The Bernie/Hillary Divide Is Finally Closed

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The Bernie/Hillary Divide Is Finally Closed
At the Democratic National Convention on Monday night, speaker after speaker illuminated a politics that delivers for working families.

By Zachary D. Carter
Aug 20, 20244:34 PM


(Slate) Kamala Harris understands the promise of a new beginning. For the past eight years, the Democratic Party has been cut by a schism between two large, broad factions that coalesced around the respective 2016 primary campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. But at the opening of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on Monday night, the divide that defined the party for nearly a decade seemed to have been bridged, with speaker after speaker illuminating almost identical visions of a politics that delivers for working families.

Here was Joe Biden’s business-friendly Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, pledging Democrats to an economy “free from monopolies” with a tearjerker about her dad’s factory job being offshored by rich Republicans. There was left-wing luminary Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from New York, firing a barn burner about Kamala’s “patriot” bona fides—earned by protecting “our way of life” from “corporate greed.” The crowd was equally enthusiastic about appeals to Harris’ background as a prosecutor as about her plans to protect abortion rights and help young families buy a home, but the centrality of the economic message was impossible to miss. No fewer than seven union leaders graced the stage over the course of the evening, most notably United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain, who had the crowd on its feet as he hammered Trump as a “scab”—a word that wasn’t even part of the Democratic lexicon at the previous convention but has since transformed into the ultimate liberal insult.

Eight years ago, anyone who accused the executive class of stoking racism to “divide and conquer” workers would have been attacked by an outrage army for minimizing the role of race in American history. When Fain said it Monday night, a relaxed audience simply cheered. This was a party comfortable with itself as pro-union, anti-monopoly, and pro-family—all families—one whose paeans to retail workers, immigrants, and ex–Trump voters seemed natural, with no need for certificates of authenticity.

There were real worldview differences between the old Clinton and Sanders camps, but what made these ideologies so difficult to unite was their origin in an equally real social distinction. For all the ink and pixels dedicated to analyzing the 2016 contest through race, gender, and class, the most striking and consistent demographic divide was age. Hillary handily defeated Bernie among women overall, for instance, even as Sanders trounced her by 37 points among women under 30. Sanders’ idealism was innately appealing to the young, whose energy and optimism have always been essential to any project aimed at social change. But his appeals to economic justice were uniquely compelling to a generation that came of working age during the Great Recession, a time when the volume of student debt more than doubled. Even college grads who made it into the economic lifeboats knew plenty of people who hadn’t. The experience of economic frustration was common, the experience of economic fear almost universal. The dividing line between millennials and Gen X was not so much a calendar year as an economic order. .............(more)

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/08/dnc-kamala-harris-economy-biden.html