Watching the debate, I kept coming back to this thought: The movement in American politics that Bernie’s 2016 campaign was part of, has come to define the Democratic party.
Democratic candidates and politicians are asked to place themselves in relation to it, and in response to it. It was openly called a battle for the “soul of the Democratic party” by one participant.
Yet it didn’t feel like much of a battle.
Virtually all the candidates used Bernie’s preferred phrasing of “working people”, a language drawn directly from generations of labor organizing. The language of Democratic Socialism. In prior cycles, candidates have favored the “middle class” construction.
Most candidates echoed the diagnosis of our economy that Bernie had. Those with money and power are doing better and better, and those without are doing worse. They talked about the 1% and 99% (terms OWS made common). Numerous candidates sought to explain how our system is used and abused by millionaires and billionaires, but most lacked the rhetorical punch of Bernie’s “rigged system”, or the courage to say it.
Bucking the trend was candidate Delaney (sp?), who believes only in “real solutions”, and not “impossible dreams”. “Impossible dreams” like universal healthcare which every other major country has turned into reality.
Most candidates adopted the language of “human rights” when discussing health care, with respect to immigrants and emphatically with respect to the interactions between police and black Americans. Virtually every candidate on the stage talked about raising the minimum wage. They all had to grapple with funding college for young people. Virtually all offered full-throated defenses of the right to abortion, without equivocating.
When asked, most candidates said they wanted to rein in the trend of the imperial presidency and wanted Congress to re-assert its exclusive constitutional power to declare war.
Most significantly, several candidates on the stage said they needed people to mobilize to make this ambitious agenda happen. Both before, and crucially, after the election. This acknowledgement, that power does eventually yield to the people, but it requires more than simply winning the White House was critical.
It can be dizzying to think of how far the Overton window has been shifted since 2016. Am I overstating the case? Just think about this: did any other 2016 candidate’s policies really get discussed on the debate stage today? Or better yet, what was that platform and those policies? Do you even remember?
At some point in this cycle, most Democratic primary voters will have to ask themselves this question: If we like this platform, this kind of candidate, this sort of campaign so much, why pick anyone but the trailblazing leader?
— @subirgrewal