The Daily Populous Thursday November 7th, 2024 morning edition
Authored by thehill.com and submitted by guyoffthegrid

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Wednesday accused the Democratic Party of largely ignoring the priorities of the working class and pointed to that as the biggest reason for why they lost control of the White House and Senate.

“It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” Sanders said in a statement about the results of Tuesday’s election.

“While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right,” he said.

Sanders’s blistering statement is the harshest and most pointed criticism of the Democratic leadership yet in the aftermath of the election, in which Vice President Harris appears to have lost the popular vote by nearly 5 million votes and Democrats lost Senate seats in West Virginia, Montana and Ohio.

Sanders, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, said “those of us concerned about grassroots democracy and economic justice need to have some very serious political discussions.”

He cited the huge growth in economic inequality in America in recent decades, advanced technologies that threaten to put hundreds of thousands of people out of work, the high cost of health care and U.S. support for the war in Gaza, which has killed tens of thousands of people.

“Will the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign? Will they understand the pain and political alienation that tens of millions of Americans are experiencing? Do they have any ideas as to how we can take on the increasingly powerful Oligarchy, which has so much economic power?” Sanders asked.

“Probably not,” he said in response to his own question.

Sanders, the chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, was never able to get a vote this year on his proposal to raise the federal minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $17 an hour by 2028.

Sanders also failed in his effort as Senate Budget chair in 2021 and 2022 to advance a $6 trillion budget reconciliation proposal to expand Medicare and address what he called a “housing crisis.”

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) later negotiated a scaled-down version of President Biden’s “Build Back Better” agenda with centrist Sen. Joe Manchin (I-W.Va.), but it fell short of the big ambitions that Sanders and other progressives had at the start of Biden’s term.

Tensions between Sanders and Manchin erupted in October 2021, when Sanders blew up at the West Virginia centrist at a leadership meeting during which Manchin tried to put limits on what Democrats were trying to pass, ruling out tuition-free community college.

barryvm on November 6th, 2024 at 22:27 UTC »

This is a recurring historical trend. Right wing socioeconomic policies (laissez-faire capitalism) lead to social dysfunction as more and more people either fall into poverty or fear doing so. The mainstream right can't win elections on these policies any more because they have become unpopular, but rather than change those it either allies or becomes the extremist right (authoritarian and reactionary), going all in on distractions and scapegoating.

This leaves the social liberals (pro-capitalist but not socially conservative) and the social democrats as the only democratic factions to counter them, but the former block most major re-distributive policies and even the most moderate moves towards a fairer society have to be fought over tooth and nail. This alliance (either as intra-party in a two party or as a coalition in multiparty systems) then fails to do enough to keep their voters on board, disillusionment sets in, voters stay home and the extremist right takes over.

Fortunately, it doesn't always completely run through this cycle, but it keeps happening. It has now happened to the USA and the best case scenario is that when those lukewarm Trump supporters are angry at not getting what they wanted out of this "change" (and they won't), they will still have the means to vote the government out. If not, then you're stuck until a revolution happens.

Arguing that more social democracy would have scared away voters is sort of pointless IMHO, because if that is true then you're doomed anyway. Unless you lower economic inequality through government policy, a descent into reactionary authoritarianism is inevitable because democracy can only work when people are more or less equal and capitalism left to itself will always concentrate wealth and power into ever fewer hands.

tantobourne on November 6th, 2024 at 22:26 UTC »

honest question, in comparison, what has the Republican party done for working class people?

Agnos on November 6th, 2024 at 22:20 UTC »

Minimum wage still at $7.25...working full time, no vacation, that is $15,000 a year, before taxes...