Staring at Windmills: How the 2016 Democratic Primary Represents a Centuries-Old Dilemma

Posted on November 18, 2015

Are you an idealist or a realist?

How you answer that question may very well determine your political leanings for the 2016 presidential election.  After witnessing Saturday evening’s debate, many Americans saw plausible differences between Senator Bernie Sanders and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for the first time.  While the first debate was generally seen as cordial and gracious, Saturday’s debate had both candidates, as well as former Governor Martin O’Malley, show some teeth and go on the offensive, actually criticizing their fellow Democratic opponents.  Although the debate was never openly hostile, it became apparent that both Sanders and O’Malley realized that they need to get moving if they intend to make a splash before the Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primary in February.  With that goal in mind, we ended up having a debate where we were able to cement the two different versions of America that the candidates are offering the American people.

These two visions are a timeless take on the values of yesterday.  In fact, these two visions represent an historical dichotomy that goes back many centuries.  These two visions actually represent the theme of the first great work of western literature, Don Quijote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes.  Cervantes’ famous work centers on Don Quijote, a man so entrenched in stories about medieval knights that he sets out to win the heart of the woman he loves, by believing he himself to be a gallant knight.  Accompanying Quijote on his quest is his squire, Sancho Panza a loyal and faithful friend who sees Quijote for what he actually is:  A brave but painfully misguided person.

Their adventures together represent two visions of the world:  Idealism and realism.  Quijote’s vision is one of what he believes to be possible.  He sees windmills as giants, and believes they must be attacked.  In contrast, Sancho Panza’s vision of the world is what he knows the world actually is.  He sees the windmills as being actual windmills and does it best to convince Quijote of this fact.  Quijote considers Panza to be naive and ends up attacking the windmills anyway, before being hurled to the ground in a failed assault.  Quijote lives his life in this way, seeing things for how they could be rather than how they are.  Panza sees things for how they actually are and fails to get caught up in Quijote’s idealistic view of the world.

This theme of idealism versus realism has been passed down over the past five-hundred years time and time again.  It is essentially the conflict that every major political leader must deal with during his or her time.  Each world leader has a vision they want to see for their country.  Each world leader ran a campaign based on this vision.  However, once elected world leaders are often stymied by the political landscape of their country and are unable to fully enact their vision for the country.  Often times their vision is shot down by the opposing political faction.  Other times a world leader gets push back from his own political party.  When either of these things happen the world leader is forced to either abandon this vision permanently reach a compromise in which the vision ends up being something drastically different than what it had set out to be.

We saw this firsthand in the United States during President Barack Obama’s first term.  During a brief 72-day period in 2009, President Obama had Democratic-control of the House of Representatives and a filibuster-proof 60 votes in the Senate.  He had a chance to work on a major political issue that Democrats had been working on for 60 years:  Health care reform.  There were calls for the United States to finally join the rest of the industrialized world and offer universal health care to all its citizens.  However, that issue was essentially too progressive for the Democratic Party as a whole and several members went on record saying they would not support legislation to do that.  Since not a single Republican supported health care reform, President Obama opted to compromise with his fellow Democrats in what became the Affordable Care Act, and even that barely passed the House of Representatives with nearly three dozen Democratic members voting against it.  It was a long cry from universal health care that many Americans had hope for, but it was certainly more than any other Democratic president had been able to accomplish over the past six decades.

Flash forward six years to this past Saturday evening where we again saw this political idea of idealism versus realism.  For the most part, we saw the notion of idealism through the performance of Senator Bernie Sanders.  Sanders has staked his candidacy on the idea of creating a political revolution.  He doesn’t accept contributions from big corporations and doesn’t have a Super PAC supporting him.  He believes in raising the minimum wage to $15, making college tuition-free, and creating universal single-payer health care for all.  Sanders has been an unexpected hit this political season and has been drawing huge crowds throughout speaking events across the country.  His supporters are on board with his progressive platform and the hashtag #feelthebern has come to represent unequivocal support for the Vermont Senator.

On the other side of the Democratic debate is former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.  Clinton is attempting to become the second member of her family to become president after her husband, Bill served as president from 1993-2001.  She is also attempting to become the first woman to become president after coming up short in 2008 when she lost the nomination to then Senator Barack Obama of Illinois.  Clinton represents a more realistic approach to politics.  She has a super PAC and takes large donations from corporations.  She believes the minimum wage should be $12 because no major nation on earth has doubled its minimum wage so there is no literature available to see if $15 is too much too soon.  She believes that we need to lessen student loan payments but doesn’t believe we should have tuition-free college for all.  She believes that instead of scraping the Affordable Care Act for a single payer system, we should use and improve upon the Affordable Care Act to help ensure that everyone has access for affordable health care.

These were the clear differences we saw between the two front-runners on Saturday’s debate and again they represent the time-honored tradition of idealism versus realism.  The question going forward for the Democratic Party is which vision will ultimately win out.  Senator Senators’ ideas are popular among young progressives but there is the concern that his ambitious goals may not be achievable, especially with both the House and Senate currently under Republican control.  There is only so much he would be able to do through executive orders an his progressive agenda will not only alienate Republicans but also some of the more conservative Democrats as well.  For Secretary Clinton, she has a wealth of experience but the concern is whether she is truly progressive enough to win over certain segments of the Democratic voting bloc.  Due to her ties to Wall Street and large campaign contributions and donors, there are those who believe she wouldn’t actually pursue something like Wall Street reform because she would be indebted to them if she were to get elected.  Her critics feel that she is too far out of touch with the working people of today to be an effective voice for them in the White House.

Despite these in-house differences, there still is a world of difference between the Democratic and Republican candidates.  Topics mentioned during Saurday’s debate included the minimum wage, climate change, immigration reform, and the #BlackLivesMatter movement, all topics that the Republican Party refuses to address in depth.  In addition, Saturday’s debate saw all three candidates stand up for Muslim Americans by refusing to loop in Isis with the term “Islamic terrorism” thereby showing how all three candidates realize that Isis does not speak for nor represent the 1.5 billion Muslims on this planet who practice the nonviolent form of Islam as it is intended to be practiced.  That is something you will not hear during Republican debates.  Even though we saw differences among the top two candidates, we still had consensus:  Something needs to be done about big money in politics, raising the minimum wage, making college affordable, and making health care more accessible to millions of Americans.  These are all issues where the Democratic Party is an agreement with the majority of Americans.

The Democratic Party may have two versions of what the windmill is in front on them but at the very least they’ve gotten out and seen the countryside.  They recognize the problems of this country and are debating solutions for them.  For Republicans, it often seems they have never left the comfort of their own homes.  They don’t understand what Planned Parenthood does.  They believe 11 million immigrants can be deported overnight.  They believe that a poor, African American child born in the inner city has the same chances to be successful as a rich, White child born in an affluent community.  They believe that giving 16 millions Americans improved health care is a travesty.  And they believe that if you keep making the rich richer that money will trickle down, even though that hasn’t happened for 30 years and counting.  They want to make America great again but have yet to define what “again” means.  Many suspect the “again” means a world where women, minorities, gays, immigrants, and non-Christians were all subordinate and recognized as second-class citizens.  That seems to be the world that many Republicans today would love for us to return to.

Talk about chasing windmills.