We can fight vote suppression, Russian electoral interference & institutional bigotry...

[Ken Burch]

...AND place greater emphasis on economic justice and controls on corporate power.

We can and must do ALL of those things.

It isn't "either/or".

Never has been.

[Buckeye_Democrat]

1. Candidates who focus on those issues probably won't survive the primaries.

If that's a candidate's strong message, then other messages won't be as strong. People have limited time to talk and the media provides sound bites for short attention spans.

If an opposing candidate argues for reparations and other racial issues with more passion in comparison (or they're simply PERCEIVED that way), that candidate will likely have more success in the Democratic primaries because African Americans are a bigger percentage of the party than the general population.

http://fusion.net/story/323539/how-bernie-sanders-lost-black-voters/

But Sanders seldom trained that same impassioned rhetoric on the problems that so many black voters wanted addressed: police brutality, white supremacy, and the ways in which economic inequality is inextricable from race.

It may have been white privilege, or simple cultural ignorance of black people and our plights. The Vermont senator, who built a movement on lofty promises like universal health care and free college, dismissed reparations for black people as “very divisive.”

He appeared not to realize that you can’t simply deliver the same speech on economic inequality to a room full of black people in Atlanta that you would to a room full of white people in Iowa.

Just look at the chasm between African Americans and whites regarding reparations. Opinions about gun control aren't nearly as different.
https://today.yougov.com/news/2014/06/02/reparations/

[Ken Burch]

2. Can we please move PAST talking about this in Hillary v. Bernie terms?

This thread isn't about 2016. It's about 2018, 2020 and beyond.

[Buckeye_Democrat]

3. I prefer to look at the past to help predict the future.

Jerry Brown in '92, Howard Dean in '04, Bernie Sanders in '16. All of those candidates had "grassroots" campaigns that focused more on class issues, and all of them did horribly among AA voters in the primaries.

It doesn't have to be about Bernie and Hillary. It could be any candidates. One of them can be more focused on class compared to another one more focused on race. Fill in the blank for the names.

EDIT: My "dream candidate" would encompass all of these concerns, of course, but there's always an opening for another candidate to pick off votes on a COMPARATIVE basis.

[Ken Burch]

4. The answer is to about race AND class...not to just not mention class.

talking about class doesn't have to conflict with opposing racism.

With Bernie, it was mainly a communications issue...there was no actual difference between Bernie and Hillary on the commitment to fighting racism...it's just that he didn't include the anti-racist agenda prominently enough in his speeches and ads.

And Jerry Brown and Howard Dean didn't lose because they talked about "class&quot Dean was more a supposedly antiwar candidate than a class struggle guy-in '92, Tom Harkin was the closes thing to a "class struggle" candidate, and he lost largely because the media declared him too grumpy to be president). Brown had also had a problematic relationship with the progressive wing of the party, since he ran against THEM as often as he challenged the right on anything.

Both Brown and Dean were running against frontrunners who had established overwhelming leads from the start. Brown's big issue was, of all things, replacing the income tax with a flat tax (something most Democrats of any stripe are against). Neither Brown NOR Dean offered a critique of the role corporate power plays in politics and neither supported any proposals that were significantly egalitarian or redistributive.

[guillaumeb]

5. An excellent critique.

And a positive post as well.

Recommended.

[Ken Burch]

6. Thank you. I'm trying to get us past the primary thing

and the "H or B" binary.

We don't need either of those things

[guillaumeb]

7. At this point they are distractions.

And saying this is not meant to imply that voter suppression and the numerous other issues are not important, but we must look toward 2018 and 2020 because the GOP strategists certainly are.

[Ken Burch]

8. We can address both things.

A national voter registration/re-registration campaign(we could call it "Democracy Summer" or "Voteapalooza&quot would be a great thing for Sanders supporters and Clinton supporters to work together on-there's a need for something that is both needed in practical terms for our own political self-interest and a crucial way to keep people engaged and get them organized for the herculean task of getting a massive turnout on our side for 2018 and 202.

[guillaumeb]

9. I like the Democracy Summer label.

It might induce some cognitive dissonance in some people. Plus any voter registration will have to also focus on Texas, with its hugely restrictive voting registration process that effectively prevents outside groups from doing mass registration.

[Ken Burch]

10. For Texas, it could be about channeling support to in-state groups.

We could do an "adopt a registrar" program or something like that.

[Buckeye_Democrat]

11. It's relative.

"it's just that he didn't include the anti-racist agenda prominently enough in his speeches and ads."

And someone driving a Prius can be criticized by environmentalists for not driving an all-electric car too.

It's comparative and there's always opportunities to create division when different voting groups are so different in their priorities/worldviews.

Sorry for my cynicism. Maybe an African American version of Bernie wouldn't allow the comparative wedges to be created as easily?

[Ken Burch]

13. Perhaps. Although we had one in '84 and '88 & the party brass did all it could to stop him.

Including falsely accusing him OF bigotry.

[Buckeye_Democrat]

15. He scared away too many white voters.

He did incredibly well among black voters.

http://www.nytimes.com/1988/06/13/us/jackson-share-of-votes-by-whites-triples-in-88.html

In 1988, Mr. Jackson got 12 percent of the white votes cast; in 1984, he took 5 percent of the white vote.

In 1984, Mr. Jackson received 77 percent of the black vote, which translated into a total of 2.3 million ballots. In 1988, Mr. Jackson won a larger share of a bigger black vote. He got 92 percent of all ballots cast by blacks this year.

I voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012. The 2008 primary was very close, but I eagerly voted for Obama because he was more "grassroots" than Clinton. The difference wasn't much considering that Obama also raked in lots of money from Wall Street.

Obama also didn't openly call for reparations to African Americans like Jackson did. That's a huge deal-breaker for many whites. (See chart in my first reply.)

It was much harder for Hillary to appear more friendly to black voters in 2008 too.

[dsc]

16. Neither Clinton nor Kerry were front runners

Clinton lost both Iowa and New Hampshire (to be fair Harken was from Iowa and Clinton took 2nd but he still did lose) while Kerry was polling in single digits mere months before voting. Dean lost largely because Saddam got captured and the Democratic electorate got cold feet on running an unabashed opponent of the war. I also think Sanders didn't just have a problem of emphasis. His free tuition plan was a direct transfer of wealth from the lower classes to the middle class (the third that the states would be paying for would have come entirely from regressive taxes) and given the state of our schools racially in this country it would have transferred wealth from black to white and asian. That is one example but a telling one.

[Garrett78]

18. Suggested reading:

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/01/bernie-sanders-reparations/424602/

The spectacle of a socialist candidate opposing reparations as “divisive” (there are few political labels more divisive in the minds of Americans than socialist) is only rivaled by the implausibility of Sanders posing as a pragmatist.

Sometimes the moral course lies within the politically possible, and sometimes the moral course lies outside of the politically possible. One of the great functions of radical candidates is to war against equivocators and opportunists who conflate these two things. Radicals expand the political imagination and, hopefully, prevent incrementalism from becoming a virtue.

Unfortunately, Sanders’s radicalism has failed in the ancient fight against white supremacy.

This is the “class first” approach, originating in the myth that racism and socialism are necessarily incompatible. But raising the minimum wage doesn’t really address the fact that black men without criminal records have about the same shot at low-wage work as white men with them; nor can making college free address the wage gap between black and white graduates. Housing discrimination, historical and present, may well be the fulcrum of white supremacy. Affirmative action is one of the most disputed issues of the day. Neither are addressed in the “racial justice” section of Sanders platform.

Sanders’s anti-racist moderation points to a candidate who is not merely against reparations, but one who doesn’t actually understand the argument. To briefly restate it, from 1619 until at least the late 1960s, American institutions, businesses, associations, and governments—federal, state, and local—repeatedly plundered black communities. Their methods included everything from land-theft, to red-lining, to disenfranchisement, to convict-lease labor, to lynching, to enslavement, to the vending of children. So large was this plunder that America, as we know it today, is simply unimaginable without it. Its great universities were founded on it. Its early economy was built by it. Its suburbs were financed by it. Its deadliest war was the result of it.

[Buckeye_Democrat]

19. I understand the argument on moral grounds, but I just don't think it will work.

I don't blame African Americans for trying, though, and I think they should.

Many white voters won't support it (as it's framed now) because:
(1) They don't see it serving their best interest.
(2) They don't feel responsible for it.

I suspect it will also drive many former white Democrats away from the party. The only way I think it might be accepted is if the argument is couched in terms where the people who benefited the most from slavery paid the reparations. About 8% of white households owned slaves before the Civil War. Trying to tell whites that slavery helped their poor ancestors get ahead when they could've been paid for those jobs otherwise won't be easy. Trying to tell whites how any injustice and barbarism toward blacks helped them today is a tough sell too because there's skin color based animosity that has resulted from it. Do they think reparations will heal it? Nope.

Some voters were turned off by Sanders' "free college" idea. How does it help them in our competitive economy if others get a college degree paid for by them? It's the employers that want those educations more than anyone else. If corporations pay for it, so be it! They're the ones who benefit from it, even more than the employees who get higher pay from those degrees. (Corporations would indeed pay for it according to Sanders, indirectly, via Wall Street traders... but many voters didn't hear that part.)

[Ken Burch]

22. You could build popular support for reparations

by arguing that reparations would reduce some of the things some white voters dislike.

As to free college turning people off, I don't think it actually did.

Yes, it would mean giving some people something now that other people didn't get...but that comes up with any social benefit that is ever established.

There are ways to reduce the resentment factor you are talking about, though.

Some folks who are too old to have benefited from this when they were of "college age" could still gain from it because it would give them a chance to reboot their lives.

Free college would also be of disproportionate benefit to the poor of all races and to people of color (two groups that are FAR from synonymous) because it would give huge numbers of people in BOTH groups a chance for education and advancement they would otherwise never have had.

There might be a way of coupling free college with a period of community service, which would also give people the chance to see the benefits of more people getting a university education on the very streets where they live.

And letting people get degrees without crushing debt would unleash the energy of young people to actually devote most of their tine to building the world we need, rather than having to spend the best years of their lives simply struggling to repay that debt, and having to abandon their principles and ideals in the effort to do so, which would significantly reduce the levels of injustice, uglinness and stress we all experience.

[Buckeye_Democrat]

23. If that can be done, then good!

Recent polling indicates to me that it's a losing issue, but that might change with better framing/arguments.

It looks like the free education idea is a split:
http://www.gallup.com/poll/191255/americans-buy-free-pre-split-tuition-free-college.aspx

I think that could improve with better arguments too -- e.g., corporations want employees better educations, so they should pay for it.

[Ken Burch]

21. Look, I support reparations and think Bernie COULD have said more about race

(although I think it would have to be conceded that he DID say much more as the campaign went on-it's not as though the Sanders message never changed on that set of issues-and it is still mystifying that people who opposed Bernie for not supporting reparations chose to support Hillary, who not only also did not support reparations but spent much of the Eighties helping build an organization, the DLC that argued that the Democratic Party should distance itself from people of color and embrace racist narratives about welfare, iut of wedlock births and crime).

This is not supposed to be a Sanders vs. Clinton thread. Neither of them will run again. I'm trying to get us towards victory in the future-victory that can only be achieved if people who supported both of those candidates join forces with people who agree with our basic ideas but supported minor-party candidates or who didn't vote at all.

[NCTraveler]

12. Exactly what most of us have been doing.

You are starting to sound like Clinton on the trail.

Double thumbs up for that.

[Ken Burch]

14. I supported her in the fall, and I've proved I was never a Hillary-hater.

This isn't a "Bernie vs. Hillary" thread.

We have to move on from that.

[NCTraveler]

17. My post had zero to do with Bernie or who you supported and when.

"We have to move on from that."

[Ken Burch]

20. It was that line about sounding like a Clinton supporter and hearing her stump speech.

And it's also the insistence of more than a few posters here of trying to turn ANY discussion into a Hillary Vs. Bernie thing.

[NCTraveler]

24. My post had nothing to do with who you supported or when.

Nothing to do with Bernie in the slightest.

Yet that was the basis of your reply.

"We have to move on from that."

Some simply can't.

[Ken Burch]

25. Ok.

I AM moved on from that.

As you can see from some other posts besides ours in this thread, a lot of people are trying to stop us from moving on.

[delisen]

26. Agree strongly. n/t