Warren Supporters, I Hear You. But Please Hear Me
By: Jake A.
Tags: 2020 Presidential Race, Bernie Sanders, Democrats, Democratic Party, Elizabeth Warren

Let me get one thing out of the way right off the bat; if Elizabeth Warren wins the democratic nomination I am more than happy to vote for her and support her in her fight against Trump. I firmly believe that after Bernie, Warren is the most progressive voice in the Democratic primary and one of the most progressive members of Congress writ large. The issue is, achieving the feat of being “one of the most progressive voices in Congress” is not a difficult task at all. Bernie and Warren are far too often viewed as equal in their dedication to progressive values. In reality, the gulf between them is huge and unignorable. In this piece I want to lay out the case for Bernie and against Warren from both the perspective of policy (who has the best nuts and bolts progressive agenda) and pragmatically (who is most likely to actually achieve the goal of furthering the progressive agenda).

A Progressive (Moral) Agenda

When I talk about who has the most “progressive policy” I want to be clear that I am referring to not just the most left policy but more importantly the most fundamentally moral policy. Because in the end, that’s what politics is about; it’s the very praxis of our moral values and ethics. At this point, I would be remiss if I did not take time to note that I have plenty of issues with Bernie’s platform and positions (my support is not sycophantic). Bernie’s vote for SESTA-FOSTA and lack of support for sex workers, his failure to commit to a comprehensive restructuring of the Scheduled Substances Act, and his stance on reparations, to name a few, are all horrible positions I take great umbrage with. However, when compared, Warren’s policy positions seriously fail to morally supersede Bernie’s. I could go into many (such as her stance against abolishing ICE and opportunistic support of Medicare4All), but for the sake of brevity I’ll focus on three issues; wealth inequality, climate change, and foreign policy.

Wealth Inequality

Every democratic candidate running for office in 2020 acknowledges wealth inequality as a major issue in this country, even nearly-brain-dead Biden. The way we most often access candidates on this issue is purely on the nuts and bolts of the policies put forward to solve the issue. On that front, Bernie quite clearly has, to use a Warren-ism, a better “plan for that”.

But nitty-gritty details aside, we rarely access the philosophical frameworks behind these policy proposals. Progressives, those that support Warren or Bernie, easily recognize Biden’s commitment to income inequality to be fraudulent and disingenuous. This is seen in his lack of quality policy and, maybe more importantly, in his actions (like when he decried America’s ‘wealth gap’ at a $2,800-a-head Manhattan fundraiser). This demonstrates a comically huge failure to understand why income inequality is an issue to begin with. Warren similarly fails to grasp 1) how billionaires acquire their wealth and 2) why billionaires are a moral policy failure.

How Billionaires Acquire Their Wealth

A key distinction between Bernie and Warren is that Warren believes that taxing the ultra-wealthy is an extension of taxing a $100,000 salary more than the guy working at McDonald’s making $30,000. Both people here earned their salary and the guy with several billion making several million a year is earning theirs. I’ll let Jeff Spross, a writer at The Week, explain further:

“D efenders of the capitalist order will point out that anyone can be a farmworker or a dishwasher. These jobs are easily replaceable, which is why they are paid poorly. Not everyone can be CEO of Apple, thus the position pays more. It’s just a consequence of supply and demand. But that is not the question. A better thing to ask ourselves is: Does anyone need to be CEO of Apple? That company is staffed by thousands of workers and software engineers and more. They’re all perfectly intelligent people. Under a different arrangement, a form of worker-elected committee could run the company just fine…Corporate CEOs are not paid gobs of money because some god-like market mechanism adjudicated the value of their labor. They’re paid gobs of money because every company is a miniature society, and we design corporate governance in a way that gives CEOs vast and disproportionate power in those miniature societies. The money they take in is not from wealth creation they’re solely responsible for — it’s from their prerogative to dictate where the wealth created by the company and all its other workers goes.”

No one “earns” a billion dollars (which I prefer to express as $999,999,999+$1). When Warren responds to the question “Bernie Sanders says there should be no billionaires, do you agree with that?’ with “Look, somebody has a great idea, and they follow it through, and they work hard — good for them!” she shows that she does not understand what it means to “work hard” and what it means to “earn”. If you have a “good idea”, work hard and succeed, sure, you should have more than the average person. Thrice as much. 5 times more. Hell, maybe 50 or even 100 times more. No one should have 10,000 times more than the median family, which is what a billion is.

2. Why Billionaires Are A Moral Policy Failure.

The problem with wealth inequality isn’t just “its bad that rich people have money when so many poor people do not”; although yes, that is A LOT of it. Let’s revisit Jeff Spross’s article “No one should be a billionaire”:

But the most fundamental problem, the problem that drives all of these other problems, is that money — or, more precisely, wealth — is power. A billionaire has gobs of capital to invest in new enterprises, dictating to the rest of us what jobs will be created, for whom, to do what, and paying how much. More than that, it’s billionaires who, by virtue of the power that makes them billionaires, control the financial system and the corporate governance that shapes all the economic activity in the country. What jobs we do and can or can’t get, what we’re paid and under what conditions we work; these are all huge aspects of Americans’ everyday lives. And billionaires run all of it like feudal lords. Yes, some billionaires also donate immense sums to charity. But in many ways this just recapitulates the problem: The small population of billionaires gets to decide the goals and priorities and organizational values of so much of the philanthropic work across both the U.S. and the globe.

While I will give credit to Warren for her support of campaign finance reform, she still fails to understand the undue power of wealth and capital and continues to identify as a “capitalist to her bones”. Bernie, on the other hand, understands this perfectly.

Climate Change

Here’s a chart of pledged Green New Deal spending by Democratic Candidates:

That’s it. That’s the whole case. I won’t belabor why climate change is the single most important issue facing, not just Americans, but humanity. If we don’t take drastic structural action our children will be living in a literal hellworld. Millions upon millions of people will die. I don’t believe any of these candidates can pass the Green New Deal, at least not immediately (we’ll get into that in Part 2), but this perfectly illustrates the degree to which these candidates appreciate the gravity of the issue. It’s existential. Plain and simple. Beyond that, as we just learned above, Warren fails to understand the nature and power of wealth, and this understanding is absolutely necessary to solve climate change. Climate change, and I cannot emphasize this enough, will not be solved by a healthy respect for capitalism. That is exactly what got us here. We cannot sit around talking about “how are we going to afford this Green New Deal”, the real question is, how are we going to afford this if we don’t go far enough?

In case I haven’t driven the point home, here is a blistering piece on Warren’s decision to remain mute on the Dakota Access Pipeline; choosing to turn her back on Native American’s after exploiting them: https://observer.com/2016/11/sen-warren-turns-her-back-on-native-americans-after-exploiting-them/

Foreign Policy

Jimmy Carter once said “Human rights is the soul of our foreign policy, because human rights is the very soul of our sense of nationhood”. He was completely wrong. Human rights have never at any point in history been at the center of American foreign policy, but he is right that they should be. Under the Constitution, the president is the federal official that is primarily responsible for the relations of the United States with foreign nations. It is quite arguably the president’s greatest power. The United States is an immensely powerful, if not the most powerful, nation in the world and guiding its international conduct is an unquantifiably large moral responsibility. Again, I will not beat around the bush here. Elizabeth Warren is unfit for that moral responsibility. She is unfit in the exact same way Obama proved to be unfit. Warren shows absolutely no signs that she is trustworthy when it comes to a dedication to curbing American imperialism.

Example 1: The Military Budget

“In 2017, she voted in favor of raising the defense budget to $700 billion dollars, including an additional $60 billion for military operations in countries such as Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The bill increased military spending by $80 billion in total, and even surpassed the $54 billion increase requested by President Trump. To be fair, this isn’t really so surprising. As a senator for Massachusetts she’s been known to meet regularly with defense contractors from her state, including Raytheon, which is headquartered there. She’s fought to stop the Army from shifting funds away from military communications products made in her state, lobbied in favor of poorly-graded General Dynamics-made products, and promised to protect Massachusetts military bases and facilities from defense cuts. https://medium.com/the-progressive-edge/progressives-dont-be-fooled-by-elizabeth-warren-d158ffba40fe

Can you guess who did vote no on Trump’s 2017, 2018, and 2019 military budgets? Bernie Sanders.

Example 2: Israel

Israel and its treatment of Palestinians is a humanitarian disaster by every metric. Israel’s human rights abuses are too numerous to count. When it comes to Israel, Warren overwhelmingly regurgitates right-wing hawkish talking points and has not committed in any meaningful way to cutting aid outside of noting that she considers it “on the table”. This issue is well beyond the consideration stage. In contrast, Bernie has been crystal clear that the U.S. must leverage military aid to Israel in order “to demand respect for human rights and democracy.”

“My solution is to say to Israel: you get $3.8 billion dollars every year, if you want military aid you’re going to have to fundamentally change your relationship to the people of Gaza.” -Bernie Sanders, October 28 2019

Example 3: South America

Elizabeth Warren’s silence on South America — from Brazil to Chile, to Bolivia — is deafening. An undemocratic, fascist, right-wing coup, supported by the Trump administration, was just staged in Bolivia against former socialist president Evo Morales. Bernie, AOC, and Ilhan Omar were amongst the only members of Congress to speak out against this. It’s shocking to see an “indigenous” politician such as Warren so quiet about the violent and forceful removal of Bolivia’s first indigenous president. I believe this truly speaks volumes about Warren’s commitment to global capitalism and American imperialism. If Warren is as interested in structural reform as she claims, she certainly has not displayed any sign of doing so when it comes to how America wields its power abroad.

A Pragmatic Choice

At risk of overusing this expression, let it be known, I am not some pie in the sky idealist. I do not believe Bernie is the messiah. I do not believe Bernie is capable of passing his entire agenda and turning America into a cute little perfect social democracy like Norway or Finland.

In fact, I don’t think he’s capable of getting huge swathes of his agenda through the Senate. But more importantly, Warren can’t either. The 2020 senate map is absolutely brutal for Democrats.

Under the absolute best-case scenario, and bear in mind this is unbelievably unlikely, Democrats win every toss up state (Maine, North Carolina, Colorado, and Arizona), hold onto Doug Jones seat in Alabama, and manage to eek out a victory in Iowa. This would result in a 52 seat majority. If you remember anything about how difficult it was for Obama to pass Obamacare you’ll understand how preposterous it is to believe Bernie or Warren can pass Medicare4All under even the best conditions. Don’t take it from me, take it from co-founder, editor, and columnist of Vox, Matthew Yglesias (both a notable neoliberal and Bernie hater).

Elizabeth Warren’s Plan to Finance Medicare for All Is a Disaster by Matt Bruenig https://jacobinmag.com/2019/11/elizabeth-warren-medicare-for-all-taxes-financing-plan

This pragmatic and grounded approach to 2020 is crucial to bear in mind when we approach the candidates. The argument that “we should put someone in who gets things done, who can pass legislation” is a weak one at best. By that logic, democrats should nominate Biden since he’s basically a Republican.

The question thus becomes, if we ignore the reality of legislative gridlock, who is best equipped to utilize the executive powers available to them? Who do we trust most to build a diverse, intelligent, progressive cabinet and fill hundreds of federal jobs? Who do we trust most to pick federal judges? Who do we trust most to govern foreign policy? I believe that the answer is clear. Let me bring to your attention an excerpt from this recent Root article entitled “Elizabeth Warren Had a Hard Time Naming Prominent Black People — On Two Occasions”

To be clear Deval Patrick, who as you may know, is running for President now, is a millionaire venture capitalist who worked for Bain Capital, a private investment firm that manages over $105 billion dollars. Very cool pick Elizabeth, very progressive, nailed it. If you believe filling an administration with wealthy financiers is the route to the “big structural change” Warren loves to tout, I have a bridge to sell you. In contrast, Bernie is building a multiracial working-class grassroots coalition with support from three of the youngest women of color in Congress.

The rallying cry of most democrats this election has been “blue no matter who”, we need to elect whoever can best beat Trump. Well, that person according to the polls, is Joe Biden. If you’ve taken up the far more reasonable rallying cry of “anybody except Joe Biden”, you’re in luck. Bernie polls second best against Trump in head to head polling. Remember when he was polling far better against Trump than Hillary was in 2016, I do. Let’s not make the same mistake twice.

The Fallacious “Appeal to Emotion”

I’m often seen as a “logic lord”, someone obsessed with the Ben Shapiro-esque mindset of “facts don’t care about your feelings”, but let me make one last appeal to emotion in my case for supporting Bernie over Warren. I deeply appreciate the desire to elect a woman or a person of color or someone from the queer community, but I think it’s important to appreciate Bernie as a minority. Bernie is a Jew whose family was murdered in the Holocaust at the hands of white supremacists. Bernie would assume the presidency, the first Jewish president, with the support of three of the youngest, most progressive, women of color in Congress: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Talib. The beauty and gravity of two of the first Muslim women ever elected to Congress (one of them Palestinian) endorsing and supporting a Jewish candidate is gravely under-appreciated. The Bernie and AOC wing of the party is the future. Anyone who’s paying attention can see that. If you need “evidence” look no further than Bernie’s speech at his 26,000 person rally with AOC in Queens, New York. Very little makes me cry, but I’ll be damned if this video doesn’t leave a lump in my throat every single time I watch it. Listen closely:

So now I ask you; Are you willing to fight for that person who you don’t even know as much as you’re willing to fight for yourself?

Bernie Sanders — chained with Black women — at the civil rights protest of Willis Wagons. August of 1963

Police arresting Bernie Sanders at a civil rights protest in 1963