Sanders, Corbyn and the coming debate inside the Democratic Party

[Valin]

Washington Post:

Dan Balz

September 12 2015

 

The election of Jeremy Corbyn, the left-wing back-bencher, as the new leader of the British Labour Party raises the inevitable question: Can it happen here? Can Bernie Sanders, the independent socialist senator from Vermont, capture the heart and soul of the Democratic Party? The immediate answer: He remains an underdog candidate for the Democratic nomination. But some of the same forces that were instrumental in bringing Corbyn to power have powered Sanders’s rise from a hopeless cause to a candidate who now leads Hillary Rodham Clinton in New Hampshire and in at least one poll in Iowa, and who has closed the gap with her nationally.

 

In a time of economic insecurity and an anti-establishment mood among so many voters here and elsewhere, the unexpected is no longer unthinkable. If Clinton’s problems and Sanders’s success are part of a surprising summer of politics here, the Corbyn victory was even more unthinkable only a few months ago after Labour suffered a historic defeat in the general election.

 

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Although Democrats have suffered humiliating defeats in two midterm elections in that time, they have not been faced with the kind of back-to-basic question about their philosophy and policies that Miliband’s defeat and resignation triggered there. And yet, Clinton has found herself struggling with many of the same forces on the left that just swept aside the Labour Party establishment. Sanders, like Corbyn, has tapped into the economic unrest that remains in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, manifested in debate about income and wealth inequality and fed by resentment that the bankers whose actions helped trigger the collapse have paid no significant penalty, which average families have.

 

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