[Vision2020] Young people support socialists Sanders and Corbyn

[Tom Hansen]

Courtesy of today's (March 3, 2016) Moscow-Pullman Daily News with special thanks to Nick Gier.

---------------------------------
His View: Young people support socialists Sanders and Corbyn
By Nick Gier
The final stop on my monthlong trip to Europe last September was London. The London papers headlined Jeremy Corbyn’s surprise election as the Labor Party’s new leader. 
On Sept. 12, Corbyn won 59 percent of the vote among 550,000 official party members. Over 60,000 joined Labor because of Corbyn. Returning union members and first-time young voters made his victory possible.
Just like those who “Feel the Bern,” Corbyn’s supporters call him authentic and lacking pretense. They admire him for saying what he truly believes. Like Sanders, he believes he can galvanize youth and other disaffected voters to create a political revolution.
Both, however, find themselves out of step with their parties. Former Prime Minister Tony Blair warns that Corbyn and his supporters are “walking eyes shut over the cliff’s edge.”
A columnist in The Economist wrote Jan. 2: “Labor has always been two parties, one social democratic and the other anti-capitalist.” The split is now clearer than ever.
European Social Democrats have long made peace with their capitalists, but Corbyn insists on the clear meaning of the Labor Party’s constitution, which commits its members to “the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange.” This means Corbyn would urge the government to help finance worker-owned cooperatives.
Corbyn wants to restore cuts to welfare benefits and to roll back the tuition university students must pay (far less than their American counterparts). He also proposes large public works projects — financed by deficit spending — and raising the top income tax rate from 45 to 60 percent.
In the U.S., Sanders also wants colleges and universities to be tuition free. He wants to scrap Obamacare and replace it with a single-payer system.
An analysis by The Economist (Feb. 13) concluded that all Sanders’ programs would require that income taxes rise from a top rate of 39.6 percent to 67 percent.
An Emory University study demonstrated that instead of saving $630 billion per year, Sanders’ single-payer plan would run an annual deficit of $1.1 trillion.
Sanders calls himself a “democratic socialist,” but commentators are wrong to compare him to other famous American socialists. Norman Thomas, for example, refused to run as a Democrat, because he embraced the traditional socialist belief in the common ownership of the means of production. Sanders is actually a Social Democrat.
Surprisingly, young Americans (18 to 29) support socialism, whatever they think it means, by a margin of 49 to 43 percent. No doubt showing the effects of the Cold War on older Americans, only 31 percent of those polled had a positive view of socialism.
YouGov, an Internet-based London market research firm, gives a more favorable result: All those polled believe that socialism is better than capitalism by 12 percentage points. A full 59 percent of Democrats would vote for a socialist president, and even independent voters are positively inclined at 49 percent.
Putting the Democrats and Independents from this poll together indicates that Bill O’Reilly may well be wrong: “Sanders would be a GOP dream. America will never go socialist.”
Averaging all the presidential polls, Sanders actually does better than Clinton against the top three candidates: 50/39 against Cruz, 47/41 against Rubio, and 51/41 against Trump. Political scientists, however, have warned us about the unreliability of these early polls.
My position on Sanders parallels this Laborite’s opinion: “My heart is with Corbyn ideologically, but I think that the wider public isn’t ready for that level of progressiveness yet.” Another said that “If we go too far to the left, we will leave ourselves isolated from the core voters we need to win.”
The results of Super Tuesday show that Democrats think that the more pragmatic Clinton is in a better position to beat the GOP candidate in November
---------------------------------

Seeya 'round town, Moscow, because . . .

"Moscow Cares"
http://www.MoscowCares.com
  
Tom "Card-Carrying, Bleeding-Heart, Tree-Hugging Liberal" Hansen
Moscow, Idaho
  
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/attachments/20160303/dfc64395/attachment.html>