- cross-posted to:
- politics@hexbear.net
- cross-posted to:
- politics@hexbear.net
Leftwing senator advises ‘unification of progressive people in general’ because threat from Republican ex-president is too great
Progressive US voters must unite behind Joe Biden rather than consider any of his Democratic primary challengers because the threat of another Donald Trump presidency is too great, Bernie Sanders has said.
“We’re taking on the … former president, who, in fact, does not believe in democracy – he is an authoritarian, and a very, very dangerous person,” the senator and Vermont independent, who caucuses with Democrats, said on NBC’s Meet the Press. “I think at this moment there has to be unification of progressive people in general in all of this country.”
Sanders’ remarks came as Trump continued grappling with more than 90 criminal charges across four separate indictments filed against him for his efforts to forcibly nullify his defeat to Biden in the 2020 presidential race, his illicit retention of classified documents, and hush-money payments to porn actor Stormy Daniels.
Despite the unprecedented legal peril confronting him, Trump enjoys a commanding lead over his competitors in the Republican presidential primary, polls show.
And though polling for now shows Biden generally is ahead of Trump, that has not stopped Robert F Kennedy Jr and Marianne Williamson from mounting long-shot Democratic primary challenges – or third-party progressive candidate Cornel West from running.
Sanders himself was the runner-up for the Democratic nomination in the 2016 White House race won by Trump and in 2020, with West among his supporters. But Sanders this time quickly endorsed Biden’s re-election campaign, a decision which prompted West to accuse him of only backing Biden because he is “fearful of the neo-fascism of Trump”.
The senator responded to that criticism on Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union, saying, “Where I disagree with my good friend Cornel West is – I think, in these really very difficult times, there is a real question whether democracy is going to remain in the United States of America.
“You know, Donald Trump is not somebody who believes in democracy, whether women are going to be able to continue to control their own bodies, whether we have social justice in America, [whether] we end bigotry.”
Sanders didn’t elaborate, but his remarks seemed to be an allusion to the Trump White House’s creation of the US supreme court supermajority, which last year struck down the federal abortion rights that the Roe v Wade decision had established decades earlier.
That court also struck down race-conscious admissions in higher education as well as a Colorado law that required entities to afford same-sex couples equal treatment, among other decisions lamented by progressives.
“Around that, I think we have got to bring the entire progressive community to defeat Trump – or whoever the Republican nominee will be – [and] support Biden,” Sanders added on State of the Union.
Sanders nonetheless said he planned to push Biden to tackle “corporate greed and the massive levels of income and wealth inequality” across the US. On Meet the Press, he suggested he would urge Biden to “take on the billionaire class”.
Those comments came about four months after Sanders called on the US government to confiscate 100% of any money that Americans make above $999m, saying people with that much wealth “can survive just fine” without becoming billionaires.
This is why the 2 party system is fucking bad. In the Netherlands we have a wide range of parties we can vote for, no need for strategic votes like this.
It’s a symptom of the winner takes all election system… Its most stable with one or two major parties. The hope for more parties is one reason some of us push for instant runoff elections, but it “confuses” people so its not had the traction I’d like.
The US can’t support more than two parties with how the elections are run. Instead the primaries have to filter down the varied candidates into compromises
Britain uses the same system and has some successful third parties like the Scottish National Party.
Regional third parties tend to dramatically outperform national ones. Because FPTP does best with 2 candidate elections, but those 2 candidates don’t have to be in the same party across every district.
For presidential elections - yeah. You run a third party candidate like Nader, you get Bush. You run Perot, you get Clinton.
How is it the same system?
@Tak @Pipoca both the US and the UK have fptp single member districts for national legislature, so the expectation would be that in the UK parliament they’d only have Labour and Tories, no 3rd parties representing regional issues, just wings of the duopoply serving that purpose. But the difference isn’t derived in that both have FPTP, but that the US has a media environment that propagates binary choices, BBC still strives for viewership but not the extent that US MSM does via oversimplification
Doesn’t that not include basically anything else but that factor and then labeled as the same thing for the sake of argument? How does that relate to funding, regulation, power structures, and much more nuanced factors?
The US has always been a two party system from the start back before there was a BBC. Are we going to say Fox news created the original contention of federalists and antifederalists?
It seriously gives some really bad incentives.
Yes, voting for Biden is better… But it also very much allows the Democrats to abuse the situation and put whoever they want on there. Because the alternative will always be worse. And so you’re destined to always having an acceptable president, but never a great one that people really want.
We have a parliament here and, yeah, it’s so much better in basically every way. I can actually vote for what I want and not have to worry that it’s not strategic. Because I’m the end it will just empower the party and thus give them more negotiating power.
The Netherlands has proportional vote, that’s why.
With electoral circles instead of PV, mathematically the two largest parties get way more representatives than the percentage of the public votes they get, and the bigger the electoral circles and fewer the representatives the worse it gets.
(Further, voters own behaviour changes to one of “useful vote” rather than “choosing those who better represents them”, plus tribalism becomes way more extreme when there is only a black & white choice - so lots of votes are driven by team loyalty - all of which makes it even worse)
(Also smaller parties dissapear, both because they can’t secure funding and because their members lose hope of ever making a difference. The closest you get to “small parties” in the US are independents, running for a very specific electoral circle only and whose voice is a drop in the ocean in a place like the US Congress)
The US has single representative very large electoral circles for Congress and double representative State-sized electoral circles for the Senate, so their system is rigged to pretty much the max it can and the result is a power duopoly.
I lived in The Netherlands and now I live in a country where the system is somewhat less so (smaller electoral circles, multiple representatives per circle) and even here you see the two largest parties getting and extra 10-20% each representatives in parliament compared to the popular vote (the governing party has 56% of parliamentary seats on 42% of votes cast) whilst the smaller parties have half as many representatives as their popular vote (in other words, every vote for a smaller party counts less than half as much as a vote for a large party, which is hardly democratic).
Most so-called “democratic” nations have this kind of rigged system, but places like the US and Britain take it to the extreme, so it’s unsurprising that when the economic supercycle is at the point where the many start hurting, in the absence of true choice you get instead the internal takeover of the rightmost of the party dupoly by the Trumps and Boris Johnsons of this world offering an ultra-nationalist far-right populist mix of othering, scapegoating and simple “solutions”.
(Funilly enough if you compare The Netherlands with Britain, whilst even now the far-right is stuck at maybe 20% in the former, in the latter it took over the Tory Party from the inside - which is far easier than convince half the population to vote for them - and hence has been in power for almost a decade with an absolute majority).
We also have more than 2 parties in Spain, however the way votes are counted it’s better to vote for the big parties than the local ones. Literally, voting your local party and them supporting the big “left” party will amount less seats than just voting the big party. Usually people vote locally but since we have the looming danger of the extreme right party, people have been focusing on the big left, just to ensure that we don’t get Vox.
Still having more than 2 parties promotes discussion and makes it really difficult for a party to go rogue.
in theory, in practice strategic votes still matter for the actual government because parties can just decide not to work with someone and the biggest party gets first picks for the coalition
meaning that in practice, having the biggest party still matters massively, and in a mostly right wing country, the right gets to vote for who best represents them, while the left still has to vote strategically if they want to take actual administrative positions
I’d like to disagree. strategic voting means you shift your vote to what you suppose to be more majority carrying, which usually tends to go for centrists with quite some neoliberal positions. And they usually manage to put through the same shit as the right on economic issues, or implementing authoritarian attacks on civil rights, like mass surveilance.
It is the same thing in the US. There is the far right extremist republicans and the right wing democrats (by european standards) because they try to cover the supposed center, and everyone left of that still votes for them. So in the end they still get no health care, no social security, lots of warmongering, bad schools and institutionalized racism…
In Germany we get the same bs with people voting social democrats “strategically”, that end up pushing for neoliberal economic policies and authoritarian social policies.
im not sure what youre disagreeing with