There have been a lot of really bad takes 48 hours out of Election Day 2024, but I think right now this is the worst one:
Sen. Bernie Sanders is blaming the Democratic Party after Vice President Kamala Harris lost to now President-elect Donald Trump and Republicans gained control of the Senate.
In a statement shared on social media Wednesday, the U.S. senator from Vermont said party leadership must have “serious political discussions” about Latino and Black workers voting for Republican candidates.
“It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” Sanders wrote. “While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.”
Sanders, 83, highlighted several issues he believes the nation has failed to address under the Biden-Harris Administration, from wealth inequality and a worsening standard of living to high prescription drug prices and the lack of guaranteed medical leave.
I have tried for a long time to be a Bernie fan—after all I really like his message. I grew up working class, or as we used to say because it accurately reflected professions where you wore an uniform to work because your job was filthy or smelly, blue collar. I know firsthand the struggles of blue collar life.
My dad is a retired steelworker (union guy). His dad was worked in an iron foundry. His mom made Keds at a Uniroyal subsidiary factory. Their fathers were miners in Scranton. My mom’s dad was a janitor and building superintendent (for a commercial building on the National Historic Register, he’d remind you). Her mom was a displaced person from WWI. My sisters and I had summer jobs in factories, and we’d come smelling of machine oil. My sisters even had uniforms.
Joe Biden’s presidency, which is part of Kamala Harris’ political legacy, has consistently had the back of working class people, across all sectors:
–The Biden/Harris administration created 700,000 new manufacturing jobs.
–Biden walked an UAW picket line; Harris had walked an UAW picket line before she became VP.
–Harris co-sponsored the Protecting Our Right (PRO) To Organize Act.
–the Biden/Harris administration authored the American Rescue Act, which saved the pensions of 120,000 union workers.
–Biden/Harris appointees to the NLRB strengthened protections for service sector workers and strengthened collective bargaining conditions.
–The American Rescue Act provided money to states to hire and retain home health care workers.
–The Harris campaign proposed making the child tax credit permanent.
–The Harris campaign proposed financial assistance to first time home buyers for down payments, and for first general home buyers.
–The Harris campaign proposed expanding Medicare benefits to include home health care workers. Honestly this was one of the best and most transformative proposals I’ve ever seen and the press simply refused to highlight it.
There is even more, but I think you get the depth and breadth of the things the Biden/Harris administration has done. Plus a the House flipped curtailed more progress but Bernie somehow leaves that out of his criticism. Mmmhmmm.
Now, what did TFG offer? I mean, Bernie is all up in arms that Biden and Harris dropped ball and so working class people (By the way? The “white” is silent in his statement.) had no choice but to vote for him.
Well, he did offer household budget busting and national economy tanking higher tariffs on imported goods.
No, seriously, that’s it. That’s the sole working class proposal TFG offered in his (invisible) platform. That is what Bernie is talking about—an economic plan that will cause incredible hardship for working class people.
This is why it is time for Bernie to just fucking go away because there are much better spokespeople for these reforms. Yes, there is a lot of work to be done to bring economic equality and economic justice to this country. But blatantly lying about why (WHITE) working class voters embraced TFG is just giving aid and comfort to the enemy. Bye bye, Bernie.
P.S. The truth is that Americans are some of the stupidest motherfuckers on the planet. The second part of this truth is that this country was founded on white supremacism and we have never addressed that as a nation. Americans LOVE racism. If you could make it tangible they would carry it around like a prized possession and sleep with it at night. And please don’t get me started on sexism in the US.
This song popped into my mind and I think you can switch out the names and the emotion behind it remains the same:
🤣👏 Excellent! Just like John Adams in “1776,” Bernie is a man who thinks his voice is the only one to listen to. Adams had to be forced into compromise and could have scuttled American independence by not feeling the need to be dependent on the voices of others! [In “Hamilton,” there is a fun nanosecond of homage to the song when Alexander Hamilton screams out “sit down, John, you fat motherfu…(he gets interrupted)!” 🇺🇸🤣
yes! i remember that callout in Hamilton. and the song just seemed so fitting on an emotional level.
I have puzzled over what Sen. Sanders meant when he said about Democrats abandoning the working class. This handy compendium of “Oh yeah? What about all this?” greatly augments the short list of stuff I’d thought of on my own. It also fits in with the observation I read a couple of days ago (sorry, don’t recall where or who) that Harris had to run a flawless campaign while Trump was allowed to run a lawless campaign.
Every perceived weakness or misstep by the Harris campaign (real or imagined) was blown up like a hot air balloon and floated through several news cycles. Watching the public breakdown of Trump’s increasingly erratic speech and behavior, none of it made a dime’s worth of difference in the coverage. It was blink-and-you-miss it mention on the way to a full treatment of President Biden calling Trump supporters “garbage” (he didn’t call them garbage).
But sure, Senator, it’s the Democrats who haven’t done anything for the working class.