HANOVER, N.H. — Here’s how lucky Bernie Sanders is: Two days before the New Hampshire primary, two of the three leading candidates were attacking one another.
Sanders was the third. He wasn’t attacking anybody. And nobody was attacking him, at least not by name. Pete Buttigieg and Joe Biden were too busy attacking each other.
The attacks didn’t seem to be helping either of them. As late as Sunday afternoon, lots of voters were still undecided, meaning the latest polls suggest more than they predict. What they were suggesting Monday morning was that, if anything, Sanders was gaining support, Buttigieg holding steady, Biden fading. (And maybe Elizabeth Warren fading, too, with one poll showing Amy Klobuchar third. It’s the New Hampshire primary; prepare for the weird.)
But Sanders isn’t just lucky. He’s good. He’s a shrewd politician. That helps explain why he didn’t go after either of his opponents. Among the most productive political tactics is, “let’s you and him fight.”
Sanders demonstrated his shrewdness in the New Hampshire debate last week, when the first question he was “why shouldn’t Democrats be worried” if he – a professed socialist — ended up as their presidential nominee.
“Because Donald Trump lies all the time,” Sanders said.
It worked. Sanders dove right into his customary litany about appealing to voters “who have given up on the political process because they don’t believe that anybody is feeling their pain,” and nobody seemed to notice that he hadn’t really answered the question.
Not that he totally ignored it. The question, from George Stephanopoulos of ABC News, noted that Trump “thinks this label socialism will work” for him against Sanders.
But everybody understood that the point of the question went way beyond what Trump would do. Lots of Democrats – including very liberal Democrats—are wary (some downright panicked) about a possible Sanders nomination both because they oppose socialism and because they fear that the label would doom their party to defeats up and down the ballot.
That’s why it was smart for Sanders to ignore that part of the question. Instead, a few minutes later, he said his goal was to “bring people together,” and the way to do that was to “raise the minimum wage to 15 bucks an hour … making it clear that we’re not going to give tax breaks to billionaires … ending the international disgrace of … being the only major nation … not to guarantee health care to all people …”
That, it seems, is socialism as Bernie Sanders defines it. He assails “corporate greed” but has not proposed abolishing corporations. The only thing he wants to socialize is health insurance, and capitalist countries all over the world have socialized health insurance.
While a recent poll leaves little doubt that as an abstract ideology socialism is unpopular (53% had a “negative view” of it), large majorities of voters generally agree with Sanders on that list of policies he recited in the debate.
Besides, capitalism, as practiced, hasn’t been an overwhelming success for many Americans for the last few decades, either. The economy has grown, but so has economic inequality. Incomes have stagnated while the cost of necessities – health care housing, education – has shot up. Millions of working families have no money in the bank.
So maybe being a socialist isn’t politically fatal any more. If not, here’s a piece of Bernie Sanders luck substantially more profound than Biden and Buttigieg going to war around him. It seems that it isn’t only Sanders who has changed the definition of socialism. So has the dictionary.
As recently as 1992, the Third Edition of the American Heritage Dictionary defined socialism as an economic system in which the “means of producing and distributing goods are owned collectively.”
Now the Oxford Dictionary (online) defines it as a system in which “the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.”
That “or regulated” makes all the difference in the world, transforming socialism from a utopian (or dystopian) vision to … well, just to the way the world works. “Regulated by the community as a whole” is why it’s against the law to dump toxic waste in the river or pay workers a dollar an hour. Who’s against that?
Not Sanders, and not any of several people who attended his event here Sunday afternoon, some of them still undecided about who will get their votes Tuesday. Not one of them identified as a “socialist,” but neither did the term bother them.
“I focus less on labels,” said 52-year-old Steve Lawson of Etna, New Hampshire. Brooks MacMillen, 63, an independent from Vermont, said he, too, was undecided, but was “open to different ideas.” Mali Obonsawin, a musician from Farmington, Maine, said “young people aren’t worried about that stuff (socialism) at all. Maybe it worries some people who remember the Cold War.”
That’s a lot of people, and even if few of them fear Sanders will introduce a centrally planned economy (something he never suggested) many could be repelled by another aspect of Sanders socialism.
Sanders regularly notes that he is a “democratic socialist.” But while earlier leaders of American democratic socialism like Norman Thomas (1884-1968) and Michael Harrington (1928-1989) consistently condemned totalitarian socialists, Sanders has not. In the past, he praised Fidel Castro. More recently he has declined to denounce the authoritarian Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.
If Sanders is the nominee, the Trump campaign would no doubt make much of all that. Whether enough people would be bothered by it remains uncertain.
No one, including Bernie Sanders, was talking about socialism in Hanover Sunday. He talked about climate change, the high cost of prescription drugs, and getting private money out of politics. He pledged to “bring our people together around an agenda that works for all of us.”
Standard campaign boiler-plate. He talked for 42 minutes. He was calm. He was even a bit boring. Under the circumstances, just what a shrewd politician would do.
