Joel
On Fri, Feb 5, 2016 at 11:49 AM, Marv Gandall <marvgand2 at gmail.com> wrote:
> A surprisingly sober look by Wall Street Journal columnist and former
> Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan at the Sanders movement and the
> receptivity to “socialist” ideas of many young adults whose only experience
> of capitalism is that it “drove us into a ditch”.
>
> “It’s all part of the great scrambling that is happening this political
> year—the most dramatic, and perhaps most consequential, of our lifetimes.”
>
> (Behind a paywall)
>
> Socialism gets a second life
> By Peggy Noonan
> Wall Street Journal
> January 29 2016
>
> Nashua, N.H.
>
> I was watching Bernie Sanders speak last week at a town hall in Bedford
> when an early intuition became a conviction: Take Mr. Sanders seriously. He
> is not just another antic presence in Crazy Year 2016. His rise signifies a
> major shift within the Democratic Party.
>
> The big room was full, 700 to 800 people, good for 5 p.m. on a Friday. The
> audience wasn’t raucous or full of cheers as at his big rallies, but
> thinking and nodding. They were young and middle-aged, with not many
> white-haired heads. There was a working-class feel to them, though Bedford
> is relatively affluent.
>
> “Let me disabuse you,” Mr. Sanders says to those who think he cannot win.
> He quotes New Hampshire polls, where he’s way ahead. He can defeat Donald
> Trump,he says.
>
> Then the meat. He described America as a place of broad suffering—“student
> debt,” “two-job families” with strained marriages and insufficient child
> care, “the old on fixed incomes.”
>
> We can turn it around if we make clear to “the billionaire class” that
> income inequality “is not moral.” The economy is “rigged.” Real
> unemployment is not 5% but twice that. “Youth unemployment is off the
> charts.” He wants job-training programs for the young. The minimum wage is
> “a starvation wage.” Raise it to “a living wage—15 bucks an hour.”
>
> The audience is attentive, supportive. “Yeah!” some shout.
>
> He speaks of Goldman Sachs, of “banksters” and of a Republican Party owned
> by “the oil industry, coal industry.”
>
> “Health care is a right of all people, not a privilege.” He asks if any in
> the audience have high-insurance deductibles. They start to call out:
> “$4,000,” “5,000,” “6,000!” Someone yells: “Nothing’s covered!”
>
> No one mentions ObamaCare, but it seems clear it hasn’t worked here.
>
> Mr. Sanders says people don’t go to the doctor when they’re sick because
> of the deductibles. “Same with mental-health care!” a woman calls out.
> “Mental-health care must be considered part of health care,” he responds,
> to applause. He is for “a Medicare-for-all, single-payer system.”
>
> How to pay for it all? “Impose a tax on Wall Street speculation,” he says,
> briefly. He does not elaborate and is not pressed to.
>
> Mr. Sanders’s essential message was somber, grim, even dark. It’s all
> stark—good guys and bad guys, angels and devils. But it’s also clear and
> easy to understand: We are in terrible trouble because our entire system is
> rigged, the billionaires did it, they are the beneficiaries of the biggest
> income transfer from the poor to the rich in the history of man, and we are
> going to stop it. How? Through “a political revolution.” But a soft one
> that will take place in voting booths. We will vote to go left.
>
> As the audience left they seemed not pumped or excited, but satisfied.
>
> I listen to Mr. Sanders a lot, and what he says marks a departure from the
> ways the Democratic Party has been operating for at least a generation now.
>
> Formally, since 1992, the Democratic Party has been Clintonian in its
> economics—moderate, showing the influence of the Democratic Leadership
> Council. Free-market capitalism is something you live with and accept; the
> wealth it produces can be directed toward public programs and endeavors.
> The Clinton administration didn’t hate Wall Street, it hired Wall Street.
> Big government, big Wall Street—it all worked. It was the Great
> Accommodation, and it was a break with more-socialist approaches of the
> past.
>
> All this began to shatter in the crash of 2008, not that anyone noticed—it
> got lost in the Obama hoopla. In March 2009, when Mr. Obama told Wall
> Street bankers at the White House that his administration was the only
> thing standing between them and “the pitchforks,” he was wittingly or
> unwittingly acknowledging the Great Accommodation.
>
> The rise of Bernie Sanders means that accommodation is ending, and
> something new will take its place.
>
> Surely it means something that Mr. Obama spent eight years insisting he
> was not a socialist, and Bernie Sanders is rising while saying he is one.
>
> It has left Hillary Clinton scrambling, unsteady. She thought she and her
> husband had cracked the code and made peace with big wealth. But her party
> is undoing it—without her permission and without her leading the way. She
> is meekly following.
>
> It is my guess that Mr. Sanders will win in Iowa and New Hampshire. But
> the tendency he represents—whether it succeeds this time or simply settles
> in and grows—is, I suspect, here to stay.
>
> A conservative of a certain age might say: “No, he’s a fad. Socialism is
> yesterday! Marx is dead, the American economic behemoth rolled over and
> flattened him. Socialism is an antique idea that rocks with age. America is
> about the future, not the past.”
>
> I disagree. It’s back because it’s new again.
>
> For so many, 2008 shattered faith in the system—in its fairness,
> usefulness and efficacy, even in its ability to endure.
>
> As for the young, let’s say you’re 20 or 30, meaning you’ll be voting for
> a long time. What in your formative years would have taught you about the
> excellence of free markets, low taxes, “a friendly business climate”? A
> teacher in public high school? Maybe one—the faculty-lounge eccentric who
> boycotted the union meetings. And who in our colleges teaches the virtues
> of capitalism?
>
> If you are 20 or 30 you probably see capitalism in terms of two dramatic
> themes. The first was the crash of ’08, in which heedless, irresponsible
> operators in business and government kited the system and scrammed. The
> second is income inequality. Why are some people richer than the richest
> kings and so many poor as serfs? Is that what capitalism gives you? Then
> maybe we should rethink this!
>
> And Mr. Sanders makes it sound so easy. We’re rich, he says; we can do
> this with a few taxes. It is soft Marxism. And it’s not socialism now, it’s
> “democratic socialism” like they have in Europe. You’ve been to Europe.
> Aside from its refugee crisis and some EU problems, it’s a great place—a
> big welfare state that’s wealthy! The French take three-hour lunches.
>
> Socialism is an old idea to you if you’re over 50 but a nice new idea if
> you’re 25.
>
> Do you know what’s old if you’re 25? The free-market capitalist system
> that drove us into a ditch.
>
> Polls show the generation gap. Mr. Sanders does poorly among the old. They
> remember socialism. He does well among the young, who’ve just discovered it
> and have little to no knowledge of its effects. A nationwide Marist poll in
> November showed Mr. Sanders already leading Mrs. Clinton, 58% to 35%, among
> voters under 30. She led him among all other age groups, and 69% to 21%
> among those 60 and older. By this month a CBS/New York Times poll had Mr.
> Sanders up 60% to 31% among voters under 45.
>
> Bernie Sanders is an indicator of the Democratic future. He is telling you
> where that party’s going. In time some Democrats will leave over it, and
> look for other homes.
>
> It’s all part of the great scrambling that is happening this political
> year—the most dramatic, and perhaps most consequential, of our lifetimes.
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