Sanders, Warren, ‘18 questions’ and the Democratic debates

A couple of crowded stages

The New York Times has been considerably less inane than usual lately, what with an article on modern Russian gæopolitics that was mostly not deliberately misleading (and even, on occasion, even insightful – a low bar, I know, but those are the expectations the Grey Lady sets for the informed reader). But they also published a series of eighteen interview questions with twenty-one different Democratic candidates which was surprisingly illuminating with regard, not only to the policy positions and values of each of the different candidates, but also to their weak spots and general approaches to procedure and problem solving.

The New York Times interview sheet is interesting and illuminating. It is not, however, perfect. Six of the questions (about personal heroes, sleeping habits, relaxation, comfort food, family history, last embarrassment) – a full third of the interview sheet – are softballs: irrelevancies that can be safely ignored by those of us who care about issues and who want to get accountable answers from the candidates on topics of pressing national and international importance. Two more (on gun control and the death penalty) are ‘red meat’ questions that, even though they do speak to important policy areas, essentially determine party loyalty and responsiveness to certain interest groups in the party ‘base’. Three further (international first visits, Supreme Court expansion, crimes of sitting president) are ‘cocktail party’ questions: politics-nerd questions that reveal something of the personality and decision-making process of the candidate, but have little broader relevance to the body politic. That leaves seven questions which I consider salient and pressing. (Surprise, surprise: they all have to do with foreign policy and œconomics!) These are the questions concerning health care; climate change; Israel and human rights; troops in Afghanistan; undocumented immigration; tech monopolies and wealth inequality.

First, full disclosure: even though I’m a third-party man both by temperament and persuasion – and, in fact, because I am such – I have a clear favourite in the race. Despite my fervent and deeply-held disagreements with Sanders on issues of reproductive and cultural politics, I do believe that the direction he portends in American politics may be our last chance to staunch the tide and exorcise the spectre of an inequality- and imperial overreach-fuelled political collapse and bloody revolution-cum-civil war in which I distinctly suspect I will have no friendly party or ‘side’. My motivations for supporting Sanders are, in a word, conservative. (I admit gladly that I also have a decided weakness for a certain Sāmoan servicewoman and representative from Hawai’i, but a bit more on Major Gabbard later.) I therefore have no compunction whatsoever about being ‘objective’ or ‘fair’ or ‘balanced’ – I am none.

The point of interrogating these seven questions and the candidates’ response to them, then, is to acknowledge the strengths of the various candidates and to offer a pro-Sanders strategic angle. It’s also a chance to showcase the significant and qualitative differences between the Sanders campaign and the Warren campaign on foreign policy, œconomics and the climate crisis, as well as talk smack on the main run of the Democratic candidates (and mainstream American liberalism generally – and I’m not going to pretend that’s not fun) and offer thoughts about surprises in the interview questions both pleasant and unpleasant.

Before I get too far into ragging on her international and œconomic views, let me first acknowledge that Warren had some strong and well-thought positions on a number of the important issues. Warren’s pushback against Blob-thinking in Afghanistan and insistence on drawing down our troop levels there were more than welcome. And particularly to be appreciated was her out front-and-centre presence and moral instinct on the question of Silicon Valley monopolies and intrusions of technological megacorporations into every facet of our lives. But on too many of these issues, Warren simply doesn’t bring that same degree of moral imagination, and is caught up in technocratic tinkers and a notional tic that American capitalism is merely off-keel and throwing out incidental errors, rather than functioning exactly as designed and in need of disruption and replacement. This fundamentally-liberal œconomic conviction bleeds over into her foreign-policy priorities and even her approach to climate change.

So let’s get down to the brass tacks.

1. Health care. Here, there is a clear division. On the one hand, you have the candidates who embrace ‘Medicare for All’ as a tangible and achievable standard, free for the patient at the point of care, modelled on an existing and highly successful state benefit for veterans and the elderly and aspiring to the standard achieved by the various successful health care programmes implemented in the European constitutional monarchies and post-Soviet Eastern and Central European states. These are: Sanders, Gabbard, Gillibrand, Yang and (in a rather pleasant surprise) Castro.
   
   On the other side, you have everybody else. Some of the candidates – including Warren, Harris, Klobuchar, Booker, Buttigieg and Williamson – borrow the rhetoric of Medicare for All, but dial it way down with weasel-wording around ‘access’, ‘affordability’ and ‘choice’ (including Buttigieg’s smarmy tagline of ‘Medicare for All Who Want It’), or else point to gradualism, ‘public options’ (which, remember, was the Obama-era compromise position that he ended up punting to the Republican senators who predictably killed it and didn’t vote for the final bill anyway) or ‘different paths’, to use Warren’s evasive phrasing. Some of the candidates – like Delaney, Bullock, Moulton and Hickenlooper – are practically indistinguishable from the right-liberal Republican position, insisting that ‘the insurance company stays; and the patient pays’.
   
   
2. Climate change. Every single one of the Democratic candidates thinks climate change is a pressing issue; this is not a surprise. However, clearly some of the candidates have a more reactive approach than others (Inslee being particularly active; and others like Harris being primarily reactive). It’s unfortunate to observe that most of the candidates are reactive in their basic stance on climate change, using Obama- and even Bush-era language to describe the problem rather than the most recent scientific findings and stressing shifts toward renewable energy sources, energy independence and Paris Accords targets which frankly should have happened fifteen years ago. The question of global scope also comes into the question. Sanders, Gabbard and Yang all stress that scope, and underscore the realistic position that any effort against climate change has to be a truly global effort which engages our diplomatic assets rather than merely our technological and commercial ones.
   
   Others, like Warren, Buttigieg, O’Rourke, Bennet and Ryan, have a tack which dually emphasises private-sector investment and American national leadership. This is particularly indicative of the whole approach to both œconomics and foreign policy evinced by these candidates, and the identification of American values with big business-friendly capitalism and an expansive idealistic account of the national interest. But I will get to that a bit more below.
   
   An unfortunate verbal tic which some of the candidates (I think O’Rourke initiated it, but Gillibrand also uses this language) have is describing the American response to the climate crisis as a ‘moon shot’. I say ‘unfortunate’ because both the rhetorical strategy and the analogy it rides on are reactive. The limitations of the analogy should be obvious: the American space programme was motivated – at least from a public sector standpoint – almost completely by a gæopolitical conflict and competition with the Soviet Union, and specifically to the 1957 launch of Sputnik. Also, America basically abandoned the manned space exploration missions after the Challenger disaster – and more broadly after the collapse of the Soviet Union when it no longer had a challenger to its global hegemony and superpower status. But even the rhetorical strategy of the ‘moon shot’ is flawed, as it attempts to hearken back to past national glory and a fabric of civic engagement, republican spirit and national solidarity (assumed and taken as read by Jack Kennedy) which – if it exists anymore – is badly tattered and fractured. For a ‘moon shot’ to be possible on global warming, this civic solidarity needs to be rebuilt on a surer footing, and that requires serious discussions of wealth inequities and low levels of overall social trust. For obvious reasons, one hopes the effort to undertake action on greenhouse gas emissions doesn’t take place under similar auspices, for similar reasons, and meet a similar fate as the Space Race.
   
   
3. Israel and human rights. Here again, the bulk of the Democratic pack is talking out of both sides of their collective mouths, recycling outdated bromides about a ‘two-state solution’ and finger-wagging to various unconvincing degrees at Netanyahu and Trump while also affirming a special relationship to and alliance with Israel that doesn’t and can’t hold them accountable. Warren is actually rather representative in this regard as she brazenly adopts the Zionist talking point of Israel as in a ‘tough neighbourhood’ and the ‘sole liberal democracy in the region’ (even if you don’t like Syria’s government, uh… Tunisia, madam? Cyprus? Lebanon right next door?). The only correct thing she says is that ‘the current situation is not tenable’, which is, to be quite frank, nerf-tier commentary.
   
   Sanders, though he adopts a cautious and neutral tone, nonetheless truly is striving after the promise of being a neutral and honest broker between the two parties. It’s an interesting phenomenon that the sole Jew on the stage appears to be the one most willing to consider the Palestinians as people with valid collective sovereignty and security concerns. He actually talks about the plight of the Palestinians as if it matters and as if they deserve to be considered on an equal footing with the Israeli state. (Could his answer have been better? Sure. I didn’t think the ‘entities’ language particularly well-chosen.) It is interesting to see both Swalwell (with direct swipes at Netanyahu and Kushner) and Williamson take steps in this direction as well; and I don’t appreciate that Gabbard needs to be pushed to give a non-canned answer.
   
   
4. Afghanistan. Here is Gabbard’s chance to shine, and she does – with an answer that is bold, direct and filled with moral gravitas. This is very much her issue. Together with Warren and Sanders (and, surprisingly, Gillibrand), she uses the question to issue a broadside against Blob foreign policy and the ‘forever war’ of which our Afghanistan quagmire has been emblematic. Gillibrand in particular wants to take the opportunity to assert the Constitutional privileges of Congress over-against executive branch overreach on questions of war and peace – a rare holdover of her Blue Dog days which I actually appreciate. It is very interesting to see the pressure on a certain contingent of the Democratic presidential candidates to draw down our troop presence: not just Booker but also the Heartland Democrats – O’Rourke, Bullock, Bennet and even Klobuchar – who seem to have gotten the memo that the ‘Forever War’ is a losing issue among their home-field constituencies, and that the principled non-interventionist Dems will use it to hit them where they live. The rest of the Democratic lineup – including, sadly, Yang – hedge or punt on the question.
   
   
5. Immigration. As expected, here is where Castro has some advantage and authenticity, just as Gabbard does on foreign affairs. He speaks with passion, moral urgency and a real sense of love. For the constituencies on the left which genuinely care about this issue, Castro’s message will resonate with particular strength. Full disclosure: this is an issue where I tend to swing to the centre. Immigration is not a straightforward issue, and even though I don’t hold any particular animus against undocumented folks – I understand personally, all too well, how prohibitively difficult our immigration system and process for legal permanent residency is – and even though I am convinced that the border abuses and the camps have to end for merely humanitarian reasons, I still have to take consideration of the possible œconomic and political ramifications the way Hickenlooper does. (Random moment of Zen: I suspect Tim Ryan has been watching too much Pirates of the Caribbean recently.)
   
   
6. Tech monopolies. Here again, unsurprisingly, out in the lead by far on the question of not only actually enforcing anti-trust legislation already on the books but also asking the deep-reaching moral and humanistic questions about our relationship to an out-of-control and unaccountable technological progress, are Gabbard, Sanders and Warren (the last of whom seems to have made this one of her signature issues). The key difference among those in favour of breaking up the tech giants seems to be among those who seem to believe that a lack of competition among businesses is the most salient problem – this is Warren’s stance, along with, say, Klobuchar’s, Williamson’s and Bullock’s – and those like Gabbard and Sanders (and even more moderate Democrats like Buttigieg) who understand the relevant problem as one of real imbalances of power which manifest in invasions of privacy, abrogation of civil liberties, even the arrogation of quasi-governmental authority.
   
   Even though they come to similar conclusions, there is a Whig logic that seems to undergird the former, and a Tory logic that undergirds the latter. Intriguingly, as our technological landscape renders our œconomy more similar to the olden days of joint-stock corporations with quasi-state powers, the political questions we seem to be asking in how we navigate that landscape are coming around full circle to the seventeenth-century British political divide between the representatives of the modern Silicon Valley gentry and the representatives of the older civil bureaucracy.
   
   
7. Wealth inequality. On Sanders’s signature issue – the sheer fact of the wealth gap, the oligarchy and its effect on the civil fabric – it almost seems in this interview like he’s tired of answering the question. Half a million people on the streets; half the country living paycheck-to-paycheck; huge loopholes and unfair regulations that allow top shareholders and executives of sprawling multinationals to reap tremendous fortunes by exploiting the labour of the poorest people both at home and abroad. Sanders rather litotically intimates that in a tax system and œconomy that operates on the principles of the Gospel of Saint Luke (my interpretation, not his), ‘my guess is… that you’re not going to have very many billionaires left’. Gillibrand is (again, surprisingly) even more straightforward: ‘no one deserves a billion dollars.’
   
   Which makes it rather appalling that so many of the mainstream run of Democratic candidates (Harris, Swalwell, Moulton, Klobuchar, Williamson, Hickenlooper, Delaney, de Blasio, Castro, Yang, even – sadly – Gabbard) seem to believe and promote the idea that hard work, and not ruthless and cynical mercantile appropriation of value created by the majority of the country’s – nay, the world’s – people, is what creates oligarchs.

As we can see from the interconnected answers given to these seven questions, we see forming two worldviews that are on the surface quite similar (and which produce similar answers from Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren on climate change and tech monopolies, for example), but that are moored at bottom by very different sets of underlying values and a priori political assumptions. One sees this clearly in their respective positions on foreign policy. Although they hit many of the same talking points – including control of foreign policy by big business, the inertia that sustains the ‘Forever War’, the ballooning military budget, the overreach of American military bases, and also (unfortunately) the existence of opposing ‘democratic’ (America) and ‘antidemocratic’ (China, Russia) blocs in gæopolitics – there is a definite qualitative difference between the two perspectives in that Sanders emphasises coöperation and multipolar alliances-of-necessity on tough global issues while Warren emphasises competition and American leadership if not dominance.

This ties directly into their contrasting attitudes on how to combat climate change; and the key underlying factor is in their basic œconomic thought process. The debates on the left over whether Sanders is actually a social democrat or a democratic socialist (or the degree to which he is or isn’t influenced by Karl Marx) are in some ways illuminating, but for practical purposes they are not instructive. I still think 15 was a softball question and I still don’t know quite what to make of the Colin Woodard thesis, but there’s something to be said here. Sanders is a first-generation New Netherlander whose parents come out of an intellectual milieu which distrusts primitive accumulation and libido dominandi. Warren, who zeroes in with such intense focus on issues like student debt and anticompetitive behaviours from tech companies, but doesn’t really articulate firm positions on questions of wealth inequality or health care, does not. She comes from an Appalachian Protestant frontier-mercantile tradition that thinks nothing is wrong with amassing wealth and power at others’ expense if at least all players start out with an equal-enough chance. That doesn’t necessarily translate in our current climate to her chances of electoral success in Appalachian and other swing states.

Something perhaps to think about a bit before the debates begin tonight.