This article promulgates a lie:
Sanders Urges Supporters: Ditch Identity Politics And Embrace The Working Class
By MATT SHUHAM, Talking Points Memo, November 21, 2016
What Bernie Sanders actually said (see 0:39:20-0:43:10):
[Speech excerpt transcript below]
Let’s be clear: Sanders explicitly said we need far more diversity in our elected officials. He also said that is a completely insufficient condition: we need candidates who advocate for an economy that works for people over corporations. To put it another (perhaps stark) way, if the Democratic Party were to become a “rainbow coalition” of corporatists, that’s a politics we should oppose.
Through this election, I think the leaders of the Democratic Party eschewed economic populism because if party leaders were to articulate a cohesive message of solidarity and collective moral responsibility across all policy areas, that message would necessarily be rooted in socialist concepts. We would start to expect our political leadership to speak and act on that basis. It would mean taking wealth and power away from the owners of international corporations and back for ourselves. It would mean undermining the intellectual framework of global exploitative capitalism. And that those Democratic leaders will not stand for. In fact, they’d rather lose than win on an ideologically moral people-over-corporations economic message. So, we lost.
Hence our fight within the Democratic Party today in favor of the Keith Ellisons and Elizabeth Warrens (wait, is that identity politics?) and against the Cory Bookers and Chuck Schumers of the party.
Look, I think it is a fair criticism of Sanders that he is too quick to turn from social justice questions to economic prescriptions and that he hasn’t sufficiently explained how they relate. I would love for politicians like him to get explicit about how, for example, chain stores extract wealth from communities as if they were colonies and about how they destroy economic sovereignty (of everyone, but especially of low-income and minority neighborhoods) via the squelching of people’s ability to run local, independent businesses. And then there is the dynamic that conditions of economic decline exacerbate ethnic hatreds. But for anyone who thinks that Sanders suggests we somehow neglect civil rights and social justice of specific groups of people within our society in the pursuit of economic fairness, please listen to what he actually has to say and learn about his life’s work, and please consider what Martin Luther King, Jr. thought about the interdependence of those vital matters with economics:
King argued in one of his last sermons, “If a man doesn’t have a job or an income, he has neither life nor liberty nor the possibility for the pursuit of happiness. He merely exists.”
The solution, he believed, was to “confront the power structure massively.”
Transcript of the part of the speech most pertinent to what the TPM article addressed, actually a response to an audience member’s question:
It goes without saying that as we fight to end all forms of discrimination, as we fight to bring more and more women into the political process, Latinos, African Americans, Native Americans… All of that is enormously important, and count me in as somebody who wants to see that happen. But it is not good enough for somebody to say, “Hey, I’m a Latina, vote for me.” That is not good enough. I have to know whether that Latina is going to stand up with the working class of this country and is going to take on big money interests.
Now one of the problems, one of the struggles that we’re going to have, right now—lay on the table of the Democratic Party—is it’s not good enough to me to say, “Okay, well, we’ve got X number of African-Americans over here, we’ve got Y number of Latinos, we have Z number of women. We are a diverse party, a diverse nation.” Not good enough. We need that diversity, that goes without saying. That is accepted. Right now, we’ve made some progress getting women into politics; I think we’ve got twenty women in the Senate now. We need fifty women in the Senate. We need more African Americans. But, but, here is my point, and this is where there is going to be division within the Democratic Party. It is not good enough for someone to say, “I’m a woman. Vote for me!” No, that’s not good enough. What we need is a woman who has the guts to stand up to Wall Street, to the insurance companies, to the drug companies, to the fossil fuel industry.
In other words, one of the struggles that you’re going to be seeing in the Democratic Party is whether we go beyond “identity politics.” I think it’s a step forward in America if you have an African-American head or CEO of some major corporation. But do you know what? If that guy is going to be shipping jobs out of this country and exploiting his workers, doesn’t mean a whole hell of a lot if he’s black or white or Latino.
And I know some people may not agree with me, but that is the fight that we’re going to have right now within the Democratic Party. The working class of this country is being decimated. That’s why Donald Trump won. And what we need now are candidates who stand with those working people, who understand that real median family income has gone down, that young people in many parts of this country have a very limited future, that life expectancy for many workers is going down. People can’t afford healthcare, can’t afford their medicine, can’t afford to send their kids to college. We need candidates—black and white and Latino and gay and male—we need all that. But we need all of those candidates and public officials to have the guts to stand up to the oligarchy. That is the fight of today.
Thanks to Kyle Clauss of Boston Magazine for the initial transcript segment.
See also:
No, Bernie Sanders didn’t ask his supporters to “ditch” identity politics.
Clio Chang, New Republic, Nov. 21, 2016
Tuesday, Nov 22, 2016 · 5:35:41 PM +00:00 · Simplify
It is important to add that the way Sanders responded to one female person of color’s question was indeed dismissive and somewhat counterproductive. Was the person who asked the question encouraged or discouraged by the answer? It would have been more persuasive had he shown more empathy and—yes—less of a privileged perspective. It’s something he partly addressed in places in the rest of his remarks, but the omission within this particular segment was unfortunate.