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View Full Version : The most profound gap between Clinton and Sanders supporters wasn’t about policy



Chris
06-20-2017, 03:40 PM
I'd be curious what liberals think of this article, if inaccurate, how; and which side they fall on, Clinton's or Sanders's.

The most profound gap between Clinton and Sanders supporters wasn’t about policy (https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/6/20/15830316/clinton-sanders-issues-rigged)


...Compared with Sanders supporters, voters with a favorable view of Clinton are much less likely to view politics as a rigged game, much more likely to express pride in America, and much less likely to express the view that “people like me” are in decline.

That tension was highly visible at the 2016 Democratic convention. The Clinton and Sanders camps had some difficult discussions on the party’s platform committee, but ultimately crafted an agenda that both sides could enthusiastically support. The speeches from the convention floor, however, revealed a stark contrast between optimistic, upbeat speeches from Clinton and the Obama families and things like Elizabeth Warren darkly warning that “people get it: the system is rigged.”

At the end of the day, even if the basic prescriptions were broadly similar — a higher minimum wage, more stringent regulation of banks, higher taxes on the rich, more subsidization of higher education and health care — the diagnoses were in some ways diametrically opposed, with Clinton seeing a beneficent American establishment threatened with disruption by the unruly forces unleashed by Donald Trump and Sanders seeing a fundamentally fallen nation in dire need of redemption.

Those thematic and atmospheric disagreements plague the party to this day in part because the diagnosis that the political system as a whole is rigged — as opposed to the GOP just being bad — plays as an indictment of many leading Democrats, a diagnosis they naturally reject. On the other hand, with Democrats now almost entirely locked out of political power, it may be much easier going forward to unify around a dark message than it was in 2016 with Obama in the White House.

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