I have to admit that I’m always gratified when I read something by someone who is basically saying the same things I’m saying, and sometimes I feel the need to pass these things along, for after all, if they are saying what I’m saying, they must be spouting profound thoughts indeed.
Today, I point the reader to this piece in Consortium News, the entirety of which is worth reading. Just a few of the points I’ve made that are echoed there:
- The media will, once they suspect Bernie may win, start comparing him to Donald Trump, despite the fact that his proposals are not at all radical. He will be accused as being as far left as the Republicans are to the right, i.e., equidistant from the mythical center, which the media keeps redefining.
- If you want to achieve something worthwhile, you have to push for it. You don’t get the full loaf if you make it clear you’ll settle for the crust.
A few out takes:
Elite media often blur distinctions between right-wing populism and progressive populism — as though there’s not all that much difference between appealing to xenophobia and racism on the one hand and appealing for social justice and humanistic solidarity on the other. Many journalists can’t resist lumping Trump and Sanders together as rabble-rousing outliers.
…
[David] Brooks warned that his current nightmare for the nation is in triplicate — President Trump, President Cruz or President Sanders. For Brooks, all three contenders appear to be about equally awful; Trump is “one of the most loathed men in American public life,” while “America has never elected a candidate maximally extreme from the political center, the way Sanders and Cruz are.”
That “political center” of power sustains huge income inequality, perpetual war, scant action on climate change and reflexive support for the latest unhinged escalation of the nuclear arms race. In other words, what C. Wright Mills called “crackpot realism.”
Meanwhile, liberal Times columnist Paul Krugman (whose idea of a good political time is Hillary Clinton) keeps propounding a stand-on-head formula for social change — a kind of trickle-down theory of political power, in which “happy dreams” must yield to “hard thinking,” a euphemism for crackpot realism.
An excellent rejoinder has come from former Labor Secretary Robert Reich. “Krugman doesn’t get it,” Reich wrote. “I’ve been in and around Washington for almost fifty years, including a stint in the cabinet, and I’ve learned that real change happens only when a substantial share of the American public is mobilized, organized, energized, and determined to make it happen.”
And Reich added: “Political ‘pragmatism’ may require accepting ‘half loaves’ — but the full loaf has to be large and bold enough in the first place to make the half loaf meaningful. That’s why the movement must aim high — toward a single-payer universal health, free public higher education, and busting up the biggest banks, for example.”
…
The momentum of the Sanders campaign will soon provoke a lot more corporate media attacks along the lines of a Chicago Tribune editorial that appeared in print on Monday. The newspaper editorialized that nomination of Trump, Cruz or Sanders “could be politically disastrous,” and it declared: “Wise heads in both parties are verging on panic.”
Well, of course anyone who takes David Brooks seriously is an ass, but there are a lot of asses out there. Krugman’s a different story, but recall that in 2008 too, he was in the “No, we can’t” school of thought as well.
Anyway, the fact that Norman Solomon, the author of the piece quoted, agrees with me doesn’t mean I’m right. But I am, and so is he.
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