Bernie Sanders Bows Out

I, with numerous millions of liberal Democrats across the US, mourn and deplore Bernie Sander's departure from the Primary race.

Some of us understood from the outset what Bernie was saying, concerning the unfairness of the political game as it was coming to be played.  From the time of Ronald Reagan, the rate at which the wealth of the nation was divided between the few richest, most powerful people, and everybody else, was increasingly out of balance, until (as Bernie keeps reminding us) the top 3 most rich families own more than half the country.

Elizabeth Warren focused on the fact that, in addition, private health insurance kept people in a state of financial uncertainty.  A prolonged illness, or an expensive treatment could throw a family into bankruptcy.  Very little separated families from being comfortably off, on the one hand, and being desperately poor.

Behind all this is the urgent need to defeat Donald Trump in the 2020 elections.  In addition to people disliking how Trump runs the White House and the Government, we have the Coronavirus destroying the health of millions.  At first, before the epidemic, we deplored Trump because it seemed that he had no feeling for the poor, minorities, women, and other sectors of society that had come to symbolize a station in life with insufficient power to fight back against the forces that usually oppress them.  But now, his actions seem to show him to be someone who cannot be trusted with the welfare of the public in any way.  We may have objected to the untruths he uttered every day just on principle.  But now, we see them as actually immediately dangerous.

Medicare for all may have been something we thought of as nice to have.  But now we see how impossible it is to face anything close to a pandemic with ordinary private insurance.  Trump supports companies that manufacture and market and sell such essential things as masks and ventilators for profit, when thousands are dying because of the unavailability of these things.  If there ever was a time when the profit motive should be set aside, it is now.  Supporting a For-Profit approach to the needs of this moment is to be a sociopath.

When it is time for the election, we shall have to vote for Joe Biden.  Joe Biden is a good politician, but as he grew older, it seems to me that he thought more In The Box every year.

While Sanders was saying: it is time to change how this country is run.  We must elect someone who sees the way forward clearly, who will fight for clean energy, and for the economic rights of ordinary people, and for this we will have to defeat Trump, Biden was saying: we need to defeat Trump.  I can do what Trump said he would do, but a lot more efficiently.  I know how to persuade undecided voters, and voters who supported Trump last time, but have got sick of Trump to vote for me.  This is why you should select me as your nominee.

When Biden realized that he would have to do more than simply convince people that moderates and former Republicans would vote for him, he belatedly began to put forward policies that Democrats would find attractive.

I find it very difficult to support a candidate whose main objective is to win the election and defeat Trump.  Obviously, defeating Trump is a central objective for any Democrat nominee.  But it would be satisfying to know that our nominee knows what to do once he or she gets in the White House!  It is no longer enough to get in the White House, and make it look just like the Obama White House, wonderful though that was.

The President Elect will have the titanic task of restoring the country, the economy, and the health of the people.  I don't think Trump can even dream of doing that.  Biden can dream, but he will need far more help than I can see him getting.


Well, I wrote that post, and I had supper with the family, and went to bed.

This morning, I woke up and went downstairs, to see in my news feed two articles that really struck home to me, on this very same subject.

The first article was from the New York Times, and it was entitled: America Will Struggle After Coronavirus.  Here's Why.  It was a lot of information that many of us knew qualitatively---that is, without the actual numbers, but in broad outline.  But when it was summarized this way, it pinpointed how the epidemic affected people of different circumstances differently.  Read through it quickly.

At the end, you will have that dreadful feeling that unless we do something to change the game rules for the poor among us, we will not really enjoy the rest of our lives.  For our own poor, changing the rules is what needs to be done.  For the poor and the refugees in the rest of the world, only a new sort of charity will help; not the sort of American charity headed by middle-class citizens, who need to keep a chunk of our contributions for themselves, in order to live normally, given that a small minority in the US is sucking in most of our resources.

The second article was a commentary, not directly related to the first one; it was, in a sense, an opinion about how much the COVID-19 epidemic is going to alter the view of America among it's citizens: The Ideas That Won't Survive The Coronavirus.  Though there is going to be a temptation to dismiss this opinion as more angry radical rhetoric, it is worth a read.  It will certainly be called a screed by some.  But we should feel obliged to either refute its points, one by one, or accept most of its conclusions.

Surprisingly, though, the author sees positive things in the present moment; things that we would consider positive only in dire circumstances, and these circumstances are as dire as Americans have had it for more than a century.

I was surprised by a third article that grabbed my interest: Why the Wealthy Fear Pandemics.  It is a historical trace of the economic consequences of epidemics, versus the political response to the problems by the ruling class, from 600 AD to the recent past.  Depending on your position as pro-labor or anti-labor (!) you will be either heartened by this article, or reduced to despair.

Archimedes