Raitosaito
Member
Article: http://www.vox.com/world/2017/3/13/14698812/bernie-trump-corbyn-left-wing-populism
Just read this when I woke up. This whole paradox is a big problem where the right grows as left wing policies become successful, and honestly I have no real answer to any of this. I was also pretty surprise at how we already have a model to look at with European countries and ignored it during the election. Bernie's rhetoric if continued can destroy the Democratic Party or worse. So idk. Discuss away.
On November 20, less than two weeks after Donald Trumps upset win, Bernie Sanders strode onto a stage at Bostons Berklee Performance Center to give the sold-out audience his thoughts on what had gone so disastrously wrong for the Democratic Party.
Sanders had a simple answer. Democrats, he said, needed to field candidates who would unapologetically promise that they would be willing to stand up with the working class of this country and ... take on big-money interests.
Democrats, in other words, would only be able to defeat Trump and others like him if they adopted an anti-corporate, unabashedly left-wing policy agenda. The answer to Trumps right-wing populism, Sanders argued, was for the left to develop a populism of its own.
[Its] a kind of liberal myth, Pippa Norris, a Harvard political scientist who studies populism in the United States and Europe, says of the Sanders analysis. [Liberals] want to have a reason why people are supporting populist parties when their values are so clearly against progressive values in terms of misogyny, sexism, racism.
The problem is that a lot of data suggests that countries with more robust welfare states tend to have stronger far-right movements. Providing white voters with higher levels of economic security does not tamp down their anxieties about race and immigration or, more precisely, it doesnt do it powerfully enough. For some, it frees them to worry less about what its in their wallet and more about who may be moving into their neighborhoods or competing with them for jobs
The bigger issue is that Americas welfare state is weak for the same fundamental reason that Donald Trump captured the Republican nomination in the first place: racial and cultural resentment. That profoundly complicates efforts to make left-wing populism successful in America.
In 2001, three scholars at Harvard and Dartmouth Alberto Alesina, Edward Glaeser, and Bruce Sacerdote found that the higher the percentage of black residents in a state, the less its government spent on welfare payments
This, they hypothesized, was not an accident. People are only willing to support redistribution if they believe their tax dollars are going to people they can sympathize with. White voters, in other words, dont want to spend their tax dollars on programs that they think will benefit black or Hispanic people
Just read this when I woke up. This whole paradox is a big problem where the right grows as left wing policies become successful, and honestly I have no real answer to any of this. I was also pretty surprise at how we already have a model to look at with European countries and ignored it during the election. Bernie's rhetoric if continued can destroy the Democratic Party or worse. So idk. Discuss away.