Why the Differences Between Sanders and Warren Matter
By Zaid Jilani, Jacobin
09 January 19
Elizabeth Warren is no moderate. But Bernie Sanders would be the most
progressive president in US history - and he'd have a movement to back him
up.
Both are critics of the Democratic establishment. Both are foes of Wall
Street. And both are substantive, policy-focused politicians. But that
doesn't mean Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren share the same worldview.
Sanders tends to focus on "post-distribution" remedies, meaning he prefers
to use the government's power to tax and spend to directly meet Americans'
needs - or replace the market altogether. His social-democratic ideas, like
free college and single-payer health care, are now policies most Democrats
have to tip their hat to at least for electoral reasons. Warren wants to
empower regulators and rejigger markets to shape "pre-distribution" income,
before taxes. Less likely to push for big-ticket programs, she wants to
re-regulate Wall Street and make life easier for consumers.
Before I go any further, I should lay my cards on the table. I have a
conflict of interest - towards Warren. In 2012, I worked for the Progressive
Change Campaign Committee (PCCC), the most influential outside PAC
supporting Warren. I raised thousands of dollars for her and recruited
dozens of volunteers. I spent hundreds of hours helping elect Warren to the
Senate. I have written favorably about most of her Senate career since.
But I've always understood that Warren does not come from the same political
tradition as someone like Bernie Sanders. She was a Republican until 1996,
when she realized the party had failed to rein in the influence of business
(especially finance). "I was with the GOP for a while because I really
thought that it was a party that was principled in its conservative approach
to economics and to markets," Warren told George Stephanopoulos in 2014.
"And I feel like the GOP just left that."
She continued: "They moved to a party that said, 'No, it's not about a level
playing field. It's now about a field that's gotten tilted.'" And they
really stood up for the big financial institutions when the big financial
institutions are just hammering middle-class American families. I just feel
like that's a party that moved way, way away."
Since her departure from the Republican Party, Warren has busied herself
promoting a "level playing field" and a fairer system for workers and
consumers. Her ideals, while not out of step with those of a mid-century
liberal Republican, would represent a marked shift away from the economic
status quo if implemented. In an interview for this article, Noam Chomsky
called Warren a "credible candidate" who is "pretty good on domestic
policy."
Yet Sanders has always existed outside the traditional party system. He has
more in common with non-American socialists like Evo Morales and Jeremy
Corbyn than party figures like John Kennedy, to whom Warren has subtly
linked herself. He would be the most progressive president the United States
has ever seen.
The two senators also have distinct theories of change. Sanders has long
believed in bottom-up, movement-based politics. Since his days as mayor of
Burlington, Vermont, he has tried to energize citizens to take part in
government. He generally distrusts elites and decision-making that does not
include the public. Warren, on the other hand, generally accepts political
reality and works to push elite decision-makers towards her point of view.
When I worked at PCCC, I was once told that Warren decided to run for the
Senate after witnessing the amount of power she had as an oversight chair
for the bank bailouts. She believed that "being in the room" with
decision-makers in the Obama administration was essential to creating
change. While Warren wants to be at the table with elites, arguing for
progressive policies, Sanders wants to open the doors and let the public
make the policy.
Many observers point out that Warren has sponsored much of Sanders's
legislation over the past few years. But that doesn't mean she shares his
precise priorities or worldview anymore than former Big Tobacco lawyer
Kirsten Gillibrand or school privatization fan Cory Booker share Sanders's
priorities and worldview because they, too, have sponsored much of his
legislation ahead of their likely presidential bids.
That is not to say Warren is in the same political lane as Booker or
Gillibrand - she is significantly to their left. But coming around to
Sanders-style ideas in the run-up to a presidential run does not equate to
meaning she necessarily would prioritize them as president.
Any president has a limited amount of political capital and limited
congressional support, and therefore has to pick their battles. Those
battles can be very expensive - the health insurance industry spent over a
hundred million dollars fighting the Affordable Care Act, a law that left
the industry mostly intact. One can easily imagine health care firms
spending a billion dollars to stop Medicare for All, which would wipe it
out. What the next president chooses to pursue in the face of political
reality is heavily dependent on their core worldview and values. And if you
roll back the clock a few years before Warren was considering running for
president, you can clearly see that she prioritizes her pre-distribution,
regulatory approach over Sanders's social-democratic one.
For instance, when she initially ran for Senate in 2012, Warren did not
support single-payer health care. That position was taken by Marisa
DeFranco, an immigration lawyer who ran to Warren's left on both health care
and foreign policy but who was muscled out of the Democratic primary during
the convention process (one Democratic activist said it would take a
"dictatorship, not democracy" to defeat incumbent Republican senator Scott
Brown).
With DeFranco eliminated from the primary ballot, Warren felt no pressure to
shift left. During an interview with the local press, she was asked about
once praising single-payer health care in a book chapter she co-authored
with Deborah Thorne.
"If you were the tsarina, something like single-payer, government-run health
care, far lower administrative costs, that sort of thing, would be the
Senator Warren prescription, would it not?" the host asked.
"I think right now what we have to do - I'm serious about this - I think
you've got to stay with what's possible. And I think what we're doing - and
look at the dust-up around this - we really need to consolidate our gains
around what we've got around the table," Warren said.
The host followed up by asking if Warren personally supports single-payer.
"No," she replied.
Five years later - after decades of advocacy by Sanders had helped
popularize Medicare for All - Warren decided to endorse the policy. But
unlike consumer protections or financial regulation, establishing a
single-payer health care system doesn't seem to be a top priority for
Warren. She probably isn't opposed to doing so, but if she's going to spend
her finite political capital moving things through Congress, it's a good bet
she would likely focus on the core priorities she has championed throughout
her adult life. It's hardly a surprise that Warren didn't raise single-payer
during her first two campaign events in Iowa and when asked about it by a
Washington Post reporter, suggested she didn't bring it up because no one
else at the events raised it.
When Warren says that the primary difference between Sanders and herself is
that she's a proponent of capitalism, it's not just rhetoric. Her life's
work has been to make markets more competitive and equitable, not to
redistribute money from the rich to the poor and remove big chunks of
economic life from the private sector. (That's one reason she was once a big
proponent of charter schools, believing that they introduced much-needed
competition.)
Warren's marquee legislation is substantive and serious. Her Accountable
Capitalism Act would increase corporate accountability to stakeholders like
the workers who produce their profits. The Consumer Financial Protection
Bureau, largely the product of Warren's advocacy, has aided consumers who
are ripped off by industry. But it also points to their political
differences.
While Sanders was authoring a bill to make health care basically free, she
was authoring one to tighten regulation of the private health insurance
industry. While Sanders was proposing making every public college in America
tuition-free, Warren was promoting a third way approach: increasing public
aid to colleges (allowing them to offer a "debt-free option") and increasing
accountability over federal dollars.
"Democrats talk about resources, pointing out that we're no longer investing
in our kids the way we once did. Republicans talk about risk and incentives
- arguing that students take on debt without fully understanding the
consequences, and that colleges get access to federal dollars pretty much no
matter the quality or cost of the education they provide," she noted during
a 2015 speech to the American Federation of Teachers. "Here's the truth -
both sides are right." The idea of simply making public college free, as it
once was in many states across America, did not occur to Warren until she
endorsed the Sanders legislation to do so in 2017.
Warren isn't totally opposed to more robust government programs. She is a
fan of postal banking, and she has also proposed getting the federal
government into the business of producing generic pharmaceutical drugs. But
both of these measures are intended to spur competition - unlike, say,
single payer, which would replace most of the private health insurance
industry altogether.
Sanders isn't opposed to "pre-distribution" measures. His campaign against
Amazon led the company to raise its minimum wage to $15 an hour. He has
authored legislation that would foster worker-owned businesses. He's a
strident supporter of unions and staunch opponent of deregulation.
But it's clear what his priorities are. All of his signal legislation is
based around increasing taxes and directly paying for Americans' medical and
education costs. To him, the problem is not so much that the rules are
rigged so people can't become entrepreneurs, or that regulators need to be
empowered to act on behalf of the public. The problem is that the government
is not doing enough to bypass the private sector to directly deliver funds
and services to the poor and working class. During Sanders's presidential
bid, he proposed paying for his agenda with a barrage of taxes and new tax
brackets; in an interview last year, Warren refused to say what she thinks
the highest tax rate should be, although in the past she has endorsed a
fairly conventional Democratic policies on taxes, such as the "Buffet Rule."
Sanders famously told the same interviewer who queried Warren that he didn't
mind the 90 percent marginal income tax rate under President Eisenhower.
With the announcement of Warren's exploratory committee and Sanders's likely
entry into the Democratic race, it will be important for voters to carefully
study the nuances of Warren and Sanders's records and worldviews. While both
are critics of the Democratic establishment, their long-held beliefs suggest
they would prioritize different solutions, both in terms of the policies
they would push and how they plan to achieve them.
Warren is a brilliant legal scholar who changed party allegiances after
studying the abusive practices of the financial industry. As a senator, she
has been effective at promoting change, primarily through brilliant
interrogations at hearings and effective advocacy within the halls of
Congress. Tellingly, she sat out the 2016 Democratic primary, choosing to
offer compelling but private policy advice to the Clinton campaign.
That is a very different approach than that of Bernie Sanders, who defied
the conventional wisdom in 2016 to run for president and became one of
America's most influential politicians thanks to thousands of volunteers and
small donors. In a span of just a few short years, he has made his
social-democratic policies mainstream. More Democrats now say they prefer
socialism than say they prefer capitalism.
As soon as the next president takes office, they will likely face intense
pressure from powerful interests, especially big business. The choice
between Warren and Sanders may very well determine if that president
confronts those interests with careful reasoning and principled advocacy or
the force of a mass movement.
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