For Bernie, we win via the High Road, not Harassment

Bernie Sanders is my candidate for president, and what I have put into his campaign evidences that no one is more devoted to his cause than I am.

But among my brothers and sisters working for the political revolution, a disturbing trend has grown, and there need to be more voices coming out against it: the heavy dose of bitter vitriol mixed with the elixir of revolution that we offer to America.  Venom will never lead us to victory.

The most recent incident: "SuperdelegateHitList.com" (since changed to SuperdelegateList.com) created by Chicago Activist Spencer Thayer, whose invitational tweet asked  “So who wants to help start . . . a new website aimed at harassing Democratic Superdelegates?”  (WaPo).  Thayer has since responded to the storm of criticism (including tales of late-night threatening calls to the homes of Hillary-declared superdelegates creeping out the likes of 12 year-olds answering the phone) by removing the word "Hit" from the name of the site, as well as publicly encouraging people to be polite in their lobbying of Superdelegates.

But the words "Harassing" and "Hit" at the moment conception cast the die, because there's no second chance to make a first impression.  And among the ranks of my fellow Bernie supporters, Thayer is not alone in words & actions that utilize vinegar rather than honey in engaging those who aren't already Bernie supporters.  Examples abound on social media, like this one I saw this morning:

Addressing one's audience as "idiots" is not the best recipe for making converts out of doubters.  Now, whoever generated this meme probably imagines that the real targets of conversion are not actually the purported addressees of the meme, but the bitter, outraged pugnacity with which this and other pro-Bernie messages are often suffused only fuels an impression that our ranks are filled only with acerbic aggression, sullen complaint, and outraged animosity--not to mention the image (mirage?) of sexist "Bernie Bros" that has grown like a cancer on the public face of the political revolution.  Perhaps it's unfair, but politics is about perception--and we supporters of Bernie need to work on ours (which is not true of the candidate himself).

One of the important roots of this is anxiety, and the accompanying paranoia, from a perception that the deck is stacked against Bernie, and institutions and people (embattled DNC chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz most frequently cited) that in fairness ought to be neutral are actually tipping the scales corruptly against our candidate.

Anxiety & paranoia, added to what has seemed to some of us like a media blackout, or pig-pile on Bernie, has been brewing a stew of nasty emotions that have emerged in all the ways mentioned above, and this is dangerous for two reasons: 1) our movement won't grow if we lead with negativity, and 2) a serious, nasty new rift on our side of the political spectrum may lead the Left in general to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in November.

So we who want Bernie to be president should not only avoid such negative tactics, but denounce them.  We should not trumpet a "Bernie or Bust" position (which I disagree with strongly, but which position I can understand).  Expressing that is not going to help Bernie win any more primaries, and may very well drive away Democrats who are on the fence about our candidate.

After last night's debate, one telling observation in the media was that "Both candidates would do well to understand that vehemence is not a substitute for substance."

If that's true of the candidates, it's vastly more true for us, the armies of the political revolution.  Neither Superdelegates nor primary voters will be won over by harassment, vitriol, or complaints.  And Bernie will not win without winning over people who aren't already in his corner.

Not all, but a great swath of those voting for Hillary are voting for her only because they think she can win in November.  They've heard Bernie's platform--and most like it--but Bernie needs to prove he can win, and we need to help, not hinder.  Superdelegates, especially, are looking more than anything to bank on a winner, and they will come over to Bernie, if he & we can convince them he's a winner.

And we can.

As of now, Bernie has won fewer overall votes (a misleading metric because of the differences between primaries & caucuses), fewer pledged delegates (1,307 to 1,087), and fewer states (18 to 16).

But that can change in the next 11 days.  If Bernie wins the New York primary, and then can be seen to have won the flurry of primaries on April 26 (PA & MD are the big prizes, but CT, DE, and RI are also voting then), Bernie can cut into the pledged delegate count, and perhaps more meaningfully, as a symbol, move ahead in the number of states won.

It is metrics like these that will make Superdelegates sit up and take notice--even those who've already committed themselves to Hillary.  And so if we want to bring them over to Bernie, working to get Bernie the win in those six states in the next 11 days should be our priority.

Bernie wins elections--and Superdelegates--with honor, not harassment; with goodwill, not grievance. By May--and certainly by June, after victory in the California primary--Bernie will have a good case to make to the Superdelegates, and we'll be ready to help in whatever way he needs.  But until then, we who want Bernie will only be undermining his cause if we focus on "hit-lists," complaints, and the kind of off-putting protestations of unfairness that will draw no one to our cause.

The Unexamined Roots of the Case for Trade: More stuff is always better

International trade has been growing as a point of contention since the Trans-Pacific Partnership arrived in the public sphere a year ago, and has become increasingly prominent in the US presidential primaries. But lost in discussions about who gets hurt who is exploiting whom is a critical perspective on the central benefit of free trade: cheaper access to consumer goods.

The discussion of the effects of trade is simple to conceive of as a back-and-forth:

• + Trade Case: Comparative Advantage!  If we can Product A more efficiently than Product B, and another country makes Product B more efficiently, then it makes more sense to make a lot of Product A, sell it to the other country, and buy Product B from them cheaper than we could make it ourselves. We'll spend less money to get the same or of both Products than if we made everything at home.
• - Trade response: but when we start importing Product B instead if making it in America, all those good people at Product B factories lose their jobs!
• + Trade Response #1: but if we've got more trade overall, more people get jobs at Product A factories, so it balances out.
• + Trade Response #2: plus, the more trade we've got, the more efficiently everything is being produced and consumed, so we can afford more Products of every kind.
• - Trade argument, at this point, usually devolves into demonizing foreigners who are "taking" the jobs of workers in Product B factories, or something about national pride, along with suspicious attempts to portray Product B factory workers as more truly "American" because of their blue-collar status, and thus more worthy of our protection--or else more well-founded targeting of the increasing profits that accrue from trade to the owners of capital.

Ultimately, though, economists and politicians defending more trade (often rolled into "globalization") are able to carry the argument not by parrying these points, but upon the seemingly unassailable Response #2, that the broad benefits for all outweigh the costs of the few who lose their jobs.  This utilitarian, even possibly socialist logic of "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" (Spock, or Jeremy Bentham?) is hard to argue against, which helps explain why the other side goes of into other types of counter-arguments.

But while the logic may be sound, the assumptions that underlie it deserve scrutiny.  What exactly is this broad benefit of trade that accrues to all?  Binyamin Applebaum (NYT) distills it as "Everyone gets a discount," while Thomas Black & Isabella Cota (Bloomberg) unpack slighlty more "the benefits of the surge of cheap imports, primarily subdued inflation that preserves consumers' purchasing power."

More and more access to cheaper physical things is the great benefit that trade provides--and indeed, if we can buy a TV from China for $300 instead of $600, are we not better off?  If we can afford to buy farm-raised shrimp from Southeast Asia for $6.99/lb instead of paying $12.99/lb for shrimp caught in the Gulf of Mexico, don't we have access to a better life?

The central benefit of trade depends on the refusal to posit that the answer to these questions might be "no".

But if we examine the lives of genuinely struggling Americans, facing poverty, joblessness, and the inability to climb up even the lowest rungs of the economic ladder, are these problems connected to constrained access to cheap goods and food? Is clothing too expensive? Cell phones? TVs? No: lots of families are trapped in cycles of poverty, but not because there is too little cheap stuff on offer to American consumers. Quality housing, less exploitative legal systems,  safe neighborhoods, and better-resourced schools are lacking, but those cannot be imported.

And what if we examine the lives of Americans in the precarious middle-class? It may be that the latest smartphone or tablet is more accessible because of trade with China, and new school clothes and fall fashions are more affordable because they come from factories in Bangladesh or Mexico. But the speedier integration of new technologies into the expected consumer basket has also loaded families with new expenses: your cable-internet package with all the right channels and download speeds to accommodate streaming over multiple devices may cost 6-7 times what you paid for cable in the 1980s, but incomes have not kept pace. And your family plan for smartphones is a new monthly bill altogether that 1990s budgets weren't forced to juggle. Indeed, many blessings of the "surge of cheap imports" come with monthly service charges that load expense onto services that cannot be replaced by trade (cell phone service cannot be imported), so are we economically better off?

A deeper problem is this: the access to lots more cheap imported goods has enormously expanded the potential participants and arenas of the most dangerous game in capitalism: "Keeping up with the Joneses." Conspicuous Consumption (Thorstein Veblen) is on the rise in reaches of the American income spectrum where it would have been simply unthinkable a half century ago, and in realms of consumption then not even imaginable: which G of iPhone do you have? What store do you buy your organic baby food at? Do you get the free version of Spotify or do you pay for Pandora?

Conspicuous Consumption, as a concept, is an enormous challenge to the basic assumptions upon which argument for trade rests. More trade is good if we are always only spending money on something that really makes our lives better, and thus, if any given thing we can get is cheaper, our lives are better because we can have more of it, or more of something else we otherwise couldn't afford that will make our lives better.

Conspicuous Consumption is the idea that due to social constructions of power and the fear of feeling inadequate (not to mention the power of marketing to get us to spend money on things that do not make our lives better), a lot of our spending is not driven by well-informed decisions about what we really want, need, or will make our lives better, but rather is wasted on things we're bamboozled into buying--many of which may make our lives much worse.

In the end, if trade's main benefit to "the many" has been expanding their capacity to buy more and more cheap goods that often do not make our lives better, but frequently make them more cluttered, expensive, and unhealthy, then the logical structure buttressing the “broad benefits” of trade falls away.