{"id":226057,"date":"2016-02-19T00:32:57","date_gmt":"2016-02-19T00:32:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=226057"},"modified":"2016-11-30T01:40:18","modified_gmt":"2016-11-30T00:40:18","slug":"hillary-v-bernie-their-two-opposite-views-of-the-presidency","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/latest-news\/hillary-v-bernie-their-two-opposite-views-of-the-presidency\/","title":{"rendered":"Hillary v. Bernie: Their Two Opposite Views of the Presidency"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/b>Eric Zuesse<\/span><\/p>\n

Whereas Bernie Sanders claims to represent the bottom 99%, Hillary Clinton claims to represent a coalition of groups who are victimized by bigots (racists, sexists, etc.: she aims at women, homosexuals, Blacks, etc.). Whereas Bernie seeks to mobilize the bottom economic 99% against the top 1% who have scooped up almost all of the economic benefits that Americans have gained since 1993<\/span><\/a>, Hillary seeks to mobilize all bigotry-victims against all of the many types of bigots. These pitches are fundamentally different from one-another. In fact, they\u2019re diametrically opposite diagnoses of the biggest ailment threatening the U.S. future: our perilous economy<\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n

At the close of the Wisconsin Democratic debate on February 11th<\/span><\/a>, Hillary Clinton made an appeal to members of labor unions, and then said: “I think that a lot of what we have to overcome to break down the barriers that are holding people back, whether it’s poison in the water of the children of Flint, or whether it’s the poor\u00a0miners who are being left out and left behind in coal country, or whether it is any other American today who feels somehow put down and oppressed by racism, by sexism, by\u00a0discrimination against the LGBT community, against the kind of efforts that need to be made to root out all of these barriers, that’s what I want to take on. \u2026 Yes, does Wall Street and big financial interests, along with drug companies, insurance companies, big oil, all of it, have too much influence? You’re right. But if we were to stop that tomorrow, we would still have the indifference, the negligence that we saw in Flint. We would still have racism holding people back. We would still have\u00a0sexism preventing women from getting equal pay. We would still have LGBT people who get married on Saturday and get fired on Monday.\u201d<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

Bernie Sanders closed instead with: \u201cThis campaign is not only about electing someone who has the most progressive agenda, it is about bringing tens of millions of people together to demand that we have a\u00a0government that represents all of us and not just the 1 percent, who today have so much economic and political power.\u201d<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

Hillary Clinton is saying that what\u2019s \u201cholding people back\u201d is bigotry.<\/span><\/p>\n

Bernie Sanders is saying that what\u2019s holding people back is concentration of too much power in too few people \u2014 not meaning a concentration of too much power in a freely and democratically elected government<\/i> (which Republicans constantly attack as having too much<\/i> power), but instead meaning a concentration of too much power in the richest 1% who buy<\/i>\u00a0 <\/span>the government, and who use it to make American workers compete against<\/i>\u00a0 <\/span>the workers in Haiti, Honduras, Vietnam, etc., so as to benefit the global stockholders of international corporations by lowering wages, instead of to benefit American workers by increasing wages. He\u2019s attacking a system that benefits global stockholders by lowering wages everywhere to some lowest common denominator, so as to increase profits and stock-values and executive compensation everywhere. Workers don\u2019t receive the benefits of that; the stockholders and executives in international corporations do. That\u2019s the \u201c1%\u201d, though actually it\u2019s even more concentrated in the top 0.1%.<\/span><\/p>\n

Hillary Clinton is saying that the main problem in America is America\u2019s bigots \u2014 it\u2019s no economic motivation, by billionaires who essentially buy the government, nor by anyone else. This political view, in which there are essentially no economic classes, but only bigots and their victims, is fundamentally different from Sanders\u2019s view. It\u2019s so different that in some other countries they would constitute two different political parties.<\/span><\/p>\n

Sanders is saying that the main problem in America is actually America\u2019s corruption \u2014 a system that he says has been very successfully gamed by \u201cthe billionaire class.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

That\u2019s what the Democrats\u2019 Presidential choice comes down to.<\/span><\/p>\n

This choice is a stark one. Democratic voters are being asked which is the primary issue for government to overcome: countervailing excessive greed by the super-rich, or countervailing all bigotry by anyone? Both greed and bigotry are bad, but which is more the main function of government to countervail? That\u2019s the question.<\/span><\/p>\n

Hillary Clinton is saying that what American workers are pitted against is, essentially, bigots, individuals who are bigoted \u2014 bigoted against gays, against women, against Blacks, against Hispanics, etc.; they\u2019re not<\/i>\u00a0 <\/span>pitted against the controlling stockholders who are collectively represented by their corporation\u2019s management and who want higher profits from paying lower wages. Hillary Clinton focuses on the cultural divide, the\u00a0 <\/span>various types of inter-ethnic conflicts, as being \u201cwhat we have to overcome to break down the barriers that are holding people back.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

Bernie Sanders is saying that the big problem American workers are up against isn\u2019t bigots \u2014 rich and poor \u2014 as much as it\u2019s the unlimited greed of the controlling stockholders who are represented by management (even if they\u2019re not<\/i>\u00a0 <\/span>bigots). His diagnosis is that not only should workers have the collective-bargaining right against the corporation\u2019s owners, just like those corporate owners themselves already possess the collective-bargaining right via managers they hire, but that workers should also be more the focus of government\u2019s concern and sympathy than stockholders are, because there are far more workers than owners, and because a one-person-one-vote democracy is far better than a one-dollar-one-vote \u2018democracy\u2019 (the latter of which is otherwise called an \u201coligarchy\u201d or an \u201caristocracy\u201d), the latter of which is what Sanders campaigns to put a stop<\/i>\u00a0 <\/span>to.<\/span><\/p>\n

Hillary Clinton is saying that there is no common and shared enemy that oppressed employees have:<\/i>\u00a0 <\/span>instead, the main problem is racist bigots in the case of Blacks; it\u2019s homophobic bigots in the case of homosexuals; it\u2019s misogynist bigots in the case of females, etcetera; and, if a Black happens also<\/i> to be a homophobe, or a homosexual happens to be also an anti-Black racist, then each one of those victim-groups will be fighting against the bigoted members of the other<\/i>\u00a0 <\/span>victim-groups. The chief job of the government, led by the U.S. President, is then somehow to punish all types of bigots equally, regardless of their particular<\/i>\u00a0 <\/span>group, so as to minimize the complaints about bigotry from, and by, all Americans. That\u2019s a balancing of groups against groups \u2014 a balancing of ethnicities. This is Clinton\u2019s diagnosis and cure for America\u2019s economic problems. <\/span><\/p>\n

Hillary\u2019s diagnosis isn\u2019t economic or systemic, but instead cultural and individual \u2014 it\u2019s actually individual against individual, instead of stockholders against employees. And, just as a particular victim of bigotry can also be a bigot (for example, a Black can be homophobic, sexist, or etc.), a particular employee can also be a stockholder; some individuals stand on both sides at once, there too; but those are all individual matters, not<\/i>\u00a0 <\/span>systemic matters, and so they\u2019re not really authentic issues of governmental policy. Hillary Clinton says that they are the main<\/i>\u00a0 <\/span>issues of governmental policy \u2014 that people\u2019s problems are mainly individual<\/i>\u00a0 <\/span>problems, against bigots; not<\/i>\u00a0 <\/span>systemic problems, against stealers-of-the-public\u2019s-government \u2014 and she says that the government should focus on individuals\u2019 problems, not on systemic problems. That\u2019s her view, which she expresses on almost every occasion, though she doesn\u2019t put it in quite this way \u2014 a systematic way.<\/span><\/p>\n

Bernie Sanders, in contrast to Hillary Clinton, is saying that the oppressed do<\/i>\u00a0 <\/span>have a common and shared (a systemic) enemy<\/i>. Here is how he expressed this in a speech to the Democratic National Committee<\/span><\/a> on 28 August 2015:\u00a0 <\/span>\u201cWe need a political movement which is prepared to take on the billionaire class and create a government which represents all Americans, and not just corporate America and wealthy campaign donors.\u201d<\/i> He was saying this to individuals \u2014 specifically, to the Democratic Party\u2019s chief political agents \u2014 most of whose own career success has largely depended upon<\/i>\u00a0 <\/span>that \u201cbillionaire class,\u201d but Sanders was up-front to them about it. He even calls this \u201cmovement\u201d a \u201crevolution.\u201d He\u2019s not trying to hide his opposition to the staus-quo.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Democratic Party\u2019s Presidential contest isn\u2019t really a contest between \u2018idealism\u2019 versus \u2018pragmatism,\u2019 such as some propagandists claim. To characterize either candidate as \u2018the idealist\u2019 versus \u2018the pragmatist\u2019 is false. That characterization of this contest is actually deeply deceptive, because it focuses on vague abstractions, whereas the real issue in the Democratic Party primaries now is totally nitty-gritty, and it concerns two alternative diagnoses of what has been going wrong with America\u2019s economy in recent decades. <\/span><\/p>\n

In Bernie\u2019s view, American democracy is now in the emergency room; in Hillary\u2019s view, complainers (against anything other than<\/i>\u00a0 <\/span>bigots) are like mere hypochondriacs who simply don\u2019t understand the experts who say that things aren\u2019t so bad, and that therefore no \u201crevolution\u201d is needed.<\/span><\/p>\n

Is America\u2019s basic governmental problem bigotry (i.e., certain cultural and \u2018values\u2019 problems), as Hillary says; or is it instead corruption (i.e., certain economic and governmental problems), as Bernie says?<\/span><\/p>\n

These are two very different conceptions of what the U.S. Presidency is about.<\/span><\/p>\n

And that\u2019s the central choice in the Democratic Presidential primaries. More than anything else, that\u2019s what the choice between Clinton and Sanders comes down to.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014<\/span><\/p>\n

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of\u00a0 They\u2019re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010<\/i><\/span><\/a>,<\/i> and of \u00a0<\/i>CHRIST\u2019S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity<\/i><\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Eric Zuesse Whereas Bernie Sanders claims to represent the bottom 99%, Hillary Clinton claims to represent a coalition of groups who are victimized by bigots (racists, sexists, etc.: she aims at women, homosexuals, Blacks, etc.). Whereas Bernie seeks to mobilize the bottom economic 99% against the top 1% who have scooped up almost all of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1254,"featured_media":237792,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487,461,1622,18],"tags":[968,29,698,949,76,40,1024],"class_list":{"0":"post-226057","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news","8":"category-editorials","9":"category-featured","10":"category-latest-news","11":"tag-bernie","12":"tag-democrats","13":"tag-hillary-clinton","14":"tag-sanders","15":"tag-warfare","16":"tag-white-house","17":"tag-ww3"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226057","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1254"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=226057"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226057\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/237792"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=226057"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=226057"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=226057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}