The Populist Prophet
The New Yorker has the article The Populist Prophet about Bernie Sanders.
In June, when NPR’s David Greene pressed Sanders on whether he embraced the phrase “Black Lives Matter,” the Senator got irritated. “It’s too easy for quote-unquote liberals to be saying, ‘Well, let’s use this phrase,’ ” he said. “We need a massive jobs program to put black kids to work and white kids to work and Hispanic kids to work. So my point is, is that it’s sometimes easy to worry about which phrase you’re going to use. It’s a lot harder to stand up to the billionaire class.”
Sanders does not argue that greater economic equality would end racism, but for most of his career he has subsumed discussions of race under class. Van Jones, a criminal-justice reformer and a former Obama adviser, derides that approach as “trickle-down justice”—and told Salon in August that he had been “warning the white populists in the Party, behind the scenes, for several months, that their continued insistence on advancing a color-blind, race-neutral populism was going to blow up in their faces.”
So know I understand why Bernie Sanders won’t use the phrase “Black Lives Matter”. I also agree with Van Jones that this stance will probably blow up in their faces.
I might have called Bernie Sanders principled for sticking to his ideals even though it might cost him the Presidency if it weren’t for the Elizabeth Warren speech discussed in my previous post Elizabeth Warren just gave the speech that Black Lives Matter activists have been waiting for. I think her speech was far more principled than Bernie Sanders’ approach, and it shows a depth of understanding that he just does not seem to have.
I did sense a rigidity in Bernie Sanders’ reaction to the people of Black Lives Matter. Now I see that what I sensed was actually true. He is going to rigid himself right out of the White House if he can’t listen well enough to figure out why he is wrong on this issue.
October 10,2015
On reading the article more thoroughly, I did come across softening paragraphs such as this reaction after the Black Lives Matter disruption at Netroots Nation
A week later, in his Senate office, Sanders sounded chastened. “The issues these young people raised are enormously important,” he said. The video showing the arrest of Sandra Bland, the African-American woman who died in a Texas jail, had just been released, and Sanders seemed shaken. “It impacted my night’s sleep,” he said. “I don’t sleep that great, and it made it even worse.” He went on, “It’s hard to imagine if Sandra Bland was white she would have been thrown to the ground and assaulted and insulted.” Sanders, speaking more broadly about police violence directed at black people, said, “I plead guilty—I should have been more sensitive at the beginning of this campaign to talk about this issue.”
Still, that understanding seems to have eroded in his recent speeches. He does not have the understanding that Elizabeth Warren does about the special hell that the oligarchs have reserved for African American victims of their plans to strip the wealth away from the people below them.