It just might be that the nation's electoral dropouts have found a candidate they can believe in. If so, that changes everything.
Democratic Presidential Candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders visits Birmingham for a rally at Boutwell Auditorium Sunday January 18, 2016. So many supporters showed up that an overflow area was set up in Linn Park. Sanders took time to visit Sixteenth Street Baptist Church and the Civil Rights Institute. (Photo: Joe Songer/AI.com)
The normally perspicacious Paul Krugman wrote a column on Friday entitled “How Change Happens.”
The last paragraph sums up his argument nicely:
Sorry, but there’s nothing noble about seeing your values defeated because you preferred happy dreams to hard thinking about means and ends. Don’t let idealism veer into destructive self-indulgence.
Krugman seems to think that Sanders’ idealistic stands are “happy dreams” because change happens from the hard work of compromise and settling for half-loafs. As a result, he suggests that Hillary Clinton and her pragmatism are the “adult” approach and the strategy most likely to lead to change.
He urges Sanders’ supporters to ask themselves, “When has their theory of change ever worked?” Interestingly, he leaps immediately to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s transformative presidency and characterizes it as strictly on the side of the pragmatists and compromisers.
In a response published on the Huffington Post, Professor Jedediah Purdy points out the Dr. Krugman’s take on FDR’s presidency misinterprets how FDR accomplished change. As Purdy points out, compromise was a secondary tactic, usually conducted on FDR’s terms. The two primary factors that made FDR such an effective change agent were how he wielded power, and the fact that he created a movement, the source of his power. He didn’t rely on old alliances forged in history, he created new ones. Purdy’s rebuttal is spot on, but there’s a larger point to be made about change.
Real change, consequential change, is usually the result of Black Swans, “a metaphor that describes an event that comes as a surprise, has a major effect, and is often inappropriately rationalized after the fact with the benefit of hindsight.”
The theory was developed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb to explain:
- The disproportionate role of high-profile, hard-to-predict, and rare events that are beyond the realm of normal expectations in history, science, finance, and technology.
- The non-computability of the probability of the consequential rare events using scientific methods (owing to the very nature of small probabilities).
- The psychological biases that blind people, both individually and collectively, to uncertainty and to a rare event's massive role in historical affairs.
Krugman’s criticism echoes much of what you hear from pundits, the main stream media (MSM), and the political cognoscenti, and it is no surprise that they are missing the prospect of a Black Swan where the Sanders campaign is concerned. Let’s break down assumptions embraced by conventional wisdom.
Sanders can’t win...
Well, this is pretty easy. He’s winning. He’s ahead in Iowa, way ahead in New Hampshire, and rocketing up in the rest of the country. But because he’s not embracing the traditional PAC and money dominated strategy that is the mainstay of modern American politics, he’s dismissed as not “serious,” not “adult.”
Sanders isn’t electable...
This is one you hear frequently from the Hillary camp and the MSM. The idea here is that against Republicans, Sanders is doomed. Problem is, he beats leading Republicans by a wider margin than Hillary and she actually loses in some head-to-head races that Sanders wins.
Krugman suggests that will change in the heat of the campaign.
But the reality...Hillary is a sitting duck
The majority of voters don’t trust her. Worse, a review of the history of her favorability numbers shows they go down when she campaigns. At the moment it’s in negative territory and that would make her extremely vulnerable in a general election – certainly more so than Sanders, who gets stronger the longer he runs. Finally, Hillary’s lukewarm support all but guarantees a low voter turnout, something that proved fatal to Democrats in 2014, and likely would again. So, once again, conventional wisdom has it all wrong.
Please continue this article here: http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/01/24/what-mainstream-doesnt-get-about-bernie-sanders
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