It simply means Vermonters don't fear the label socialist. But in substance Bernie Sanders stands among left-wing Democrats, a number of whom are to the Left of him.
On 11/8/06, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> On Nov 8, 2006, at 7:47 PM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> > Have you taken a look at Bernie Sanders' voting records?
>
> You're willing to make all kinds of excuses for a regime that stones
> adulterous women, yet you find Bernie Sanders, who is about as good a
> mainstream politician as you can find in the US, too right wing?
> That's really fucked up.
Being to the right of Conyers, Kucinich, Lee, etc. doesn't make a congressman "right-wing" -- it simply means there are many Democrats who are to the Left of the congressman on foreign and domestic policy, and there are even some Republicans who are to the left of him on some foreign policy issues like Israel/Palestine.
If the US weren't the hegemon, supporting Bernie Sanders and left-wing Democrats as the lesser evil would be like supporting the NDP in Canada, the Olive Tree in Italy, the Socialist Party in France, the Socialist Party in Spain, the Social Democratic Party in Germany, etc.
What makes Sanders and left-wing Democrats much more of a problem for leftists here than their social-democratic counterparts abroad are for leftists there is that the US is the hegemon. Social democrats abroad can sometimes help prevent their governments from supporting the White House all the way in its most destructive policies like those on Israel/Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, etc. (though they help theirs join it in its lesser adventures like Haiti, Afghanistan, and Yugoslavia), whereas social democrats in the US can't. Nor have social democrats in the US helped us get social democratic domestic policy legislation (like universal single-payer health care, federal, inflation-indexed minimum wage set at the living wage level, etc.) either, and they can't as long as the US remains the hegemon.
That the US is the hegemon is the reason why Chavez, Ahmadinejad, Putin, Hu, Morales, Lula, AMLO, etc. in the developing world are good enough for their countries for the time being, and social democrats in the EU and Japan can be still useful vehicles in their countries from time to time, but Sanders and left-wing Democrats are not good enough for America.
It might be a different story if the Democratic and Republican Parties both split and reconfigured themselves into three new parties, putting Sanders, left-wing Democrats, and others on the Left in a new social democratic party, DLC democrats and moderate Republicans into a new centrist party, and right-wing Republicans into a new right-wing party. Then, Sanders and left-wing Democrats can play a role of occassionally useful opposition, like their European and Japanese counterparts. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>