A new political era? (2 articles)

[zoogs]

Thomas Piketty on the rise of Bernie Sanders: the US enters a new political era

 

An interesting UK perspective, musing on the current improbable rise of a disruptive candidate in the Democratic party.

 

In many respects, we are witnessing the end of the politico-ideological cycle opened by the victory of Ronald Reagan at the 1980 elections.

 

(...) From the 1930s until the 1970s, the US were at the forefront of an ambitious set of policies aiming to reduce social inequalities. Partly to avoid any resemblance with Old Europe, seen then as extremely unequal and contrary to the American democratic spirit, in the inter-war years the country invented a highly progressive income and estate tax and set up levels of fiscal progressiveness never used on our side of the Atlantic. From 1930 to 1980 for half a century the rate for the highest US income (over $1m per year) was on average 82%, with peaks of 91% from the 1940s to 1960s (from Roosevelt to Kennedy), and still as high as 70% during Reagans election in 1980.

Vox: Top Democratic economists don't think much of Bernienomics. He doesn't care.

 

Matthew Yglesias is I think the most pro-Bernie voice I've seen at Vox, or at least he seems to take him much more seriously than Ezra Klein. This is a good discussion on the (let's call it) optimism of Bernie's promises that culminates in a reflection of the rise of ideology in the Democratic Party.

 

The dismissals of the critiques of Friedman's praise for Sanders's plan are, in a way, more telling and informative than either the Friedman paper or the critiques of it. Sanders and his core constituency simply don't care.

 

Sanders is running a style of campaign that's very unusual for a prominent Democrat but extremely common for a Republican.(...)

 

To Sanders's critics, of course, this is just gross irresponsibility that neglects the best traditions of the Democratic Party and raises serious questions about Sanders's ability to do serious policy analysis when the time comes to make choices. But to his fans, fetishizing wonky details is just a way of circumscribing policy proposals to what can be uncontroversially modeled in a world where obtaining and deploying concrete political power not drawing up more and better white papers is the crucial task for progressive politics.