I’m going to define the word “establishment” more broadly than just the Democratic Party establishment, though there is a historical problem there. I believe there is also an “establishment” media and an “establishment” intelligentsia who also have an anti-progressive bias.
Progressive Jesse Jackson had no Senatorial endorsements
It is well known that Senator Sanders has very little support from his co-workers in congress. The only leadership group that has supported him are from the Progressive Caucus, a group he helped start 25 years ago in 1991. But the history behind the need for a progressive caucus goes back to at least 1988. Sanders, though officially an Independent, supported whom he believed to be the progressive candidate among the Democrats: Jesse Jackson. (More discussion of that here.) In a 1988 endorsement of Jackson, Sanders noted that although Jackson had at that point garnered more popular votes than any other Democratic candidate, he still had zero endorsement from any Senator or Governor:
Bernie Sanders endorses Jesse Jackson, 1988
Party leader Bill Clinton repudiated what Jesse Jackson stood for. Moved Party to Center.
Corey Robin at Salon made this case already. So I will just quote from that piece:
It may be a generational thing—I was born in 1967—but this is what Hillary and Bill Clinton will always mean to me: Sister Souljah, Ricky Ray Rector, welfare reform, and the crime bill. And beyond—really, behind—all that, the desperate desire to win over white voters by declaring to the American electorate: We are not the Party of Jesse Jackson, we are not the Rainbow Coalition.
Many of the liberal journalists who are supporting Hillary Clinton’s candidacy are too young to remember what the Clintons did to American politics and the Democratic Party in the 1990s. But even journalists who are old enough seem to have forgotten just how much the Clintons’ national ascendancy was premised on the repudiation of black voters and black interests. This was a move that was both inspired and applauded by a small but influential group of Beltway journalists and party strategists, who believed making the Democrats a white middle-class party was the only path back to the White House after wandering for 12 years in the Republican wilderness.
….
….Clinton’s real target in his Sister Souljah speech was Jesse Jackson, who was blind-sided and humiliated by Clinton’s tirade as he sat next to Clinton on the dais.
History repeats itself. Progressive Senator gets no Senatorial endorsements in 2016. Democratic Primaries controlled by Clinton Loyalists whose neutrality is very questionable.
Among other things Debbie Wasserman Schultz limits debates and places them in questionable time slots. In Iowa, the state Democratic Party chair has a pro-Hillary license plate and the objectivity is questionable. (link) The top political commentator from Nevada, Jon Ralston, believes that Harry Reid pulled strings to help Hillary win.
In the middle of last week, Reid made a phone call, first reported by The New York Times’ Amy Chozick, to D. Taylor, the head of the parent of the Culinary Union local in Las Vegas. Before that call, the Culinary, facing difficult contract negotiations and seeing no advantage in enmeshing itself in a bloody internecine fight, had declared it was more Swiss than Hispanic. With the Culinary not endorsing and unwilling to even engage in the caucus, employee turnout at six casino sites on the Las Vegas Strip was forecast at a combined 100 or so. That is, insignificant.
….
But Reid did not stop there. He also called casino executives, sources confirm, with a simple message: “Let your people go.”
That is, he wanted to ensure the workers would be allowed time off from work to caucus. No one said no to Prince Harry.
It is a following paragraph by Ralston that captures the gist of what is happening. Even if they are officially neutral, many officials, Like Harry Reid, are afraid Bernie would be a disaster and use their power to work against him behind the scenes (likewise the behind the scenes efforts to smear Bernie’s Civil Rights record):
Despite their common public neutrality, Taylor and Reid surely believe, as do most Democratic power brokers, that a Sanders nomination would be a disaster. Reid knew that Taylor would get his swarms of organizers to turn out mostly Latino workers, who would likely vote for Clinton.
Never mind what the polls (link, link) are saying about Sanders being more electable. These establishment leaders think they know better. They HAVE to interfere, even if they are officially neutral, to stop Bernie Sanders. I’m not sure their motives are so clear. While it is logical to think they want to hold onto the presidency, pretty much all of these politicians have big money ties that may factor into their anti-Sanders mentality.
The Establishment media is anti-progressive
There are plenty of angle to criticize the “mainstream” media. They are always over-obsessed with the political horserace rather than the issues. This explains at least some of the media blackout of Bernie Sanders for months before he became a viable contender. All the big Sunday shows have panels that lean right of center or have an overabundance of Republican talking heads. The media is more interested in entertainment than news. It would rather cover a train wreck like Donald Trump than (supposedly) boring Bernie Sanders.
But there is also no doubt that all the big networks have corporate owners. (for example) These corporate owners have a vested interest in knocking down anyone who threatens the rich and powerful. And progressive Bernie Sanders does that more than anything else.
The Establishment Intelligentsia is anti-progressive
When your plans are detailed enough to be analyzed, and reasonable models produce certain outcomes, one would expect the intelligentsia to admit that reasonable models were used and maybe quibble over what is the best model. But that is not what has happened. Rather than admitting the reasonableness of models used by Friedman, “experts” panned the results, which basically just came from plugging numbers into an acceptable model. 5.3% growth was deemed outlandish, even without realizing that such growth has actually been achieved under other circumstances. (link)
So, let's first ask whether an economic growth rate, as projected, of 5.3 percent per year is, as you claim, “grandiose.” There are not many ambitious experiments in economic policy with which to compare it, so let's go back to the Reagan years. What was the actual average real growth rate in 1983, 1984, and 1985, following the enactment of the Reagan tax cuts in 1981? Just under 5.4 percent. That's a point of history, like it or not.
You write that “no credible economic research supports economic impacts of these magnitudes.” But how did Professor Friedman make his estimates? The answer is in his paper. What Professor Friedman did, was to use the standard impact assumptions and forecasting methods of the mainstream economists and institutions. For example, Professor Friedman starts with a fiscal multiplier of 1.25, and shades it down to the range of 0.8 by the mid 2020s. Is this “not credible”? If that's your claim, it's an indictment of the methods of (for instance) the CBO, the OMB, and the CEA.
When an assessment of Bernie’s health care plan was confirmed by two people (link) whom Ezra Klein previously praised as most insightful on cost savings, he still resorts to “puppies and rainbows” language instead of recognizing who these experts among the experts are. (link)
And the “progressive analyst” who came up with the “puppies and rainbows” line is Ezra Klein, who in mid-January wrote a harshly disparaging piece, “Bernie Sanders’s Single-Payer Plan Isn’t a Plan at All,” on the website he co-founded, Vox (1/17/16). How times change: As long-time FAIR contributor Seth Ackerman showed in an incisive analysis (Jacobin, 1/25/16), Klein was once a strong proponent of a single-payer scheme.
In a 2007 piece for the American Prospect (4/22/07), Klein explored what he called “the best healthcare systems in the world,” including Canada’s, looking for lessons for the US. (Krugman liked the piece enough to put it on a2012 syllabus for a Princeton class on the welfare state.) Klein’s conclusion, expressed in his opening sentence, was that while medicine is hard, health insurance is simple: We should emulate these other systems that achieve both universal coverage and cost control, like those of Canada, France, Germany and the UK. Though he now holds Sanders’ advocacy of single-payer in disdain, Klein specifically praised Canada’s single-payer system, citing a 2003 paper by Steffie Wooldhandler, Terry Campbell and David Himmelstein in the New England Journal of Medicine (8/21/03) that found that administrative costs were over three times as high in the US than in Canada, mainly because of the inefficiencies of private health insurance. Eliminate private insurance and you enjoy hundreds of billions in savings.
More interesting hijinks from Ezra et al here.
David Sirota traced the money trail and political connections trail. At least some of the experts have big money connections and/or direct connections to Hillary Clinton. Perhaps that explains at least some of the anti-progressive bias.
