As The End Of The Year Of The 100th Anniversary Of The Armistice Which Ended World War I Is At Hand- Some Artists Who Served And Survived To Create “Modern” Art

As The End Of The Year Of The 100^th Anniversary Of The Armistice Which Ended World War I Is At Hand- Some Artists Who Served And Survived To Create “Modern” Art-Ferdinand Leger 

Comment by Ronan Saint James

I was not centrally involved in the now four year commemoration of the horrors of World War One but I was struck by the number of artists who served in some capacity in the militaries of their respective countries and after surviving the onslaught produced some very provocative works which to my mind have to have been a reflection of the destructiveness of that war to civilization and their psyches. What do you think?  

As The End Of The Year Of The 100th Anniversary Of The Armistice Which Ended World War I Is At Hand- Some Artists Who Served And Survived To Create “Modern” Art

As The End Of The Year Of The 100^th Anniversary Of The Armistice Which Ended World War I Is At Hand- Some Artists Who Served And Survived To Create “Modern” Art-Oscar, Oops, Oskar Kokorchka   

Comment by Ronan Saint James

I was not centrally involved in the now four year commemoration of the horrors of World War One but I was struck by the number of artists who served in some capacity in the militaries of their respective countries and after surviving the onslaught produced some very provocative works which to my mind have to have been a reflection of the destructiveness of that war to civilization and their psyches. What do you think?  

As The Year Of The 100th Anniversary Of The Armistice Which Ended World War I Is At Hand- Some Artists Who Served And Survived To Create “Modern” Art

As The Year Of The 100^th Anniversary Of The Armistice Which Ended World War I Is At Hand- Some Artists Who Served And Survived To Create “Modern” Art-Georges Braque

Comment by Ronan Saint James

I was not centrally involved in the now four year commemoration of the horrors of World War One but I was struck by the number of artists who served in some capacity in the militaries of their respective countries and after surviving the onslaught produced some very provocative works which to my mind have to have been a reflection of the destructiveness of that war to civilization and their psyches. What do you think?  

As The Year Of The 100th Anniversary Of The Armistice Which Ended World War I Is At Hand- Some Artists Who Served And Survived To Create “Modern” Art

As The Year Of The 100^th Anniversary Of The Armistice Which Ended World War I Is At Hand- Some Artists Who Served And Survived To Create “Modern” Art-Jean Arp

Comment by Ronan Saint James

I was not centrally involved in the now four year commemoration of the horrors of World War One but I was struck by the number of artists who served in some capacity in the militaries of their respective countries and after surviving the onslaught produced some very provocative works which to my mind have to have been a reflection of the destructiveness of that war to civilization and their psyches. What do you think?  

White Identity Politics Aren’t Going Anywhere How should Democrats understand — and confront — them? Thomas B. Edsall By Thomas B. Edsall Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C. on politics, demographics and inequality.

White Identity Politics Aren’t Going Anywhere How should Democrats understand — and confront — them? Thomas B. Edsall By Thomas B. Edsall Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C. on politics, demographics and inequality. Dec. 20, 2018 579 Voters at Merry Acres Middle School in Albany, Ga. on Nov. 6, 2018 Credit Ruth Fremson/The New York Times Image Voters at Merry Acres Middle School in Albany, Ga. on Nov. 6, 2018CreditCreditRuth Fremson/The New York Times For 50 years Republicans have battered the Democratic coalition, wielding the so-called southern strategy — built on racism and overlaid with opposition to immigration — to win control of the White House and one or both chambers of Congress. At the same time, Democrats have struggled to piece together a coalition strong enough to deliver an Election Day majority. In the 1950s, the Democratic coalition was 87 percent white and 13 percent minority, according to the American National Election Studies; it is now 59 percent white and 41 percent minority, according to Pew Research. As the Democratic Party has evolved from an overwhelmingly white party to a party with a huge minority base, the dominant strategic problem has become the tenuous balance between the priorities of its now equally indispensable white and minority wings. President Trump has aggressively exploited Democratic vulnerabilities as no previous Republican candidate had dared to do. The frontal attack Trump has engineered — in part by stigmatizing “political correctness” — has had a dual effect, throwing Democrats back on their heels while simultaneously whetting their appetite for a fight. ADVERTISEMENT For Democrats to counter Trump effectively, a number of scholars believe it is essential to understand the motivations — the needs, beliefs and agendas — of those whites who have moved into the Trump camp. Only armed with that information, the way these scholars see it, can the left recapture enough of those voters to regain majority status on a more permanent basis, both in its battles for Congress and for the White House. In her forthcoming book, “White Identity Politics,” Ashley Jardina, a political scientist at Duke, describes three groups of whites who generally fall on the right side of the political spectrum. The first is made up of those for whom their white “identity is extremely or very important” to them. Surveys taken from 2012 to 2016, according to Jardina, show that the percentage of whites who say their white identity is very or extremely important ranges from 28 to 42 percent. According to Jardina, “higher levels of white identity are somewhat linked to higher levels of racial animosity.” At the same time, she contends in her book: A small percentage of white identifiers score quite high on measures of racial prejudice or resentment, but many more white identifiers possess average and even low levels of racial prejudice. In other words, white identity is not defined by racial animus, and whites who identify with their racial group are not simply reducible to bigots. The second group comprises those who rank high on a test of “white consciousness.” The difference between white identity and white consciousness, Jardina argues, is that those in the latter category believe that “many whites are unable to find jobs because employers are hiring minorities.” Jardina reports that they also stress “the importance of whites working together to change laws that are unfair to whites.” The third constituency is made up of whites high in “racial resentment.” This is based, Jardina writes, on responses to four survey items, with response options ranging from strongly agree to strongly disagree for each. The survey items ask respondents if they agree/disagree that (1) blacks should work their way up without any special favors; (2) generations of slavery and discrimination make it difficult for blacks to work their way out of the lower class; (3) blacks have gotten less than they deserve; (4) blacks must try harder to get ahead. The index is scaled to range from 0 (least resentful) to 1 (most resentful). On average, the level of racial resentment among whites is high, Jardina found: “Among all whites in the 2012 ANES face-to-face study, the mean level of racial resentment is 0.68 on a zero to one scale.” Editors’ Picks Is There Something Wrong With Democracy? What if the Placebo Effect Isn’t a Trick? How to Buy a Gun in 15 Countries ADVERTISEMENT Jardina argues in her book that the racial resentment scale reveals a new type of racial prejudice — one that is a subtle combination of anti-black affect and the belief that blacks do not adhere to traditional American values associated with the Protestant work ethic. Racial resentment predicts whites’ opinions toward a wide range of racialized political policies and has a profound impact on political candidate evaluations. It is, quite clearly, a central component to the way in which whites interpret the political and social world. There is an ongoing dispute over the use of such questions to measure racial resentment. Jardina acknowledges that “some scholars are critical of this framework” and “argue that racial resentment entangles conservative principles, like individualism, with racial prejudice.” Most recently, Riley Carney and Ryan Enos, political scientists at Harvard, have sought to assess the validity of racial resentment questions in their working paper, “Conservatism and Fairness in Contemporary Politics: Unpacking the Psychological Underpinnings of Modern Racism.” In survey experiments, Carney and Enos substituted Lithuanians and other nationalities for African-Americans so that the first resentment question would ask for agreement or disagreement with the statement: “Lithuanians should work their way up without any special favors.” Their conclusion: The results obtained using groups other than blacks are substantively indistinguishable from those measured when blacks are the target group. Decomposing this measure further, we find that political conservatives express only minor differences in resentment across target groups. Far greater differences in resentment toward blacks and other groups can be found among racially sympathetic liberals. In short, we find that modern racism questions appear to measure attitudes toward any group, rather than African-Americans alone. Carney and Enos conclude that the “modern racism scales” fail to capture attitudes specific to African-Americans. However, the scales do capture a form of racism, both a general resentment that applies to many groups and a specific failure to recognize the unique historical plight of African-Americans. Jardina, whose work I have written about before, agrees that “some of this backlash” — including the election of Donald Trump and the opposition to immigration — “is rooted in prejudice, racism, and ethnocentrism.” But, she adds, many whites’ reactions to our country’s changing racial landscape do not simply manifest in outward hostility. Amidst these changes, many whites have described themselves as outnumbered, disadvantaged, and even oppressed. They have voiced their anxiety over America’s waning numerical majority, and have questioned what this means for the future of the nation. They have worried that soon they may face discrimination based on their own race, if they do not already. Such fears, in Jardina’s view, drive the emergence of white identity as a political issue: These threats, both real and perceived, have, as I will demonstrate, brought to the fore, for many whites, a sense of commonality, attachment, and solidarity with their racial group. They have led a sizable proportion of whites to believe that their racial group, and the benefits that group enjoys, are endangered. The result? This racial solidarity now plays a central role in the way many whites orient themselves to the political and social world. Central to Jardina’s argument is the contention that some whites “identify with their racial group without feeling prejudice toward racial and ethnic minorities,” while others do “possess some degree of negative affect toward racial and ethnic minorities without also identifying with their racial group.” For example, in the case of support or opposition to domestic spending programs, she writes, “Higher levels of white identity and consciousness are actually associated with greater support for spending.” By comparison, she continued, “racial resentment is associated with support for decreasing spending on all groups, including whites.” This finding leads, in turn, to another Jardina assertion: Many whites are not motivated to oppose immigration because they dislike Latinos. They are also not inclined to support Donald Trump because they feel negatively about people of color in the United States. Rather, Jardina puts forward the argument that these whites feel, to some extent, that the rug is being pulled out from under them — that the benefits they have enjoyed because of their race, their groups’ advantages, and their status atop the racial hierarchy are all in jeopardy. Put another way, she makes the case that white identity is not synonymous with racial prejudice. White racial solidarity provides a lens through which whites interpret the political and social world that is inward looking. According to Jardina, whites, to a certain extent, are deliberately claiming victimhood: White identifiers have co-opted the language of racial discrimination and oppression. Put bluntly, the politics of white identity is marked by an insidious illusion, one in which whites claim their group experiences discrimination in an effort to reinforce and maintain a system of racial inequality where whites are the dominant group with the lion’s share of power and privileges. Because for many whites “identifying with their group and protecting its status hardly seems problematic, especially compared to racism,” it’s difficult to “convince some whites that there’s something normatively objectionable about identifying with one’s racial group and wanting to protect its interests.” Eric Kaufmann, in his forthcoming book “Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities,” addresses similar racial and ethnic tensions. Kaufmann writes: As the urban West gets more diverse, the finger increasingly points to the white majority as the engine of segregation. White majorities are retreating towards places where they are relatively concentrated. Kaufmann, a political scientist at the University of London, argues provocatively in an email that a strategic shift to compromise on the most divisive issues, including immigration, could work to Democrats’ advantage: The right’s problem in America is more its doctrinaire tax-cutting, suspicion of government and international institutions. If the left didn’t give it so much domestic cultural ammunition, the right would face defeat and have to adjust. Kaufmann argues that there is a structural dilemma posed by the multiracial nature of the left coalition: he views what he calls “the institutionalization of multiculturalism/diversity/equity” and of “high immigration” as fueling the rightward direction of recent political movements in the United States and Europe. He believes that it would benefit progressive groups, “in the interests of harmony,” for liberals to “argue their case for diversity” but that they should “tolerate difference of opinion and accept compromise.” Get our weekly newsletter and never miss an Op-Doc Watch Oscar-nominated short documentaries from around the world made for you. SIGN UP ADVERTISEMENT Kaufmann’s strategic approach and suggestions run counter to the thinking of many others. In an essay published in Time in September, “Don’t Let the Loud Bigots Distract You. America’s Real Problem With Race Cuts Far Deeper,” Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., a professor of religion and African-American studies at Princeton, argued that the media and many political analysts reached the wrong conclusion after the 2016 election by claiming: that more attention needed to be given to the dire circumstances of working white men and women, that Trump’s election was a white, working-class, often rural backlash and what was needed was a focus on Middle America. This criticism coalesced with an ongoing obsession about what suburban white America was thinking. It felt, Glaude wrote, “like folks weren’t fighting the true problem. They were, in fact, protecting it.” Lynn Vavreck — a political scientist at U.C.L.A. and one of the authors of one of the most influential books on the 2016 election, “Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America” — is also looking at the recent rightward drift in the United States. She believes that developments in contemporary politics are not in any sense racially neutral but instead amount to “hostility or fear of outgroups.” One of the key attitudes revealed in survey data linked to support for Trump has been the “fear of losing your job to a minority,” Vavreck wrote me by email. In addition, 64 percent of Trump voters believed that “average Americans” have gotten “less than they deserve” but “only 12 percent said black Americans have gotten less than they deserve.” Vavreck argues that whatever identity exists at present among whites as a group is largely based on ideas about deservingness, and centers on outgroups getting too much or taking too much that is not due to them. Lawrence Bobo, the W.E.B. Du Bois professor of social science at Harvard, is also far from agreeing that more accommodation should be granted to the white working class, arguing that intractable racism, in one form or another, continues to pervade American politics. In a 2017 paper, “Racism in Trump’s America: Reflections on Culture, Sociology, and the 2016 US Presidential Election,” he suggests that contemporary racial conflict can be described as “laissez-faire racism.” Laissez-faire racism, he argues, identifies this new era as one where longstanding values of meritocracy, individualism, majority rule and competition in a free marketplace weave together as rationalization for persistent racial inequality in a putatively anti-discrimination, race-neutral democratic state. In a 2018 paper, “Immigration and Redistribution,” Alberto Alesina, Armando Miano and Stefanie Stantcheva, who are all economists at Harvard, point to the costs of ignoring majority opinion on public policy matters that affect redistribution — policies that arguably have a disproportionate ethnic or racial impact. The three authors found that merely prompting “respondents to think about immigration and immigrants’ characteristics generates a significant negative effect on support for redistribution.” They surveyed 22,500 people in France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Britain and the United States and found that respondents greatly overestimate the total number of immigrants, think immigrants are culturally and religiously more distant from them, and are economically weaker — less educated, more unemployed, poorer, and more reliant on government transfers — than is the case. When shown more accurate — and more positive — information about the hard work performed by immigrants, respondents “become significantly more favorable to redistribution.” But that did not last long: If respondents are also first prompted to think in detail about immigrants’ number and composition, then none of the favorable information treatments is able to compensate for the negative priors that resurface and that lower support for redistribution. In other words, pro-immigration, pro-diversity Democrats face clear obstacles breaking the Republican hold on white voters — and a challenge in repelling Trump’s race-and-immigration-focused offensive. Still, the accumulating insights on how and where Republicans have successfully worked these levers may help demonstrate — as President Barack Obama, President Bill Clinton and the results of this year’s midterm elections prove — that these obstacles are not insuperable and that they can be overcome. I invite you to follow me on Twitter, @Edsall. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. Thomas B. Edsall has been a contributor to The Times Opinion sect

How Come So Many Bernie Bros Are Women and People of Color? Despite data to the contrary, the media continues to distort Sanders' politics and the diversity of his supporters byKatie Halper

How Come So Many Bernie Bros Are Women and People of Color?

Despite data to the contrary, the media continues to distort Sanders' politics and the diversity of his supporters

by

Katie Halper

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Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) speaks at "Workers' Right=Civil Rights" rally in Canton, Mississippi on March 4, 2017. (Photo: Youtube/Screenshot)

A recent CNN poll shows that among potential Democratic candidates in Iowa caucuses Senator Bernie Sanders has the highest approval rating from people of color. And the diversity of the Sanders-inspired left was on display at the Sanders Institute Gathering in Burlington Vermont earlier this month, which I covered on my podcast, The Katie Halper Show.

But empirical evidence has not stopped much of the corporate press—including many "liberal" or "progressive" outlets and commentators—from condemning the senator as having "a race problem."

Over the past week we saw Jonathan Martin of the New York Times (who happens to be white) claim that Sanders "has done little to broaden his political circle and has struggled to expand his appeal beyond his base of primarily white supporters." Meanwhile, Clara Jeffery, the editor-in-chief of Mother Jones (also white), recently presented not only Sanders' supporters but the left movement in general as white. Linking to a written exchange between two Splinter journalists about Sanders, she tweeted, "In which white lefties have a debate that somehow does not discuss the fact that Bernie has no real purchase among the POC base of the Democratic party. And that problem has not improved for him, if anything it seems larger…"

Even those who openly mock the concerns of the white working class, undermine their own alleged commitment to marginalized voices when they ignore the diversity of Sanders' supporters.

But despite evidence like the new CNN poll, in which Sanders had the highest approval among non-white voters, outlets reporting on the survey studiously avoided mentioning that key finding which undermines the media narrative about Sanders' struggle to appeal to minority voters. While it's only one poll, and his favorability among voters of color isn't far ahead of Joe Biden's, it's newsworthy and significant precisely because it undermines the media narrative about Sanders' alleged struggle to appeal to non-white voters. On social media people who happily call Sanders #FakeJews, and defend Hillary Clinton's use of prison slave labor, continue to vilify Sanders as somehow "racist."

Most politicians could "do better," when it comes to addressing and speaking about racial inequities, sexism, homophobia, transphobia and classism. But the claim that Sanders is exceptionally problematic is absurd, given, for example, that Biden opposed integrated busing in the 1970's; mistreated Anita Hill during the confirmation process of Clarence Thomas; called Obama "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy"; and said "You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin' Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I'm not joking."

Sanders' critics smear him as blinded by straight, white, male privilege. The mere mention of class gets Sanders and others condemned as class reductionists. The irony is that many of the most vocal critics attacking him for being insufficiently intersectional fail to address class altogether as an aspect of identity.

It's cruel, immoral and politically disastrous to dismiss the experience of working class people of all colors and backgrounds. But even those who openly mock the concerns of the white working class, undermine their own alleged commitment to marginalized voices when they ignore the diversity of Sanders' supporters. By ignoring the people of all ages, backgrounds, genders, sexuality, and ethnicity who support Sanders, they engage in the very erasure and marginalization of the women, people of color, LGBTQ people (and all the intersections thereof) that they claim to oppose.

The real story is very different, as I found at the Sanders Institute Gathering. Organized by Jane Sanders and David Driscoll, the 3-day event was more about the movement that Sanders helped spark than it was about the man. Though Sanders delivered the keynote and participated in several panels, the gathering focused on issues, bringing together leaders, thinkers, organizers and activists. Participants included physician and public health activist Abdul El-Sayed; San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz; actor and activist Danny Glover; executive director of Good Jobs Nation, Joseph Geevarghese; Our Revolution director, Nina Turner; Presente.org's executive director Matt Nelson; and many others. Over the weekend, the panels and roundtables addressed healthcare, climate change, criminal "injustice," civil rights, immigration, Puerto Rico, the housing crisis, the international progressive movement, and other issues with attention to class, race, and gender.

The following are excerpts from my interviews, which you can hear in full here and here:

Bernie Sanders: Bringing people together

The first person I ran into at the gathering was, believe it or not, Bernie Sanders himself. I told the senator, "One of the things that's really frustrating to progressives who support you is this narrative about your not being a feminist or not being anti-racist." Then I asked, "How can we push back on that, given how much the corporate media seems to be interested in that narrative?"

"What we are fighting for is to bring people together—Black and White and Latino, Native American and Asian American—around an agenda that speaks to the needs of ordinary Americans and not just the one percent." 
—Sen. Bernie SandersTo which he replied:

What we are fighting for is to bring people together—Black and White and Latino, Native American and Asian American—around an agenda that speaks to the needs of ordinary Americans and not just the one percent. We want Medicare for All, we want to raise the minimum wage to a living wage, we don't want our kids to be living in a planet ravaged by climate change. So we are making progress. We expect opposition to continue. And we're gonna do the best in this fight that we can.

When you look at corporate media, you're looking at media owned by large, often international corporate conglomerates, which are owned by some of the wealthiest people in this country or in the world. They will do anything and everything they can do to protect their own interest and they will say anything about anybody that they want.

During a panel discussion later that day, he went spoke further about the dangers of divide-and-conquer strategies deployed by the enemies of equality:

When people are pushed aside, when people are hurting, you have demagogues who step in and say "Our problem is that Mexican who is picking strawberries." So you take that anger and frustration and pain that people are feeling and you turn them against people who are in worse shape than [they] are. And our job is to bring people together and say, "No. It is not some Mexican who is picking strawberries who is our enemy. It is Wall Street, it is the fossil fuel industries, it is the drug companies, it's the insurance companies." Let's stand together and take those people on.

Mayor Michael Tubbs: We absolutely have to be intersectional

I also interviewed Stockton, California Mayor Michael Tubbs, who—as he put it during a panel at the Gathering in Burlington—grew up a "poor black child on the south side of Stockton with an incarcerated father and a mother who had me at sixteen as a teenager. The things we fight for like affordable healthcare, affordable childcare, entitlement programs like WIC and Head Start all paved the way for me to be here today."

After the round table he spoke to me about how Sanders' 2016 run pushed him to embrace bolder more progressive ideas:

Senator Sanders came and spoke in Stockton in a presidential campaign, which was unheard of—someone running for president to come to Stockton. And I was able to introduce him. And I was also impressed with the number of people who were at that rally in the middle of the day like five- or six-thousand people. And Stockton's not a super rabid political town and I was like, "Wow, this message is resonating." And I think that gave me the confidence to be a little more bold in my policy prescriptions or pilot programs that we're doing in the city because I saw the hunger and the want for a government that is actually responsive and works for regular everyday people.

The mayor sees such bold progressive policies as crucial to defeating the equally bold but opposingly reactionary policies of Trumpism. There is "no middle ground," Tubbs said, when you're battling fascism. "Some of Trump's supporters wanted to see—and I don't think that discounts racial resentment—something bold, shocking, say something that's different, that's not vanilla."

"We absolutely have to be intersectional in how we think about things. It's not just one thing, we have to be intersectional in our policies and programs." 
—Mayor Michael TubbsThe president's rhetoric and policies are xenophobic, Tubbs continued, and his solutions are bad. "But some of the problems he articulated with trade deals and the way they impact regular people are clear problems that we have to address," he said. "So I think it's about how do we give people something bold that relates to their everyday life that says [to them]: 'I am seen. I am heard. This leader cares about what I'm dealing with.'"

Tubbs sees intersectionality and multiracial organizing as challenging but crucial. 

"Historically since Bacon's Rebellion," Tubbs explained, "poor white folks have voted against their best interest and I don't think we've done enough work to actually show people why is it in your best interest to cast your lot with these folks that don't look like you. We absolutely have to be intersectional in how we think about things. It's not just one thing, we have to be intersectional in our policies and programs."

Mayor Gus Newport: Neoliberals are single-issue people

Right before speaking to the mayor of Stockton, I interviewed the former mayor of another California city. Eighty-three year old Eugene "Gus" Newport worked with Malcolm X, is the great grandson of a slave and was the mayor of Berkeley from 1979-1986. He and Sanders were mayors at the same time and Newport had stumped for Bernie earlier during Sanders' unsuccessful runs for governor of Vermont in 1972 and 1976.

Newport recalls that as the two campaigned in Burlington, a reporter asked Sanders, "Why does a Jew from Brooklyn, who's a Socialist, invite Gus Newport, a former black nationalist and a socialist from Berkeley to campaign for him in a state that is 97% white?" Bernie's answer was short: "Because we're gonna talk about the issues." After that, Newport explained, the reporters had no more questions. "I've loved him ever since," he said.

"Why does a Jew from Brooklyn, who's a Socialist, invite Gus Newport, a former black nationalist and a socialist from Berkeley to campaign for him in a state that is 97% white?" Bernie's answer was short: "Because we're gonna talk about the issues."

Sanders would later appoint Newport to the Democratic Unity Commission in 2017 in the wake of Hillary Clinton's loss to Trump. "I found out more than I ever wanted to know about the Democratic National Committee than I ever wanted to know," he said, but "nobody in the Democratic Party has ever spoken to all the issues in the depth that Bernie Sanders has."

When I asked him what he thought about the claim, often perpetuated by the media, that socialism is a white project, Newport responded:

The media—look who they work for, that's corporate America. You must remember Malcolm X was a socialist and Martin Luther kIng was moving towards socialism when he talked about the war against Vietnam. But a lot of Black leaders didn't go along. We've got to educate our own to become an integral part of this. And we're gonna do it. Danny Glover and I, we've gone down to Mississippi and South Carolina with Bernie. And the minute it appears that Bernie's going out there [to run in the 2020 primary], we're gonna go organize. I'm gonna be ready to campaign 9 to 10 months out of the year. I'm going to rehab now for this bad knee but as soon as I can—I'll do a lot of walking.

While some smear Sanders for being a "single issue" candidate, Newport believes it's the centrist "neoliberal" Democrats who deserve that label. "They are a single issue people," he declared. "They do not work around other issues [like class or poverty]. They're usually not a part of the working class. We're looking for real people."

Newport was thrilled that the Gathering—for which "Jane Sanders needs to be given all the credit in the world"—provided participants with "a challenge to pull ourselves together and make sure there's a worthwhile future for the next generation."

Though people often consider the intersection of race, gender and sexuality—class and age are often excluded. A popular narrative which pits people of different ages against each other is that of the spoiled, entitled and lazy millennial. Newport has sympathy, empathy and righteous outrage for the bleak economic reality that millennials face.

As he said at the Democratic Unity Commission, it is time to get "past our own egos and look at the issues." He added, "Too many of us who get into body politic eventually just focus on ourselves. We got retirement for life, we got healthcare for life. But what about the people? You gotta think of the reality: the millennials have had enough. Many of them know they won't be able to buy a house in their life times. They gotta pay student loans. So I'm proud. But we have a lot more work to do."

Naomi Klein: connecting the dots between all issues

In some ways climate change affects us all, as writer and journalist Naomi Klein told me: "Climate change impacts everything because we're all inside the climate so there's no prying anything apart from it."

"[The left has to] deepen its analysis of what racial capitalism means. Too often race is an add-on. Too often gender is an add-on. And we have to take that on board and do a better job." 
—Naomi KleinIn some ways, climate disasters don't discriminate: "As anyone who's lived through a hurricane knows, no matter how rich you are or how powerful you are those winds are absolutely terrifying; no matter how rich you are or how powerful you are if the flames are coming towards your house in Malibu, you're not safe." But, Klein added class perspectives to her analysis. "Climate change doesn’t affect all of us equally." She explained:

It's tricky. [Climate change] isn't a leveler. In the short term what it does is exacerbate pre-existing inequalities. It's already here for people who are very precarious and who have no protections. And it is true that wealth can buy you protection for a couple of generations. And in the meantime there are enormous profit potentials. It's not very comforting that there's such a keen interest in Mars. Because that really does start to feel like a Plan B. Not that it's a realistic one.

Ultimately this is a system that will collapse on everyone's head... eventually. But in the short term there are definitely rooms that are going to collapse first.

I'm not making the argument that it has to be the issue to trump all other issues. I think we need to have an analysis that is all about connecting the dots between all of these issues.

Klein pointed to the distinctions among Democrats that the Sanders campaign exposed. There were liberal centrists who were liberal centrists "because they honestly didn’t believe that more progressive, more redistributive policies were popular or possible. But when they saw that they might be, they got on board." And then there were liberal centrists who didn't shift to the left because, it turned out, they "just opposed those ideas."

"We've all have our eyes opened by that," Klein said. "And then you realize, we're not all on the same side."

Roseann DeMoro: The duplicitous Bernie Bro smear

Former executive director of National Nurses United and of the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee, Roseann DeMoro does not mince words when describing the dishonesty of the latter group.

"I was just talking to Susan Sarandon," she explains. "We were all accused of being Bernie Bros. It's to delegitimize us. It's a lie. It's a duplicitous, ugly, malicious, horrendous, calculated lie. It's a calculated lie by the DNC. It's a PR campaign masquerading as politics."

I agreed that many of the people who spread the Bernie Bro smear are, indeed, disingenuous and malicious. Others, however, are more misinformed by the coordinated propaganda campaign which portrays Sanders as "bad on race and gender" whose supporters are a monolith of white men or people who want to curry their favor.

DeMoro objected to prioritizing identity over policy and profits over people. "People are suffering across the spectrum," she said. "They can't take care of their families or of themselves. Their personal dignity is going down the drain. Ultimately, what we were supposed to do was to buy into a neoliberal paradigm to elect a neoliberal woman who didn't share our values because she was a woman. Well, Margaret Thatcher was a woman."

Of course, as DeMoro and I agreed, one of the differences between Clinton and Thatcher is that neither Thatcher, nor her fans, ever claimed the Iron Lady was a feminist.

An ardent supporter for Sanders to run again in 2020, DeMoro is prepared for more of the smears which started in 2016 and never really went away. "They're gonna throw everything at us, when it comes to Bernie, and we're gonna be like Wonder Woman and bounce 'em right back. So put on your bracelets."

Maria Svart: You can’t understand class without understanding gender and race and vice versa

I also interviewed Maria Svart, the national director of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), for The Real News Network and my podcast. She also criticized the Bernie Bro narrative.

"Look at Bernie Sanders," Svart said, "the most popular politician in the country. And yet people that support Bernie are called Bernie Bros. You look at DSA. I am a Latina. I'm leading the organization. And there are many women of color in leadership, and yet we are characterized as a bunch of Bernie Bros."

Svartz went on to describe her own intersectional identity:

"You look at DSA. I am a Latina. I'm leading the organization. And there are many women of color in leadership, and yet we are characterized as a bunch of Bernie Bros."  
—Maria Svart, Democratic Socialists of America

You can't understand class without understanding gender, and race—and vice versa. How can you possibly understand, for example, the life experience of my grandmother, who was an undocumented Mexican immigrant, without understanding the much bigger picture, the whole systems of our society, whether it's white supremacy or xenophobia or capitalism? They all intersect. And we need to talk about the complexity of that reality all the time, and we have to push back against lean-in feminism, mainstream feminism, all the time.

Whether or not Sanders decides to run for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination (and in case you can't tell, I hope that he does), the movement he sparked is deepening its understanding and analyses of the intersectionality for the electoral and organizing work ahead in 2020 and beyond.

According to Klein, the left has to "deepen its analysis of what racial capitalism means. Too often race is an add-on. Too often gender is an add-on. And we have to take that on board and do a better job."

No matter what the landscape looks like in 2020, Klein continued, "we have to spend 2019 building as broad a coalition as possible, understanding as deeply as we possibly can that all these issues are so profoundly intertwined. To me what's clear is that if we fail, it is not because our ideas are unpopular. It is because we failed as organizers."

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Katie Halper is a writer, comedian, filmmaker and the host of "The Katie Halper Show," a weekly WBAI radio show and podcast (become a patron of the show on Patreon here). Her writing has appeared in New York Magazine, Common Dreams, Rolling Stone, Salon, The Guardian, and The Nation, and she has appeared on MSNBC, Sirius Radio, Fox News Radio and "The Young Turks."  Follow her on Twitter: @Kthalps