Is Bernie Sanders squishy on immigration by accident or is he squishy on purpose? I guess it depends on what your definition of “squishy” is.
Elise Foley and Daniel Marans at the Huffington Post give a rundown on Bernie’s recent comments, in which he’s both pushed for a path to naturalization for the millions of illegal aliens within the U.S. and echoed the anti-immigration charge that immigration takes jobs away from Americans. Unsurprisingly, Sanders was/is a bitter opponent of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which he called “disastrous.”
Although Sanders faulted the TPP because, he said, it would benefit corporations rather than workers not only in the U.S. but in other countries as well, Bernie’s left-wing populism is a natural counterpart to Trump’s populism of the right, without (of course) any of Trump’s racist poison. It’s a pattern that one can see in other countries as well. The Great Contraction has led to the Great Spasm, a bitter populist reaction to the elitist failures that led to worst economic collapse since the Great Depression (largely justified if poorly focused) and an even more bitter reaction to the elitist measures taken to reverse the collapse (very largely unjustified), with rival wings on both the left and right, longing for some unspecified “better time,” when everything worked for people like us.
The Democratic Party can count itself lucky that the Great Contraction occurred at the end of George Bush’s second term rather than at the beginning of Barack Obama’s first. If it had, then Democrats would have to bear the opprobrium (opprobria?) for both the collapse and the response, which was the fate of the Labour Party in Great Britain. It is an article of faith among almost everyone in the UK that the Labour Party was wildly extravagant while in power, and this was the real cause of the Contraction, rather than, as in fact was the case, private mis- and malfeasance. In Britain as in the rest of Europe (the rest of “rich Europe”), the backlash in favor of an entirely counter-productive “austerity” policy has been far stronger than in the U.S. At the same time, the front-running candidate for the leadership of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn1, has a defiantly Old Left rap, preaching the sort of cloth-cap socialism of which Bernie can only dream. Seems like everyone is looking backwards these days.
