The corporate politicians are starting to worry. First the Pope gives a left wing speech. Then Obama takes up the issue of economic inequality in the US. Now, there is a story that US Senator Bernie Sanders is considering running for president. For those outside the US: Sanders is the only senator who is not a member of either political party. He calls himself a socialist, although he’s a totally different kind of socialist from Kshama Sawant. He’s a left liberal and he sits with and votes with the Democrats in the Senate.
What the article doesn’t make clear is that evidently if he decides to run, he’s considering running for the Democratic nomination, rather than as an independent. At the same time, he’s evidently encouraging US Senator Elizabeth Warren to run. Like Sanders, Warren is a left liberal.
So what we see here is the beginnings of a return to the more traditional role of the two parties. As previously noted, the mainstream of Corporate America is now taking steps to reassert itself in the Republican Party, over the populist Tea Partiers. In the Democrats, it seems that a liberal wing may revive. We see this in these events as well as the victory of a left liberal for New York City mayor just last month.
It’s as if the US capitalist class is deciding that the right wing populist Tea Party is too disruptive and also that it’s not serving the purpose of preventing a left populism – even socialism (gasp!) – from developing. So the “left” of the Democrats has to be revived.
Categories: politics, United States