The New Yorker (2/2/16) takes aim at “all the celebration of Bernie Sanders’ intransigence on the issues.” (photo: Evan Vucci/AP)
It’s clear that Bernie Sanders has gotten many mainstream types upset. After all, he is raising issues about the distribution of wealth and income that they would prefer be kept in academic settings, certainly not pushed front and center in a presidential campaign.
In response, we are seeing endless shots at Sanders’ plans for financial reform, healthcare reform and expanding Social Security. Many of these pieces raise perfectly reasonable questions, both about Sanders’ goals and his route for achieving them. But there are also many pieces that just shoot blindly. It seems the view of many in the media is that Sanders is a fringe candidate, so it’s not necessary to treat his positions with the same respect awarded the views of a Hillary Clinton or a Marco Rubio.
The New Yorker is clearly in this attack mode. It ran a piece by Alexandra Schwartz asking, “Should Millennials Get Over Bernie Sanders?” You can guess the answer.
But the piece runs into serious problems getting there. It tells readers:
[Sanders’] obsession with the banks and the bailout is itself phrased in weirdly retro terms, the stuff of an invitation to a 2008-election theme party. As my colleague Ben Wallace-Wells points out, we voters under 30 have come of political age during the economic recovery under President Obama. When I graduated from college, unemployment was close to 10 per cent; it’s now at 5. Sanders’s attention to socioeconomic justice is stirring and necessary, but when his campaign tweets that it’s “high time we stopped bailing out Wall Street and started repairing Main Street,” you have to wonder why his youngest supporters, so attuned to staleness in all things cultural, are letting him get away with political rhetoric that would have seemed old even in 2012.
Alexandra Schwartz: “Learn how to embrace compromise.”
Those familiar with economic data know the labor market, which is the economy for the vast majority of the public, is very far from recovering from the recession. While the unemployment rate is reasonably low, this is largely because millions of workers have dropped out of the workforce.
And, contrary to what is often asserted, these are not retiring baby boomers or people without the skills needed in a modern economy. The employment rate of prime-age workers (ages 25–54) is still down by 3.0 percentage points from its prerecession level. Furthermore, this drop is for workers at all levels of educational attainment. Employment rates are even down for workers with college and advanced degrees. Other measures of labor market strength, like the percentage of people involuntarily working part-time, the quit rate and the duration of unemployment spells, are all still at recession levels.
Furthermore, the huge shift from wages to profits that we saw in the downturn has not been reversed. As a result, wages are more than 6.0 percent lower than they would be if the labor share had not changed.
Source: Bureau of Economic Analysis.
If this stuff is hard for New Yorker editor types to understand: If workers lose 6.0 percent of their wages to profit, it has the same impact on their living standards as if they faced a 6.0 percentage point increase in the payroll tax. Would the New Yorker think that today’s young people have anything to complain about if they had seen an increase in the payroll tax in 2009–10 of 6.0 percentage points, which still remains in place today?
If the answer to that one is “yes,” then its editors should be able to understand why millennials in 2016 are unhappy about the state of the economy, and why they might find a figure like Senator Sanders attractive.
Economist Dean Baker is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC. A version of this post originally appeared on CEPR’s blog Beat the Press (2/3/16).
Letters to the New Yorker can be sent to themail@newyorker.com (or via Twitter: @NewYorker). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.
Cue the “young, comfortable, white liberal hipster-purist” trope to trash Bernie. With no discussion of his policies (or of Hillary’s for that matter, a very revealing fact, one could note) we are presented an attack on Sanders disguised as an attack, largely, on his “purity” besotted throngs as evidence of their immaturity.
Others have written quite well about this style of tendentious punditry, but the point that the New Yorker writer ends on is worth a brief consideration given that it is a refrain from Hillary’s defenders/supporters.
“Compromise” is suggested as a virtue that bursts the fever of distemper in those demanding “purity” — as if ANY Bernie supporter ever spoke of his alleged “purity” as a reason to support him (why can’t any in the yammering classes find that Bernie supporter and quote him/her ever using that word or any of its synonyms?).
Anyway, Alexandra Schwartz’s “For that [Democrats coming together, presumably, to support Hillary and defeat the Republican candidate] to happen, a lot of young Democrats may have to learn how to embrace compromise” translates easily as “give up your hopes for a less unjust economy and for progressive action on climate change and anything else your idealistic little hearts desire, and vote for the plutocrats’ choice because, by definition, you’ve already lost and nobody likes hippies.”
Yeah, grow up and wait for your inevitable screwing because “compromise” means that the rich win and everyone else loses, and “intransigence on the issues” is anything that gets in the way of that.
It is interesting is that Ms. Schwartz does not tell us what a Bernie supporter has to gain from this “compromise”, or what a Bernie supporter stands to lose as a consequence of his “intransigence”.
Come to think of it — no one ever asks a Hillary supporter if a Sanders administration would ever turn its back on her (unless she happened to be lobbyist for Goldman Sachs, that is) or what it is that she could be asked to “compromise” away. Why are progressives always being asked to give up something in order to (again, presumably) avoid handing the election to a Republican?
Asking progressive to embrace compromise is to ask progressives to embrace yet more neoliberal assault on workers, the poor, women, non-whites.
Headline needs to read “New Yorker Magazine…”
But it’s not Nick Kristof in the NY Times today, he’s selling some “Fix The Debt” idiots’ attack on Sanders.
The sophisticated Ms. Schwartz spends a good deal of time and space in her “think” piece, expanding on those factors that made Obama the ideal candidate for her generation–with his dancing, basketball and, of course, “the sheer force of that fluid, academically honed intelligence! ” And then she buries that old coot Sanders by noting that his tweet, “that it’s ‘high time we stopped bailing out Wall Street and started repairing Main Street,'” is “political rhetoric that would have seemed old even in 2012.” Eustace Tilley, that New Yorker dandy, is smiling, somewhere.
For those readers whose mental or physical health preclude them from reading this sad and strange essay, she seals the deal with the insightful passage, “One conclusion to draw from Obama’s Presidency is how necessary the right proportion of flexibility and resolve is for the job, and what a significant liability the insistence on purity can be when it comes to the actual business of governing.”
Things must be swell where the New Yorker staff live. Try spending some time in the rest of the country where the only substantive change in the economy in seven years has been the latest Wall Street bubble created by the Fed’s supplying the big banks with free money, while all new wealth has gone directly to the wealthy. Try dancing around NSA spying, mass deportations, the war on whistleblowers, no effort to install the “check-off” provisions for unionizing, no effort to change the Bankruptcy Act to allow for student debt to be dischargeable, “clean coal,” more money for nuclear power, off-shore drilling resumed in the Gulf and authorized in the Arctic as well as continued privatization of schools, prisons and the USPS. On foreign affairs, the lady is silent.
You know, Alexandra, sweetheart, remember that ageism is as vile as sexism though apparently quite handy and fair game for such expert “analysis” as yours.
Well, this just proves to me that there are millenials who are blind to our history. Alexandra Schwartz’s recommendation “Learn how to embrace compromise.” sits squarely in the economic philosophy of the 1 per centers whose greed and callousness about much less advantaged financial Americans have had to deal with. Reminds me of Marie Antoinettes’ “let them eat cake”…. and from a woman yet….for shame
I haven’t known many women who are this passionate for the status quo and defending a system that has been so corrupt. We are the gender with a history of caring…but I guarantee you she may consider herself independent but she’s no feminist, that’s for sure. Feminism is allied with humanism.
Big dorky glasses and a dowdy hairdo don’t make you intelligent.
As wealth is the property we own above what is needed to stay alive, why is it that the corporate owned mainstream media never tells us that only the voting majority owns wealth? Because for the upper half of society the fact is most self-evident and if the laboring-class lower half were to see the light, surely things could get terribly messy and bloody in one gigantic hurry.
Hillary Clinton
“A progressive is someone who makes progress.”
Quite the reverse, for a progressive is one who retards the expansion of the rich and powerful.
First, she’s wrong on the real numbers about unemployment… it’s nearer to 10% counting those who have given up. And, as Bernie Sanders explains… and broken down throughout minorities, it’s worse. it’s like 50% for black students, a bit less for Latino students, etc.
AND GUESS WHAT! New National QUINNIPIAC Poll Shows Bernie Sanders SURGING TO A VIRTUAL TIE with Hillary Clinton:
http://usuncut.com/politics/new-national-poll-shows-bernie-sanders-surging/
“the nutty great-uncle at the Seder table who insists on debating the morality of the Ten Plagues while everyone else is dying to just eat already”
Wow, not only has extreme inequality the inevitability of the ten plagues for ms Schwartz but her contempt for life long social justice activists like Sanders could not be any more obvious. What a terrible hit piece on Sanders in the New Yorker.
Alexandra Schwartz, The New Yorker
“One conclusion to draw from Obama’s Presidency
is how necessary the right proportion of flexibility
and resolve is for the job”
Because ObamaCare was written and created entirely by the medical industry, because of Obama’s corrupt “flexibility and resolve,” during Obama’s 8 years in office the medical industry will make an extra $1.5 trillion a year over what BernieCare would cost. And if paid actor Clinton wins the White House, the total corruption caused by ObamaCare for the 16 years would be $24 trillion.
NOT AN ELECTION FOR PRESIDENT —
VOTE TO PUT IN POWER A MORAL SOCIETY
Do you deserve to be rich? If so, then to see if you are a high-achiever destined to be rich, vote for paid actor Clinton as she will surely create many a new way for Empire builders to make their wildest dreams come true.
On the other hand, if this day of life is more then you deserve, if a grateful humility is your way of thinking such that most guilty do you feel if ever you fail to give all you can give, then vote for morality, vote for a grateful giving society with a caregiver like Bernie to lead the way.
How sad that the New Yorker should be so off, so to the right. Much sadder though – that this article should have a mere 12 comments (13 including this one) after 3 days. How irrelevant the magazine has become. But, with articles like this, fairly inevitable.