This article promulgates a lie:
Sanders Urges Supporters: Ditch Identity Politics And Embrace The Working Class By MATT SHUHAM, Talking Points Memo, November 21, 2016
What Bernie Sanders actually said (see 0:39:20-0:43:10):
x YouTube Video[Speech excerpt transcript below]
Let’s be clear: Sanders explicitly said we need far more diversity in our elected officials. He also said that is a completely insufficient condition: we need candidates who advocate an economy that works for people over corporations. To put it another (perhaps stark) way, if the Democratic Party were to become a “rainbow coalition” of corporatists, that’s a politics we should oppose.
Through this election, I think the leaders of the Democratic Party eschewed economic populism because if party leaders were to articulate a cohesive message of solidarity and collective moral responsibility across all policy areas, that message would necessarily be rooted in socialist concepts. We would start to expect our political leadership to speak and act on that basis. It would mean taking wealth and power away from the owners of international corporations and back for ourselves. It would mean undermining the intellectual framework of global exploitative capitalism. And that those Democratic leaders will not stand for. In fact, they’d rather lose than win on an ideologically moral people-over-corporations economic message. So, we lost.
Hence our fight within the Democratic Party today in favor of the Keith Ellisons and Elizabeth Warrens (wait, is that identity politics?) and against the Cory Bookers and Chuck Schumers of the party.
Look, I think it is a fair criticism of Sanders that he is too quick to turn from social justice questions to economic proscriptions and that he hasn’t sufficiently explained how they relate. I would love for politicians like him to get explicit about how, for example, chain stores extract wealth from communities as if they were colonies and about how they destroy economic sovereignty (of everyone, but especially of low-income and minority neighborhoods) via the squelching of people’s ability to run local, independent businesses. And then there is the dynamic that conditions of economic decline exacerbate ethnic hatreds. But for anyone who thinks that Sanders suggests we somehow neglect civil rights and social justice of specific groups of people within our society in the pursuit of economic fairness, please listen to what he actually has to say and learn about his life’s work, and please consider what Martin Luther King, Jr. thought about the interdependence of those vital matters with economics:
King argued in one of his last sermons, “If a man doesn’t have a job or an income, he has neither life nor liberty nor the possibility for the pursuit of happiness. He merely exists.”
The solution, he believed, was to “confront the power structure massively.”