Five Democrats will take the stage in Las Vegas on Tuesday for the party's first presidential primary debate of the season, but really it's a showdown between the only two candidates who are polling in the double digits (or even above 1 percent, for that matter): Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. Because they agree on all of the social matters that primarily demarcate Democrats from Republicans—a potpourri of issues including abortion, LGBT rights, and contraception—the competition largely comes down to their positions on inequality and state benefits. That's why this debate stands to predict not just the Democratic Party’s immediate future, but the future—if there is one—of the American left.



Sanders repeatedly describes himself as a democratic socialist, but that hasn't stopped his critics from claiming that his economic policies are less progressive than Clinton’s. In an article last month, The Washington Post’s editorial board lamented that the Vermont senator would “shower largess on young and old, poor and well-to-do.” When Clinton swiped at Sanders’s college affordability plan in a town hall event last Monday, saying she is “a little different from those who say free college for everybody,” because she is “not in favor of making college free for Donald Trump's kids,” the Post’s board proclaimed Clinton’s quip as the final proof that she is “more progressive than Bernie Sanders.”

In no universe is opposition to universally available higher education the “more progressive” stance. Moreover, Clinton supported her husband’s passage of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, also known as “welfare reform,” which radically restricted cash assistance for the poorest families. The economic boom of the late '90s masked the disaster welfare reform would eventually reveal itself to be for a time, and perhaps this is why Bill Clinton enjoys a reputation as a fantastic president with an almost lovable scoundrel side. But since the collapse of the dot-com bubble, his reckless gutting of welfare has plunged millions of families into deep poverty.

The point of welfare reform was, in Hillary’s words, to “transition from dependency to dignity”—that is, to transition desperately poor families from welfare to work within a definite period of time. Although Clinton has refused to comment on whether or not she still considers welfare reform a success, she has since stuck to the theme of keeping benefits means-tested, with the goal of limiting benefits to the most destitute. Thus her interest, one presumes, in preventing Donald Trump’s kids from attending college without paying tuition, as Norway’s Princess Märtha Louise didn’t when she attended one of Norway’s many state colleges. Quelle horreur.

Clinton’s approach is one way to think about benefits: as tightly limited programs of last resort for people in extreme circumstances. This is mostly the way we talk about benefits now, in the parlance of a “safety net” for the precariously balanced and fallen. In this vein of thought, it makes sense to limit benefits to the extremely needy and to impose terms even upon those benefits, so as to prevent dependency—since the point is, after all, eventually ending one’s use of benefits.