Tuesday, March 31, 2020

Albert Camus in the Age of Covid-19


Truth may be stranger than fiction as Mark Twain once said.  Yet fiction often speaks truth to  reality.   In the case of civilization living under the dagger of Covid-19, many are turning to books and plays for distraction and pleasure.  While some might read Waiting for Godot in hopes that the quarantines and the disease will soon pass, or  Sinclair Lewis’ account of malaria in Arrowsmith, a better read would be both  Albert Camus’s The Plague and The Stranger.  Together they capture the absurdity and tragedy of life in the age of Covid-19, one full not necessarily of one where people pull together but instead cast a wary eye toward others, seeing in others the face of death or danger.
            Albert Camus (1913-1960) was a French playwright and existential philosopher.  While born in Algeria, he was in Paris when the Nazis invaded, fleeing the city and becoming a member of the resistance and underground.  He, along with Jean-Paul Stare, were two of the most famous exponents of French Existentialism, a theory of philosophy that rejected any inherent meaning to life as well as emphasizing often the tragic incoherence of human existence.    French Existentialism was  honed during WW II at a time when France and the world were literally fighting a battle for existence, with Nazi Germany vowing a final solution for Jews and the reality of death everywhere.
            As part of the French Underground Camus had to constantly fear others.  Who were your friends or enemies?  Could someone you thought be loyal rally be a spy or simply turn on you for no apparent reason.  Instead of finding comfort in others the French Resistance instilled a sense of paranoia and fear of others.  The look of others, their close contact, or trusting them too much could result in a betrayal.  Strangers were to be feared and contrary to Blanch DuBois of  a Street Car Named Desire, one should not rely upon their kindness.
            The Stranger is the story of Meursault, a person who receives a telegram that his mother has died.  He goes to her funeral, meets a woman with whom he becomes involved, and then faces trial for the killing of an Arab.  As Camus describes the murder:

On seeing me, the Arab raised himself a little, and his hand went to his pocket. Naturally, I gripped Raymond’s revolver in the pocket of my coat...After all, there was still some distance between us....I couldn’t stand it any longer, and took another step forward. I knew it was a fool thing to do.”

The two, the Arab and Meursault, both fear one another and their glances  for reasons not completely known. There is no premeditation for the murder, as becomes clear in Meursault’s trial.  The absence of a viable  explanation is used as evidence of callous indifference for life that leads to his conviction and execution.    Yet distrust, paranoia, or simply the fear of the look or glance of the other and not knowing what he might do is perhaps the real reason.  The look of the stranger might simply be the most primordial rule of survival, kill or be killed.
            Fear of the other is central also to Camus’ other major play, The Plague.  Here, a fictionalized account of a plague spread by rats running rampant through a community  spews fear of one another as they are seen as a source of disease.

He has an insight into the anomalies in the lives of the people here who, though they have an instinctive craving for human contacts, can't bring themselves to yield to it, because of the mistrust that keeps them apart. For its common knowledge that you can't trust your neighbor; he may pass the disease to you without your knowing it, and take advantage of a moment of inadvertence on your part to infect you.

The Stranger but especially The Plague are stories for our times as Covid-19 ravages across the world.  The Plague follows  the pattern of the five stages of death described by Elizabeth Kübler-Ross and then told in the 1979 All that Jazz with Roy Scheider fictionalizing Bob Fosse.  It is  how a community goes from denial, anger, bargaining, depression and to acceptance that the plague is real and will kill.  This is Trump’s world.  It is a blend of Camus and  a  Kübler-Ross in an absurd political tragedy in the age of Trump.
            When the plague first breaks out in Camus’ play, denial was the word of the day.  So too was it with Donald Trump.

No one wished to acknowledge the disease.  Yet “when the Ransdoc Bureau announced that 8,ooo rats had been collected, a wave of something like panic swept the town.  There was a demand for drastic measures, the authorities were accused of slackness, and people who had houses on the coast spoke of moving there, early in the year though it was. But next day the bureau informed them that the phenomenon had abruptly ended and the sanitary service had collected only a trifling number of rats. Everyone breathed more freely.

A mere false alarm.  But the false alarm was not.  It could no longer be denied. 

The word "plague" had just been uttered for the first time. At this stage of the narrative, with Dr. Bernard Rieux standing at his window, the narrator may, perhaps, be allowed to justify the doctor's uncertainty and surprise, since, with very slight differences, his reaction was the same as that of the great majority of our townsfolk. Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky. There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise. 


Plagues are not what happen to us, it happens to the other, the stranger.  He is the one who brought it to us, be he the vagabond, the foreigner, the immigrant, or simply someone who is not us.  For Trump, Covid-19 is the Chinese disease  Plagues are not homegrown directed at the righteous.  Plagues from Biblical times have been brought as a revenge by God against a people who did something wrong,  yet we are the innocent ones.  We are the Shining City on the Hill, the plague must be the result as Christian Pastor Rick Wiles tell us in an Elmer Gantry way, to  punish humanity for its sins or, as in the case of Jerry Fawell, Jr.  A plot by North Korea.  It is not our plague; it is from the stranger.

            Denial takes many shapes.  It is not simply denial that the plague exists, but that if it does, it will be short term.  It will be not too bad as Trump said of Covid-19, or maybe a few cases will increase or go down, or whatever.  It will be short-lived; we can reopen America and go back to work soon.


When a war breaks out, people say: "It's too stupid; it can't last long." But though a war may well be "too stupid," that doesn't prevent its lasting. Stupidity has a knack of getting its way; as we should see if we were not always so much wrapped up in ourselves. 


            Maybe it will end soon as the president hopes. But as reporters questioned his responses, Trump lashed out, angered that anyone could question his administration or its competence.  Anger too is that somehow this Covid-19 plague will hurt Trump’s reelection.  Maybe it just doesn’t exist and if we close our eyes and plug our ears a “pestilence isn't a thing made to man's measure; therefore, we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away.” Were it to go on too long it might  hurt not just lives and the economy but more importantly, his political prospects for re-election?  Covid-19 simply was a partisan plot as FOX’s Trish Regan declared to hamper Trump’s reelection.  Maybe as Sean Hannity and others hoped, it would soon pass.

Nevertheless, many continued hoping that the epidemic would soon die out and they and their families be spared. Thus they felt under no obligation to make any change in their habits as yet. Plague was for them an unwelcome visitant, bound to take its leave one day as unexpectedly as it had come. Alarmed, but far from desperate, they hadn't yet reached the phase when plague would seem to them the very tissue of their existence; when they forgot the lives that until now it had been given them to lead. In short, they were waiting for the turn of events.


If denial and anger do not work, bargaining might work.  Covid-19 is a test of American character and resolve, proof of the superiority of our way of life.  Pull together, like we did during WW II, and it will be the good plague, the one that transcends partisanship and brings us together in death and sacrifice.  We can win this good fight, deluding ourselves into thinking that self-exile was a product of free will and not necessity.  Bargaining is also the name of the game when it comes to states receiving needed supplies.  Trump has demanded that governors be grateful in return for help.

Thus week by week the prisoners of plague put up what fight they could. Some, like Rambert, even contrived to fancy they were still behaving as free men and had the power of choice. But actually it would have been truer to say that by this time, mid-August, the plague had swallowed up everything and everyone. No longer were there individual destinies; only a collective destiny, made of plague and the emotions shared by all. Strongest of these emotions was the sense of exile and of deprivation, with all the crosscurrents of revolt and fear set up by these.

Death is not a choice.  And as seen first in Italy and now in New York City, the solemnity of funerals turned into depression and acceptance.  Depression and acceptance at the prospect that deaths would occur there, but nationwide too that 100,000 to 200,000 will die.

Actually the most striking feature of our funerals was their speed. Formalities had been whittled down, and, generally speaking, all elaborate ceremonial suppressed. The plague victim died away from his family and the customary vigil beside the dead body was forbidden, with the result that a person dying in the evening spent the night alone, and those who died in the daytime were promptly buried. Needless to say, the family was notified, but in most cases, since the deceased had lived with them, its members were in quarantine and thus immobilized.

            Moreover, depression and acceptance are the reality that the response to it is too little and too late.  It is also the reality that while Covid-19 itself might be the great equalizer, treating the rich and poor alike, the burdens upon how it will wear upon people will not be so egalitarian.

Meanwhile the authorities had another cause for anxiety in the difficulty of maintaining the food-supply. Profiteers were taking a hand and purveying at enormous prices essential foodstuffs not available in the shops. The result was that poor families were in great straits, while the rich went short of practically nothing. Thus, whereas plague by its impartial ministrations should have promoted equality among our townsfolk, it now had the opposite effect and, thanks to the habitual conflict of cupidities, exacerbated the sense of injustice rankling in men's hearts. They were assured, of course, of the inerrable equality of death, but nobody wanted that kind of equality.

The winners and losers of Covid-19 simply replicate the that already existed in our society.  Accepting that this tragedy would be an occasion for significant political reform was a fantasy at best.
            What we learn from reading The Stranger and The Plague is that there is a script to human nature.  It is the script of  Kübler-Ross that plays out with every tragedy.  How we respond to events like Covid-19 is like living in the movie Groundhog Day, where we simply relive and reenact a series of scripted events that prove that Hegel was correct–the only thing we learn from history is that we don’t learn from history.

Wednesday, March 25, 2020

Covid-19 Reveals the Weakness of the US Public Health Infrastructure

My latest appeared on March 25, 2020 in the  International Policy Digest.


The spread of Covid -19 across the US is perplexing.  If, in the words of Georgia Congressional Representative Buddy Carter: “We have the best healthcare system in the world,” why does it appear the US is one of the hardest hit nations in the world and on the brink of shutting economy down to try to prevent its spread?  Should not a country that spends more of its gross domestic product (GDP) than any other country in the world on health care be better prepared to confront this medical emergency than other countries?  The answer is no, simply because while the US may have a great private health care insurance and delivery system, it has an exceedingly weak public health system.
In 2019 the US spent 17.8% of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on health care expenditures.  Its next closest rival was Switzerland which spent 12.1% of its GDP.  Per capita, the US spends more than $10,000 per year on health care, 20% more than  Switzerland.  Despite this spending, the US ranks 46th in the world in life expectancy, 55th for infant mortality rates, and a prevalence of  incidence of   infectious  diseases at 9%, triple that of China and Japan at 3%, and 50% larger than the incidence of 6% in many European Union countries.  These three factors are traditional markers of health across the world. 
Moreover, compared to other advanced countries, 91.7% of the US population has health care insurance, ranking 35th in the world and far behind most other rich countries across the world which have 100% or universal coverage.  In essence, the US has the most expensive health care system in the world and it does not cover everyone and it does not produce the best outcomes.  We pay too much for too little.  It is hard to argue that we have the greatest health care system in the world based on these statistics.
We pay too much and get too little for at least two reasons.  One, compared to other countries we have highest drug and administrative costs in the world.  But equally important, the US has among the weakest public health care delivery systems in the world.  By public health care, one needs to look at what we spend for example on long term care, preventive care, the gathering of health care epidemiology statistics, and perhaps even on nutritional and diet programs.  Looking at those factors we lag behind many countries in the world.  We have not built a public health care infrastructure that is as well suited as is other countries to addressing public health crises such as the rapid spread of an infectious disease as Covid-19.  As has become clear, the funding for the Center for Disease Control is behind what it needs to be to do the research and tracking necessary for health care issues, and there seems to be no federal infrastructure in place to coordinate a national health emergency.  States appear to be left on their own, ill-suited or prepared to address a national or global health emergency.
The US has a terrific private health care delivery system, for those who can afford it.  For those who want and can afford a doctor it is terrific.  For those who want and can afford elective surgery, it is terrific.  For those who want treatment for highly personal health care problems and can afford it, it is terrific.  For those who want can afford a wonder drug, it is terrific.
But in terms of treating or preventing basic maladies, the US health care delivery is weak.  It is weak because it is a system based upon a privatized notion of health and health care.  Health is a personal not a public issue, as is the cost or responsibility for paying for it.  Health and health care are seen not as public goods but as private or individual commodities that we each individually are responsible for.  Moreover, health care reform in the US has, at least since the failed Clinton reforms of the 1990s and the passage of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) of 2010 been focused on insurance and not on improving the structure of the actual delivery system for health care, let along for the public aspect of it.
The US spends a lot of its effort on providing insurance to access a health care delivery system seen as more of a private good than something that is universally important.  We have under-invested in the public aspect of health care compared to many other countries, rending the US far less prepared to confront a public crisis such as Covid-19 compared to other nations in the world.  If we have learned anything from the current crisis, we need to invest more in public health than we currently do.

Saturday, March 14, 2020

Mandatory Vaccines and Quarantines: Public Health and the Constitution


I  teach constitutional law and health care policy.
I  have put together as a supplement  to my  Constitutional Law in Contemporary America, West Academic (2017) a packet entitled Public Health and the Constitution..  I put it together over the last couple of days so it is still a work in progress.  It contains an intro and four cases.

The intro is below.

Public health crises such as the recent concerns over the spread of the Corona virus (Covid 19) across the world and the United States in 2020 or spread of the detection of the Ebola virus in America in 2014 implicate concerns that test the intersection of public health and safety versus individual rights.  These are issues distinct from public security issues implicated by events such as the terrorist attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001.  In the case of the latter, concerns of future or recurrent military or terrorist activity against the United States may be viewed as criminal or national defense issues and treated as such under rules that address criminal due process rights or the scope of American military authority.
In the case of the spread of a virus or other public health issue, individuals who are ill are not criminal defendants.  Nonetheless, because they might be able to infect others, they pose a threat of harm to others.  Individuals seriously ill with easily transmitted diseases or viruses such as Tuberculous, influenza, measles, mumps, or small pox for example can threaten the health and safety of others.  If they are left to move about freely, they could infect others, jeopardizing others. Additionally, what if some individuals fail to take certain precautions, such as take vaccinations, and they therefore risk transmitting certain illnesses to others, what can be done?
One the one hand all of us are entitled to our personal freedom to move about or act in ways we wish.  Conversely, what happens if our actions endanger others, perhaps not to a criminal level, but still to a degree that it causes harm to us or others.  When can society take action?  Philosopher John Stuart Mill in his classic 1849 book On Liberty contended that there are limits that society has over an individual and that unless one’s action affect others, a person’s personal liberty cannot be restricted, even for their own good.  Respect for personal freedom is a hallmark of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution, but rights have never been held to be absolute.  There may be times when the government may need to act to restrict the rights of an individual to protect the rights of others.  Matters of public health raise that question.
Questions of public health are typically matters for states to address.  The reasons are twofold.  One, states possess something called the “police power.”  The police power is the authority of a state government to enact laws to protect the health, safety, welfare, and morals of its residents.  The police power is the basic authority of states to enact criminal and public health measures. The US Supreme Court has ruled that the police power is an inherent power of states, but that it is not a power given to the US government by the Constitution.
Two, for the United States Government to regulate health matters directly it has to rely primarily on it Commerce Clause authority as found in Article I, Section 8, clause 3 which states that Congress has the power “[t]o regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes."  According to the Supreme Court in Gibbons v. Ogden, 22 U.S. 1 (1824), the US government cannot regulate commercial activity unless it affects interstate commerce.  While since that decision the Supreme Court has vacillated over the scope of the Commerce Clause, it is generally agreed today that if an activity can be shown to impact interstate commerce then the federal government may act.
What this means is that the US government has limited authority to take direct action to regulate public health; it must show that health matters such as the spread of a virus affect interstate commerce.    Until a few years ago few would have thought that the Commerce Clause would have excluded addressing public health matters.  Yet when the Supreme Court in National Federation of Independent Businesses v. Sebelius, 567 U.S. 519 (2012) struck down as unconstitutional the individual mandate to buy health insurance under the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), it now raises questions about what Congress may do to regulate public health under this clause.  What needs to be shown is how a public health crisis, such as Covid 19, impacts interstate Commerce.
However, in the Sebelius case, the Court did uphold the individual mandate under a different part of the Constitution.  It was the General Welfare Clause located in Article I, Section 8, Clause 1.  This Clause empowers Congress to raise money and spend it for the general welfare.  Congress may be able to use this Clause to provide for lots of money to address public health issues, but its authority here may still be far more limited than what states have under the police power authority.
Four cases are presented here that look at how the Constitution addresses public health measures.  The first, Jacobson v. Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11 (1905), examines the constitutionality of state mandatory vaccination laws.  Here the Court upholds them, finding that they do not violate any personal liberty interests or rights.
The second case, Jew Ho v. Williamson, 103 F. 10 (N.D. CA 1900), looks at the constitutionality of a state quarantine law.  What makes the case fascinating is that the claims in this case where that the arguments in favor of a Tuberculous quarantine law were challenged on two grounds.  One, there was no detected Tuberculous and, second, the claims that there were that necessitated it were a pretext to discriminate against Chinese-Americans.  The case is important for discussing how laws may be used to classify a group of people to be targeted by public health laws and how the courts will approach these laws.  In general, while wide deference will be given to their constitutional validity, the Courts will still police them to ensure that states do not exceed their authority.
In O'Connor v. Donaldson, 422 U.S. 563 (1975), the Supreme Court ruled that a person involuntarily committed to a state mental hospital because he was adjudicated to be mentally ill was unconstitutional.  More specifically, the Court ruled that the loss of liberty was a protected constitutional interest and that merely being mentally ill was not a ground to involuntarily deprive someone of their liberty.  There had to be a showing that the person posed a threat to himself or others.  O’Connor is important because it suggests that merely being ill may not justify quarantining someone; you have to show how that person posing a danger to self or others.
Finally, in Best v. St. Vincents Hospital and Bellevue Hospital, 2003 WL 21518829, a Court had to decide if the State of New York followed appropriate procedures in quarantining a person with Tuberculous.  The Court discusses how one cannot simply pick up and detain a person.  There must be some due process or hearing according to established procedures before the government can involuntarily detain and quarantine an individual.
Overall, these cases suggest that there are important limits on the ability of the US and state (and local) governments when it comes to some types of public health action.  Mandatory vaccinations or quarantines may be constitutionally permissible, but there will be a significant burden on the government to show real harm and that, at least in the case of quarantines, one is afforded due process and a hearing to challenge the decision.
As you read these decisions ask yourself these questions:
* How certain must the harm be to justify a public health measure such as a mandatory vaccination or quarantine?
* How serious of a harm or threat must the public health issue be to justify a mandatory vaccination or quarantine?
* Do public officials have the authority to ban or limit public gatherings to protect public health?  What if individuals wish to gather and protest an order regulating public health, would they have a First Amendment right to do that?
* Could a state target a quarantine against a specific group of people, such as people from China, whom they suspect have the Corona Virus?
* If a person is detained or suspected of having the Corona Virus, what type of hearing and when is required before they may be subjected to a quarantine?
* Is a geographic quarantine of an area constitutional? If so, under what conditions?

Friday, March 13, 2020

What if They Gave A Revolution But Nobody Came?


Bernie Sanders wanted a revolution but it appears that no one read the memo announcing it.
The hallmark of the Sanders’ presidential campaign was to defy conventional wisdom held by mainstream political science and political operatives.  This wisdom depicts American public opinion and voters as plotted along a bell curve from political left to right, with the median voter at the center.  The theory says that most voters are in the political center and that the battle for victory in presidential elections is to move to the center and capture the five or so percent of the electorate who are swings, especially in the critical presidential swing states that will determine the electoral college victory.  This model recognizes that perhaps only about 55% of the electorate votes and that it would be extremely difficult to bring new voters into the voting booth.
Sanders’ campaign challenged that.  The allegation is that the electorate is less of a bell curve and one that has become bimodal with a decreasing percentage of the voters located at the center.  The median voter still exists but largely is immaterial given the polarization and shift in American public opinion.  It is also a model that says that effectively swing centrist voters have  disappeared and racing to the center to find them is futile.  Better to try to mobilize many of the 45% who do not vote.  These are young people, people of color, urban liberals.  They chose not to vote because they do not like the political choices or policy options they are offered. 
These non-voters, the theory goes, face an empirical reality different from voters.  Capitalism has not been kind to Millennials and Gen Z.  They face a wealth gap, high college costs, high housing costs, and an expensive medical and health care delivery system their Silent, Baby Boomer, and Gen Xers do not confront.  They are America’s future.  Speak to their concerns and issues and you move American politics to the left and build a movement and party for the future.
There is a lot of truth and empirical evidence to support Sanders’ theory.  The electorate has become bimodal.  There is evidence of a decreasing number of swing voters and the reality of the median voter.  The political attitudes of Millennials and Gen Z are very different from that of Silents and Boomers.    The problem seems to be the last leg of the theory–mobilize the young and non-voter.  This is not happening for Sanders this year.
We know now according to Pew Research that the Millennials this election are now the largest generational voting bloc, surpassing the Baby Boomers.  Millennials and Gen Z together are now 37% of the electorate–the 2020 election is the beginning of the end of the political era for Baby Boomers, and perhaps the last hurrah for the Silents.  Yet so far, younger voters have failed to turn out in the caucuses and primaries, with voting rates less than what they were in 2016. On average, turnout among younger voters is about 25% less than it was in 2016.  Why is Sanders’ revolution not happening?
There are many reasons.  First, he is an independent running as a Democrat and his politics is not within the mainstream of the party and so far the Millennials and Gen Zs are not in control of the party.  In fact, they do not like the Democratic Party as presently constituted, seeing it still as controlled by the Boomers.  That alone could be hurting him.  Two, he has done a bad job expanding his political coalition, including a failure to bring on African-Americans.
Moreover, Sanders might have done so well four years for three reasons not present now.  By that, many voters did not like Hillary Clinton and a vote for him was a protest vote.  Two, Sanders did well in caucus states (because the smaller numbers in those states favored a fervent few) and there are fewer of them this year.  Three, the depth of Democratic Party anger to beat Trump is greater this year than four years ago.  Pragmaticism might be prevailing.
There are other possibilities.  Perhaps it is too soon for the revolution.  Godot has not arrived and we need to wait for more Boomers to die.  Some claim voter suppression, but there is not a lot of evidence that accounts for the dramatic voter downturn.  The rejection of electoral politics may be a factor, but rallies go only so far in an electoral political system.
Conventional political science and politicos may be wrong about the bell curve, median voter, and swing voter, but they still seem correct in regards to the difficulty of motivating the non-voter on the left.  Sanders is not crazy to look to bringing them into the political system to build a movement, yet his failure is that of not being able to figure out how to do that.  Where he and progressives need to go is to identify the real barriers to their disengagement and then determine the ways to bring them in politically.  Should the Democrats or a third party not do that longer term, America’s electorate will shrink dramatically over the next few years, perpetuating a base of voters who are not representative of the majority.

Thursday, March 5, 2020

If you are Waiting for the Revolution, Please Pay Cash

You say you want a revolution?  Apparently it does not look like young people are ready for it yet.
Nor are others.  It will also not be televised or lived streamed on Youtube.
In two presidential campaigns Bernie Sanders has called for a revolution, yet not enough people, especially young, have shown up for it.  Legitimately Sanders is speaking to economic concerns that they and other feel–expensive college, gross economic inequality, flat wages, and high housing and medical costs.  Capitalism has not delivered for them and democratic socialism looks good.  Yet the hope for a revolution, with revolutionary consciousness brought to the masses from the outside via the revolutionary guard of Vladimir Lenin, spontaneously arising via Mikhail Bakunin, or built via an electoral movement via Eduard Bernstein, is not happening yet.
Overtime the moderate politics of the Baby Boomer era will end.  Already this is the first election in nearly 30 years where Boomers are not the largest generational voting cohort, the Millennials now are.  Perhaps, as some think, demographics are destiny and power will eventually shift along with the agenda.  That time has not yet arrived.  It is time for B.
Demographics are not destiny.  Hillary Clinton and the Democrats are learning that the hard way.  You do not get people’s vote simply because you have the right demographics–you still need the right message, right candidate, and strategy to win.  Clinton’s mistake in party was thinking she had the votes of the Midwest and did not have to campaign or ask for them, that is why she lost Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and almost Minnesota.  Conversely, Sanders’ has hoped that a new narrative appealing to the 45% of the electorate that feel disenfranchised would engage them to vote.  It too has failed so far to work, necessitating a plan B for him.
One of the first rules of politics is that you have to take power in order to govern and make policy.  If Democrats want to win they need to form a grand coalition to do that.  So far while Joe Biden and the moderate Democrats are putting together a coalition that includes suburbanites, women, and older African-American voters, they have done little to reach out to younger and more liberal voters.  They need them.  Without them it is a pipedream think there are many moderate Republicans for disaffected Trump voters who will vote for Biden.  Conversely, Sanders has done little to expand his base and get his agenda enacted.  A grand coalition is needed.
Consider France in 2002.  Jean-Marie Le Pen was the candidate of the far right National Front Party, a reactionary ultra-nationalist xenophobic party.  He was challenging Jacques Chirac,  President, and candidate of the Rally for the Republic Party.  Socialists detested Chirac.  But the prospect of staying home and electing Le Pen was too great and they threw their support to Chirac  who then won.
It is time for Democrats and Sanders supporters to reach their rapprochement if their goal is to win an election.  Moderates need to give on some issues such as free college or health care and Sanders needs to give up on his  absolutes too.  Both sides are playing intra-party winner take all politics that will do nothing more than make 2020 a repeat of 2016.  If they want to win, both sides need to work together to build the electoral college coalition to defeat Trump. Otherwise, while waiting for the revolution it might be better if both sides pay cash.

Tuesday, March 3, 2020

Biden, Buttigieg, and Klobuchar: It’s my party (and I’ll do what I want to)

Lesley Gore’s famous lyrics It’s my party (and I’ll cry if I want to) are the words to define  the
Democratic Party on Super Tuesday, especially for its moderate wing.  They seem prepared to  take back control of the party in a way that prevents the voters from making the same mistake the Republicans did four years ago which unfortunately resulted in them winning the presidency with Donald Trump.
In my election law seminar I ask from a constitutional perspective who is the party?  Is it the candidates, party leadership and officials, convention attendees, primary voters, or general election voters.  The legal implications of who is the party are significant as they determine whose rights are recognized or prioritized.  Yet politically determining who is the party is equally an interesting question as it raises questions about orthodoxy and what it stands for and whose interests it represents.
For mainstream Democratic and leaders, Bernie Sanders represents an existential threat.  He is an outsider raising the spectre of democratic socialism and supporting the interests of younger people and marginalized voters who have felt they have no voice.  These individuals, including Millennials and Gen Zs, have not seen capitalism work. Their parents or they lost homes in 2008, wages have not gone up, home prices are out of sight, student loan debt is beyond manageability, and compared to other generations at a similar age, they have less wealth.    They like Sanders because he speaks to their reality.  He represents their Democratic Party, the one they want to join.  They are now the largest generational voting bloc in the US and want to assume the mantle of power.
The party they do not want to join is the one of Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Amy Klobuchar, and Peter Buttigieg. That is the party of the Baby Boomers, the affluent who have already made it.  It is of a Democratic Party who has Wall Street members such as former Goldman Sachs chief Lloyd Blankfein and self-described Democrat who said “It would be harder to vote for Bernie than for Trump.”
Establishment Democratic Party leaders, mainstream media, and the political science field are apoplectic over Sanders.  He challenges orthodoxy in so many ways.   He challenges the neo-liberalism of the Party over the last 40 years that pushed the white working class over to Trump.  He also questions the wisdom of the idea of moving to the center to win, contending that with the disappearance of the bell curve shape of the American electorate and the demise of swing voters, it may not make sense to move to the center any more and instead appeal to a new rising generation of voters.  Despite what Democratic Party moderates and mainstream political science contends, there is more evidence than they think that a Sanders’ strategy might work.  After all, it was these same people who thought Trump was impossible.
The point is that there is now a panic within the moderate wing of the Democratic Party.  Fearful of a Sanders’ takeover similar to a Trump takeover of the Republican Party, they are fighting back.  Now many of my political science colleagues scoff, contending that parties are weak and think super delegates would never pull a coup.  However, 70 years the political science profession advocated for stronger party government.    Ask any third party about how strong the two parties are for an answer.
What we are seeing on the eve of Super Tuesday with the withdrawal of Buttigieg and Klobuchar from the race is first recognition of the reality they were going nowhere.  Second, it was fear that their  party was going to Sanders and to those whom they perceived as outsiders.    If Sanders is Robespierre then what is happening now is the Thermidorian Reaction. 
The mainstream  is crying over where their party is going.