Are You Feeling the Bern?

It takes a British intellectual to take the true measure of Bernie Sanders. Now that the Vermont senator appears destined to lead the Democratic Party into political oblivion, it is time to analyze him as a bizarre and dispiriting avatar of a failed ideological crusade. 

After all, if anything ought to be received wisdom these days it is that socialism, especially the totalitarian variety, failed miserably. The body count for Communist governments has surpassed 100 million. Communism has only succeeded in producing famine and misery. Even the Chinese Communist Party, having rid itself of its Maoist roots, has not really been Communist for the past four decades.

And yet, maniacs and fanatics like Bernie Sanders soldier on, oblivious to the lesson of history. They would rather believe that the arc of history will justify their decision to devote their lives to a losing cause than to accept that perhaps they were wrong all along.

As it happens, Sanders has put together a rag tag army of young losers, the kinds of people who do not know what socialism and Communism wrought, but who are happy to sign on for free stuff. These people have been trained to be dysfunctional insolent indolent fools, incapable of making a living, incapable of competing in the arena. They want to be taken care of, by the Nanny state, and by the Nanny in chief, Bernie Sanders.

Such is the analysis brilliantly presented by British writer, Dominic Green in The Spectator. The reason for rendering America’s young people stupid is that they will then be more vulnerable to the Sanders message. It takes a Brit to see things clearly, because Sanders is yet another incarnation of what Britain saw in the ascent and decline of former Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn. 

As you know, once it was given the chance Great Britain sent Corbyn straight to the dustbin of history. One assumes that America will do the same for Bernie Sanders, but one needs to be cautious about such prognostications. I will note that Green is more optimistic than I. He sees Sanders as an embodied Father Christmas. 

Green opens on this upbeat note:

Historians of the future, if there are any, will note that though the demieducated youth of the United States shed their belief in God, they still believed in Father Christmas. Uncertain of their futures, and in no hurry to pay off their student loans, the young entrusted their faith and debt jubilee to the Santa Claus of socialism, a little man with fluffy white hair proffering gifts from a big sack of other people’s money.

In Victorian England, this traditional figure was known as Jeremy Corbyn, a vegetarian who gave every worker a lump of nationalized coal and scourged the Jews because they would not recognize him as their savior. In the United States, where people are wealthier and more generous in spirit, young Americans know their redeemer as Bernard Sanders. Every four years he descends from one of his homes in Vermont, which is not far from the North Pole, to hail spittle-flecked imprecations upon the heads of the rich and regale the children with fantastical tales of nationalization.

The problem is that America’s youth knows nothing about socialism. After all, it ended before they were born and thus they consider it to be a relic, a good idea gone bad. But one that they, as if by magic, can revive:

The subversion of humanities education by the radical left has scoured the tarnish off 20th-century history and restored the gleam of ideals to ‘actually existing socialism’. Americans born since the end of the Cold War have grown up thinking that a gulag is a Hungarian stew and a White Russian is just a cocktail, if only because their parents made them watch The Big Lebowski. Meanwhile, the Democratic party’s abandonment of American workers has done more to create a genuine proletariat than all the New Left’s xeroxing and leafleting ever did.

The Democratic Party, consumed by righteous fury at the failure of that incompetent fraud named Hillary Clinton to win the presidency, has burned all of its little gray cells. It has handed over leadership to the most furious and most irrational wing, its radical squad. All the while it was beholden to Wall Street and Silicon Valley for its funding. Marxists would say that it is suffering an internal contradiction, but today's young people have certainly not read Marx. So, the party is being led by someone like Sanders who has done nothing but betray the sources of Democratic fundraising:

The Democrats are now being unraveled by what Sanders might call the ‘contradictions of capitalism’. While the Democratic leadership was soaking Wall Street and Silicon Valley and pandering to the public sector unions, it outsourced the maintenance of its coalition to the radicals, and indulged them as they built their Potemkin villages of intersectionality. Now, as the party structure hollows out and the party leadership fails convincingly to answer Donald Trump, the radicals have the ground game and the ideology to remake the party from the bottom up. The result is a radically depraved version of the rainbow coalition, with Sanders as its Corbyn-style ‘Magic Grandpa’, a deceptively cuddly fellow traveler determined to ride their youthful exuberance into office.

Who makes up the Sanders coalition? Glad you asked:

A coalition of coalitions has mobilized for Sanders: acrimonious initials like the DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) and CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations), Jew-baiting proxies like Ilhan Omar and Linda Sarsour, woke warriors like IfNotNow and the Justice Dems, and bongwater conspiracists like the Chapo Trap House chaps and the campus wing of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

And let’s not forget, Sanders who is ostensibly Jewish, has surrounded himself with a gaggle of viciously anti-Semitic politicians and thought leaders. In this he remains faithful to the Corbyn formula for political self-deconstruction. Or, at least we can hope.

Notable bigot Linda Sarsour represented the Sanders campaign at an event that reeked of anti-Semitism:

In November, Sarsour represented Sanders’s campaign as a speaker at the American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) conference, whose official program called Zionism a ‘disease’ that will ‘destroy the purity of Al-Quds [Jerusalem]’. It’s impossible, Sarsour said, to oppose ‘white supremacy in America and the idea of being in a state based on race and class’ without also opposing the existence of a Jewish state. Israel, Sarsour said, is ‘built on the idea that Jews are supreme to everyone else’ — a libel more likely to emerge from the mouths of white nationalists.

Q. E. D.