Voters on both the left and the right often claim that there is no difference between the Democratic and Republican Parties, and of course that isn’t true. There’s a big difference between Elena Kagan and Antonin Scalia, for one thing. But there may be more to this argument than you think.
Democrats now depend as much on affluent voters as on low-income voters. Democrats represent a majority of the richest congressional districts, and the party’s elected officials are more responsive to the policy agenda of the well-to-do than to average voters. The party and its candidates have come to rely on the elite 0.01 percent of the voting age population for a quarter of their financial backing and on large donors for another quarter.
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Sanders is running on an explicitly left-populist platform. It includes taxation of overseas corporate profits, a progressive estate tax, an increase in the minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2020, the investment of $1 trillion in infrastructure, withdrawal from Nafta and other trade agreements, free tuition at public colleges, a single-payer health care system, and more.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
