Who's worth reading? John Cassidy, for one: Bernie Sanders and the New Populism

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This new populism, as it might be termed, connotes a deep suspicion of political, corporate, and media élites; an eagerness to mobilize people who are new to politics; and a willingness to embrace policies that have long seemed verboten. On the right, this has meant proposals to crack down on immigrants, Muslims, and outsiders of all kinds. On the left, it has meant demands to downsize big banks, crack down on tax-dodging multinationals, shift to a much more progressive tax system, and get serious about curbing carbon emissions.

Sanders says that he would take all of the latter steps. But what really sets him apart isn’t his policy platform, which can be fairly described as shifting the United States toward the Scandinavian model of social democracy more rapidly than Clinton and other Democrats would; it’s his fiery rhetoric. In calling for a “political revolution,” attacking the “billionaire class,” and embracing the label “democratic socialist,” Sanders is using language that has never been heard before in a Democratic Presidential primary. (Socialists such as Eugene Debs and Norman Thomas have run for President in the past, but on the ticket of the Socialist Party.)

Some political analysts seem taken aback that Sanders’s leftist language is resonating broadly among Democrats, particularly young ones, but they shouldn’t be surprised. A recent O.E.C.D. study showed that, between 1975 and 2012, nearly half of all the pre-tax income growth in the United States went to the richest one per cent of households. Another study, by the economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, showed that the richest 0.1 per cent of households own almost a quarter of the country’s wealth, which is more than the bottom ninety per cent of households.

Thanks to the efforts of Sanders and others, such as the French economist Thomas Piketty, disturbing facts like these form part of the mental picture that voters, and particularly young voters, now have of the world. Partly for this reason, some old political labels are being reassessed. In a January poll of likely voters in the Iowa Democratic primary, forty-three per cent of respondents described themselves as “socialist.” And it isn’t just Iowa. A 2011 study by the Pew Research Center found that forty-nine per cent of millennials—defined as Americans between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine—view socialism favorably, compared to forty-three per cent who view it unfavorably. Asked about capitalism, forty-six per cent of the respondents said that they viewed it favorably, and forty-seven per cent said that they viewed it unfavorably.

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http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/bernie-sanders-and-the-new-populism

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1. Kick. This is first rate stuff.