Patrick Semansky/AP Photo
Either’s presidency would mark a sharp break with the Democrats’ previous complacency about our cruelly misshapen economy.
Like a number of my Prospect colleagues—and, I suspect, a number of Prospect readers—I’m a fan of both Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Right now, many of their respective partisans are mightily steamed at the one they’re not backing. Having myself been a partisan during a similar bout of left-presidential-candidate vs. left-presidential-candidate warfare 52 years ago (Eugene McCarthy vs. Robert Kennedy), I understand what both Bernie’s and Elizabeth’s supporters are feeling.
Today, of course, McCarthy and Kennedy are remembered, in the context of the 1968 campaign, for both running against Lyndon Johnson and the Vietnam War. They had real differences with each other, both political and personal, some far more bitter than any between Sanders and Warren. We partisans (as an 18-year-old between high school and college, I worked on McCarthy’s campaign) avidly attacked the other guy for his shortcomings, perfidy, you name it. Their differences were exacerbated by the fact that McCarthy was a “wine track” candidate, with a base among college students and liberal professionals, and Kennedy was winning the “beer track,” appealing—remarkably—to black, white, and Latino working-class voters. That both sought to end our horrific war in Vietnam—the issue that dominated all others in 1968—was a point of concord that both camps downgraded in our zeal to boost our candidate and diminish the other.
So, how will Sanders’s and Warren’s campaigns be remembered half a century from now? That he was more beer-track and she more wine? That he said he was a socialist (albeit, he added, in the tradition of Franklin Roosevelt) and she said she was a capitalist (albeit, she added, in the tradition of Franklin Roosevelt)?
Robert Clark/AP Photo
Senator Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy are readied for the presidential debate, June 1, 1968.
I’m not going to be around in 2070, but if somehow there’s any money left in my posthumous checking account, I’ll bet it all that they’ll both be remembered for initiating a sharp break with the financialized capitalism of the past 40 years, and bringing the cause of a radically more democratized and egalitarian economy into American political discourse and the highest levels of American politics. Unlike the other candidates in this year’s Democratic field, each wants to tax wealth and financial transactions, each wants to put workers on corporate boards, each wants to switch to Medicare for All (if at different speeds), each backs free universal child care and preschool, each wants to curtail hedge funds and private equity, each wants to go as far beyond Obama and the previous ideology of the Democratic Party as (to paraphrase Michael Harrington) Roosevelt went beyond Hoover. As well, each has sworn off high-dollar fundraising and depends solely on small contributions—again, unlike the other Democratic candidates.
Do they nonetheless have differences? Sure. Will the fact that they’re both seeking the same office exacerbate them? Sure, if they and their supporters are human. But would either’s presidency mark a sharp break not just with Trumpian and Republican idiocy, but also with the Democrats’ previous complacency about our fundamentally and cruelly misshapen economy? Sure again.
Right now, some of their supporters are vilifying whichever of these senators isn’t their pick, and vilifying that senator’s enthusiasts, too. Been there, done that. Bobby Kennedy was a coward, an opportunist; didn’t enter the race until McCarthy had shown that LBJ could be beaten; he wasn’t pure enough. Gene McCarthy was an elitist who could barely restrain himself from displaying his disdain for politics, the Kennedys, and damn near everyone else.
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In fact, both were mainstream liberals who, whatever their particular flaws, would have ended the Vietnam War without the four years of mass slaughter—at least 25,000 more American deaths and more than a million Vietnamese—that followed 1968.
In fact, both Sanders and Warren, whatever their flaws, are daily prescribing the kinds of radical egalitarian reforms that our increasingly plutocratic nation so badly needs. Campaigns are invariably about comparisons and differences, but I hope Warren’s and Sanders’s supporters, and Warren and Sanders themselves, can remember how much, uniquely, they have in common, and how important it is that their common perspectives, under either’s banner, prevail.
