I’m a Gay Hoosier. Pete Buttigieg Would Be a Terrible President.

On March 23, 2019March 23, 2019 By Nora BelroseIn Current EventsLeave a comment

Ever since his well-received town hall two weeks ago, Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign has been gaining steam. If you don’t know who Buttigieg (boo-ti-jedge) is, he’s the mayor of a mid-size town called South Bend, Indiana. He’s also an openly gay veteran who recently served in Afghanistan.

I happen to have grown up just 90 minutes southeast of South Bend, and I have friends who live there. They certainly seem to like him as mayor: he won re-election in 2015 with about 80% of the vote. But being a popular mayor does not mean you’ll be a good president.

The fundamental problem with Pete Buttigieg is that he doesn’t understand the severity of the crises that we are facing as a country and as a global civilization. He doesn’t understand that radical, transformative change is needed to address climate change, rising income inequality, economic insecurity, and a deeply corrupt political system. Buttigieg talks about these issues, but his policy proposals— to the extent that he has any— are totally inadequate to address them. Here are just two examples.

He’s effectively against Medicare for All

During his CNN town hall, Pete Buttigieg said that he thinks we should “move in the direction of” Medicare for All. But he immediately backtracked, saying that we should focus on incremental reforms, like allowing people to “buy into” Medicare, rather than rapidly transitioning to a single-payer system:

The idea of a Medicare buy-in is not new. President Obama supported it as part of his initial proposal for the Affordable Care Act. But he quickly dropped the idea when it faced opposition in the Senate. Under a President Buttigieg, we have every reason to believe that the same thing would happen. By starting the negotiating process with a proposal as weak as “Medicare for all who want it,” Buttigieg concedes far too much to the right wing, and makes it more likely that no serious healthcare reforms will be passed at all.

Buttigieg has also said that, under his version of Medicare for All, private health insurance companies would still exist. He points to Medicare Advantage, which currently allows Medicare recipients to buy private insurance plans with public money, as a model. But keeping private insurers in the mix would be totally unnecessary and would simply increase overhead costs. The beauty of Medicare for All, as traditionally understood, is that it eliminates the bureaucracy of the private healthcare system and uses the immense bargaining power of the federal government to drive down costs. Buttigieg’s Medicare buy-in / Medicare Advantage proposal simply isn’t Medicare for All, and he should stop pretending that it is.

Unlike Buttigieg, rival presidential contender Bernie Sanders understands the need for a radical overhaul of the American healthcare system. Americans deserve healthcare as a human right, provided free at the point of use. This requires completely eliminating the private healthcare industry, and establishing a single-payer system that covers everyone. Any proposal that continues to allow insurance companies to profit off of sick and dying Americans simply will not cut it.

He’s against tuition-free college

Despite being a 37 year-old millennial, Buttigieg has had very little to say on the issue of college affordability and student debt. The one interview in which he did discuss the issue was quite telling, however. Buttigieg outright opposes student debt cancellation, and makes it pretty clear that he opposes making public colleges tuition-free, too. Instead of free college, he wants to modestly increase federal aid for public universities, and make adjustments to the federal student loan forgiveness program:

“I think there should be a comprehensive strategy [on student debt], and I’m not wedded to any individual element of that. So there may be trade-offs between how generous we want to make different forgiveness programs and what we do around bankruptcy, for example… We could [also] tie these students’ share of college costs to either an income metric or an affordability metric and then make some federal aid to states in the field of education contingent on them offering that up.”

But these wonkish, incrementalist proposals are totally inadequate to address the massive college affordability and student debt crisis we are facing today. Americans are now shouldering more than $1.5 trillion in student loan debt. It’s a larger burden than credit card debt or auto loans. In the 21st century, it’s simply not possible for most people to get a decent job without a college degree— and even that is often not enough. The least we can do is provide a college education to every American for free, something that Senator Bernie Sanders has fought for for years. It’s frankly outrageous that the only millennial in the Democratic primary race does not understand this.

We need a transformational president

As we enter the third decade of the 21st century, we need a president who will fight to rapidly transition our economy toward green energy, guarantee healthcare and higher education as a right of all Americans, raise wages and reduce income inequality, end the control of Washington by corrupt special interests, and reign in the parasitic financial sector. This requires specific policy proposals and an understanding of what it will take to implement them. Buttigieg has made it clear that he has no such agenda:

Buttigieg’s “values-first” philosophy is somewhat reminiscent of Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. Obama ran on a message of “Hope and Change” that included few specific policy proposals. The result was a largely failed presidency that did not do anything to positively change the long-term political trajectory of the country. We cannot afford another Obama-style presidency. It would only strengthen the populist Right, and lead to the election of a Republican president in 2024 that makes Trump seem like a moderate. As my friend Ben Studebaker recently argued about another moderate presidential candidate, Beto O’Rourke:

“A [Buttigieg] presidency means two years of milquetoast, Obama-style reforms at maximum, followed by 2 to 6 years of right-ward drift under divided government, followed by 4-8 years of a new Republican president who is at least as bad if not worse than Donald Trump. That Republican president could be more capable and could get far more legislation through congress, perhaps enough to change the country forever. At the very least, this would mean another lost decade for the left.” — A Second Term for Trump is Better Than Beto

Saving our country from the savagery of right-wing Republicans and implementing a truly progressive agenda will require transforming the Democratic Party. While Buttigieg likes to call himself a “progressive Democrat,” when it comes to the schism between the progressive and establishment wings of the Democratic Party, he has consistently supported the establishment. Buttigieg endorsed Hillary Clinton during the 2016 Democratic primaries, and was a delegate for Clinton at the Democratic National Convention. If Buttigieg were somehow able to win the Democratic nomination and become president (very unlikely scenario), the Democratic Party would essentially remain the same as it is today. Corporate money and special interests would continue to run the show, and most Democratic officials would still be Clintonite moderates who have little interest in transformative change.

There is one presidential candidate, however, who is determined to transform the Democratic Party and the entire country along with it. That candidate is Senator Bernie Sanders. Senator Sanders has a much better shot at winning the Democratic nomination than Buttigieg does, and he has consistently fought for left-wing policies for decades. He wants to bring about a “political revolution against the billionaire class.” Why settle for President Buttigieg, when you could have President Sanders?

Harris and Warren are Wrong on Reparations for Slavery

On March 2, 2019 By Nora BelroseIn Current Events, PoliticsLeave a comment

In the last few weeks, the issue of whether the descendants of black slaves should be given “reparations” has become a hot topic in the Democratic presidential primary race. It all started when Kamala Harris came out in favor of reparations, when asked about the issue during a radio interview. Soon afterward, Elizabeth Warren and Julián Castro chimed in, declaring that they also supported reparations.

During CNN’s recent town hall with Senator Bernie Sanders, one of the questioners asked him whether he would support reparations for slavery, too. Sanders responded that he couldn’t answer the question without first getting clarification about what the word “reparations” is supposed to mean, since advocates have used the term in many different ways:

Many activists on the Left were very unhappy with Sanders’ response here. They believe that Sanders must come out unequivocally in favor of reparations for slavery, and that it is cowardice for him to do otherwise:

But Sanders was right to demand clarification. Candidates like Harris and Warren have been muddying the waters on the issue of reparations, using the word disingenuously to refer to policies that are not race-specific. In order to adequately address this issue, we need to get clear on what kind of policy we’re actually talking about.

Historically, the term “reparations” has been understood to refer to race-based, cash reparations. That means that a cash payment would be given specifically and exclusively to the descendants of black slaves, in an effort to “bring justice” to African-Americans who are still dealing with the socioeconomic legacy of slavery and Jim Crow segregation. Sometimes other types of reparations have been proposed, such as grants to “black” nonprofit organizations, but the common thread is that they are all race-based, and not universal programs. Reparations are often promoted as the best way to address the ongoing, substantial racial wealth disparities that exist in the US:

“Universal programs are not specific to the injustices that have been inflicted on African-Americans… I want to be sure that whatever is proposed and potentially enacted as a reparations program really is a substantive and dramatic intervention in the patterns of racial wealth inequality in the United States.”
— William Darity, pro-reparations economist

We know that Senator Sanders is outright opposed to this kind of race-based reparations. In a 2016 interview, he pointed out that such a policy would be “very divisive.” On this point, Sanders is exactly right. Reparations for slavery are an incredibly divisive policy proposal, and they’re something that the Left should firmly oppose.

The case against reparations

If we want to elect a Congress and a president that are committed to enacting a left-wing, democratic socialist program, we need to win tens of millions of white voters over to our side. Including reparations in our platform would make it almost impossible to do that. Polling has shown that just 6% of white Americans support cash reparations for slavery, while 79% actively oppose them. And we should expect that white opposition would only deepen as whites are exposed to the right-wing propaganda that would accompany serious push for reparations.

If somehow reparations for slavery were ever enacted, they would create a tremendous amount of resentment by whites, Latinos, and Asian-Americans alike. Non-blacks would view reparations as a redistribution of wealth away from themselves and their families, toward black Americans who did nothing to deserve them. Racial discrimination and hate crimes against African-Americans would substantially increase, and the whole political spectrum would lurch far to the right. The backlash would cause whatever Left government that enacted them to be voted out of office, making it impossible for us to carry out the rest of our program.

If that’s not enough, the logistical problems with such a reparations program would be immense. Because of the widespread intermarriage between African-Americans and other ethnic groups over the decades, the government would have to be in the grotesque business of determining who is “black enough” to deserve reparations payments, dredging up genealogical records to find out who is a descendant of slaves and who is not. This would only reinforce, rather than undermine, right-wing pseudoscientific racial ideologies that assert the existence of a “black race” with an essential character.

Furthermore, reparations would not do much of anything to end systemic racial disparities in wealth and income in this country, because they would leave the structure of the economy intact. Giving black families a one-time payment of a few thousand dollars might help them make their rent payments and shore up their savings for a year or two, but there would still be widespread discrimination in the job market and long-term outcomes would likely be unchanged. As Senator Sanders aptly put it, there are much more effective ways to address racism than simply “writing out a check”:

In a post-reparations scenario however, the political will for further efforts to address systemic racism would largely evaporate. The Right would be able to argue, “Hey, we already did reparations for slavery, now racism must be over.” And millions of Americans would buy into those arguments. In the long run, reparations would only harm the standing of African-Americans in this country, rather than helping them.

What about Latinos?

While the reparations debate has so far only focused on the issue of poverty among black Americans, Latinos are actually not much better off than blacks in this country. Reparations would do nothing to benefit the Latino population, so even if reparations succeeded in raising black families to the same level as white families, Latinos would be left behind as a new underclass.

racial wealth gap — Source: “The Racial Wealth Gap”, Demos 2015

The sheer fact that Latinos are roughly as disadvantaged as African-Americans calls into question the assumption, essential to the idea of reparations, that blacks are worse off because they are the descendants of slaves per se. Rather, it’s likely that both Latinos and African-Americans are disadvantaged due to similar processes of racial discrimination and the inter-generational poverty. The interests of Latinos and African-Americans are closely linked, and both of these populations would benefit from similar policies. It is totally counterproductive and wrong-headed to separate these issues, and thereby pit people of color against one another, by advocating for a reparations policy that exclusively targets one disadvantaged minority without addressing the plight of others. As Bernie likes to say, we need to bring people together, rather than dividing them up.

Reparations are probably unconstitutional

All of this is assuming, however, that a reparations act would not be struck down by the Supreme Court before it could take effect. This is not a good assumption. The Fourteenth Amendment, which stipulates that US citizens must be given “equal protection” under the law, has been consistently interpreted by the courts to severely restrict the extent to which the government can allocate any kind of benefit on the basis of race. The Court has found that any use of racial classifications must be subjected to “strict scrutiny,” which essentially means that there must be no other, narrower, or non-race-based method for achieving the same “compelling government interest.”

Strict scrutiny is very demanding. For example, in the landmark case Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional for a public university to set aside a specific number of seats in a medical school program for students of “disadvantaged minorities” in order to help them overcome the effects of discrimination:

“We have never approved a classification that aids persons perceived as members of relatively victimized groups at the expense of other innocent individuals in the absence of judicial, legislative, or administrative findings of constitutional or statutory violations… Hence, the purpose of helping certain groups… perceived as victims of ‘societal discrimination’ does not justify a classification that imposes disadvantages upon persons like [Bakke, a white medical school applicant], who bear no responsibility for whatever harm the beneficiaries of the special admissions program are thought to have suffered.”
— Regents of the Univ. of Cal. v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 310 (1978)

Essentially, the Court is saying that it is impermissible for the government to relatively disadvantage white Americans, who have not committed any crimes, in order to “make up for” past or ongoing discrimination against minorities. This ruling is fundamentally at odds with the idea of reparations, and it is very unlikely that the Court would overturn decades of precedent by upholding such a program.

Advocates might try to defend the constitutionality of reparations by formulating the act so that it does not refer to “race” at all, but only to whether an individual is a descendant of slaves. But this is very unlikely to pass Court muster. The category “African-American” is often defined in terms of whether a person is a descendant of American slaves. Recent immigrants from Africa, or migrants from Haiti, are generally not considered to be “African-American.” Additionally, the Court has ruled that strict scrutiny must be applied to many non-racial classifications, such as national origin, so the constitutional question would not hinge on whether the reparations were strictly speaking “racial” or not.

Some reparations advocates have pointed to the example of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which provided cash reparations to victims of Japanese internment during World War II. They argue that these reparations prove the viability and constitutionality of reparations for slavery. But the Civil Liberties Act gave reparations only to those who were personally interned during World War II, not their children or grandchildren. Reparations for slavery, by contrast, would involve giving reparations to the distant descendants of those who were directly wronged. That is the critical legal and political difference between these two cases. It is a core assumption of American jurisprudence that children are not punished for wrongs that were committed by their parents, nor are they awarded compensation for wrongs committed against their parents.

Given that reparations are almost certainly unconstitutional, it’s simply a waste of time and resources to continue advocating for them, especially when there are many alternative policies that are compatible with the Constitution which would be much more effective at ending systemic racism than reparations ever could be.

Alternatives to reparations

Black workers in this country have the same basic needs as workers of any other race. Universal, class-based policies like a $15 minimum wage, the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, free college tuition, and free public childcare would all disproportionately benefit African-Americans and Latinos, thereby reducing the racial income and wealth gap in this country. These are things that Senator Sanders has forcefully advocated for throughout his career. Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren, however, have been much less enthusiastic about these kinds of universal, social democratic reforms.

Massively expanding the stock of high-quality, affordable public housing in this country would also disproportionately benefit racial minorities. And affirmative action policies could be used, to the extent permissible under the Constitution, to ensure that public housing projects are occupied by a diverse mix of races and ethnicities. This would reduce housing segregation and help break down racist attitudes over time. Singapore’s public housing program is a great example of how this can be done.

Finally, anti-discrimination laws in employment must be much more vigorously enforced than they currently are. Studies have shown that job applicants with “black names” are around 36% less likely to get a callback than applicants with “white names,” even when their résumés are otherwise identical. There are similar findings for the results of in-person job interviews. In order to address this issue, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) must be greatly expanded, allowing it to actively investigate and press charges against employers it finds to be engaging in discriminatory practices, without first waiting to get a complaint.

If all of these measures were enacted, we would be a long way toward achieving genuine racial equality in the United States. Furthermore, these policies are much more politically viable than reparations, since they do not involve an overt redistribution of wealth from non-blacks to black Americans. It’s about time that the Left stop advocating this wrong-headed, counterproductive idea of reparations and instead fight for things that really could help end systemic racism in this country.

Nobody is More Left-Wing Than Bernie Sanders

On February 24, 2019 By Nora BelroseIn Current Events, PoliticsLeave a comment

The American Left has been celebrating for the past few days, as Bernie Sanders’ second presidential campaign has rapidly gained steam. Sanders was able to raise nearly $6 million in the first 24 hours after his announcement, and he is close to reaching 1 million volunteer sign-ups on his website. But there is a vocal minority on the Left who aren’t so happy about Sanders’ bid for the presidency. Some leftists are arguing that Senator Sanders has problematic positions on a number of issues, that he is not as left-wing as he is often made out to be, and that the Left should not support his candidacy.

This Left skepticism of Bernie Sanders is largely baseless, however. Bernie is by far the most left-wing presidential candidate in the race, and his platform represents the most transformative change that the Left can reasonably hope to achieve in the near term. Sanders’ so-called “problematic” positions— like his opposition to reparations for slavery, his refusal to endorse the “Abolish ICE” slogan, and his alleged “softness on US imperialism”— are really not problematic at all. Furthermore, we have good reason to believe that Sanders’ long-term vision is thoroughly socialist and anti-capitalist. Sanders wants to eliminate wage labor and guarantee a high standard of living for everyone. He just recognizes the merits of a gradualist approach for carrying out his socialist program.

Bernie isn’t “soft” on imperialism

Many on the Left have criticized Bernie for being “soft” on the military-industrial complex and US interventionism around the world. This issue has especially risen to prominence in recent months, as the economic and political crisis in Venezuela has worsened. Some leftists are furious at Sanders for failing to fully defend Nicolás Maduro’s nominally socialist government. Sanders has staked out a nuanced position on the Venezuela issue, criticizing Maduro for his anti-democratic moves and his refusal to accept humanitarian aid, while also opposing US sanctions on the country. But to pro-Maduro leftists, this is not enough.

They argue that Maduro is the rightful democratically elected president of Venezuela, and that any anti-democratic moves on Maduro’s part, like banning opposition parties or ruling by decree, are either necessary evils or are being exaggerated in the mainstream media. I don’t have time to address this issue in full here, but you can read my recent blog post on Venezuela for more detail. Needless to say, there are many valid criticisms of Maduro’s regime, and his legitimacy as Venezuela’s president is seriously in doubt. It is also true that US sanctions on the country are exacerbating the ongoing economic and humanitarian crisis, and must be ended immediately. Bernie’s position on this issue is eminently reasonable.

Furthermore, Sanders has consistently attacked the bloated American military budget for decades, calling for major reductions in military spending in order to fund social welfare programs at home. He also has repeatedly condemned US interventionism and attempts at regime change in foreign countries. It is not an exaggeration to say that Sanders’ foreign policy positions are the most left-wing of any federal elected official.

It seems that in order to placate the most radical “anti-imperialists” on the Left, Sanders would have to advocate something close to the unilateral dismantling of the US military. But as long as there is no world government to keep the peace among nations, the idea of unilateral disarmament is simply untenable. It makes good sense for the United States to maintain a sizable army and navy, alongside a modest nuclear arsenal, in order to deter aggression from rising great powers such as China and to a lesser extent Russia. This does not mean that the bloated American military budget should not be substantially scaled back— it ought to be. But Sanders’ proposals are completely reasonable and are proportionate to the size of the problem.

Why reparations are a bad idea

Bernie skeptics often argue that Bernie Sanders has a “race-blind” approach to politics, focusing excessively on class issues at the expense of racial justice. They point to his opposition to reparations for slavery as proof of this. It’s argued that providing monetary reparations to African-Americans is necessary in order to eliminate the legacy of systemic racism in the United States.

These criticisms have gotten more intense now that Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren have come out in favor of reparations. It seems that Sanders is being outflanked on the Left by Harris and Warren— candidates that don’t even identify themselves as democratic socialists. However, Sanders is simply correct on this issue. Reparations would be a highly divisive and counterproductive endeavor which would harm, not improve, the standing of African-Americans in the United States. Polling has shown that 68% of Americans, and a staggering 79% of whites, oppose reparations for slavery. Sanders himself opposes them on the grounds that they would be divisive:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUFrErawm4c

The simple matter of fact is that, if the US government were to give a monetary lump sum to every African-American in this country, the vast majority of white Americans would view this as an undeserved redistribution of wealth from working-class white people to black workers. It would create a tremendous amount of resentment and would likely cause whatever Left government that enacted the reparations to be voted out of office. It’s vitally important that the Left not advocate for policies that emphasize and deepen the separation of American workers based on race. As Bernie likes to say, we need to bring people together rather than dividing people up.

Additionally, the logistical problems with such a reparations program would be immense. Because of the widespread intermarriage between African-Americans and other ethnic groups over the decades, the government would have to be in the grotesque business of determining who is “black enough” to deserve reparations payments, dredging up genealogical records to find out who is a descendant of slaves and who is not. This would only reinforce, rather than undermine, right-wing pseudoscientific racial ideologies that assert the existence of a “black race” with an essential character.

Furthermore, reparations very likely would not do much of anything to end systemic racial disparities in wealth and income in this country, because it would leave the structure of the economy intact. Giving black families a one-time payment of a few thousand dollars might help them make their rent payments and shore up their savings for a year or two, but there would still be widespread discrimination in the job market and long-term outcomes would likely be unchanged.

But in a post-reparations scenario, the political will for further efforts to address systemic racism would largely evaporate. The Right would be able to argue, “Hey, we already did reparations for slavery, now racism must be over.” And millions of Americans would buy into those arguments. In the long run, reparations would only harm the standing of African-Americans in this country, rather than helping them.

Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren’s support for reparations is merely a cynical ploy to win more votes from African-Americans in the Democratic primaries, and it certainly doesn’t make them any more left-wing than Bernie Sanders. Sanders’ platform of universal social programs would do much more for black Americans than any one-off reparations payment ever could.

Bernie is right on immigration

Some on the Left have also criticized Sanders’ stance on immigration. Bernie Sanders has been reluctant to back the slogan “Abolish ICE,” and has said that abolishing border controls is “a Koch Brothers idea.” Instead, he supports a comprehensive immigration reform package which would include a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants residing in the country. He also advocates an end to mass deportations, and wants to grant full citizenship to DACA recipients.

Those leftists who do want a complete and immediate dismantling of the immigration enforcement apparatus of the United States are understandably very upset about his refusal to endorse this idea. But calling for open borders and the abolition of ICE is simply a mistake. While full freedom of movement across the globe should be a long-term goal for socialists, this can only be achieved in the context of a world government which could put an end to the very large disparities in wealth between countries that we see today.

Without global political integration, unilaterally opening our borders with Latin America would likely cause a chaotic wave of mass migration that the United States would simply be unable to handle. It would also cause a brain drain in Latin American countries which would ruin their economies, thereby motivating further migration into the US, in a downward spiral. In the absence of a world government, immigration restrictions will still be necessary. Our goal should be to establish an immigration policy that allows for the successful integration of immigrants into American society, ensuring that they have access to living wage union jobs which do not push down wages for native-born workers.

This means providing legal status for the millions of law-abiding, gainfully employed undocumented immigrants in this country. But it does not mean dismantling our entire immigration enforcement system. Furthermore, the proposition of abolishing ICE and adopting an open borders policy is wildly unpopular among Americans. Advocating for it only marginalizes the Left and makes it harder for us to take power. The fact that Sanders understands this, and has chosen not to adopt it as part of his 2020 platform, is a strength, not a weakness of his campaign.

Abolish ICE — Source: July 2018 Politico/Morning Consult poll

Bernie really is a socialist

There’s a broader, more general argument that is often made against supporting Bernie Sanders: he’s not really a socialist. While Sanders has consistently identified as a “democratic socialist” for decades, there is a widespread belief on the Left that he doesn’t qualify as a socialist in the robust sense of the term, because he doesn’t publicly advocate for the collective ownership of the means of production. Some leftists even argue that Sanders is harming the socialist movement by actively sowing confusion about the definition of socialism, such as when he defines it as “having a government that reflects the interests of ordinary people, rather than… the billionaire class.”

But these concerns are misguided. First of all, democratic socialists should be very wary of defining socialism in terms of specific forms of property. If socialism is defined as “collective ownership of the means of production,” then authoritarian regimes like the Soviet Union and North Korea would qualify as socialist, which is a proposition that the democratic wing of the socialist movement has always denied.

Instead, it is much better to define socialism in terms of concrete ethical goals, like the abolition of the exploitative employer-employee relationship, and the de-commodification of social goods like healthcare, education, housing, and food. Some of these goals, like the abolition of wage labor, cannot be achieved in the here and now, but must wait until advances in automation technology make them possible. Ultimately, it will likely be necessary to bring most industries into public ownership in order to fully achieve these goals, but advocating for this in the meantime can only be counterproductive.

Furthermore, Bernie Sanders does advocate for forms of collective ownership of industry. As recently as 2017, he introduced a bill which would provide incentives for the development of worker-owned enterprises. But Sanders understands that simply promoting worker cooperatives or nationalizing industries won’t improve the lives of most workers. That’s why his most urgent priority is the establishment of a robust welfare state, modeled on the example of Norway and Sweden.

It is a great merit of Bernie Sanders that he understands which policy proposals will be popular among American workers today, and which will not. The calls of many leftists to “push Bernie to the left” and to “keep him accountable” simply fail to recognize the fact that Sanders’ current platform is close to the furthest left we can go without starting to alienate substantial numbers of American voters. Going further left would only harm, not help, the socialist project.

One of the ways we know that Sanders is committed to a transformative socialist vision is the simple fact that he has continued to insist on using the phrase “democratic socialism” to refer to his political ideology, even when this probably modestly hurt his short-term appeal. If Sanders was simply a moderate social democrat or a New Deal liberal, he would not have bothered trying to revitalize the term “socialism.” Clearly he sees the value in promoting the label to refer to an ideology that is opposed to capitalism. Unlike Elizabeth Warren and even Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie has consistently refused to identify as a capitalist:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGCKNtQXGbE

Furthermore, Sanders has repeatedly expressed his deep admiration for the radical socialist activist Eugene Debs, who was put in prison for his opposition to World War I:

“[Debs] fought to achieve a truly democratic society in which working people, not big money, would control the economic and political life of the nation… Eugene Victor Debs remains a hero of mine. A plaque commemorating him hangs on the wall in my Washington office.” — Outsider in the White House, 2015

Sanders is possibly the only member of Congress today who would be willing to associate himself with someone like Debs, who advocated for “the emancipation of the working class from wage-slavery.” This should give you an idea of just how radical Bernie really is.

For Sanders, and for millions of socialists all over the world, democratic socialism means reducing exploitation and expanding economic rights (healthcare, housing, childcare, etc.) as much as possible given our current level of technological development. Increasing automation will end the need for wage labor in the next century or so, but we shouldn’t try to rush toward that that kind of society prematurely. Getting Sanders elected President of the United States in 2020 is the first step in the long process of socialist transition.

Advocating for policies that are premature or simply inadvisable does not make someone more left-wing. It just makes them counterproductive to the socialist movement. That’s why nobody is more left-wing than Bernie Sanders.

No Easy Answers: A Left-Wing Analysis of the Venezuela Crisis

On January 30, 2019January 30, 2019 By Nora BelroseIn Current Events, Economics1 Comment

Venezuela’s economy is collapsing. Hyperinflation is causing widespread chaos and uncertainty, leaving millions of Venezuelans destitute. More than 10% of the population has fled the country in the past year alone. The unemployment rate has reached a staggering 35%, and 90% of the population is living in poverty. Crime is pervasive, and Venezuela’s murder rate is now the highest in the world. The country’s economy is now less than half the size it was just a few years ago. The ongoing economic meltdown in Venezuela is significantly worse than the Great Depression was in the United States, or the depression that occurred in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Meanwhile, Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro has been sworn in for another six-year term. Last year’s presidential election was widely regarded as illegitimate by the international community because the main opposition coalition, the MUD, was banned from participating. It was largely boycotted by opposition groups, and featured a record-low voter turnout. In response to Maduro’s inauguration, the opposition-controlled National Assembly declared the centrist legislator Juan Guaidó to be interim president of Venezuela, citing a clause in the constitution which allows the President of the Assembly to be declared acting president when the office is “vacant.” The United States and its Western allies have recognized Guaidó to be the one true president of Venezuela, while China, Russia, and many left-wing commentators consider Guaidó’s attempt to take power from Maduro to be a “coup.” This political uncertainty is only exacerbating the ongoing economic crisis, by further undermining confidence in the Venezuelan government.

Maduro is the hand-picked successor of former president Hugo Chávez, who initiated Venezuela’s left-wing drift when he was first elected in 1999. Maduro wants to keep the country’s current economic model essentially intact in the hope that oil prices will rise, which would give a boost the economy since oil is Venezuela’s #1 export. But things have now spiraled so completely out of control that even a significant rise in oil prices could not save Venezuela’s economy. Confidence in Venezuela’s currency, the bolívar, and its government has been completely destroyed by recent events. To make matters worse, the United States has recently imposed tough sanctions on Venezuelan oil, and is considering a full oil embargo. This is sure to further devastate Venezuela’s economy, making the current political crisis even more severe.

Chávez’s legacy

But things didn’t have to turn out this way. The first several years of Hugo Chávez’s presidency led to widespread prosperity and poverty relief for millions of Venezuelan citizens. Oil prices were high in the 2000s, and this allowed the government to fund generous social welfare programs from the proceeds of its state-owned oil company, PDVSA. The poverty rate was slashed from 55% in 1995 to 26% in 2009. Unemployment fell from 15% to 7.8%. The government was overwhelmingly popular, with Chávez winning re-election by a wide margin four times in elections that were certified as free and fair by international monitors.

How Chávez could have prevented this

The problem, however, is that these years of prosperity were built on very shaky ground. The entire system was built on high oil prices, and when the price of oil collapsed in 2014, so did the economy. While Chávez pledged to make the Venezuelan economy less dependent on oil exports through investment in other industries, the country actually got more dependent on oil during his presidency, not less so. Oil now makes up over 95% of Venezuela’s export income, up from 67% in 1999. As long as Venezuela’s economy remains so completely dependent on oil revenues for its survival, left-wing policies will be seriously threatened every time the price of oil declines significantly. This is the fundamental problem facing Venezuela today, and it is a problem that Chávez did nothing to address.

But Chávez could have made progress in diversifying the Venezuelan economy, if he had made different choices during the 2000’s. The key would be to invest in the manufacturing sector, encouraging the growth of a Venezuelan industrial base that could outcompete Chinese industries on the world market. Using export subsidies, state owned enterprises, and other “protectionist” measures, Venezuela would be able to take advantage of its natural resources and proximity to the United States to develop its manufacturing base and its economy rapidly. South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, and more recently China have demonstrated that this strategy can succeed. But these policies require long-term planning and discipline, something that the Chávez government apparently did not have.

Chávez’s failure to diversify the Venezuelan economy set the stage for today’s hyperinflation. Here’s how it got started.

The road to hyperinflation

Like most developing nations, Venezuela needs to import a lot of the goods it needs from other countries. And since Venezuela is a small, relatively poor country with a history of political instability and a chronically high inflation rate, virtually no one outside of Venezuela is willing to accept Venezuelan bolivars as payment for anything. This means that Venezuela needs to pay for its imports in US dollars. But in order to acquire US dollars, Venezuela needs to export goods to foreigners in exchange for dollars. And around 95% of Venezuela’s US dollar revenue comes from its oil exports.

This means that when oil prices fall, Venezuela’s supply of US dollars shrinks dramatically, leading to a variety of economic problems. Venezuelan citizens in need of dollars try to sell their bolivars in the black market, but few people want to give up their safe, stable, internationally accepted US dollars in favor of the volatile, rapidly inflating bolivar. Those who do decide to sell their dollars demand a very high price, which pushes the value of the bolivar downward. And when the exchange rate falls, imports get more expensive, which tends to raise the price of everything else. This is why the inflation rate rises dramatically in Venezuela whenever the price of oil falls.

But while inflation has been a problem in Venezuela for a long time, the country had never before experienced the horrors of hyperinflation until recently. Hyperinflation is essentially a vicious feedback loop wherein high inflation rates cause people to try to exchange the domestic currency for a safe foreign currency, which pushes down the exchange rate, which in turn accelerates the inflation, in a downward spiral. During a period of hyperinflation, prices can sometimes double within just a few days or weeks. It’s a highly destabilizing phenomenon that hits the poor and the working class the hardest.

The main reason why inflation turned into hyperinflation this time around is that the Venezuelan government started running very large budget deficits. Accurate statistics on Venezuela’s economy are hard to come by, but multiple sources indicate that by 2018 the government was running a budget deficit at around 40 percent of GDP. Maduro is trying to maintain a generous level of social spending even as the economy is contracting, and the country’s US dollar supply is drying up. There is clearly something admirable about this from a left-wing perspective— Maduro is wants to avoid cutting social programs at all costs. But arguably the negative consequences of this policy are much worse for Venezuela’s poor and working class than austerity would be. The government is financing its deficits by taking out massive loans directly from the central bank— effectively “printing money”— which greatly exacerbates the inflation problem. And the inflation, in turn, erodes the real value of wages and leads to higher unemployment.

No easy answers

None of the options that are available to Venezuela at the moment are very attractive. Maduro’s preferred strategy, which is to change nothing and simply wait for oil prices to rise, is reckless and irresponsible. There is no reason to expect a major increase in oil prices in the near future, and even if one were to occur, it would not be enough to resolve the crisis at this point. On the other hand, while a US-backed Guaidó government would go a long way toward restoring confidence in the Venezuelan economy, this confidence boost would come at a steep price: deep cuts to social services, which would hurt the poor the most.

Fundamentally, the most pressing short-term task for Venezuela is to transition to a different currency, one that workers and businesses alike can have confidence in. The Venezuelan economy simply cannot hope to recover while the hyperinflation continues. Many commentators have called for “dollarization“— that is, the adoption of the US dollar as Venezuela’s currency. Several countries, including Ecuador and Panama, have dollarized their economies in an effort to curb the same kind of chronic inflation problems that Venezuela has been experiencing for decades. The main problem with dollarization is that it would require a tremendous amount of austerity, since the Venezuelan government would no longer be able to simply print money in order to finance its social spending.

The Chinese option

In theory, Venezuela could try to adopt the currency of a foreign country other than the United States— say, China. Adopting the Chinese yuan would have a similar economic effect to dollarization, since the yuan is a much more stable currency than the bolivar, and its value is backed up by the trillions in US dollar reserves held by the People’s Bank of China. Since China wants to make allies with Latin American countries in order to undermine US hegemony, it might be willing to offer Venezuela much better terms on a currency deal than the United States, allowing Maduro to maintain most of the country’s social spending. In exchange, Maduro could offer to allow China to build military bases in Venezuela, which would increase Chinese power in the region and would protect Venezuela from potential US aggression.

Unfortunately for Venezuela, however, this “Chinese option” is likely to remain purely theoretical. While China would love to have a client state in Latin America, similar to Cuba’s relationship with the Soviet Union during the Cold War, in reality China would not want to make such a bold move against the United States at this time. Unlike the Soviet Union, modern China is heavily reliant on trade with the US for its economic growth, so antagonizing the US by building military bases in Venezuela would likely end up hurting Chinese power more than it would enhance it. In the future, when China is much more powerful than it is today, aligning with China may become a serious and attractive option for developing countries in the Western Hemisphere. But today, this option is not really on the cards.

The Cuba option

The final option is what I like to call the “Cuba option.” Some socialists argue that Venezuela needs to move toward an overwhelmingly state-dominated economic model, along the lines of Cuba or the Soviet Union. It’s argued that by confiscating private property and implementing a planned economy, Venezuela could overcome its current problems with hyperinflation and unemployment:

“The control and direct administration of the means of production by the working class is vital to end both capitalist sabotage and the corruption of the bourgeoisie and the bureaucracy. As long as the big companies are not expropriated, the sabotage of production will continue.”
— Izquierda Revolucionaria, a small Venezuelan Trotskyist group

But this idea fundamentally misdiagnoses the cause of Venezuela’s current woes. The problem is not simply that Venezuela’s economy is dominated by privately owned, profit-seeking firms. Rather, the current crisis is due to Venezuela’s over-reliance on oil exports to finance its imports from the rest of the world, as well as the dominance of the US dollar in world trade, which makes it an imperative for Venezuela to acquire dollars in order to pay for its imports. If Maduro attempted to convert Venezuela into a planned economy, the crisis would be made even worse. The United States and other Western countries would almost certainly place a full oil embargo on Venezuela, thereby starving it of almost all its oil income. Venezuela would then have to undergo a painful process of becoming economically self-reliant, which would inevitably make Venezuela a much poorer country than it currently is.

The future of Venezuela

In reality, the question is not if, but when a US-backed regime takes power in Venezuela. At this point, it is unclear whether Maduro will be able to maintain his control over the country for the rest of his six-year term, or whether the military will place Guaidó in power. If Maduro does remain in power, the economic situation will continue to get worse. Eventually, Maduro will either be voted out in another election, or the military will force him out once the crisis becomes severe enough. At that point, a US-backed government will come to power. It will make major cuts to public services, and will likely change the official currency to the US dollar.

These events will bring stability, but they will also cause major suffering for the poor and working people of Venezuela. The hope is that, after these things come to pass, the Left will again be able to come to power, this time equipped with the hard-won experience of the past 20 years. This new Left government would not make the same mistakes as Chávez or Maduro. It would understand the vital importance of diversifying Venezuela’s economy, so that it is no longer dependent on the whims of international oil markets to stay afloat. And it would usher in an era of rapid economic growth and shared prosperity for all Venezuelans.

While my short-term predictions are pessimistic, this does not mean that there is nothing we can do to help the Venezuelan people. The Left should argue forcefully against US sanctions and military intervention into Venezuela, which will only make the current dire situation even worse. We should advocate for democratic norms and the rule of law, which have been greatly eroded under Maduro’s administration. The people of Venezuela must be able to choose their own leaders in free and fair elections, where all political parties are allowed to participate. And most importantly, the Left must work harder than ever to elect socialist candidates to Congress who can change US foreign policy toward developing countries like Venezuela. The United States could use its economic might to help poor countries through the process of diversifying and developing their economies, rather than simply leaving them on their own. Without a more compassionate US foreign policy, our international comrades will be severely constrained in their ability to pursue a left-wing agenda in their own countries. It’s time that the American Left took this responsibility seriously.

Elizabeth Warren Doesn’t Deserve Your Vote

On December 31, 2018March 23, 2019 By Nora BelroseIn Current Events1 Comment

Today, Elizabeth Warren announced that she will be forming an exploratory committee to consider a presidential run in 2020. That means she’s almost certainly running for president.

Certain progressive groups are celebrating Warren’s announcement, hailing her as a champion of “bold, inclusive populist ideas.” Even many committed Bernie Sanders supporters view the announcement as a positive development, since it guarantees that at least one progressive candidate will be in the race.

Warren’s Problematic Past

It’s true that Elizabeth Warren has worked hard in the last few years to cultivate a reputation for being a strong progressive leader, in the same vein as Senator Bernie Sanders. But if we look underneath her populist façade, we will find that her basic political philosophy profoundly neoliberal and committed to free market capitalism.

The most striking evidence of this is the fact that Warren spent much of her adult life as a member of the Republican Party. When asked about this in 2011, she explained:

“I was a Republican because I thought that those were the people who best supported markets. I think that is not true anymore,” Warren said. “I was a Republican at a time when I felt like there was a problem that the markets were under a lot more strain. It worried me whether or not the government played too activist a role.”

In these telling remarks, Warren makes it clear that her most fundamental political commitment is the protection of free markets and private property. In fact, her reasoning for becoming a Democrat in 1995 was that Reagan’s neoliberal agenda had actually undermined markets, rather than protecting them. She apparently failed to realize the tremendous harm that Reagan’s policies were inflicting on workers, the environment, and the poor while Reagan was in office. Indeed, when she was asked whether she voted for Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984, she declined to comment.

Warren’s deep, enduring commitment to capitalism is the common thread that connects her early days as a Reaganite Republican with her liberal progressivism today. In a recent interview, she reaffirmed her support for free markets, declaring that she is “capitalist to the bone.” This is a fundamentally right-wing and neoliberal perspective, because it prioritizes markets and private property over human needs. No progressive, let alone democratic socialist, should support a candidate with views like this.

Elizabeth Warren’s long history of conservatism stands in stark contrast to Bernie Sanders’s record. Senator Sanders has been an outspoken socialist for over 50 years. As a student at the University of Chicago, Sanders was a member of the youth wing of the Socialist Party USA, and was deeply involved civil rights activism throughout the 1960s. In the 1970s, he ran for office on the Liberty Union Party ballot line multiple times, championing socialist and anti-war causes. In 1981 he was elected mayor of Burlington, Vermont as an open socialist, and spent the rest of the decade battling developer interests in the city and building affordable housing. As a US Representative in the 1990s and early 2000s, he consistently opposed Bill Clinton’s right-wing policies, and was an early opponent of the Iraq War and the Patriot Act.

An Unreliable Progressive

Since Warren joined the Democratic Party in the 1990s, she has been a very unreliable supporter of progressive causes. During her 2012 campaign for the US Senate, she refused to endorse Medicare for All— a shortcoming for which her primary challenger, Marisa DeFranco, criticized her on numerous occasions. When she was asked about her views on Medicare for All in June 2012, she explained:

“I think right now what we have to do — I’m serious about this — I think you’ve got to stay with what’s possible. And I think what we’re doing – and look at the dust-up around this – we really need to consolidate our gains around what we’ve got on the table [the Affordable Care Act].”

This quote is very telling about her overall political philosophy: Warren is an unwavering pragmatist, focused on incremental improvements to existing institutions, rather than radical change. In this respect, Elizabeth Warren is much closer to Hillary Clinton than to Bernie Sanders.

It wasn’t until 2017, after Bernie’s presidential campaign popularized Medicare for All, that Warren publicly endorsed the idea. Even today, it’s not clear how committed she is to the principle of publicly provisioned healthcare for all Americans. She has repeatedly proposed halfway measures that would actually expand the subsidized private health insurance market that Obamacare created. Her commitment to pragmatism means that a Warren administration would, at most, carry out a modest expansion of the Affordable Care Act’s programs. Like Obama, Warren would likely weaken her bargaining position from the outset by conceding the “political unacceptability” of Medicare for All, and instead advocate for more subsidies and tougher regulations on private insurers.

Tellingly, Senator Warren refused to endorse Bernie Sanders during the 2016 Democratic primaries, instead assuming a position of “neutrality.” Presumably Warren was concerned about maintaining her strong relationship with the establishment wing of the party. But the 2016 primaries were not a contest that any principled progressive could sit out. It was the most high-profile struggle yet between the two major wings of the Democratic Party: the neoliberal establishment wing, and the insurgent, social democratic wing. If Warren had endorsed Sanders, it likely would have tipped the scales in his favor during the Massachusetts primary, which he ended up losing by just 1.4 points. Warren’s cowardice during the historic 2016 primary race is simply inexcusable.

Warren Would Lose to Trump

Furthermore, we have good reason to believe that if Elizabeth Warren were to win the Democratic nomination for president in 2020, she would likely lose the general election to Donald Trump. At the very least, she would be much less competitive against Trump than other potential Democratic nominees, especially Senator Bernie Sanders.

She underperformed in her home state

One sign of Warren’s poor electability is her weak performance in her re-election campaign for the US Senate. In November, Elizabeth Warren won re-election by 24 points. That may sound like a lot, until you realize that Hillary Clinton managed to win Massachusetts by 27 points in 2016— a much less favorable year for Democrats overall. In fact, Harry Enten from FiveThirtyEight has shown that Warren was one of the worst performing Democratic Senate candidates of 2018. When taking into account the demographics and overall partisanship of Massachusetts, her vote share was 7 points lower than what would be expected from a generic Democratic candidate.

One potential reason for Warren’s weak performance in her re-election campaign is the massive public relations blunder that she made in October, when she released the results of a DNA test that supposedly proved that she has some Native American heritage. Native leaders quickly denounced this PR stunt, pointing out that DNA is irrelevant to the legal and cultural criteria for Native American heritage that are accepted by all Native tribes in the United States.

She’s unpopular

Warren’s cynical ploy to gain media attention and recognition for her alleged Native identity clearly backfired on her. A recent Politico/Morning Consult poll found that just 30% of voters view Warren favorably, while 38% view her unfavorably.

It seems that Americans like Warren less, the more they get to know her. Back in August 2017, a Gallup poll found that 34% of voters viewed Warren favorably, compared to 31% viewing her unfavorably. In other words, Elizabeth Warren’s net favorability rating has gone down by 11 points in just over a year. This is a terrible sign for Warren’s general election prospects, if she were to win the nomination in 2020.

Compare these dismal poll numbers with those of Senator Bernie Sanders. Gallup has found that 53% of voters view him favorably, compared to 38% viewing him unfavorably. These numbers have stayed quite stable since September of 2016:

Senator Sanders’s 15% net favorability rating should speak for itself. Sanders enjoys a much broader appeal than Warren does, especially among those independent voters that we need to win over in order to have any chance of defeating Trump in 2020. Among independents, Sanders has a 54% favorability rating, compared to a dismal 22% for Warren (see here, pg. 351). Given these numbers, nominating Elizabeth Warren would be suicidal.

She’s a spoiler candidate

In short, progressives and socialists should not be happy about Elizabeth Warren’s candidacy. Elizabeth Warren has been sliding in recent polling among likely Democratic primary voters, and she’s not likely to get very far, but it’s important that she drops out of the race as quickly as possible. A prolonged Warren primary campaign would pull valuable funds, volunteers, and votes from Bernie Sanders, effectively splitting the progressive wing of the party and benefiting the more explicitly establishment candidates, like Joe Biden.

The 2020 elections offer a historic opportunity to make an avowed democratic socialist president of the United States. Urgent social democratic programs, like Medicare for All, free college tuition, and a Green New Deal would have a real chance of being enacted under a Sanders administration. By entering the Democratic primary race, Elizabeth Warren is getting in the way of all of this. She simply does not deserve your vote.