Over my nearly 50 years of voting, I have consistently voted Democratic. But I do not consider myself a Democrat. Here’s why.
On several issues of paramount importance to me, there is little difference between the parties. Most discussion of the issues is based on assumptions with which nearly every politician of either party agrees. The establishment of both parties and of the mainstream media almost never questions these assumptions. This consensus stifles thorough and detailed public discussion about any number of important issues, among them climate change, foreign policy, racial justice, and our economic system. To address these and other issues effectively will require systemic change, but the establishment of neither party has any interest in such thorough change.
On climate change, while there is some discussion of particular issues, most mainstream politicians of both parties are unwilling to consider or even discuss the systemic changes necessary to create a genuinely sustainable economy. While most Democrats, including the President, believe that climate change is serious, they do not advocate policies commensurate to the disastrous threat. While President Obama has acted courageously in seeking to reduce carbon emissions, his policy of “all of the above” is simply not sustainable and his continued failure to address fracking and extractionist exploitation of public lands is disturbing. If we are to save future generations from catastrophe, we must begin to discuss and seriously consider far more thorough and even drastic solutions, including moratoria on drilling, fracking, logging, and mining on federal land, extensive investment in public transportation, a transfer of all carbon subsidies to development of sustainable energy, a tax on carbon, farm policies that favor small, local, natural farms over big ag, serious efforts to curb deforestation, and economic policies that favor small, local businesses over large national or international corporations.
The Washington establishment of both parties has favored a foreign policy that is aggressively imperialist. While they may differ over details, few mainstream politicians have questioned the assumptions that we must act as the world’s policeman, must protect our multi-national corporations from economic competition, and must maintain a military more powerful and expensive than the militaries of the nine or ten next most heavily armed nations combined. And so we have initiated or supported disastrous coups in such countries as Iran and Chile and Ukraine and have supported oppressively dictatorial regimes in such countries as Argentina and the Congo and Honduras. We have become involved in a series of unjustified and illegal wars in Vietnam, Somalia, the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya--wars that have in some cases destabilized whole regions, have killed hundreds of thousands if not millions of civilians, and have contributed to the refugee status of millions more. We have a national security apparatus that classifies countless billions of documents, that brutally silences whistleblowers, and that spies on its own people. We commit war crime after war crime without accountability. The bombing of MSF’s hospital in Kunduz is only the latest in a long string of war crimes, including, perhaps most notably, the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq. We are horrified lest Iran develop a nuclear weapon, but no one in the Washington establishment suggests that our repeatedly treating Iran as an enemy might contribute to their being an enemy or that we, the only country ever to use such a weapon, might consider reducing our arsenal of 7000 such weapons. And, as we all proclaim our opposition to terrorism, has anyone in Congress or the administration bothered to ask why we have chosen to ally ourselves with the three leading state sponsors of terrorism: Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Turkey? Or why, in a 2013 Gallup poll of 66,000 people in 66 countries asking which is the world’s most dangerous nation, the US was deemed most dangerous by far more respondants than any other country? Why would 24% of those people deem us most dangerous, three times as many people as considered second ranked Pakistan most dangerous, four times as many as considered third ranked China, and six times as many as Afghanistan or Iran?
While they may differ on specific policies, establishment politicians of neither party seem willing to question the monopoly capitalism that dominates our economy in virtually every sector. We have an economic system that values profits over people and the natural world and that is based on the exploitation of the powerless by the powerful. As Pope Francis has made clear, many of those who claim to be “Christians” among us are idolaters, actually worshipping money, not God. If an uninsured American becomes gravely ill and cannot afford the exorbitant cost large pharmaceutical companies demand for the drugs he/she needs, that’s collateral damage, an external cost not relevant to the success of the business. Similarly, the coal companies whose miners die of black lung or whose neighbors’ children die of asthma seem to regard those deaths as collateral damage, as economically irrelevant “external” costs. We allow the consolidation of businesses into monopolies and oligopolies, decreasing competition and increasing costs while decreasing quality and innovation. We allow our businesses to bury their profits in offshore deposits or to invest in stock buybacks rather than creating more jobs or to ship millions of jobs overseas where labor is cheaper. We sign trade deals that allow multi-national corporations essentially to dictate policy to governments through the threat of Investor State Dispute Settlement. We continue to privatize essential public services, allowing necessities such as water and waste management to be sold for a profit. Monopoly capitalism such as currently practiced in this country and much of the world has, quite simply, failed the people. But establishment politicians are not discussing the need for a more competitive, small business economy that values people over profit, an economy largely controlled by workers and by consumers.
Finally, while mainstream Democrats, unlike Republicans, have, thanks to the efforts of Black Lives Matter and of writers like Shaun King, shown serious concern about racist police practices, few if any have addressed the sheer pervasiveness of systemic racism in our country. Racism permeates virtually every facet of our society, including education, criminal justice, employment, housing, health care, toxic waste disposal, nutrition, lending, and financial systems. Yet beyond acknowledging and deploring the racist behavior of some police, mainstream politicians and pundits seem to pay little attention to widespread racial inequality.
Most of our politicians and mainstream media seem to assume that we can control climate disruption without systemic change or that a vigorous effort to address climate change will seriously damage our economy. They assume that we must always violently defend our economic interests and that doing so is in the best interest of the world at large. They assume that an economy based on profit and a so-called “free” market that is actually far from “free” will ultimately be best not only for our people, but for all the world. Finally, few if any appear to doubt that, except in the criminal justice system, we are a “post-racial society.” I am not suggesting that there is some sort of conspiracy to stifle discussion, just that the Washington establishment is so accustomed to these and other assumptions that it cannot see any sense in questioning them.
So I am not a Democrat. Georgia, the state I live in, does not require me to state a party affiliation to register, and so I have not. I believe this country desperately needs either a viable third party on the left that represents the interests of the people, not the moneyed few, or a profound and powerful leftward movement within the Democratic party. Those who currently hold most of the power in Washington seem to be seeking neither.
But then there is Bernie Sanders. He has recognized climate change as the single most serious challenge facing the world and has called for an all out effort to address it. Environmental organizations have ranked Sanders as the most or one of the most environmentally friendly members of Congress for years. While he is to the right of me on foreign policy, he expresses far less eagerness to take us into war than most of our other politicians and pundits. Unlike most of our politicians of both parties and most of our mainstream media, he consistently opposed both the first Gulf War and the invasion of Iraq, and he courageously voted against the Patriot Act. He has called not just for raising the minimum wage and cracking down on monopoly power, but for thorough economic reform, including increasing support for small, particularly worker and consumer owned, businesses. Unlike many other politicians of both parties, he has consistently opposed corporate-friendly trade deals like NAFTA and TPP. While he still has much to learn about racial inequality, he has long recognized the economic struggles many people of color face and has begun to recognize the need for police and judicial reform. He recently introduced a bill to end private, for-profit prisons, a small step, but at least a beginning of criminal justice reform.
But it’s not his specific proposals that cause Sanders to stand out from other politicians. It’s his recognition that the system simply isn’t working; that we need a revolution to rebuild it so that it works for the people, not just for corporations or the wealthy. No other politician in either party—at least none that I am aware of—has been so explicit in saying that the system is broken and cannot be fixed by minor policy changes, but requires thorough, systemic change. That so few if any other politicians have been willing to endorse him speaks volumes. They are a part of the establishment; he is anti-establishment. Consequently, he is able to speak and act more freely. I agree with his call for revolution, and so I support him. But whether or not he wins, his running has been a net good for the country because he is changing our national conversation and drawing attention to important, but seldom-discussed, issues.