sophie
Break My Heart
Ok, quick clarification: Warren isn't 75% of Bernie. If 100% equals the perfectly ideal candidate to me, then Bernie is 85-90% of an ideal candidate, and Warren is 75% of an ideal candidate.
Now why? Well for some really good reasons which I will elaborate on in a bit, but if you don't want to hear me ramble on about this stuff, I would recommend you take a look at Nathan J. Robinson's article on the topic in Current Affairs which essentially sums up my thoughts pretty well. Alternatively (if you aren't one for reading), Robinson appeared on the most recent episode of Rolling Stone's Useful Idiots podcast and lays out more or less the same points (plus a pretty good summation of what it means to be a Socialist).
My problems with Warren essentially boil down to two categories: ideology (comprising both macro-level political approach and micro-level specific policy proposals), and credibility (comprising voting record and behavior/statements on the campaign trail).
Ideology
Robinson has an excellent line in that Current Affairs article which says something to the effect of "Warren views politics in the way a law professor would, while Bernie views politics in the way a union organizer would." I think a very illuminating reflection of this disparity comes in the way Warren talks about our current political malaise; namely, everything is a product of "corruption." Now what is meant by this term (and why do I have a problem with it)? Basically, the concept of corruption here draws two pictures:
1) Bad actors exist. Bad actors are empowered to exploit the system and perform bad acts, whether by:
- taking advantage of existing loopholes
- taking advantage of absent/derelict regulatory bodies
- paying money to political actors and regulators to either write loopholes into legislation or be derelict in regulatory duties (thereby turning otherwise "good" or "neutral" actors into "bad" actors).
In either case, the prescription from Warren is the same: close loopholes and give teeth to regulatory bodies to ensure that bad actors are no longer allowed to perform bad acts. This is, I think, broadly, what Warren means by "big structural change," and is very much in keeping with that law professor/union organizer distinction Robinson notes. For Warren, "big structural change" means "change the legal structure so that bad actors can be held accountable." To me, this view is problematic, in the first part because it won't actually fix the problem, both in the sense which Robinson notes in Useful Idiots, that for this to be effective you're somehow going to have to convince the brightest minds coming out of the top law schools year after year after year to come work for your regulatory bodies instead of going to work for the big law firms and hold that pattern in perpetuity, and, in the wider sense because it fundamentally ignores the role power plays in this relationship. Legal reform is a purely superficial fix, and until you address the power imbalance between labor and capital, you're just going to get the same problem. Those with asymmetric power, who are incentivized to pursue profit at all costs, will inevitably use that power (whether in the form of influence or money) to put pressure on politicians to ease their burden, or to conscript large legal firms to identify new loopholes for them to exploit. To me, I see it as akin to when people point to Bill Gates or Warren Buffet as exemplars of "good" billionaires (more on this manichean good/bad dialectic below). Sure, maybe in some sense they provide "good" for the world, but positing a system in which we as a collective non-billionaire class, have no recourse but to sit around and hope that all, or even a majority of, billionaires will pursue "the good" (particularly when all incentives push them in the opposite direction) is not a sustainable plan for a system. Likewise, change of the legal "structure," is positing a system in which these newly reformed regulatory bodies will be hyper vigilant and hyper competent and hyper ethical forever, essentially. To my mind, that is not in accordance with how relations of power work, and therefore is not a sustainable or desirable policy objective.
Secondly, I don't like the way this political animus is good-bad ethical value system. I think it's reductive, ahistorical, and, ultimately, distracts broader structural power dynamics which are much more the driver of the inequalities we see in the system. But the problematic consequences of this good-bad dialectic also exist on the other side, namely in the form of benefits and means-testing. Under this Liberal good-bad dialectic, we need to be hyper-vigilant of "bad" or "corrupt" actors who would seek to abuse the system, and so we must therefore create a system in which poor people must demonstrate to skeptical liberal elites that they are sufficiently both poor and virtuous to merit help. At the surface level, such means-testing provisions are gross, degrading, and exceedingly patronizing, and serve no purpose other than to create unnecessary bureaucracy which dissuades the people most in need of aid from receiving help, and produce a culture of shame around the very notion of receiving welfare, but it also belies the very premise of providing these welfare services in the first place. Which is to say, if you are, as Warren does, advancing these services - health care, secure housing, college education, etc. - as fundamental human rights, then the notion of providing means testing for these things is fundamentally antithetical to that declaration. If they're human rights, then all people are entitled to them by virtue of their very humanity and shouldn't have to prove they're sufficiently virtue or meritorious enough to qualify for them. But they aren't treated like this in practice, but rather like gifts paternalistically handed down from on high to those poor unfortunate souls, but only once they've demonstrated their worth via performative poverty. It may seem like marginal ephemera, but these sorts of hand-wringing about the thought of Donald Trump's children getting their student debt dismissed or going to a free public university point to very large gaps in fundamental world view, and signals to me a very disturbing approach to policy that will lead to undesirable outcomes.
Credibility
This is less esoteric and more straightforward. Frankly, I don't trust that Warren is going to follow through on most of the things she's promising. First and foremost there's the obvious stuff: her cozying up to Hillary and rich donors at Martha's Vineyard, the comments those same donors have said about her having a private politics which is very different than the politics she presents to the public, her voting support for Raytheon (despite publicly condemning their "corruption"), her voting for Ben Carson and Trump's military budget and her inability to justify those votes when asked about them directly, her mealy-mouthed comments regarding where she stands on Medicare For All. She vocally supports it in the debates, but on Twitter she's used the phrase "healthcare access," the "plan" on her website is extremely light on specifics and also talks about "affordable mental health care access" (Bernie's plan explicitly covers mental health care), and her recent characterization of Bernie's bill as "a framework," which rings very much like Kamala's and Klobuchar's positions of "I'm proud of my support for Bernie's bill and I thought it was a great first step, but now I have built off that with my own plan (which totally guts all the good parts of Medicare for All)." Warren hasn't made that pivot yet, but she's very conspicuously leaving room for her to make that move in the future.
I think far more infuriating to me was her recent comments on TYT that, while she has promised to take no PAC or corporate money during the primary, all bets are off during the general, and that "she doesn't believe in universal disarmament." It's simply disgusting, and she can't have it both ways here, going back to that "corruption" ethics. Either money in politics is a fundamentally corrupting process and needs to be avoided in all costs - including in the general, or it's not, in which case what's the point in your pledge for the primary? What does this say about how she feels about the primary? The primary is unserious and it's fine for her to dabble in this sort of rhetorical ornamentation. It's literal virtue signalling. What does it say how she feels about this issue of money in politics? It sounds like she thinks it's a joke. Nice in theory, but when we're in a "serious race" we need to set our ethics aside and fight on even ground, but once we win we'll fix it trust me. I'm sorry, but I just don't trust you. If it's not important enough to you to stand by the moral principle when it really matters then it probably doesn't really matter that much to you, and you're demonstrating now that it's not a hill you're willing to die on during the election, so why should we trust you to fight and die on this hill when in office and the establishment dems are burning the house down over this. To me this whole thing represents a massive slap in the face. It's very Hillary-esque line-riding of representing on the one hand the eminently qualified pragmatic technocrat and on the other the ordinary every-woman who deeply understands and stands in solidarity with the issues that matter for you, and it comes to the same result as in 2016: patronizingly telling us she agrees with us while giving every indication that she doesn't actually care.
There's also the fact that her Foreign Policy is garbage-tier continuation of Obama, and that her pitch is that technocratic (I am an expert, put your trust in me because I have all the plans) which I find, again, profoundly patronizing and also impracticable at a political level. If you want genuine structural change, you need to do what Bernie's doing: build a movement based in class consciousness and solidarity and get that movement directly engaged in the political process through frequent calls for direct action. As I've said before: big positive political and legislative change only happens in this country when there's a mob standing outside the Capitol telling Congress "give us our rights or we'll burn your houses down." That mob simply does not materialize under the watchword "I've got a plan for that," and even if it did, Warren gives the impression that she'll do as Obama did, and simply dissolve that movement upon inauguration, because that's simply the way a Law Professor thinks about these sorts of things: political movements are for elections; real power rests in the law, and as my constituents did their job of getting me elected, it is now time for me to do my job of enacting the law. That's not the way any of this works though, as Trump has reminded us all so very well these past 3 years. Real political power in a democracy rests in a mob. Keep stoking that mob and use it to hold the party's feet to the fire and it doesn't matter how distasteful they find your cult of personality or absurd and nonsensical they find your appointments or policy proposals. They'll fall in line, because if they don't, they'll get the boot. That's how a union organizer thinks about this sort of thing: get a mob, get it angry and use the leverage of that mob's anger to get the change you want. And keep that mob angry even after you get what you want. The constant looming threat of that mob guarantees compliance.
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