The unity candidate

As a Bernie Sanders nomination and presidency become increasingly viable (if not downright likely), his widening popularity signifies something bigger – a palpable yearning and movement across America for a unifying politics based on universal needs that can bring Americans together around common interests instead of dividing us through fear, scapegoating, and radical inequality.

Despite the desperate smears from center-right opponents claiming he is “divisive,” the reality is that Bernie Sanders’ policies are all about unity: common needs, mutual care, and a shared future.

Ragingly divided as the Trump era has been, there is a remarkably strong chance that Sanders’ politics of compassion and care can win the day in 2020. What this politics means for America and the world cannot be underestimated. With climate crisis and inequality bearing down on us with increasing ferocity, our planet and humanity cannot afford the “options” of Trumpian carnage and division or of woefully compromised centrist tweaks offered by Biden, Buttigieg or Klobuchar that uphold the very same system that is crumbling before our eyes.

The Trump era has ushered and emboldened so much hate, enmity, and division, some may ask, how could we do a national about-face and elect something so vastly different? In fact, tons of polling shows that Trump’s Darwinian politics of winners and losers, based on voracious venality and short-term plundering, can be soundly defeated by its diametric opposite: a politics of compassion and unifying shared interests.

Bernie Sanders’ entire agenda is about unifying Americans by addressing the fundamental crises that sow division and distrust. Medicare for All. College for all. Housing for all. Justice and safety for all. Jobs for all. Not just some of us – all of us. Sanders’ politics and policies are a bold rebuttal to both right-wing and neoliberal policies that create the very divides we now face.

Sanders has exhibited these politics in deeds and words for decades. Combatting war and militarism is an act of love; standing up for civil rights is an act of love; fighting for living wages and workers’ rights is an act of love; leading the effort for single-payer universal healthcare and a climate-healing Green New Deal are acts of love. These policies, and other social-justice initiatives promoted by Sanders, are about ending and reducing harm, healing wounds, and preventing pain and suffering by addressing root causes.

In a major speech in June 2019 defending democratic socialism, Sanders said America must replace its current path of hatred and divisiveness, and “instead find the moral conviction to choose a different path, a higher path, a path of compassion, justice and love… And that is the path that I call democratic socialism.” This politics is not only simply about government programs – it’s about human rights and dignity, and an economy and politics that spreads wealth rather than consolidating and privatizing it.

Witness the nationwide upwelling of support for transformative, socialistic policies based on shared common interests – policies based on mutual compassion and universality over inequality and separation. Democratic socialism is increasingly popular and non-controversial: in a recent Gallup poll, 76 percent of Democrats, 17 percent of Republicans, and 45 percent of independent voters said they would vote for a socialist.

Consider two immensely popular and urgently necessary policies: Medicare for all and the Green New Deal. There are entirely rational, dollar-driven reasons to support and enact both (preventative care and economics, pay now or pay later, save money and save lives over the long term). In fact, a major recent study published by The Lancet, one of the world's most esteemed medical journals, shows that Medicare for all could produce up to $450 billion in savings annually, reducing current health care costs by about 13 percent.

Beyond any units of progress they deliver, these policies provide a foundation for societal transformation by uniting mass common interests and equalizing conditions.

Decades of deepening socioeconomic divisions, entrenched by neoliberalism, capitalism, and corporate-friend policies, have led us to today’s crucible – a choice between fake “populism” and separatist nationalism on one end, and a unifying democratic socialism that transcends liberal tinkering.

The obstacles to this politics of unity and love are immense: corporate power; money; entrenched industrial and wealth interests in both political parties. Capitalism’s multitude of economic and political tentacles and well-heeled apparatchiks, embedded throughout politics, business, and mainstream media.

Excerpted from: 'Bernie Sanders Is the Unity Candidate'.

Courtesy: Commondreams.org