The ascendancy of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump in opinion polls shows that the United States is splitting more and more along the class lines, according to a journalist and anti-war activist in Virginia.
Phil Wilayto, an editor at Virginia Defender Newspaper, made the remarks in an interview with Press TV on Monday while commenting on a new poll which shows Senator Sanders ahead of Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton in the US presidential race in New Hampshire.
The senator from Vermont gets the support of 49 percent of Democratic voters in New Hampshire and the former secretary of state gets 38 percent, according to an NBC News/Wall Street journal poll released on Monday.
New Hampshire holds the first primary election in the US presidential race every four years to choose the delegates to the Democratic and Republican national conventions, who choose the party nominees for the elections.
“It’s very interesting because Sanders was not a particularly very well-known candidate up until fairly recently,” Wilayto said. “He’s been in the US Senate for over thirty years. He is a liberal on almost all issues, social issues. He concentrates on the question of economic equality.”
He added that the United States is being divided “more and more between the wealthy and the poor and the middle class is being increasingly pressured and disappearing. This has raised a great deal of anxiety and concern among working people that the future may not be very great and they may in for a lot of economic problems.”
“So Sanders is appealing to this anxiety, and his solutions, they seem almost radical today, but they really were sort of the traditional Democratic reform measures that were very popular in the Democratic Party -- say in the sixties and in the early seventies. The party has become more and more conservative, so he seems more radical,” the analyst noted.
“And, of course, he calls himself a socialist; that’s not socialism in the sense of the Venezuelan government or the Cuban government, but it’s more along the lines of the type of social democracy that the Scandinavian countries practice,” he pointed out.
“I think his appeal is basically because he is attacking the status quo in which a very small number of very wealthy people can control the political process and the direction of the economy to their own advantage. This was the great contribution that the Occupy Wall Street movement made; [it] explained that there was the one percent of the country that ran the political process at the expense of the other 99 percent,” he observed.
“Hillary Clinton has not been the unknown. She is a wealthy person herself. She is not known as someone who’s particularly criticized Wall Street, and she’s been pressured by Sanders,” the activist stated.
“At the same time, on the other end of the political spectrum, Donald Trump – an extremely reactionary, racist, xenophobic, warmongering reactionary – has become the leading candidate of the Republican Party, to the great concern of mainstream Republicans,” he continued.
“I think both of these phenomena – the Sanders' ascendancy and the Trump ascendancy – show that the people in the United States, the public is more and more dividing along class lines, and stronger voices in each camp are proposing more radical solutions: The right wing attacking immigrants and attacking social programs that exist, and building up fear and hostility against really the rest of the world, and on the liberal side, presenting solutions that are more akin to the social democracy economies of Europe and particularly the Scandinavian countries,” the veteran journalist opined.
“I think the Sanders' candidacy is an indication, as is the Trump candidacy, that the country is splitting more and more along class lines, and this division will play itself out in the electoral arena but in other areas as well… in community struggles and ultimately a real battle over who is going to be dominant in this country, the one percent that run [the country] today or working class people who are increasingly squeezed by the system and want some relief and want a future for themselves and for their children,” Wilayto concluded.
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