The Electability of Bernie Sanders

For the "Bernie can't win the independents" crowd:

This piece on his popularity with independents -

"Among independents [in Iowa], you, Bernie, were the runaway favorite--with 69 percent of the nonaligned voting for you, compared to 26 percent for Hillary, almost a 3 to 1 margin."

For the "Moderate/conservative democrats won't support Bernie" crowd:

This piece on his popularity with those groups.

For the "Conservatives will oppose Sanders even more fiercely than Clinton" crowd:

This piece on Sanders' intention to court Trump supporters; and

This piece on Trump's very unconservative economic populism; and

This piece on Clinton's unfavorability numbers relative to Sanders across all voters.

So: (1) data from independents; (2) data from moderate/conservative democrats; (3) strong arguments on where the substantial anti-establishment sector of the right will turn if (the, relatively speaking, economically liberal) Trump is eliminated; and (4) deeply entrenched negative views of Clinton relative to Sanders across the political spectrum point to the conclusion that Sanders is more electable than Clinton.

Now, to address the opposing argument from Vox and their 6 political scientists -

I was genuinely shocked by how poorly reasoned this is. The idea that the Republican nominee could successfully portray Sanders' health plan as a threat to what people already know is downright hilarious. What people already know at this point is Obamacare - and I would love, love, in a way I cannot express, to see the Republican campaign on "Vote Sanders and you might lose your Obamacare!" - and Medicare - which is why the Sanders plan is branded and marketed as Medicare for all. In fact, the loss aversion argument clearly goes the other way: it has now been long enough for a very large segment of the American people to grow accustomed to the actual benefits of Obamacare, and Republicans have dug themselves a hole much too deep to get out of by their implacable opposition to it in the absence of any proposal for a replacement or alternative. Whatever the public perception of the ACA, and whatever the significance of that perception - however distorted or misinformed it might be - in general, the Republicans have no "loss aversion" argument available to them, since their entire healthcare platform is based precisely on a promise to take something away which people currently have, and it is much too late, and they have much too much invested, for them to turn it into anything else at this point. That is true regardless of how many people recognize that what they now have is good for them compared to what they had in the past, or not. That point should be perfectly obvious.

The unstated assumptions in the rest of the piece are that 1) Rubio will be the nominee rather than Trump or Cruz (both of whom Sanders would crush); and 2) Rubio is a moderate like Romney. Maybe Rubio will be the nominee; but 2) is, again, laughable. He's slightly to the left of Cruz and Trump, yes, but he's a Tea Party candidate and incredibly extreme in absolute terms. In the general, he would in fact face the mirror image of Romney's devastating problem: Romney was a moderate who had to try to pass as an unhinged right-wing lunatic, but failed. The failure meant he didn't get the lunatic vote, but the attempt meant he lost moderate votes. Rubio is an unhinged right-wing lunatic who has to try to pass as a moderate. Since Democrats will be turning out in huge numbers in the general no matter who the nominee is, a Rubio victory would have to rely on a move to the center which wins over enough moderates/independents to offset the hardliners (the ones who would be more comfortable with Cruz) who will end up feeling betrayed by that move, and staying home.

Essential to that would be moving back to the center on immigration, which he can't easily do, because he has so publicly and enthusiastically abandoned his centrist position on that issue to be competitive in the primary. And the current and ephemeral illusion - because that's what it is - that he's already pretty close to being as moderate as he needs to be (while also being sufficiently conservative) is based solely on (1) not being Trump/Cruz; and (2) being the pick of big business and the Party establishment. (1) disappears in the general, and (2) doesn't help him that much with moderates/independents this year. That aside, the idea has to be that over the entire course of the general, the Democrats wouldn't be able to scare independents off him based on the rest of his actual, quite extreme, record. Not even I think they're that incompetent. Rubio can't win the general without moving to the center, and he can't win the general without not moving to the center. In other words, the Republicans have built themselves a primary system which currently makes it impossible for them to win the general.

The snag in that story is that if the Democrats nominate Clinton, Republican voters will go to the polls no matter who their own nominee is. Clinton would have to make that up with a big share of moderates/independents, and I'm not at all convinced that she would end up doing better with them than Sanders, because 1) she has major issues of trustworthiness with them; and 2) Sanders' leftism isn't hurting him with moderates/independents on anything like the scale many seemed to be anticipating in this election cycle. Sanders, moreover, can call himself a socialist, or whatever else he wants, and still won't need as many moderates/independents as Clinton because the vast majority of this country's die-hard conservatives won't be moved against him to the same extent that they will be against her. There is no one they could hate as much as they hate Hillary Clinton, and one of the most significant things we have learned about a sizeable portion of this group in this election year is precisely that they are anti-establishmentarians first, and evangelical Christians/rugged individualists/free-market disciples second. Sanders would actually pick up some of the anti-establishment vote in the absence of Trump - his radically different policy positions won't matter nearly so much as the fact that he's the only other candidate not taking big money and challenging the economic and political establishment head on - and in the presence of Trump, he wins easily.

(Coates on) Johnson on Coates

I'm still a Coates fan, and I do disagree with Sanders' response to the reparations question - while also disagreeing with some of the specific criticisms of that response. But this is a thought-provoking, if slightly uneven, piece by Cedric Johnson; and Coates' reply is equally so (on both counts). To some extent, Coates is misinterpreting, and so talking past, Johnson; but Johnson bears some responsibility for that.

Johnson is trying to accomplish two conflicting tasks simultaneously: providing a Marxist critique of Coates' position, and defending Sanders' social democratic policy program against Coates' criticisms of Sanders.

The crucial line in Coates' piece is this: "But eventually, I came to believe that white supremacy was a force in and of itself, a vector often intersecting with class, but also operating independent of it."

There are two claims that need to be considered:

(1) White supremacy/institutional racism is an effective social force, the result of which is that black American poverty is significantly different than white American poverty; and

(2) White supremacy/institutional racism is independent of the class struggle.

Because Johnson is trying to defend Sanders, Coates takes him as denying both of these claims (although that's a little unfair at this point, given Sanders' response to his encounter with Black Lives Matter, namely, his development of far-and-away the most comprehensive plan for criminal justice reform); and Coates spends the first half of this piece defending his central thesis - thesis (1), the difference between white and black poverty - from Johnson, who does not, I think, mean to dispute it.

What Johnson, qua Marxist, does dispute is thesis (2). Coates may be right (almost certainly is right) that white supremacy/institutional racism would survive a series of social democratic reforms of the sort Sanders is advocating (and that remains true even if we include his criminal justice reforms). Johnson's position, again qua Marxist, on this point would have to be that it would not survive the abolition of private ownership of the means of production, because the class struggle is causally and explanatorily prior to white supremacy/institutional racism. Unlike non-hegemonic racism, which derives from the early hominid evolution of in-group/out-group dynamics, white supremacy/institutional racism is held up, as it were, by the fact that it serves the interests of economic power - which means, in the modern age, capital. The two best books on this are this one (from an econometric perspective) and this one (from a historical one). But it is impossible to stress this point in the context of a defense of Bernie Sanders' campaign, since Sanders is not running (this time) as an actual Marxist.

What Coates does not deal with is Johnson's critique of his alternative identity politics. Coates is unable to see that white supremacy/institutional racism would be unscathed by reparations in any form, or by any other action which he or anyone else might propose in the context of capitalist society, especially neoliberal capitalism. This is why the Marxist point about the causal and explanatory priority of the class struggle is important. It is Coates' greatest blind spot, as far as I'm concerned - his worst pieces, at least among all the ones I've read, are posts on his old Atlantic blog which defend the present day de facto requirement that writers be willing to work for free indefinitely if they really want a shot at "making it", and then having the opportunity to write for compensation.

One final complaint - Coates is self-consciously playing to an uninformed white audience with the digs he takes at Johnson's worries about the "Black managerial class". This is a persistent theme in the writing of black Marxists who are even deeper thinkers than either of them, like Adolph Reed, Jr (who subjects Coates' arguments to far more scathing critique than Johnson does).

The Realness of Donald Trump (If Not of the Political Pundit Class)

Brooks distills, as only he can, the most predictable and least informed media narrative, down to its essence.

The Trump scourge is by no means behind us, no matter how badly we may want it to be. In a year whose voter turnout shattered the previous record by 65,000 voters (a 50% increase), and saw nearly 85,000 first-time voters, Trump collected more first-time votes than any other GOP candidate. His people did turn out. His second-place finish was an under-performance only relative to the last two weeks of polling - a period during which Cruz, who already had the best turn-out operation by far and who had been the favorite in the polls - ran one of the dirtiest final-stage primary campaigns in recent history. The Evangelical winning Iowa isn't news. And Trump failing to get a larger portion of first-time voters than he did isn't news either. What is news is that he got more of them than anyone else, in a state that makes its voters caucus, despite running a fake campaign there - he didn't even have staffers telling people where to go vote! (The rest of that article is rubbish).

The unstated assumption is that after losing, a man who loves nothing so much as winning, who is all ego, and who has virtually unlimited funds, is not going to throw money at staffing and ad buys in the next several states where he has, and has long had, a commanding lead. The important - and frightening - but also interesting - question was never whether Trump could win the nomination without really campaigning; it is whether he'll win if he decides to start. Whether Trump starts winning or not is something he still has an enormous amount of control over, especially after giving the Republican side's best speech last night; it comes down to whether or not he's interested enough to stop running a fake campaign. That is the terrifying part.

Rubio's over-performance was big enough to be genuinely surprising, and his share of first-time voters does show real anti-Trump sentiment. But the fact that he collected that sentiment in Iowa, beyond the characteristics he shares with Cruz (who got a matching share), is down to his performance in the debate Trump skipped - and we can be sure that's a lesson The Donald has learned. Rubio's path to the nomination still absolutely relies on Bush, Christie, and Kasich dropping out (and Carson's voters splitting between Trump and Cruz after he leaves further complicates things). A lot of people seem sure that Bush will accept his walking papers from the Party because he's a company man; but he's also a Bush, which means he's a feuder and a grudge-holder, and right now his beef is with Rubio. I could see him bucking the Party merely to siphon off Rubio votes for as long as possible, purely out of spite. And he still has a lot of donor money. He also, along with Christie and Kasich, pretty much skipped Iowa, and Rubio has been polling miserably in New Hampshire. Christie isn't a company man and is already going after Rubio; and Kasich, besides being positioned for a strong showing next week (at least a strong third, just like Rubio got), may very well feel his highest obligation this year is to be the voice of moderation, and devil take the consequences.

There is no unity or sanity or normalcy here. Rubio is still in third, however you look at it. And even that is nothing to cheer about, because a Rubio presidency would only be marginally less disastrous than a Cruz or Trump one - and quite a bit more likely if he reaches the general. But that 'if' hasn't gotten much smaller.

Reports of the Republican Party's vitality are greatly exaggerated.

On "Serious" Critiques of Bernie Sanders' Health Plan

One - perhaps the most - important claim which is at least implicit in the "serious" critiques of Sanders' health plan is just false: It is not the case that under Medicare, a patient cannot be denied a treatment he/she wants. Medicare coverage is still subject to a "medically necessary and reasonable" standard - the latter part of which officially and explicitly involved subjective judgments of cost vs. chance of success until 2008, and I find it incredibly implausible to believe that it doesn't still effectively and implicitly involve such judgments on a day-to-day basis, at least for patients in demographics which are unlikely to be able to challenge decisions in court.

To sharpen the critique, the challenge should be posed in the form: will denials of treatment increase under a Sanders-style single-payer plan?

The analyses (like Thorpe's - which doesn't hold up) and the, to put it bluntly, ramblings (like Krugman's and Klein's), which answer in the affirmative are relying on two assumptions, one much-more-probably-than-not false, and one false to a practical certainty: the assumption of significantly increased demand (not borne out by reviewing the data from other jurisdictions), and the assumption of non-significantly increased bargaining power over the costs of drugs and medical supplies (whether because such power is simply assumed - obviously falsely - not to exist under single-payer systems in wealthy countries, or because a significant drop in willingness to supply is assumed contrary to all international evidence. This is actually more of a theological statement, or perhaps a superstitious one, than anything else; "Ooh, ooh, The Market won't like this...it will desert us!"). Furthermore, it is at least worth contemplating the potential for a cultural change in patterns of healthcare consumption in the US - a shift in preferences such that consumption becomes less wasteful - following (with some delay, of course), the major institutional shift to single-payer.

To spell out where Sanders is fudging (it has nothing to do with logical possibility or arithmetic, though yes, the campaign document did contain a faulty estimate of drug cost savings which needed to be updated): he isn't saying what denials of treatment would look like under single-payer vs. what they are under Medicare (or under the US healthcare system as a totality) now. There's no way to make a sound and relatively fine-grained prediction about that at this point.

But there are good reasons - the ones just stated - to think that denials will actually go down - certainly on the whole (that is, if we include denials of treatment by all insurers, public and private, under the current system), but even with respect to just Medicare as it currently exists. They won't go to zero, but they aren't at zero now.

The US does ration healthcare; it just uses different mechanisms than Canada and Europe (places where, incidentally, private clinics also exist - that's one of the biggest and most incomprehensible whoppers going around - and so, just like in the States, if you have the money, you can have whatever you want done right away). Rationing in the US is achieved via high costs of care - and that includes plenty of types of care that are covered under Medicare, but for which the program does not reimburse 100%.

And that's what really bugs me - as a citizen and resident of a single-payer country - about what's coming from Krugman, Klein, and plenty of others, at this point. Their opposition to Sanders and favoring of Clinton are driving them to embrace one of the greatest, most thoroughly debunked, bogeymen of the Right: "You don't want healthcare like they have up in Canada - they RATION!!! [cue scary music]" Yes, as does the US (even more so if we don't merely and unjustifiably define rationing in a way which excludes the mechanisms by which this is achieved in the US); but Canada does it in a way which delivers objectively superior health outcomes to a much larger percentage of the population at a much lower cost.

Before this election, no self-respecting progressive would have taken this seriously, let alone disseminated it.

GOP Primary Prediction

I'm going on record as calling the GOP primary for Donald Trump.

Tamir Rice, Gun Laws, and American Apartheid

Esquire has a great essay on the unresolvable tension between American gun laws and American policing of minority communities.

This is the issue I've been harping on since John Crawford, but even here - the piece closest to the heart of the matter, at least among those that I've seen - an insufficiently fine point is put on it.

What is the theory of law here?

Video evidence makes crystal clear that neither Crawford nor Rice - the latter of whom was perceived to be of legal age for owning a firearm by the officer - was "brandishing" a weapon, in the technical sense of that term. Both were carrying what were perceived to be firearms. Ohio is a permissive preemptive open carry state. This means that a) both were perceived to be performing actions which, had they actually been performing them, would have been exercises of their federal, state and municipal rights; and b) as a consequence, police orders to relinquish their (perceived) weapons were unlawful. So there are only two possible theories of law here: 1) the second amendment and state gun possession laws do not apply to black people; or 2) it is objectively reasonable for police offers to use lethal force against black people when they exercise their legal rights, if those officers feel subjectively threatened by that exercise.

The argument that it was objectively reasonable to believe that either of them were in the course of committing, or intending to commit, a crime, takes us no further. It implies that under American law, the subjective impressions of a complaining civilian suffice as the basis for such an objectively reasonable belief about a black person, even though no feature of the scene itself at the time police arrive supports this, and multiple features count against it.

We are seeing, with alarming frequency, evidence that the U.S. Is in fact an apartheid regime - as it would have to be in order to reconcile the absurd permissiveness of gun laws as written with the actual motivation for those laws. Why can't anyone see/admit this? When will we be able to have a public conversation about the reality that this is, de facto, contemporary American law?

Is Donald Trump an Embryonic Fascist?

It may be true that despite his national poll numbers, Donald Trump doesn't have a realistic chance at winning the GOP nomination. But even if that's the case, focusing on that purported fact buries the lede. Because we have to ask, if the 5-months-and-counting front-runner isn't going to win, who is? And the answer that is beginning to emerge - as Ben Carson watches the floor disappear beneath his feet, and more and more people realize that Marco Rubio is running for president because he needs the money - is Ted Cruz.

And that would be unthinkable without Trump pushing this primary as far to the right as it is possible, under current historical, economic, and socio-cultural conditions, for it to go. So anyone (and I'm looking at you, Nate Silver), who thinks that the real story here is that so many people are taking Trump seriously when he really doesn't have a prayer: No, the story is the extent to which he is changing this race; the story is that he is handing it to a candidate who is only nominally a member of the establishment, who would be far too radical to be taken seriously, let alone to be where the smart money is going, if not for the profound effect Trump is having on the shape of the race, and on American politics and political discourse in general right now. With Trump, we are honest-to-God talking about a leading candidate for the American presidency, regarding whom the question "Is he a fascist?" is an intricate and academic one - unless of course you write for Wonkblog, in which case you've never met a question that can't be answered with a five-point list or a single graph, because you are in fact so simple-minded it beggars belief. And the argument that Trump isn't a facist, but is rather a right-wing nativist populist - which is expounded in the above-linked text with admirable sophistication, though it is probably unreasonable to expect that level of sophistication in governing the ordinary use of the term 'fascist' - isn't even wholly convincing, resting as it does on (a) the fact that Trump does not - yet - command a private paramilitary force (or does he?); and (b) armchair psychological speculation regarding what the man does and does not believe as a matter of principle.

But in any case, in this, his most recent and most facism-adjacent policy proposal to date, the mildest response by far, not even approaching a condemnation, has come from Cruz - a man who is universally reviled in Washington, even by the other members of his own party. So if (when?), he secures the nomination, I sure as hell better not see any stories to the effect that "We told you so, the establishment wins again." Ted Cruz is not, by any but the thinnest and most useless of definitions, a member of any "establishment"; and a victory for him would confirm, within the margin of error, the claim that Trump has had an indelible impact on this race. Spend some time really thinking about what that says about the American electorate - or at least, the half being pandered to in this increasingly nightmarish clown show.

And then, of course, there is the in-fact-not-at-all-insignificant chance, against which this summer's nay-sayers have already begun to hedge, that Trump will win the nomination, because, as we apparently failed to learn from the greatest economic crisis in 75 years, predictions based on purportedly sophisticated statistical reasoning, which tacitly assumes that the future will be fundamentally similar to the recent past, can, after all, lead us horribly astray.

There is one good argument against calling Trump and his campaign fascist: that, despite wanton disregard for the Constitution with respect to policy proposals, they are not explicitly anti-democratic. It is worth remembering that from 1920 to 1932, the NSDAP (the Nazis) participated in several democratic parliamentary elections. And the 25 point party program speech which Hitler gave in 1920 did not advocate abolishing democracy or one-party rule - though it did implicitly advocate repealing the Weimar Constitution through its call for the Reichstag to have unlimited law-making authority, and called for all government offices to be restricted to native born "Aryan" Germans. So, by this argument, Hitler and the Nazis were not fascists until 1932/33. They were, in essence, right-wing nativist populists who took the further step of calling for an apartheid regime. Now, maybe that's right and maybe it's useful to define fascism in that way, so that by the definition they became fascists when they seized absolute power (after winning an election). But in that case, it is of no practical interest in itself that Trump and his campaign are not currently fascist.

If Trump, once elected, would become explicitly anti-democratic, then he and his campaign are on the road to fascism, they just haven't reached the destination yet, because they are not yet in position to seize power (not having yet won an election). If that is even remotely possible, there is no reason to police the use of the term 'fascist' in this context, as some seem to want to do. Whether it is remotely possible or not depends on what Trump privately believes; and so this argument may just collapse into the second one mentioned above.

For anyone who thinks that this isn't even remotely possible, either for reasons having to do with Trump or for reasons having to do with America, consider this.