The best reason for Bernie Sanders to fight on: Hawkish, neoliberal Clintons need a watchful eye

The best reason for Bernie Sanders to fight on: Hawkish, neoliberal Clintons need a watchful eye from progressives

Yes, Sanders needs to play it smart from here. But let's not forget that we need a check on Hillary's deep failings

JIM SLEEPER

If Bernie Sanders loses most of today’s primaries in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Connecticut, Delaware and Rhode Island, the wise and the mighty of the Democratic Party and the press will call more loudly than they already have for him to stand down as a candidate and to focus his and his supporters’ energies instead on helping Hillary Clinton to discredit Donald Trump or any Republican opponent.

Their logic seems compelling, so let me mention and rebut a few of its most convincing points before mentioning the…, ah, elephant in the argument that could embarrass Democrats and actually worsen conditions in the United States even if Clinton wins the White House and the Senate.

The first argument for Bernie to pack it in as a candidate and go all out for Hillary is that we can’t afford to underestimate the dangers of Trump’s slippery demagoguery and many voters’ susceptibility to it. To defeat him or any other Republican nominee, Clinton will have to move rightward, not leftward, as she had to do to head off Bernie in the primaries.

This argument doesn’t reckon clearly enough with the reality that Democrats would be uniting behind a corporatist, neoliberal grand strategy that Clinton has always supported but whose successes and credibility are nearly exhausted but that she has shown neither the inclination or capacity to change. Breaking glass ceilings and curbing racist and xenophobic policies are absolutely necessary preconditions for American renewal, but they’re also absolutely insufficient. Curbing the national-security mania, the militarist juggernaut, and predatory marketing and lending that have trapped us like flies in a spider’s web of 800-numbered, sticky-fingered pick-pocketing machines would require out-strategizing powerful enemies in ways that nothing in Clinton’s record proves she can or will do.

more: http://www.salon.com/2016/04/26/the_best_reason_for_bernie_sanders_to_fight_on_hawkish_neoliberal_clintons_need_a_watchful_eye_from_progressives/