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Senator Elizabeth Warren's strategy to win the Democratic presidency of 2020 is risky. She has presented a series of ambitious policy proposals, in the hope that bold progressive ideas can capture the imagination of voters, but she finds it hard to be heard in a news cycle dominated by broadcasts. Donald Trump's reality show and his political points.
Warren's latest offer – a plan to use antitrust laws and principles to dissociate Big Tech – is provocative enough to provoke a reaction. This reaction, by fitting into the model of gossip and drama that drives opinions and readership, helps to draw attention to Warren's current political ideas.
The first incident came after Facebook's refusal to broadcast ads purchased by Warren's campaign that highlighted his antitrust program. Advertisements have explicitly called Facebook, naming Mark Zuckerberg's company, as well as Amazon and Google, as an entity with "vast power over our economy and democracy." When the ads were blacklisted, Warren tweeted that Facebook "has too much power" and "the ability to end a debate" about the limits of this power.
Facebook has restored the ads by describing (hilarious) censorship not as an attempt to stifle critics of their company, but as an accident resulting from their ban on using the Facebook logo in advertising. Whatever the reasons, this decision ended up drawing more attention to Warren's proposal – and more discussion of the threat posed by these monopolistic technology firms.
Politico reacted to the idea of breaking Warren's Big Tech by a hit job.
"Warren took technology money by ripping his biggest players," titled the title, in a transparent attempt to hunt down the candidate as a hypocrite.
Even on its surface, however, the accusation makes no sense. Are voters supposed to be angry because Warren did not sell to his donors? Are they supposed to be outraged that she has done what we hope the politicians will do, to defend the interests of the people rather than the big donors?
But the attempt is even more stupid than that: as Media Matters and Splinter pointed out, the donations did not come from technology companies but from their employees, who are probably free citizens participating in a democracy and not controlled serfs. by their feudal masters. As free citizens with first-hand knowledge and strong opinions about their employers, some might even agree with Warren that their businesses have too much power.
"If a guy pumps gasoline into a Flyspeck BP station, Montana sends $ 200 to your campaign, you're in Big Oil's pocket," lamented Charles Pierce, of Esquire. "It's the laziest form of campaign to which any publication can go."
This type of trolling, which aims to sow the division left and become self-identified progressives against Warren, has unfortunately worked in the past. Traditional journalists have fun with the idea that Warren avoids the "socialist" label and pointing out that she's not trying to overthrow capitalism as much as to make sure that "the markets that have a cop on the pace and have real rules and everyone follows them".
Unfortunately, this focus on labels worked better than Politico's half-cooked game. Some left have seized on this word game as somehow proving that Warren is not all that she has cracked to be. That makes no sense, of course, because the so-called "socialist" people – typically Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as well as their inflexible supporters – are no more socialist than Warren. (That's why they call themselves "democratic socialists", after all.)
Sanders, for example, has an admirable climate change plan to end federal subsidies to polluting industries and put in place a carbon tax. This is not a "socialist" solution – which could imply a forced nationalization of the industries in question – but it would probably be more effective in combating climate change. If a socialist state profits directly from oil and gas (as was the case in Venezuela during the Hugo Chávez years), it eliminates any incentive to adopt regulations that could reduce fossil fuel extraction revenues. .
In truth, there is no real day between politicians called "socialists" and Elizabeth Warren. Both actually advocate the same mix of progressive taxation, aggressive regulation and a broad social safety net. Both are less interested in destroying capitalism or destroying it than in saving the capitalist system from collapse. Where Warren stands out, she focuses on empowering corporations and using the power of government to level the playing field between the rich and everyone else.
In this, she stands out from the rest of the Democratic field. While most candidates talk about corporate responsibility and income inequality, Democratic candidates generally follow Sanders' example by focusing more on increasing social spending – such than Medicare for all and free or subsidized colleges – rather than dramatically expand the regulatory powers of the federal government.
Warren, no matter what label she chooses to wear, is waging a campaign to directly attack capitalist power. To be clear, she also supports important social spending programs that directly help people, such as her universal child protection project or her support for health insurance for all. But no other candidate has ever approached her to come up with innovative ideas, such as her "wealth tax" or Big Tech dismantling plan, which focuses on the power of big and wealthy corporations.
This goal makes sense for Warren, both personally and politically. Before running for office, his career was to analyze economic systems and show how to transform them so that ordinary people are not left behind. She basically designed the idea of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, after explaining how predatory banks were preventing workers from achieving financial security. Kicking capital capitalist exploit is its strong.
It remains to be seen if this will be enough to distinguish Warren from the group of Democrats vying for the 2020 bid. Unlike free universities or Medicare for All, you can not explain in two sentences why antitrust laws or a wealth tax will help ordinary people to get up, and most people will not pay attention to long explanations of mechanics.
Still, Warren has a gift for simple explanations that go well in the rough but real sense that the class of billionaires is enriched by screwing up the little guy, as evidenced by this tweet from the MSNBC host Ari Melber.
"Warren is doing something that none of the others do," wrote Michael Tomasky in the Daily Beast.. "She's running for the presidency, the others are just positioning themselves."
It will take several months to know if it works. But if Warren continues to make good enemies, who own themselves by taking on her, there is a good chance that this will happen.
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