Pundits Get a Grip!

Margaret Sullivan of the Washington Post has documented how the non-Trump pundits are sure that nominating Bernie Sanders will be a disaster. According to Jonathan Chait, “Running Sanders Against Trump Would Be an Act of Insanity.” Jennifer Rubin says that a “Sanders Trump-like campaign is a disaster for Democrats” Then David Brooks weighed in, saying that Sanders is peddling an “Us vs. Them” myth just like Trump.

The pundits have been wrong before. Remember 2016? I am far less confident than they are, about how this is going to turn out. But there are two things they are overlooking: the extent of the problems millions of Americans are facing and the support for most of the policies that Sanders favors.

Brooks claims that Sanders is promoting a myth that “The corporate and Wall Street elites are rapacious monsters who hoard the nation’s wealth and oppress working families.” He sees a more benign reality than an “us vs. them” story:

“Everywhere I go I see systems that are struggling — school systems, housing systems, family structures, neighborhoods trying to bridge diversity. These problem aren’t caused by some group of intentionally evil people. They exist because living through a time of economic, technological, demographic, and cultural transition is hard.”

I agree with Brooks that these conditions are not the result of a group of intentionally evil people. After three years of studying the recent evolution of U.S. capitalism, I don’t think that conservatives set out to make society worse than it was. As Jane Mayer documented, they simply worked to advance their own economic interest through extensive, sophisticated, and stealthy advocacy for free market ideology. But in the process they steadily increased economic inequality and child poverty, eliminated well-paying jobs in manufacturing, and curtailed regulation of corporate behavior.

In essays on the online magazine, This View of Life, I document the extensive harm that six unregulated industries are doing. The Tobacco industry accounts for more than 400,000 deaths per year. The gun industry contributes to 60,000 deaths a year. The food industry designs and markets foods that are a direct cause of the obesity epidemic, which is shortening the life span of our children. Among the harms done by the pharmaceutical industry are the 630,000 deaths between1999 and 2016 due to drug overdoses involving prescription opioids or heroin. (Many heroin deaths resulted from people who became addicted to prescription opioids and turned to heroin because it was cheaper.) The financial industry, which benefitted from deregulation in the 1990s, marketed investment instruments that directly resulted in the Great Recession. And finally, there is the fossil fuel industry, an industry that was essential to economic growth over the last two centuries, but which is using all of its influence with policy makers to maintain its business despite the climate catastrophe that is rapidly approaching.

The punditry seems to believe that if we can just get rid of Trump, we can return to normalcy. They fail to understand that Trump is not an aberration. He is the natural result of fifty years in which this country has embraced free market economic theory. We were told that government is the problem; that if we simply trusted unregulated markets, where corporations are free to pursue their own economic gain, it would produce the most good for the most people. The pundits are blind to the fact that our fifty-year experiment with free market economics has been a complete failure.

The one exception to this statement is the work of Nicholas Kristof and Cheryl WuDunn. In their new book, Tightrope, they document how badly a large swath of Americans have fared. We have one of the highest rates of children living in poverty, the highest rate of economic inequality, the most expensive health care system of any nation, and higher rates of premature death than most developed nations. Most of our communities are blighted by neighborhoods of concentrated disadvantage in which stable two parent families are the exception, schools are underfunded, and our punitive criminal justice system, lack of good paying jobs, and our failure to educate working class young men, undermine family stability. Under these conditions, people are prone to use drugs and alcohol to medicate away their depression, anxiety, and pain. Anne Case and Angus Deaton have documented how the deaths of despair that result in these conditions are producing an unprecedented decline in life expectancy for white non-Hispanics without a college degree.

If the pundits are successful in ensuring that a “moderate” Democrat wins the presidency, I hope that that moderate understands just how corrupt our entire economic and political system has become. We will not fix this country with incremental steps. We must face up to the fact that not only wealth, but political power has been taken over by a small segment of the population. I am not just talking about the oligarchs at the very top of the hierarchy. As Richard Reeves has shown, the top ten percent of earners are all complicit — and that includes the pundits and this writer.

The pundits are right that it will be hard for Sanders to win this election — especially with all the criticism being directed at him by their commentary. But polls show that the majority of Americans, sometimes a great majority, support most of the policies Sanders is proposing.

• Two thirds of people favor a $15 minimum wage.

• Seventy-six percent of registered voters want the wealthiest Americans to pay more taxes.

· Sixty-seven percent of American’s think economic inequality is getting worse and 65% think the problem needs to be addressed now.

• Fifty-four percent of Americans favor adding a government-sponsored health insurance option

• Sixty percent support the regulation of the tobacco industry.

• Eighty percent want government action to reduce drug prices

• Sixty percent say gun laws should be tougher.

Both Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are clear in saying that we cannot win without a mass movement. It may be the case that it will be hard to get angry and disillusioned people to get involved. But rather than frightening them with talk of socialism (think Venezuela, not Denmark!) pundits would do well to focus on the conditions that are so harmful and the stranglehold that the very wealthy have on our political system.

The pundits didn’t see Trump coming because they didn’t see all of the disillusioned people. They still don’t see them. If they want to repair the damage that has been done to the nation over the pasty fifty years, they will need a more accurate analysis of the nature and causes of our problems. And they will need to generate support for the policies that are needed.

I Googled “sanders” and “monsters.” I can’t find any evidence that he called corporate elites “rapacious monsters,” although I did find a YouTube interview where he showed how he pretends he is a monster when he plays with his grandchildren. Those who make him out to be a boogey man, might take a look at Andy Borowitz piece from the New Yorker in 2015: “In Serious Gaffe, Sanders Treats Opponent with Dignity and Respect.”

Anthony Biglan is behavioral scientist and the author of the soon to be released book, Rebooting Capitalism: How Behavioral Science Can Help Forge a Society That Works for Everyone.