Sanders and the Theory of Change: Radical Politics for Grown-Ups
This is an excellent article.
Krugman's mistake is very basic. He's wrong about the Sanders campaign's theory of change. It isn't that a high-minded leader can draw out our best selves and translate those into more humane and egalitarian lawmaking. It is that a campaign for a more equal and secure economy and a stronger democracy can build power, in networks of activists and alliances across constituencies. The movement that the campaign helps to create can develop and give voice to a program that the same people will keep working for, in and out of election cycles. In other words, this is a campaign about political ideas and programs that happens to have a person named Bernie at its head, not a campaign that mistakes its candidate for a prophet or a wizard (or the second coming of Abraham Lincoln, who gave us the now-cliché phrase about better angels, but had no delusion that words could substitute for power).
The campaign whose loyalists made this idealistic mistake was, of course, Obama's 2008 run. The candidate spoke so charismatically, and seemed so much to embody a vision of realigned, common-sense, fresh-feeling progressivism, that some of us did imagine he could recast American political loyalties. Back then, Krugman was accusing Obama's supporters of spewing "bitterness" and "venom" and coming "dangerously close to a cult of personality." Now he's pleased that President Obama, unlike Candidate Obama, has governed rather like a Clinton: pragmatically, with the hand he was dealt. He seems to think that supporting Sanders's "purist" positions means "prefer[ing] happy dreams to hard thinking about means and ends." And so, he wants us to think, if we are going to be political grownups, we had better put away childish things. Like talk of truly universal health care (his only example of Sanders's alleged extremism) or, probably, the term "socialism," whose revival is baffling pundits everywhere.
These movements were sources of ideas, and also of power. Why did all those enemies and reluctant allies end up meeting Roosevelt halfway? The answer was not not his pragmatic attitude. The reason that even some who hated him had to compromise with Roosevelt or give way was the political force he could marshal. His theory of change was no more about compromise than it was about high-minded words: It was about power. Compromise was a side-effect, a tactic at most.
And, while F.D.R. was willing to compromise, he was also willing to draw hard lines, calling out "economic royalists" and saying of his enemies, "They are unanimous in their hate for me -- and I welcome their hatred."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jedediah-purdy/sanders-and-the-theory-of_b_9057570.html
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