For all 5 of you (and that's an optimistic estimate!) who are still following this blog, I don't want to leave anyone with the impression that I think Hillary is a bad person. I don't. I do, however, think she's a product of her own bubble, as we all are. It just happens that her bubble doesn't correspond very well with the bubbles of most of her constituents...and yet she has to make policy for those constituents. It's very difficult, nearly impossible in fact, to succeed in American national politics unless you are either wealthy or appeal to wealthy people--or at least that's been the consensus for my political lifetime. She's not the only one who faces this issue; I think most American politicians do. It's a real problem with our system, and the more money there is in politics and the more income inequality grows, the worse it becomes. So no, I don't think Hillary is a bad person. I do, however, think that she responds to the consensus of her social circle, her community--which consists, as in most cases it has to, of Washington elites, lobbyists, and other wealthy politicians. It's a whole ecosystem of connections, and we kind of take it for granted that that's where our politicians move, but it has important impacts on the policies they make. We don't often talk about that real side of privately funded elections and the two party system, but it means that we are ruled by people increasingly segregated from us by class.

For example, public schools. The Clintons were not the parents of public school students. It doesn't matter why they didn't send Chelsea to a public school, but the fact remains that they didn't. That means they themselves didn't have the same concerns as many public school parents do, and it also means they don't know people who have those concerns. Given their income level, it's unlikely that they'd encounter any such parents except in a scripted constituent contact moment. Hillary does, however, know a lot of parents who send their kids to private schools, and a lot of people who lobby for the testing and charter companies--both major Washington powers at this point. Her campaign chairman, John Podesta, is a huge supporter of rewarding/punishing teachers based on standardized test scores, pushing charters, and allocating federal education funding based on competitions like Race to the Top. Now, I don't think that's necessarily why she chose him--he's worked for the Clintons (and in fact for Obama) for a long time. He's part of the establishment ecosystem, and probably a friend of Hillary's. I think it's just an illustration of how the ecosystem can have unintended consequences. Many of Hillary's constituents are growing more and more concerned about the uses of standardized tests and the inequities caused by the way charter schools are implemented. But it's going to be hard for them to be heard because when Hillary hears those constituents voicing problems, her first reaction isn't going to be, oh yeah, I heard something about those problems (from other people I know). Her first reaction is going to be--no one I know in my personal life says that. Why are you making such a big deal about this when every person I talk to says charters are great and test scores are about accountability? Why are you whining about this thing I have never had to think about? I mean, almost all of us do it when we're confronted with views from outside our social circles. But the problem is, Hillary as a politician has to make policy about this, and she does so from within an elite ecosystem that many of those she serves do not belong to.

Why is Bernie different? I think his personal history and political commitments make him different on some level-he went to the public schools in Brooklyn as a poor kid. And his commitment to left-wing politics means that he's committed to at least trying to make that imaginative leap, between the consensus of his social circle and what happens lower on the socioeconomic scale. But he's also structurally anomalous in a way that has allowed him to maintain his difference and still function as an American politician. He represents a state where it's still relatively cheap to run for office--air time is cheap, for example. Vermont is sparsely populated and has harsh winters, so people are more likely to have to cooperate with others who they might not necessarily choose in order to get out and around than they are in, let's say, New York. Bernie is also an independent, which means that the structure of US party politics, where people who are good at fund-raising events for wealthy donors move up in the hierarchy, hasn't impacted him too much. He's managed to serve in Washington without needing to be part of the elite.

I could say a lot about why this election cycle has turned out to be such a perfect storm. Certainly Citizens United and the gutting of the Voting Rights Act are part of it. The jobless recovery, Wall Street getting away with causing the housing crash, the replacement of the few remaining good working class jobs with service jobs, the Republican assault on the states...a lot has been going on to make non-elites aware of just how poorly we are represented by the people in power, and how badly we need something to change. Bernie has the capacity to bridge the gap between the government and the governed, partly because of his political commitments, partly because, as I say, he's a structural anomaly. But for people who are trying to convince Bernie supporters that his policy positions and Clinton's are virtually identical....it's just not true.

Even if you ignore the policy differences they talk about on the campaign trail: the fact that she's a hawk and he wants to end wars, the fact that she wants to support Israel doing whatever it does and he's worried about Palestinian rights too, the fact that he wants free college and she doesn't, he wants single payer health care and she doesn't, etc etc--you need to pay attention to the policy ideas they don't talk about. Or, to be more exact, the policy ideas that they're likely to view as unquestionable based on the people they know and the ecosystems they are or aren't part of. If you think that Hillary Clinton won't consult John Podesta, her friend, about education policy before she consults someone like you or me, I think you're wrong. If you think she won't talk to the people she knows in the prison industry about criminal justice policy before she talks to someone who's been inside a prison, I think you're wrong. Again, it's human. It doesn't make Hillary a bad person--but it does make me not want her to be the president. We need someone who can actually move outside of the elite consensus, which has created much of the situation we're in. Bernie, partly because of his structural position, as I say, can do that. Hillary, like almost every other politician in Washington, just can't. She's too enmeshed in that world.