progressives from Hollywood, not out of affection for liberalism but to oppose conservativism; all gun rights advocates in the liberal conception are portrayed as gun nuts.

Some years after I had taken a position on guns, I joined the Socialist Party of Peru and started to be interested in the history of the New Left, first in my own country, then in America. When I read the libertarian Anthony Gregory defending the use of guns by the Black Panthers, my position changed and I became a supporter of gun rights. But that wasn’t my first step to being sympathetic to guns, I think it was reading the left-libertarian Alexander Cockburn that I started to be suspicious of the liberal arguments for gun control.

The idea is very simple — self-defense. Minorities throughout history have had to defend themselves from the aggression of centralizing powers including the State, from the militia movement to the Zapatistas. It doesn’t matter if they are a minority based on ideas or ethnicity, the thing that matters is that they are going to be able to defend their community, just like the Panthers did before the Reagan crackdown.

It is funny that liberals still often portray gun enthusiasts as closet white supremacists or something similar. Sure Dylann Roof was a real racist, but what about the Huey P. Newton Gun Club? Despite the popularity of Bernie Sanders, I don’t think that liberals are going to agree with him on gun rights, I think they would had been more comfortable with a gun control liberal like Elizabeth Warren, but the fact that Hillary was far to the right that Bernie became a choice for an average Democrat voter. Even if Sanders’ popularity hasn’t anything to do with his position on gun rights, maybe there are baby steps to toward a left favorable to the Second Amendment.

Some argue Sanders’ support for gun rights is simply a matter of Vermont being a rural state where guns are popular and maybe there some truth in that, it would be very difficult to get elected as a supporter of gun control. Some people think socialists are just like liberals, but it’s more complicated. In the years of war against the Sandinistas in Central America, even some social democratic parties from Latin America were in favor of them. While social democrats oppose revolutionary socialism, they more or less agreed that the Nicaraguans should resist. If you say that you are a fan of Che Guevara, it doesn’t make sense to be in favor of gun control. On the contrary, if you want to empower people, give them guns and the possibility to defend themselves.

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ObamaCare is American democracy at its finest

ObamaCare is the law of the land, now and forever. Well, at least until the country goes broke and the entitlement state falters.

The Supreme Court’s second upholding of President Obama’s health care law was as comical as it was predictable. Conservatives fumed over Chief Justice John Roberts’ dereliction of duty. Liberals basked in the victory, with the president proclaiming, “The Affordable Care Act still stands, it is working, and it is here to stay.”

And stay it will. The left already knows it. King vs. Burwell marks a huge victory in the march for progress. Many on the right are still unwilling to accept the loss, and can’t wrap their heads around the fact that the highest court in the land just effectively changed a law’s wording, thus legislating from the bench, instead of judging the law as it was. Such a maneuver represents a complete abandonment of the American conception of rule of law. For those who believe law should be strict and straight-forward, this was a devastating blow.

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