Bernie Sanders

It’s a curious thing that, months after the election which saw Jeremy Corbyn become leader of the Labour Party in September 2015 with a thumping 59.5% of the first round vote, the mainstream media were still struggling to understand how it had happened. It wasn’t as if they hadn’t kept a close eye on the campaign itself: hardly a day went by without there being some intrigue about the Corbyn campaign, its personalities and its problematic relationship to the party machine. But there was a sense that it was all too fantastical, and right up until the end the media clung on to the idea that ‘normality’ would be restored and the status quo re-established. 200-1 shots don’t win Labour leadership elections, after all. Even after Corbyn’s election on September 12th, when that theory was firmly put to bed, media commentators attempted to frame it in terms of received wisdom, failing to identify what was unique about this campaign.

This study aims to investigate the language and the attitude of two well-known U.S. politicians, U.S. President Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, towards media in their social media messages on Twitter microblogging site. The comparison and analyses are performed using Fairclough's analytical framework of the socio-cultural approach of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA): text, discourse practice, and sociocultural practice. The data consists of 50 non repetitive recent media related tweets collected from personal accounts of Trump and Sanders. The findings indicate that Trump uses an informal, direct, and provoking communication style to construct and reinforce the concept of a homogeneous people and a homeland threatened by the dangerous and biased other (media) while Sanders having more democratic, liberal language, and focuses on more tangible, important social issues such as environment, education, and health problems as he himself prominences often. Moreover, Trump employs positive self-presentation and negative other presentation to further promote his agenda via social media. Bernie Sanders on the other hand criticize media for a set of different reasons. Although they both criticize the media extensively in their usage of Twitter, discourse analyses indicate that the underlying political motivations are fundamentally different.

In 2016 and 2020, the Bernie Sanders campaign gave American leftists a path towards social change through electoral politics. After progressive Democrats discovered that Hillary Clinton and party insiders had blocked the Sanders nomination, the Democratic Party establishment fabricated Russiagate as a diversion from the fact that it lost the election to a Reality TV demagogue. In 2020, they pursued the same agenda of neoliberal policies combined with identity politics. In order to combat Trump’s reactionary uses of identity, the 2020 Sanders campaign combined a working-class agenda of universalist policies with various forms of social movement activism. In doing so it compromised on universalist principles and socialist radicalism in order to appeal to demographic groups and win the election. Making use of Žižekian ideology critique as well as the work of Ellen Meiksins Wood, Adolph Reed, Walter Benn Michaels, and other critics of the professional-managerial class, Bernie Bros Gone Woke reveals how intersectional politics contributed to the failure of the Sanders campaign – a lesson that the organized left must learn if it is to challenge progressive neoliberalism and move beyond postmodern post-politics.

Articles from the Platypus Review 2015-2017

Edited by Chris Cutrone

Trump’s victory is the beginning not the end of a process of transforming the Republican Party as well as mainstream politics more generally that is his avowed goal. So the question is the transformation of democracy—of how liberal democratic politics is conducted.  This was bound to change, with or without Trump. Now, with Trump, the issue is posed point-blank. There’s no avoiding the crisis of neoliberalism.

This volume collects articles by Chris Cutrone, Leonie Ettinger, Boris Kagarlitsky, Catherine Liu, Daniel Lommes, Gregory Lucero, Nikos Malliaris, John Milios and Emmanuel Tomaselli, addressing problems raised for the Left by the election of Trump.

The stunning defeat of the ‘Remain camp’ in the Brexit referendum in the UK and the surprise ‘discursive dominance’ of Bernie Sanders and Donald J. Trump throughout the presidential primaries cycle on the other side of the Atlantic have shaken the neoconservative-consumerist policy consensus in Berlin and Brussels. A new consensus seems to be emerging amongst British, American and French experts, one that favors ambitious developmentalism, modern infrastructure investment and the defense of native workers’ rights including pensions over lawless ‘free trade’ and regulatory overreach

The aim of this paper is to analyse the political language of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump during the 2015/2016 presidential primaries in the United States. The narrative delivered by both candidates is interpreted from the perspective of political science in order to show not only its ideological and political content, but also the electoral significance. The author stresses not only the highly particular nature of the analyzed primaries of the Democratic and Republican Parties, but also discusses the character of the candidates themselves. Sanders and Trump not only represented the populist answer to the 8 years of presidency of Barack Obama (on the left and right side of the political spectrum respectively), but were also the main candidates of the American anti-establishment circles, which becomes very clear in the analysis of their political language.

In the wake of US debt crisis a wave of protest swept through the advanced Capitalist countries and around the world bringing down governments in Tunisia, Egypt and challenging neoliberal centrist parties throughout the developed world. This ‘newest’ wave of social protests is distinct in its predominantly young social base, its leaderless organization structure and its media savvy tactics. Guided by the highly anti-capitalistic narrative these protests have developed, leading scholars in the field of social movements have begun to re-analyse the impact of economic and cultural structures and the role of class on the development of this newest wave of social movements. The present analysis builds on this research trend first theoretically by adding the insights of Marxist scholars on the nature of capitalism and the specifics of both normative, cultural and structural sources of grief and frames of action within neoliberal labour relations to an analysis of relationally based class location. The analysis focuses on the changing base for social movements within the west. Identifying a particular ‘latent’ class of young educated precariat the analysis uses models developed within the social movement literature to conduct an historical analysis to reveal the transformational process of class formation within these movements as they react to changing political and cultural events. This study then traces the development of this class consciousness through to the later more active forms of class consciousness seen in the Sanders and Corbyn campaigns. Rather than fading from view, this class-in-the-making is seen to evolve a more focused political consciousness during this period. Finally, a comparative analysis in done looking at the movement and party-politics of this precariat class in the wake of the crises brought on by the election of Donald Trump and the EU referendum.

Since the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States, an intense debate has developed around the connection between social media and populist movements. In this article, I put forward some theses about the reasons for the apparent ‘elective affinity’ between social media and populism. I argue that the match between social media and populist politics derives from the way in which the mass networking capabilities of social media, at the time of a ‘mass web’ involving billions of people worldwide, provide a suitable channel for the mass politics and the appeals to the people typical of populism. But this affinity also needs to be understood in light of the rebellious narrative that has come to be associated with social media at times in which rapid technological development has coincided with a profound economic crisis, shaking the legitimacy of the neoliberal order. This question is explored by examining the role acquired by social media in populist movements as the people’s voice and the people’s rally, providing, on the one hand, with a means for disaffected individuals to express themselves and, on the other hand, with a space in which disgruntled Internet users could gather and form partisan online crowds.

Although many men perceive their masculinity to be threatened by feminism, several men explicitly embrace it. Among them are a couple of male politicians. In this thesis, their subversions and reproductions of hegemonic masculinity (the most normative form of masculinity) have been analyzed by understanding hegemonic masculinity and what I will call ‘feminist masculinity’ as discourses. Therefore, a critical discourse analysis has been performed to analyze speeches of Justin Trudeau and Bernie Sanders. The results indicate that these male politicians subvert hegemonic masculinity with feminist masculine discourse that is either embedded in a broader discourse on diversity and social justice, or (to a lesser extent) discourse that centers around feminism explicitly. Furthermore, they also subvert hegemonic masculinity without the use of feminist discourse. However, occasional reproductions of hegemonic masculinity were found as well. Finally, the male politicians that were analyzed do not perform discourse that is explicitly against feminism, although they sometimes risk overestimating their role as feminist allies.

Working with the notion of translation, this paper illustrates a central contribution of Gramsci to communication theory: his philosophy of praxis. Such a framework works through an indissolubly twofold historical materialist program: (1) as an investigation of social phenomena through the exercise of a translation of polity aimed at the raising of a critical consciousness, and (2) as a political instrument that aims to consolidate and dialectically sublate " common sense " into " good sense, " through a politics of translation. I will offer the example of presidential candidate Bernie Sanders's " Political Revolution " to point out the meaningful but also ambiguous space of reciprocal translation between his discourse, Occupy Wall Street's trope of " 1% vs. 99%, " and Donald Trump's " Make America Great Again " rhetoric

What is happening at Iŋyaŋ Wakháŋagapi Othí (which is located near to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s reservation in so-called North Dakota) has been widely hailed as the largest gathering of Indigenous peoples in a generation, or more. Yet, despite that, settlers continue to prove either unable or unwilling to represent this standoff adequately in our media and popular discourses. In this paper I am interested in parsing the discursive significance that is played by the language of ‘civil disobedience’ as it is applied to the Standing Rock standoff in particular; however, I believe my analysis may also be applicable elsewhere. It is my central contention that while the language of civil disobedience may occasionally be deployed by water protectors themselves for the strategic purposes of harm reduction - establishing an appeal for legal accommodation - I believe that settlers who seek to ally themselves with this cause are responsible for utilizing and propagating the more radical, and consciously anti-colonial, discourses developed both at Standing Rock and over the centuries of resistance struggles. This shift in our discourse is imperative, first and foremost, because it is asked of us by those whose bodies are directly in harm’s way. It is also imperative because the hegemonic language of civil disobedience is at once inadequately equipped for describing this situation in its full complexity and, moreover, such a language carries connotations and implications that reify the settler state’s colonial relationship towards Indigenous peoples generally, and the Sioux in particular. This, I assert, is because the language of civil disobedience sustains a system of signification premised on, and reproduced through, the temporality of the settler state. Unpublished; All Rights Reserved; Do Not Copy, Print or Site without the express permission of the Author

In den USA gibt es keinen Sozialismus. Das weiß alle Welt. Das sagt auch das politische Spektrum. In diesem ist der Sozialist nicht einmal vorgesehen. US-Alltagsverstand und Politikpresse unterschieden hier von rechts bis links traditionell bekanntlich nur „conservatives“ (Rechte/Republikaner), „moderates“ (prinzipienlose Opportunisten oder Ideologen, deren Ideologie es ist, keine Ideologie zu haben), „liberals“ (Link(sliberal)e/Demokraten) und bestenfalls noch „progressives“ (Sozialdemokraten). Sozialisten und Kommunisten haben dagegen entweder etwas mit der untergegangenen und vergessenen Vergangenheit zu tun. Oder mit dem – durch Religions- und und dann politische Bürgerkriege zerrissenen – „Alten Europa“, dem man alle Jahre wieder den verlängerten Rücken retten musste (Weltkrieg Zwo). Mit anderen Worten, d.h. den Worten des US-Hightech-Kapitals im demokratisierten Hausgebrauch: “Das Element wurde nicht gefunden. Das Element befindet sich nicht mehr in C:\Benutzer\Proletariat\Sozialismus\USA. Überprüfen sie den Ort des Elements und wiederholen Sie den Vorgang.” Wie erklärt sich also der Aufstieg von Bernie Sanders in den demokratischen Vorwahlen von 2015/2016?

Hard questions must be asked: what errors did Bernie Sanders, his staff, his followers commit that could have been avoided? Would a better understanding of the theoretical and practical contradictions in his campaign clarify the ways in which his strategy misfired? It is not my purpose to give Sanders a theoretical legitimacy (as I attempted in an earlier version of this paper) but to question whether Bernie’s stated public understanding of a political revolution was matched by the reality of his campaign, and whether this conflict played a role in his political demise.

In this paper I sketch a Levinasian theory of human rights in relation to contemporary political calls for a Human Rights Revolution. In so doing, I identify three ways in which liberalism, the original political-philosophical harbinger of human rights, is ultimately inadequate to the task of preventing human rights travesties. No longer the "Rights of Man"—the rights of the individual, the right to possess, the right to assert oneself within the boundaries of a social contract—the rights of today's burgeoning Human Rights Revolution are being articulated distinctively in terms of an ethics of alterity and social responsibility.

The dawn of New Deal progressive politics is an era that has been relegated to a single chapter in history books, a time of contentious politics, a time of radical political doctrines of the far left and the far right. From the administration of Woodrow Wilson to the fourth term of Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency, the United States of America was forever changed, reconstructed in ways that the war of rebellion never could have forecasted. The etiology of great change in America, like most revolutionary changes, cannot be isolated to a singular phenomenon or causal agent, but rather is a complex interconnected network of systems, ideas, actions, reactions, and sociocultural shifts. This paper will synthesize and analyze a deeper, more intimate, story of contentious politics and revolt and offer a telling narrative of history where American nationalism had an objective meaning.

This presentation reflects upon the significance of settlers using the language of ‘civil disobedience’ to describe the ongoing standoff against the Dakota Access Pipeline, centred around the Sacred Stone Camp and the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. I assert that the language of civil disobedience is a not only an inadequate discourse within this context, but it also performs a dangerous re-signification of these events, reinscribing them as contiguous with processes of colonization.
This is because the language of civil disobedience, as it is deployed throughout dominant liberal academic literature seems to be inextricably tied to, and instantiate a reification of, the (settler) state. In as much as the canonical literature is concerned, those who commit acts of civil disobedience tend to be conceptually emplaced as subjects within a temporality signified through the state. The civilly disobedient subject(s) are not viewed as resistant to the prevailing political order: they are emplaced within the state and within the state’s claim to legitimate political obligation.
Affixing such discourses to Standing Rock reproduces the logic that the American government is itself a given or apolitical body. This works to disappear the processes of historic and ongoing settler colonization by normalizing the settler colony’s claim to authoritative rule over Indigenous peoples. I propose the ethical and political imperative of abandoning discourses of civil disobedience, in favour of those that more fully respect the anticolonial struggle at Standing Rock.

This is the English language version of my  book Le nouveau populisme américain : Résistances et alternatives face à Trump. Paris: Syllepse, May 2018. The English language version differs somewhat from the French translation and it contains more complete footnotes.

This article explores the ‘democratic socialism’ being proposed by new left movements on either side of the Atlantic, and evaluates its claim to be a form of anti‐ or postcapitalism. It argues that in the democratic socialist worldview, the line between capitalism and socialism rests on the balance of power between workers and capitalists in the economic sphere. While traditional social democracy seeks to redistribute wealth but leaves relations between workers and capitalists within firms untouched, democratic socialism seeks to abolish private property in the economic sphere. Production is controlled democratically by the workers themselves, in league with a workers’ state. The article critically appraises the claim that such a scenario constitutes a form of postcapitalism. Drawing on the work of critical Marxists such as Moishe Postone, it argues that capitalism is not primarily defined by private property relations in the economic sphere, but rather the peculiar social form of capitalist labour. Unlike in pre‐capitalist societies, for labour in capitalism to secure a continued basis on which to reproduce the means of subsistence, it must be socially validated as ‘value‐producing’. The criteria for value validation is not set in the workplace, or within a single nation state, but rather on the world market. The article concludes that, for all its merits, the democratisation of workplaces does not overcome the need for this social validation, but rather constitutes an alternative form of managing the process of production in this context. As such, democratic socialism, like social democracy, remains susceptible to the same imperatives and crises as other forms of capitalist production, and so cannot be said to constitute a form of ‘postcapitalism’.

Edito nell'Aprile del 2016, il saggio approfondisce la carriera politica di Bernie Sanders, contestualizza la sua corsa alla nomination democratica sia all'interno della vicenda dei Dem, sia all'interno della più articolata sfida contro l'establishment repubblicano e l'insorgente Donald Trump. Raccoglie osservazioni e commenti ai discorsi tradotti e selezionati per il volume e approfondisce il messaggio politico di Sanders anche alla luce del dibatitto pubblico che la sua candidatura ha scatenato negli USA, con particolare attenzione al mondo giovanile e culturale.

4 de? Candidatos:¿Apoyan la Agenda Globalista Progresista? #2020Election #BernieSanders #JoeBiden #2A @VoteMpls @MNSecofState #Military @realDonaldTrump #Republican #Democrat #YellowVest #Progressive @MNCourts @USSupremeCourt @ScottPresler #GenZ @WayneDupreeShow @AmyMek #Congress https://www.instagram.com/p/B9aTKCrJJ6H/

To address  the  appeal  of  Bernie  Sanders  for  a  college-age population,  I created a course at Vanderbilt, and see what the students had to say about the Bernie they knew, and the Bernie they came to know better as they read primary and secondary texts relating to his life and work. The Political Science Department at Vanderbilt University was amenable, and so in the fall of 2021 I opened the course up to (a flood of!) students. Ilimited the class size, however, because Iwanted to review all of the material myself, and not have to rely on a graduate student. I decided  as  well  to  invite  guests  who couldbroaden  and  deepen  the  conversation,  and so we  had memorable  talks  from John  Geer  (Vanderbilt  Professor  and  Dean),Ryan  Nobles(CNN), Alex Rogers(CNN)and Faiz Shakir,Bernie’s campaign manager.Within weeks  of  starting  the  course, Irealized  that I’d  struck  intellectual  gold  with  these students. They were engaged, sharp, critical, and deeply aware of the issues. Iwanted to hear their voices, though, rather than leading them to follow a set course plan, and so Iasked them tocontribute “position papers”pertaining to their specific areas of interest,and to present their ideas to the class in oral presentations. They also turned in final projects, which sometimes expanded their work for the other assignments, orelse set out on new pathways. Ialso invited them to read froma broad list of works connected to Bernie’s ideas, and (as an optional assignment) to contribute a book review as well. By mid-semester, Iknew thatIwasn’t going to write that biography of Bernie Sanders, but Iwas  instead  going  to invite, help  edit,  and  then  publish  those  students  who  wrote positionpapers and/or book reviews in AmeriQuests.This special issue,The Mittens and the Dove, is the result.

REVIEW ARTICLE
- Francesco Campolongo e Loris Caruso,
Podemos e il populismo di sinistra. Dalla protesta al governo, Milano, Meltemi, 2021;
- Raffaella Fittipaldi, Podemos. Un profilo organizzativo, Milano, Meltemi, 2021;
- Jorge Tamames, For the People. Left Populism in Spain and the US, London, Wishart, 2020

Ernesto Laclau's On Populist Reason (OPR) explains the social logic behind populism independent of a predetermined ideology. Through utilizing Laclau’s text and theoretical approach, one can gain a greater understanding into the mechanisms behind the formation of a populist movement. In this paper, I use Laclau’s OPR as a lens to consider whether the Bernie Sanders campaign can adequately be deemed a populist movement. I will argue that the Sanders campaign demonstrated a progressive populist movement by successfully establishing an alternative hegemony on the left, and therefore is a sound application of Laclau’s theoretical approach.

La diffusione del socialismo democratico negli Stati Uniti e la polarizzazione elettorale accresciutasi con l'ascesa alla presidenza di Donald J. Trump ha permesso a diverse figure della società civile di assumere un ruolo influente nel panorama politico nazionale. Linda Sarsour, attivista musulmana di origini palestinesi, rappresenta una generazione progressista votata alla causa dei più deboli. Gli obiettivi di Linda Sarsour vertono sulla difesa dei diritti civili di vari segmenti della società che, in questi anni, hanno subìto un trattamento ritenuto non equo. Parole chiave: Islam, Stati Uniti, socialismo democratico, diritti civili, Donald J. Trump

The spread of democratic socialism in the United States and the increased electoral polarization that followed Donald J. Trump's rise to the presidency pushed various civil society figures to play an influential role in the national political landscape. Linda Sarsour, a Muslim-American activist of Palestinian origin, represents a progressive generation that pays attention to the weakest part of the society. Linda Sarsour's goals focus on the defense of society various segments's civil rights that in recent years have been subjected to behaviours she deems unjust.

The present thesis uses methods of Critical Discourse Analysis to examine 16 front-page newspaper articles, from The New York Times and The Washington Post, covering progressive presidential candidate Bernie Sanders during the 2015 “invisible primary”. In particular, this thesis investigates how Sanders and his supporters were represented, linguistically and visually, and whether these representations – formulated as “interpretive frames” – appear more legitimizing or delegitimizing. In the crucial pre-voting period of the invisible primary, the media largely have the power to construct the identity of relatively unknown candidates, such as Sanders, in the minds of the national public.

The 2015/16 election season occurred against the backdrop of extreme levels of economic inequality and related societal ills, which have arguably arisen from four decades of neoliberal policies implemented by successive American presidents from both major political parties. The findings of the analysis appear to confirm a concerning pattern of largely delegitimizing US media coverage (or omission) of progressive political candidates and social movements going back several decades. In the articles analysed, Sanders was represented using interpretive frames casting him as an extreme leftist, angry and impersonal, or marginal and old. Only one major interpretive frame – representing him as a skilful, pragmatic politician – appeared legitimizing. Similarly, Sanders’ supporters were largely framed as activists, excitable fans, or divided into narrow identity categories (e.g. “white liberals”) that appear delegitimizing when considered opposite the shared economic struggles that many of them likely face. Given the liberal reputation of The New York Times and moderate image of The Washington Post, the results raise further doubts about the ideological diversity of the mainstream American public sphere.

Even though Hillary has the lead in the Democratic Party primaries (and also in the general election), Sanders’ popularity cannot be overlooked. In particular, it represents a shift towards the left of a significant part of the electorate. The advances made by the two candidates who operate in the margins of the traditional political system—either through the right (via Trump) or the left (via Sanders)—are an expression of the crisis in which US society is submerged.

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#WETHEPEOPLE #Boomers #GenX #Millennials #DonaldTrump #College #GenZ #Teen #FFA #HighSchool #HomeSchool #VoTech #Student #militia #gun @SCOTUS #JudicialWatch #MarkLevinShow @HodgeTwins #PragerU @christianllamar @CCHFreedom @Act4America https://www.instagram.com/p/B9hlASmAR60/

Il 3 marzo 2020 si è tenuto il Super Tuesday, giorno in cui si è votato contemporaneamente in più Stati per le elezioni primarie presidenziali statunitensi, in vista delle nomination per i candidati per le prossime elezioni presidenziali, che si terranno il 3 novembre [...]