Editor,
Protagoras was among the first partisans of the so-called social contract, a compromise prohibiting the stronger from injuring the weaker that ratified (in effect) the foundation of democratic government — and strength in the modern age has been principally economic. Wall Street one-percentism is the unambiguous dissolution of the social contract; the Sanders movement represents its surprised restoration.
Those of us not preoccupied with being rich should not for that reason be poor, but we have been conscripted into subsidizing the entitlements of an economic minority. Bernie Sanders, pollsters repeatedly show us, would route the reactionary populism of Trump in a general election, where the electorate is more populous and more diverse. The purposeful alarmism of Trump and the cynicism of the Clinton-complex have hidden what increasingly is in the line of sight—that the contest is not between Trump and Sanders, or between Sanders and Clinton, but between civic participation and itself, a point made with startlingly consistency by Sanders and repeatedly confirmed in practice.
Yet the media continue to give Sanders the Chicago-Tribune Roosevelt treatment, as the Columbia Journalism Review has reminded us, even as he repeatedly upends glowering expectations and buoyant media grave-digging: winning by the impossible margin of 78 percent in Idaho, 75 percent in Utah, 82 percent in Alaska, 73 percent in Washington and, 70 percent in Hawaii, while out-fundraising Clinton in a kind of bumble-bee-flies-anyway performance.
But the Sanders campaign is less a campaign than it is the return of the “Occupy Wall Street Movement” with candidate muscle. Mocking the positivity of a campaign of participation is surely its own reward, and the media will continue its defeatist performance of Alas Poor Yorick, but caricatures and epithets continue to break against the movement itself. The Sanders campaign is a shockingly candid invitation to participatory democracy, the surprised concatenation of the 99% in democratic call-and-answer.
New Mexico’s primary is June 7th. The deadline to register in New Mexico’s closed election is May 10th and Independents favoring Sanders will have to register as Democrats in order to vote in our primary. Those of us who believe, with Protagoras, in the continued value of the social contract, will work to give New Mexico’s delegates back to the Politics of Participation.
Jason Merriam
UNM student
