A Mirror to the Left: Why Bernie Sanders is Worse than Donald Trump

(So Please Don’t Make Me Choose)

My first experience of Bernie Sanders on the national stage came in early 2015 when a (then) friend who had worked in celebrity ‘wrangling’ for the Obama campaign called to tell me she was supporting Bernie Sanders and hosting a meeting for like-minded Hollywood folks. She wanted to know if I’d be interested in supporting the Sanders campaign and being involved on the ground in recruiting celebrities to make appearances on Bernie’s behalf in Los Angeles and around the country. I responded that I was open to the idea but wasn’t certain I would be interested in supporting Bernie until I knew more.

At that point, my familiarity with Bernie Sanders was cursory — I’d listened to him in small chunks over the years on Thom Hartmann’s radio program in a regular segment called ‘Brunch with Bernie’ — and my impression was that he seemed honest, genuine, and caring.

I was, in nearly all ways, a socially acceptable ‘Hollywood progressive’ in good standing. I’d voted twice for Obama and participated in all primaries and midterms, following party lines in voting for candidates and policies. I participated in countless social media battles in defense of that party line and was more than happy to play the game at whatever level of toxicity and vehemence would arise. I relished it. After all, I studied philosophical logic in college and found the process of formal argument, in any arena, to be mentally stimulating and fun.

It’s always struck me that people who dislike formal argument/debate and people who seemingly have no talent or interest in it nonetheless dive in head first when they feel elements of their identity are being challenged. In 2020, identity is everything. Our thoughts are not merely ‘our thoughts’, they’re the lone signifier of good or evil in a two-dimensional digital world. We can see on Instagram that you’ve achieved ‘hot’ or ‘rich’ to whatever degree your curated display of self reflects those traits, but we cannot see ‘good’ from your freckle-face filter. No, ‘goodness’ is displayed by having the right political views on the topic of the day, even if the whole of one’s knowledge about the topic is a meme seen just seconds ago. Mass movements for the release of convicted murderers have been spawned from exactly this process. Why? Because people suddenly care about the falsely convicted? Because they know the facts of the case and feel the jury got the verdict wrong, or the law was wrongly applied by the court, or certain facts were never brought to light? Of course not. They were instantly trained to know that the desired response could be achieved by simply supporting narrative x over narrative y, and the process ends there. A Kardashian or a pop star takes the same position, and suddenly we have a nationwide movement.

A digression, yes, but an important one, because I believe that this process is what has generated the so-called ‘political revolution’ that we’ve all now been subject to for the better part of five years, and this process by which we achieve cheap, yet totally unearned, social credit for expressing political views is going, well, nowhere. It is critical to understand these views as an aspect of identity, because as other more common signifiers of goodness — ‘good mother’, ‘decent husband’ — are impossible to determine in the two-dimensional world of Instagram, political virtue is right there in someone else’s words that you’ve reposted. The ideas expressed are now wholly part of you to the point where someone challenging them is not only challenging the idea but challenging you, somehow invalidating you as a person with agency. This is commonly called ‘dehumanization’ today. No longer is dehumanization about subjugation or violence or coercion, it’s about disagreeing with your views on this or that simple economic issue, for example. The identification with one’s expressed political beliefs, it should be obvious by now to everyone, requiring no further explanation from me, is unsustainable.

In the weeks and months following that phone call with my former friend, I considered Bernie’s candidacy seriously until one day I came across a quote from Sanders in an interview with John Harwood, appearing on CNBC on May 26, 2015 from an interview titled, “10 Questions with Bernie Sanders”, where Bernie says, “You don’t necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants or of 18 different pairs of sneakers when children are hungry in this country.” This is the point at which I realized what many people before me have discovered — Bernie isn’t just a simple, happy warrior, just wanting the best for everyone. Far from it. He’s a dyed-in-the-wool socialist like any other, and should be considered as such, with one’s eyes fully open.

The reason we have plentiful options for shoes is because people have different desires, different needs, different resources, and different feet. Not because they don’t care about poor people. The reason we have plentiful options for deodorant is because people have different bodies, different hormones, and different ways they choose to smell, not because they don’t care about starvation. These varied needs create a market, the same market that employs people in production and allows innovators to profit from their life’s work. Things don’t just keep getting better in a vacuum. We can recognize that our quality of life is better than other people’s, want to see those people’s lives improved, and still not want the overall quality of life to decrease. Bernie Sanders admits the reality of a world of vast abundance, but aims to end the incentives by which this abundance is put to use for human flourishing.

Consider: how many chronic workplace injuries have been caused over the years due to improper footwear? How many people whose jobs require standing for extended periods — retail workers, restaurant staff, builders, factory workers, doctors and nurses, et al… — could’ve been spared the missed work, the medical care, and most importantly, the pain, had they just had the proper footwear? But the solution on offer is to turn over the entire health care economy to someone whose ideas haven’t changed in 60 years, except when the political winds do? Why don’t we just give them all an abundance of shoes? Preventing chronic injury using proper footwear is surely less expensive than the resulting medical care. Is Bernie not dreaming big enough, or he is simply wasteful with taxpayer money? How many types of shoes can we provide to each and every citizen of the “richest country the world has ever known”, and can one of the eighteen please be Christian Louboutin? Are men just given a pair of steel-toed work boots? Women a comfortable pair of flats? And is anyone allowed to do ballet? Why aren’t their needs being seen to?

After this epiphany, I was no longer in tacit support of Bernie as a candidate, nor was I neutral, I was fully opposed to it. What I realized was that Bernie was just as ignorant as our current president about some of the simplest realities of economics and American life, just as divisive, just as reliant on the victim-oppressor narrative (if not more), and every bit as interested in pursuing continued power at any cost. This was borne out in significant ways in 2015–2016 and we are seeing the same things taking place now as we head into the eight weeks that will almost definitely decide which Democrat is nominated to square off with that dastardly orange villain this fall.

Before we fully cross this Rubicon, I implore ‘the left’, insofar as I would still claim any allegiance to what it’s become, to save us from the binary choice between Sanders and Trump, a choice that almost certainly will not produce the result so many Sanders fans (they’re not merely supporters, as I’ll show) expect.

The argument I intend to make will be met as most arguments are these days that one disagrees with — by attempting to claim this or that about my motives or that I must be a closeted Trump supporter, a wolf in sheep’s clothing. I promise you I am not. As of this writing, I would support these candidates, in order, in full-throated fashion if they are nominated to face Donald Trump: Michael Bloomberg, Michael Bennet, Amy Klobuchar, John Delaney, Andrew Yang, and Pete Buttigieg. I will support Joe Biden against Trump with some hesitation. I truthfully don’t know where I’d stand with Warren but I feel like I would choose her over Trump as well. I will support all of these candidates to the degree that their campaigns steer clear of socialism, identity politics, and the extreme ‘woke’ left. I voted for Clinton, Gore, Kerry, and Obama twice. I even voted for Kamala Harris for Attorney General in California, and for the U.S. Senate. I was an unabashed vocal supporter of Hillary Clinton. I have no problem electing a man or woman of any ethnicity and any sexual identity or orientation. But socialist? No.

I will not support Bernie Sanders under any conditions.

What follows is the support of this thesis: Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump are opposite sides of the same coin — they are both egomaniacal, Manichaean demagogues — and Bernie’s lifelong, unwavering commitment to a purely socialist agenda makes him not only unelectable and untenable were he to somehow win, but actually worse than Trump.

Let us explore the similarities, and in the process show that the differences between the two men should be rather inconsequential to those who consider themselves Bernie fans on their own terms. The aspects of Donald J Trump found most toxic and hated by these people are reflected in Bernie, and the realization of this simple truth is crucial in preventing what I believe to be a crisis bigger than the one currently inhabiting the White House.

I want to unpack the statement I made above, that both men are egomaniacal, Manichaean demagogues, and I think it’s best to view each of these as a separate phenomenon. It seems given that the audience finding this piece will take for granted that Trump is all of these, so I will as well. I won’t waste time proving a premise upon which we already certainly agree.

Both men are egomaniacs.

Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump have both created massive followings of fans who abide their every word with a fervor indistinguishable from fundamentalist religion. Bernie’s rallies are similar to Trump’s in that they not only entail the screamed and screeching repetition of ridiculous political platitudes, they are constructed as a show, meant to entertain and spur assent to ‘the cause’ in a manner wholly unrelated to the ideas being put forward. If the profound impact the group has on the behavior of individuals is somehow disputed, dear reader, you should move on to a different article, because that idea won’t be taken seriously here at any point.

The advantage of these settings for the candidate is twofold. Within the arena, each man is able to hijack the attention and affection showered down and transmute it so that the experience becomes transcendent on some level, its ‘truth’ now lying somewhere deeper than its connection, no matter how thin, to the reality in which it must (eventually) operate. Is it somehow less likely for Trump to have Mexico pay for the wall than it is for Bernie to change the entire American political system, much less its economy in all the ways he lists? The government simultaneously running top-notch health care for everyone, paying off everyone’s student debts, providing post-secondary education for everyone, while enacting the “Green New Deal”, eliminating all medical debt, etc… is more realistic than extracting money from Mexico to pay for a border fence?

You may say it’s a better use of funds, or that Mexico is never going to pay for the wall, and you’d find agreement from me on both, but to say Bernie is more likely to realize these goals than Trump is to realize his is biased to a degree of utter insanity. Our system, thankfully, doesn’t give any president the power to achieve such a radical (yes, radical) transformation of the society at large, whether that president is operating out of the pureness of his charitable heart or snapping off whatever priorities stumble out of his brain while desperately flailing to satisfy the needs of his own ego.

Through me alone, you are saved.

This is the promise of every religious cult leader, every historic religious tradition, every dictator, and anyone anywhere who’s looking to convince people to subjugate themselves.

I doubt the most committed Bernie fan whose eyes these words cross would argue with the assertion that Bernie believes he is our last best hope before all is lost. I’ve had this conversation with plenty of Bernie fans and they have no hesitation in asserting the same — that all is lost if this man does not win. In recent months, this assertion has been given an assist with the claims of climate activists that we’re a mere twelve years from an existential disaster that can only be aided or reversed by the implementation of a wholesale government takeover of anything in the orbit of environmental policies, including paying for retrofitting buildings, giving ‘living wages’ to displaced workers, etc… The original memo posted by the initial supporters of the Green New Deal proposed a living wage for “anyone unable or unwilling” (emphasis mine) to work. It shouldn’t require explanation to understand this is unsustainable. To be clear, I share the view that manmade climate change has the potential to be an existential crisis on a scale not seen in millennia. I do not share the view that the only solution is the Green New Deal.

The extent of Sanders’ ego doesn’t end with his own simple self-regard on political lines. He imagines himself a paragon of political virtue. Like Hillary Clinton, his installment into the halls of power is pre-ordained. Bernie cost the Democrats the 2016 election. Any suggestion to the contrary should be disregarded out of hand. On March 1, 2016, Bernie Sanders lost the primaries or caucuses of seven of the eleven states holding their primary elections. In every prior election, a candidate who no longer had any reasonable mathematic probability of winning would have dropped out, but not Bernie. Bernie pressed on. His was an ‘important’ campaign, we must remember, and his message — the same message we always hear from him — needed to be repeated to his fans around the country. YouTube simply would not suffice.

After Super Tuesday, the Democratic primary campaign got increasingly more vicious and divisive. The Sanders campaign believed (perhaps correctly) that Hillary Clinton was corrupt and compromised, and that to save the party, Bernie needed to forge on. Remember, conspiracy theorists knew Hillary would be indicted and we’d need Bernie there to take her place. The prominent Twitter loon, Seth Abramson, proposed theory after theory on how exactly Bernie Sanders would eventually triumph at the Democratic National Convention and become the nominee. Bernie’s fans believed it, and it would surprise me if Bernie didn’t think the same. I often wonder how this sort of ‘fake news’ is acceptable and widely shared online by the same people who accuse Trump’s fans of believing fake news.

Let’s be clear here: Bernie Sanders continued campaigning for over five more months after there was no mathematical probability that he would win while knowing that he was diminishing the electoral hopes of Clinton, the all-but-certain nominee. This is an act of political selfishness and self-righteousness that can only be matched by people like Donald Trump. It’s as if Bernie Sanders was unwittingly campaigning for the candidate with the demeanor most similar to his own. And what a success he achieved!

I am familiar with the refrain from Bernie’s fans that Bernie was robbed of the nomination by a ‘rigged system’ in the DNC. This disregards the simple truth that Bernie Sanders did not, in any way, come close to defeating Hillary Clinton for the nomination of the Democratic Party. In fact, Bernie Sanders used the Democratic primary as a platform for his own personal advancement. Bernie Sanders is not a Democrat. He has not spent his life working with the organization to elect Democrats, which is the DNC’s sole purpose, their raison d’etre. The Democratic National Committee’s one job is to get Democrats elected. Every bit of interference perpetrated by the DNC, as claimed by Sanders fans, occurred after March 1, 2016, the date when Bernie Sanders’ viability was nil. If someone can explain to me how an organization that exists to elect Democrats was wrong to attempt to head off the potential downfalls of a protracted intraparty fight, I would love to hear it. The common answer is that the primary wasn’t purely democratic, as if Bernie would have would the millions of votes needed in a purely democratic paradigm to change the results in the halls of the Iowa caucus. To say this is to betray the cause, and to doubt the cause is to mark yourself damned.

We have seen one tactic work for both Sanders and Trump: meet any dissent over the politician’s agenda with the claim that the dissenter is somehow compromised (by ‘the Russians’ or by ‘the corporations’ or impure or otherwise evil, which brings us to claim two.

Both men are Manichaean.

Manichaeism is an ancient religion whose foundational belief is the everlasting battle between light and dark, good and evil. This is exactly what the all-encompassing victim/oppressor narrative does to rational conversation on issues. There is no acceptable compromise under these conditions, and if the Constitution was for anything, it was to make compromise a necessary feature of politics. If you agree with me that the prospects for common sense, workable, tolerant compromise is currently impossible in this political climate, you’d have a hard time arguing that Bernie Sanders is any less a part of that than Donald Trump. How effective a leader can you be if your default stance is to tell everyone that their problems are someone else’s fault? By what standard is that even leading at all?

On each issue, Bernie Sanders is fully convinced not only of his platform’s rightness, but its righteousness. To some degree, every politician shares this point of view. They’d have little reason to seek office otherwise. Sanders’ constant refrain, [whatever issue he’s championing] “is not a radical view” is to be taken as a fundamental truth, even though the achievement of these policies in full would reorganize one of history’s greatest civilizations and one of the purest systems built to ensure individual freedom in service of the broader and inherent good of socialism because, the logic goes, other countries have tried one or two of the ideas and Americans should simply accept they work because their dear leader tells them so.

It’s stunning in the current political environment that the examples of the Nordic countries — a fraction of our size, ethnically homogenous, and predominantly white with an historic tradition of social cohesion of the kind not seen in America since World War II, if it ever existed at all — aren’t recognized immediately as racist when you notice that the examples of socialism among countries full of ‘brown people’ are disregarded as having done socialism wrong. The next move is always to claim that but for the corrupt politicians, the programs would’ve worked, without even a sideways glance toward the irony here — you can’t expect politicians of even the purest hearts will cede power to those with hearts just as pure. It’s exactly the level of power handed over from the people to the government that allows leaders like Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez to systematically dismantle their countries and countless lives in the process.

All of this takes for granted that the Nordic countries are actually Democratic Socialist or something similar (they aren’t) and that Bernie is somehow a Democratic Socialist (he’s not) and not just a genuine article socialist. Back in 2015, in good faith, I asked various friends who were Bernie supporters what it was that made him a “Democratic Socialist” and not just a regular socialist. Their response was that I only need watch Bernie’s address at Georgetown University in November of 2015. I watched it. It was just like all of his other speeches — he only has one speech, and in debates and interviews, he simply regurgitates the segment of the one speech loosely applicable to whatever question was asked. All other questions are rejected, responded to in passing and then dismissed, or met with claims of impure priorities on the part of the questioner.

In this cycle, Bernie addressed the definition of Democratic Socialism in a speech at George Washington University in June of 2019. Unsurprisingly, these speeches are almost identical, save a few added paeans to new ‘oppressed’ groups, broken down, of course, by identity. He defines Democratic Socialism as “A higher path. A path of compassion, justice, and love,” and says “that is the path I call Democratic Socialism” (emphasis mine). If there is a definition there, I don’t see it. I do see that as being exactly the same wording any religious person might use to describe their religion if they didn’t actually know any of the fundamental beliefs of that religion. Try asking a quasi-religious friend what constitutes their religious beliefs and you’re likely to get the same answer. It might behoove one to ask why that’s so.

He proceeds to identify a series of ‘rights’ that make up Democratic Socialism. Without a protracted discussion of what constitutes a right, positive vs negative rights, etc… aside from simply asserting it as Bernie does, it should be sufficient to note that there is no definition of ‘right’ in a governing context that can require the positive action and labor of another free individual. Consider what it would mean to cement into law each of the following ‘rights’ named by Bernie Sanders that (with the aforementioned other stuff) constitutes Democratic Socialism: “The right to quality health care. The right to as much education as one needs to succeed. The right to good job that pays a living wage. The right to affordable housing. The right to a secure retirement. The right to live in a clean environment,” and not only is health care a human right, but “economic rights are human rights”. For a moment, let’s leave the impenetrable barriers to the achievement of these goals aside. It may not have occurred to Bernie that human rights might extend beyond the borders of our country, or perhaps it did, but I’m not sure putting ourselves on the list of human rights abusers for not providing health care to needy Siberians is a good aim. What would be the justification for protecting the human rights of Americans while people around the world live in poverty and ‘experience’ dying?

It once again strikes me as odd in this political culture that this doesn’t sound to Bernie and his supporters like a sort of birthright privilege, and a potentially racist one (by their definition) at that. After all, why do we have 91 flavors of Kool-Aid while there are people in poverty around the world? Why are there 23 seasons of The Bachelor when people in other countries are enslaved right now? Why are there 29 (or possibly more) Kardashians? Separate question. Are we to meant to agree that the United States has a moral obligation to provide everything for everyone? I feel like there’s a word to describe that besides ‘colonialism’, but it’s not coming to me. No matter.

If we accept the construction of this argument, the process has no end. ‘Why do X people have Y when Z people have no Y?’ questions the very sad truth of reality. There is no current answer, though religious types have tried. Generally, it’s that the devout are more deserving of god’s endowment, or if god fails to provide, the cure to this dilemma is more religion. In both fiction and reality, this is how dystopias emerge. It starts with someone wanting to cure the world of its ills and introduce every human, plant, and animal into a vast and blossoming utopia. It shouldn’t be surprising that these attempts, without exception, end in death and destruction and the disintegration of even the strongest societies.

His speech follows along with a discussion of socialism, not on the merits of socialism qua socialism but on his audience’s predisposition to disavow people who have, throughout history, pointed out that certain policies America is now comfortable with were called “socialist” by those trying not to institute said policies. He does not bother with whether or not the problems these policies meant to address were handled efficiently, nor whether their implementation posed undue restrictions on personal liberty, he merely tied them to names like Boehner and Reagan and claimed that they’re opposed to ‘anything that helps the people’. Surely, you must agree that the other side loves socialism when it is “corporate socialism”, he adds, without the recognition that it’s possible for both instances to be wrong and immoral.

In this speech, he quotes Franklin Delano Roosevelt, saying, “Government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob”. What then, is a government whose entire purpose is to organize a massive portion of the people’s money that the government then uses to make the people’s choices on the assumption that people are too dumb to make their own? What is the difference between a government formed in revolution by self-proclaimed radicals if not an organized mob? Who among you wouldn’t use the phrase, “organized mob” to describe Trump’s rally-attending MAGA hatters? You should understand the phrase when used on you is every bit as valid.

Sanders says, “you cannot be free without economic security and economic independence”. This is just not true. My grandparents were Italian immigrants. They came to America through Ellis Island with next to nothing. They worked hard and raised a family. My father and his siblings did the same. At no point did my grandparents think their struggles meant they were not free. It’s absolutely comical to imagine otherwise.

Across the family tree from me are 3rd generation Americans who would now be described as ‘white children of privilege’. But if that is so, the question is, even now, are three generations of hard work and good decision making a wall too hard to climb for new members of our society? This isn’t hypothetical. This is exactly the American dream. Lack of economic security and economic independence did not prevent them from accessing the American dream. It does not prevent hard working immigrants who become American citizens each year from achieving it either.

Bernie’s narrative isn’t true, but it’s accepted as true. Why? How many of his other narratives are just dead wrong? Need a hint? Most of them! But what sort of society does a belief in this narrative create? One where the less advantaged are told their lives are essentially hopeless, but at least you know who to hate. Now, grab your pitchforks!

To digress for a moment, what has become of that American dream? Bernie Sanders says it’s gone. He’d like to, as it were, make America great again. I don’t believe it’s gone and I doubt you do, either. The American dream, as it’s been described, is making of your opportunities everything you can, and then providing a life to your children that is, in some way, better than the life you had growing up. It is not a misconstrual of this formulation to declare that the American dreamitself is to accumulate and pass down whatever privilege and benefits one has earned. Maybe I have less faith in the altruism of people than you do, but I don’t think there’s a person in this country that doesn’t want the American dream exactly as I’ve described it. It is not an unjustifiable “privilege” to take the fruits of my wonderful parents’ labor and put it to my use, in hopes of one day paying it forward before I leave the planet.

A new slogan for the Sanders campaign is “Not me, us”. It’s not out of line to wonder whether this is the same sort of ‘oneness’ that religious megachurch grifters like Joel Osteen pretend to share with their congregations as they divert attention to the fact that their messages have made them fantastically wealthy. By Bernie’s own definition of whether or not wealthy people deserve their money — hint, they don’t, except when he needs them to — what utopian justice would provide vast riches to a man who literally had no money and no job until winning a mayoral election by 10 votes at age 41? Is that just the well-deserved windfall for a ‘lifetime fighting for the people’? Are your eyes rolling as hard as mine?

Take note of a key difference in Bernie’s stump speech from 2016 and his stump speech from this cycle: Bernie no longer says “millionaires and billionaires”. He now says “oligarchs” and “the billionaire class”. I’ll give Bernie the benefit of the doubt and assume he realized not all millionaires are evil. I wouldn’t want to suggest he’s a total hypocrite now after parlaying his taxpayer-funded 50-year career into riches.

Bernie also claims he’s thrived for decades as his opponents have thrown the socialist card at him. Is it wrong to ask how? Does he mean this has been the common tactic used against him in his decades of running for office in Vermont? Surely, he must, in all of those close races he’s had. Bernie Sanders is well known to be a lifelong independent. He’s lost plenty of elections in Vermont, even to Democrats. Despite those losses, he became such a fixture in Vermont’s politics that he’s won elections with 70+% of the vote. Is that because Vermonters are very socialist, or is it because he’s every bit the entrenched and well-funded candidate that he so often rails against? Any study of Vermont politics would show that the state loves the candidate in all his novelty and idiosyncrasies, but not interested in his policies and have indeed rejected them there. Who, then, is Bernie Sanders down in Washington fighting for, exactly?

That aside, it’s worth asking who has ever attacked Bernie in any real way. To be sure, the Clinton campaign ran strongly against Sanders in a number of ways, but none of those ways were directly calling Bernie a socialist or implying that there was an underlying danger in electing him. Disagree with this if you like, but even the greatest Hillary-hater in the country would call her politically ruthless, and she didn’t touch it. Why? Because there was no benefit to alienating the far left. Donald Trump has no such concern.

Bernie simply has not been widely attacked on a national level at any point for his socialist agenda in any way other than pointing out small preferences in the execution and implementation of policies with similar aims. If this sort of dissension is out of bounds or ‘red baiting’, then we’re well past the point of even having campaigns. But like the leftist version of Trump’s base, this is how one’s purity is measured. If you disagree with the cause, you are a threat to the dear leader’s mission of saving us, poor chumps, from ourselves.

At no point during either speech does Bernie Sanders differentiate his“Democratic Socialism” (and, he reminds us, it is his version) from traditional socialism — the one that requires government control of the means of production. If you think the achievement of all of Bernie’s policy goals will not require that last bit, the most important one, pardon my finding you profoundly gullible in the same way that one might be were one to believe that Mexico is going to pay for Trump’s wall. Bernie’s goals are all-encompassing, and if you don’t believe me when I say it, head on over to Bernie’s site and see for yourself. He has a ‘plan for everything’, as one must when one purports to reimagine the whole of American life. When you are guaranteeing a good job with a living wage to every American as a human right, you’re necessarily required to exert control well beyond the bounds of what our Founders intended the government’s purpose to be (and, I’d imagine, beyond what most rational people’s reasonable brains would expect) not just including, but especially over the ‘means of production’.

How will all his goals be achieved, one might ask, now that the previously converted have been redundantly stirred to action? Well, by a ‘political revolution’, of course. Leaving aside the impact actual revolutions have. Bernie would know of these. He has participated in them before, in support of socialists and their regimes in Cuba, Nicaragua, and the Soviet Union.

The problem with the common standpoint on socialism is that, like any religion or conspiracy theory, is that it is unfalsifiable. There is no point at which supporters of this ideology would accept that it doesn’t work. Every counter example is dismissed. The solution to any problem arising within a socialist structure is simplymore socialism. If things don’t work as they should, it’s not because of human nature or a corrupt ideology, it’s that the all-powerful class are preventing it from working.

If only they didn’t exist, right, comrade?

This isn’t ‘red baiting’, this is a simple, provable fact — Bernie excuses his own supposed ‘revolution’ with the word ‘political’. The word doesn’t do as much of the heavy lifting as Bernie thinks. Every revolution starts this way until the point at which it fails to achieve its ends and violence becomes necessitated as the only remaining way to defeat one’s enemies — enemies whom, we must remember, are evil by definition.

Bernie imagines and even details what this would look like inside the mythical halcyon haze he’s conjured, ancient wizard that he is. ‘Thousands and thousands’ of ‘young people’ and ‘workers’ will show up on the steps of Congress and demand that their representatives do what Bernie says, even though Bernie represents the policy positions of very few Americans including, stunningly, 70% of Democrats who oppose Medicare for All under Bernie’s construction. Our system of government, thankfully, has prevented Donald Trump from doing a great many things, even as he takes positions on issues upon which I would find myself in accordance with my friends on the far left.

Will Bernie’s political revolution even happen? Of course not. But we’re meant to see Bernie and his supporters as a battalion of moral crusaders who, in the light of their sheer good nature will break the Washington gridlock and bring Bernie’s utopia into being.

And this differs from Trump… how?

Both men are demagogues.

Oxford defines “demagogue” as follows: a political leader who seeks support by appealing to the desires and prejudices of ordinary people rather than by using rational argument.

If phrases like, “it’s not a radical idea”, or “not me, us”, or the constant referral to corporations, the wealthy, ‘oligarchs’, and “Wall Street fat cats”, aren’t the tools of the demagogue, I’m not sure what those tools might be. This is common populist rhetoric of the same stripe as Trump’s. It’s possible to dissect, for instance, the Wall Street practices that have hazardous societal consequences without the assertion that Wall Street is, in essence, the enemy of the people while ignoring any positive societal benefit they might provide. This is unsurprising. Bernie Sanders sees (other people’s) wealth as inherently unearned and undeserved. What would be the point of seeing the enemy as human beings as well? Pointing this out isn’t a carte blanche excuse for when Trump does it. Not at all. Again, I know how bad Trump is when he does these things. It’s not better simply because it comes from Bernie. It is dangerous. The stirring of righteous anger and hatred for an undefined ‘other’ is always dangerous.

Bernie’s tactics on this regard are not only accepted as the cost of saving the civilization, they’re trumpeted by his fawning masses. Bernie is not simply a politician to his fans; he is a cultural icon. Responding with rational dissent is simply ‘missing the point’, and if one misses the point so clearly, if one is opposed to the cultural icon saving the civilization in exactly the way the cultural icon suggests, one is evil, selfish, and hoping for the downfall of all in society but oneself.

Am I talking about Trump or Bernie? I don’t even know anymore. They are indistinguishable in this regard, both egomaniacal, Manichaean demagogues. Righteous anger is not, and should not be, for any thinking person of sound mind, a substitute for real argument. Bernie is “passionate” while Trump is “furious”?

Bernie has carried this indignation around for sixty years, during which time the quality of life in the United States has risen in nearly every conceivable way. The only society where people aren’t swept aside is a communist one where they all are. This is just reality. Our responsibility as a society is to help these people help themselves and/or care for them fully when they’re genuinely indigent and incapable. That requires strong communities and a financial safety net. It does not require a socialist who hasn’t had a new idea in sixty yearswhile believing in socialism to be all of our collective father.

If you agree with me that these similarities in approach are cause for concern, good. I don’t want to bear the consequences of exploitative capitalism any more than those of socialism or its big brother, communism. Combined, socialism and communism are accountable for more than one hundred million lives lost in the 20thcentury. This isn’t wayward speculation or ‘red baiting’, this is exactly the point. The United States didn’t magically wind up in position of wealth and prosperity. It happened because of our system of government, not in spite of it. All goods come with ills. The Sanders fan imagines his utopia as one where, for instance, everyone has an iPhone. In reality, their world is the world without the iPhone in the first place. They imagine free public internet on their way to make use of their free access to the best schools and health care in the world. Their world is one where the government provides and regulates the internet (with the best of intentions, of course) while service providers crumble and vanish. That’s extreme, you say. Well, yes, eventually. The point is knowing from every available historical example that this is what happens. Socialism is anti-human in nature. Humans have a range of desires. These desires aren’t fulfilled in socialist societies. Why would they be? What’s the motivation in a socialist society to invent jet-skis or bungee jumping or art or fashion or an exquisite culinary expense? You don’t have to be in Sex and the City to want more than one pair of drab, brownish, all-purpose shoes.

A thought experiment: Let’s imagine a world where we all start at a neutral, equal point. This doesn’t need to be a ‘zero’ point, but let’s say it is. We decide that each person will be provided a Universal Basic Income on a scale even Andrew Yang (who I may well end up supporting and have given money to) would think ridiculous. This sum would be big enough for each person to have all their ‘needs’ met to an ‘acceptable’ standard and enough left over for a vacation, or a special gift for your spouse on the date of your anniversary, or even taking the family for ice cream. How long does this top-down mode of equality remain? Again, humans have a range of desires. What happens when one person doesn’t want to eat anything but ice cream, or fast food? Maybe they’re addicted to sugar or maybe video games (assuming these exist, because why would they?). What happens if a person spends his entire allowance on video games or some other hobby or habit and doesn’t have any left for his basic needs? What happens when someone invents a product or service that improves everyone’s lives to the point where a staggering proportion of society cheerfully hands over their allowance to the same person or company because the product or service is such a benefit to the lives of the members of that society? When does our dear, dear leader say “enough is enough”? And how does this differ from controlling the means of production, not to mention the means of consumption?

Another thought experiment: Bernie has won and the sun that rises each morning is smiling upon us, the tide carving messages of love and acceptance into the sand in front of the Malibu beach houses we all gratefully share. Our society has a few remaining problems that Bernie intends to solve, but things look gorgeous so far.

It comes to Bernie’s attention that some African-American and Hispanic people live in rural communities and their schools are horrendous, perpetuating the consequences of the darkest episodes of America’s history. Bernie announces a pilot program to test a new method of schooling targeting an equal number of rural school districts/students in each state in the union. After the five years it takes to implement the program, held up by astounding levels of bureaucratic interference and the proper consultation (paid for by government) to ensure against violations of the codes set out by that same government, the plan is enacted without a hitch (five years are not a hitch, the regulations are necessary, and if you disagree, you’re evil). Because of the restrictions of the plan and the demographics involved, 75% of the schools are predominantly white with the remainder being the predominantly black and Hispanic districts.

Ten years later, the program has achieved mixed results, but not across the board, spread evenly. For the predominantly black and Hispanic schools, the success rates are off the charts, hallelujah. The predominantly white districts, however, see no improvement in performance, and while they started out in a better relative position due to their privilege, the students taking part in the program from the black and Hispanic areas are now outperforming them.

There are a few paths from here and I want to consider which path President Bernie might choose. We could decide to eliminate the program in the predominantly white districts while maintaining it in the black and Hispanic districts, realizing the evidence is overwhelming that what has succeeded in one area may not be set up to succeed everywhere, but that the successes were well worth the effort. Or, we could quibble about the details and decide to give it more time in the predominantly white districts in hopes that it would improve and we would continue to monitor and study the results.

Both of these are rational. The first option is more fiscally conservative, a quality whose possession is of the utmost importance if one is going to be directing the flow of money across a society from on high, but it comes with the necessary admission that there was something different about groups of people. Unable to overcome the contradiction in wanting equality and then privileging certain groups for help, under Bernie’s rubric, this option must be eliminated.

No, you say. It’s necessary to compensate these identity groups based on prior oppression, considered in the collective, whether or not a given individual was oppressed. I’ll accept that. One question. Till when? At what point have we reached an acceptable level of equality, and then who will be the one to say this specific program needs to be dismantled, with funds directed elsewhere and, oh yeah, this specific program was targeted at a specific racial group? The political ads would call anyone supporting that position a racist. Does it matter that nothing about that would be racist? Of course not. Maybe we should just keep studying it for, say, ten more years. This is what Democrats with no spine would choose, which is to say, all current Democrats. Yeah, many Republicans would do the same. But their incentives to do so are, outside corruption, non-existent. If you want to spend the day finding examples of the other side doing it, it’s not my time you’re wasting. I accept they do.

My suspicion, though, is that neither option would be the one chosen by President Sanders. My suspicion is — and I believe it’s not a great leap to accept this — Bernie would choose to not only continue the program for everyone, because its success in the one instance means the same method will work for everyoneeven though it indisputably does not, his choice would be to expand it to all other schools in every demographic, knowing full well that 75% of the future expenditures would essentially be dumped on the ground and burned at the homecoming pep rally. After all, why should the government cut funding for those poor children just because they didn’t learn right? No matter, public schools are an inherent good without dispute. If you don’t like Bernie’s altruistic government controlling what the next generation learns, you’re evil.

“But that’s not what would happen!” the righteous bellow.

Isn’t it, though? Eventually?

I would submit that if you believe this sort of thing would not happen under a President Sanders, you haven’t examined Bernie’s policies with any depth, and forgive me, but I’m guessing that description accounts for basically everyone, including and especially his fans.

Speaking of schools, one of the pillars of Bernie’s education platform (as mentioned above) is the ‘human right’ to as much education as you need, to do the job you want. Permanent scholarly life in academia isn’t just for humanities professors anymore! Now any student can stay in college forever. The dorm room is, after all, free. Jokes aside, this program, to the extent stated on his website or mentioned by the candidate, has no method for controlling costs. The education policy page discusses the “skyrocketing cost” of college as, somehow, a reason to have the government pay for it, not an obvious prohibitor to government’s ability to do so. It’s as if the cost of college doesn’t increase because of manipulation of the market. Why would college get cheaper in a society where we’re told that the value of college will exceed its costs, no matter what that cost is, even though a degree now is little more than a certification of trying in school over four more years for a large number of attendees?

Questions, be damned! In truth, it doesn’t matter whether costs increase. We all know that Wall Street ‘fat cats’ horde over the natural fountain of money they discovered running under the streets of Bill de Blasio’s New York City. We need to simply tax these people a fraction of a percent on each financial transaction they make. Will the imposition of these taxes impact the financial markets in unseen ways and have potentially huge downside results?

Who cares, oligarch?

This isn’t hyperbole. This is in black and white on Bernie’s campaign website. “Tax Wall Street Gambling to Cancel All Student Debt and Pay for College for All” is the subheading to the summary of his education program. “Tax Wall Street Gambling”? Why not, “Impose a Small Tax on Financial Transactions”, a formulation that not only describes the actuality more accurately, it leaves out the wholly unnecessary demonization of Wall Street. Is this the behavior of a rational actor working toward the cohesion of society for everyone’s benefit, or that of a demagogue? This isn’t a real question. The answer is obvious.

This sort of thing continues in the section on the Green New Deal. A heading reads “End the Greed of the Fossil Fuel Industry and Hold them Accountable”. “End the greed”? What sort of man thinks himself capable of “ending greed”? What does that look like? Humanity’s capacity to wantgoes away? The competition between people just comes to an end? This didn’t make sense in 1960s pop songs and it doesn’t make sense now without being completely ignorant of not only human nature, but all nature. Bernie says he will pay the untold trillions of dollars this plan would cost by taxing (in addition to sanctioning, suing, and prosecuting) fossil fuel companies who have “knowingly destroyed our planet”. Naturally, this is justified because, as we all know, fossil fuel companies are evil. Forget about the fact that the natural gas boom has allowed the United States to drastically reduce carbon emissions while achieving energy independence, thus increasing energy security between this country and the bad actors who populate the global stage. For Bernie Sanders, such corporations must be evil.

Bernie’s website conveniently leaves off any description of how Medicare for All will be paid for but it does require all the money we spend on health care (one would assume) to be redirected to the government in the form of a new tax to fund the program, in consort with his stated goals of taking the drug companies to task (because they’re also evil) and completely eliminating the health insurance companies.

You want to make health care more affordable tomorrow? Pass a law that says what the actual raw market cost of services rendered would be in a totally free market next to the amount the medical provider billed the insurance company. Or perhaps make them state the cost of the same service in ‘similar’ (not really) countries. Or force them to tell customers what percent of their out-of-pocket costs go toward covering various potential legal liabilities due to the abundance of frivolous lawsuits? You want ‘the common folk’ to get on board the same train on health care? Maybe let everyone know what the actual price of their services would be on an open market and compare that to what they pay the insurance company.

But no, the only solution is that government would pay for everything in perpetuity, regardless of rising costs. This necessitates hospitals being less incentivized to operate and doctors to spend the years in medical school with less financial motivation to take on the task of great magnitude required to become a medical doctor. In the Utopian States of America, though, doctors will continue to do this out of the goodness of their hearts, because the fact that they currently are allowed earn an exceptional living from their value to society is a hint at their true evil, and society’s. If they were truly good, they’d work in whatever conditions the government provided, for whatever the government pays, in whichever location their services are needed. There may be some arguments on this notion’s behalf, but they’re not convincing enough to me to advocate for the abolishment of the entire system as it stands, and it won’t be convincing enough to the citizens of the country who simply are not on board with this policy.

This is when Bernie’s fans repeat the old mantra that the country would be on board with the policy if only they understood it better, or could open their hearts to trusting Bernie’s unimpeachable soul, or if they would just ‘vote in their own self-interest’. This mantra was used to great esteem at this year’s Golden Globes by Michelle Williams as she urged female voters to vote in their own self-interest. The echoes of the applause she received still ring through the canyons today.

Williams’ statement was meant to communicate, “we all know that women’s best interest is for abortion to be widely available without restriction, yet so many women must be too dumb to see abortion as an indisputable good for women, or perhaps they’re just being led by the nose by their misogynist and patriarchal husbands”. I wish I could say it was shocking that feminists could support a statement saying a full forty percent of women were either too dumb to know what they’re voting on, or too weak to choose for themselves in the privacy of the voting booth, or that they’ve been brainwashed, or better yet, internalized misogyny.

There is no credence given to the idea that all women do not view abortion the same way, and inasmuch as these women see abortion as the undue taking of a human life, there is no scenario where they would be expected to prioritize the woman’s right of choice over the currently-forming human’s right to not be killed. This isn’t women voting to take away women’s rights in their view. It’s voting to preserve the rights of the unborn. For clarity’s sake, I am pro-choice… to a point. If and when we learn the point at which a fetus becomes conscious, I think the argument that the fetus does not have rights in the womb past that point becomes a hard one to make.

There is no way to win an argument if you’re willfully misunderstanding and intentionally misrepresenting what your opponent believes in order to win elections. Beyond that, if you have any interest in the intense division throughout the country and would like to see it healed, why support a politician who uses the same tactics that divide us? The only people talking about that toxic separation are Andrew Yang and Pete Buttigieg.

Likewise, the belief that ‘people would support Medicare for All if only they knew what was good for them’ tags all of those in dissent as too ignorant, too insensitive, or in Elizabeth Warren’s construction, ‘not dreaming big enough’; it’s as though convincing the general public that your society-wide changes are achievable goals, knowing full well they aren’t, is a moral ‘good’ due to its dreamy aspiration. Everywhere else, for all time, that’s been called lying. And yes, Trump does it constantly. Once again, these are not rational arguments from reasonable politicians. They are the products of demagogue-saviors and power-hungry political manipulators.

This is what it looks like to not even bother making a case.

On housing, Bernie plans to “make rent affordable”, “combat gentrification”(??), and spend $2.5 trillion dollars to build 10,000,000 units of “affordable housing”, among other goals. The first two goals are fanciful utopian notions that are wholly undefinable. They don’t even make sense.

Oh, you want to build a big house with a swimming pool for your family? Why? Building pools in urban areas, or potential urban areas, is a waste of land that could be put to better use for public housing, and as we know, housing projects have a very successful history in this country. And just like that we’ve stumbled upon another flaw in the argument that “Democratic Socialism” is somehow not just socialism.

In regard to the 10,000,000 units of affordable housing, it’s been tried and failed on far smaller scales. In 2016, Los Angeles passed Proposition HHH, committing $1.2 billion dollars of taxpayer money to build housing units for 10,000 people experiencing homelessness. Since the measure passed, the estimated cost per unit has increased from $140,000 to upwards of $550,000 per unit. For some projects, the number is even higher — $600–700,000 per unit. This is according to LA’s own audit. That’s a full 4–5 times the expected cost, and the 10,000 units don’t come close to providing housing to LA’s estimated 50–60,000 homeless. As of October 2019, not one of the buildings funded by the program has opened. A full 35–40% of developers’ expenditures, meanwhile, are going toward “soft costs” — consulting fees, permitting, and financing.

One wonders whether California’s constant regulation of everything might exacerbate these exact problems. Now, Gavin Newsome is asking the state to allocate another $1.4 billion to “fix” the problem. Pardon me for doubting whether this is the best use of taxpayer money. Pardon me for thinking we might as well just give every homeless person the $500,000 and send them on their way. Hell, give me $500,000 and I’ll move to the woods. Someone can have my place in Hollywood. Problem solved. Forgive me when I balk at committing to letting the government spend a full one-eighth of the yearly national GDP on Bernie’s guaranteed housing project. If that is the best solution to the housing crisis, we may as well throw up our hands and admit we don’t have one at all.

But no good socialist worth his rationed salt would admit this. For every problem, there is a solution, and Bernie’s solution now is the same as Bernie’s solution 48 years ago when he first ran for elected office in Vermont. He lost elections for the U.S. Senate and the Vermont Governor’s office multiple times before being elected mayor of Burlington, winning that election by ten (yes, ten) votes over the incumbent Democrat who didn’t even bother campaigning. Bernie won re-election as mayor three more times before winning a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives and eventually Vermont’s seat in the Senate. Prior to his election to public office at age 41, Bernie’s vocations were activist, carpenter, “writer”, and “filmmaker”, also known as ‘unemployed’. If blogging was a real thing in 1962, Bernie would’ve spent his life tapping out socialist screeds that not even Jacobin would’ve published. His writing is poorly conceived and composed. No one has seen his ‘radical film strips’ aside from Vermont schoolchildren in the 70s whom Bernie was happy to indoctrinate. It’s not a radical idea that schoolchildren should probably be spared from learning the activist community’s radical ideas in their classrooms.

At no time in Bernie’s life did he genuinely produce value in the American economy. He did not participate in the single purest and truest way to improve people’s economic lives, his own amongst these. Why would one be expected to produce the fruits of one’s labor for the benefit of all when one can simply accept the fruits of others’ labor, gifted from on high?

The only retort would be that Bernie’s particular role was so crucial that it makes sense for him to have muddled by on his meager income until society realized his inherent value and began paying him in taxpayer dollars for the next 40 years. Is it hard to imagine that someone who has called himself a socialist for nearly sixty years and has been running for or sitting in public office for fifty of those might really be a socialist demagogue with an unquenchable thirst for his own ascension in power and hold the view that he and only hecan save us before it’s too late?

Is it evil to wonder whether he understands what workers actually do? This isn’t intended as a dramatization. Bernie was a socialist activist in his early twenties, before he ever held a job. In socialist/communist literature, “workers” may as well be printed as “Workers”. They are defined in terms of relative power. What they do is irrelevant. They are nothing more than cogs in the capitalist machine. They are the pure and the good while the powers that be use everything in their evil arsenals to hold the Workers down. The Powers That Be would be nothing without The Workers, therefore The Workers should earn an equal amount. Is this reductive? Maybe. Is it wrong? No. This narrative of The Worker was likely cemented in Bernie’s mind before any notion of actual work ever arose. It is no surprise that Bernie believes everything should be free to everyone in equal proportion. He has no idea how any of it was created. In decades prior, such a person would’ve been called a ‘bum’. With the invention of social media, people like that now call themselves ‘activists’.

After his failed attempt to defeat Hillary Clinton for the nomination of a party of which he was not even a member, and his success in helping to elect Donald Trump president, Bernie finally entered the private economy with the release of his three books, a new one each year since 2017. Bernie is now a millionaire, worth an estimated $2.5 million. When this was pointed out to him, he quipped to the New York Times last April that, “”I wrote a best-selling book. If you write a best-selling book, you can be a millionaire, too.”

Yes, Bernie. In this America. In this America, a person who has never held a real job can be paid by the public to repeat the sixty-year-old socialist mantras he’s never reconsidered and then parlay their failed run for office to massive financial profit. The Workers have no problem donating to your campaign, buying your ‘Bird’ merchandise, or paying you for the printed version of your one speech. After all, the only thing they expect in return, Bernie, for their hard earned dollars is to bask in your glory… and for you to accomplish all the impossible and unworkable things you’ve promised so that they will profit from the exchange, a motive that sounds quite a lot like the capitalism you and your fans so loathe.

In your America, though, Bernie, that “fortunate” (your word) financial windfall wouldn’t be available to someone who was only employed in the public trust, tasked with deftly operating the levers of power for the benefit of all. You’d have a satisfactory home rather than three. Yes, even the lake house would be gone. Truly, sir, how do you sleep at night? Is it fair that one man can have three houses while so many have zero houses? Is it fair for one man to have 2.5 million dollars while I have 2.5 dollars? What has prevented Bernie from declining tax deductions, from donating the full sum of his book proceeds to the less fortunate, from housing the homeless in his lake house for the eleven months a year it goes unused?

Socialism for thee, but never for me!

It’s worth mentioning that Bernie Sanders didn’t even pay his staff the proposed $15 per hour minimum wage until that information began to have negative public relations consequences for his campaign. His employees were paid salary that would amount to $15+ only by assuming they worked 40-hour weeks, which they did not. Then he excoriated those who complained for going outside of his internal ‘labor negotiations’. Is anything about this believable? How was that lesson not learned, and the solutions implemented, in 2016?

But no matter, the mighty moral warrior will do what must be done! We don’t go to campaign with the wages we want, we go with the wages we have. Something must be left over to make sure the celebrities have VIP access to the next Vampire Weekend (great band) concert that just so happens to spontaneously start up at his rally.

The truth is this: Bernie’s money, and his campaign’s money, are not subject to the rules by which everyone else is expected to play. It’s no more moral for Bernie to have amassed the material wealth he has while screaming at the system that produced it than for his fans to be screaming through their fingertips about socialism on devices manufactured at sweatshops with suicide nets.

In the real world, we must choose between tantrums of righteous indignation and inconsistency with our expressed values. In Bernie Sanders’ world, both are not only not incompatible, they’re a ‘human right’, because the expectation is that what we end up with by electing Bernie is the whole of everything we already have plus everything we need to give the have-nots. iPhones would be produced and distributed at the same purchase price we now pay, and all The Workers assembling them would be here in America, in gleaming factories, and paid at or above the minimum wage which is, of course, a federally mandated $15 per hour, because no matter where you live, “work” is “worth” that amount.

In the mid-80s, my father purchased a computer for the family. He’d used them at work and was convinced they’d be important in his children’s development. That purchase was in the neighborhood of $4,000. Today, that would be nearly $10,000. Because I know what you’re thinking, no, my parents were not rich. My father worked in a job that never truly made him happy for 33 years. The same job, at the same place, because he knew damn well that his responsibility was to provide. We lived thirty miles of country roads from the nearest city, the city where he worked. He drove 12,000 miles a year to and from work. We were firmly in the middle class, but we were far from rich and I was scolded countless times for holding the refrigerator door open because ‘electricity costs money’. One of these times, my petulant immaturity caused me to say, “fine, I’ll give you the nickel”.

Later in life, I realized that was not at all the point.

A purchase of that magnitude for the sake of creature comforts was not something my family did. It was exceptional. Today, $4,000 can buy a top-of-the-line computer, not the $10,000 in 1980’s equivalent scenario. That’s a substantial difference. Advanced smartphones now are essentially a mobile window to all of human thought, but they’re not $500 by magic. How are smartphones distributed in Bernie’s world? How much do they cost? I have no idea, but I can imagine that the unemployed socialist hippie version of Bernie Sanders, reflected in his adoring fans today, couldn’t have afforded to buy one. Yet, somehow his fans do.

After all, they wouldn’t be able to scream online without them.

The United States has issues. The United States has problems. Bernie Sanders has made a career of pointing out all of them (many more of them in the recent past, as issues he never concerned himself with before become more convenient). He has not, however, proposed workable solutions to these problems, much less created real reform during his time in national office. His reputation of stubbornness and obstinance is indisputable. The results of that stubbornness are nowhere to be found.

Socialism is not the answer, unless the question is “How is Bernie Sanders worse than Donald Trump?” Socialism is how.

Now, you might be of the mind that anything is preferable to Donald Trump in office. Normally, I would tend to agree. I’m almost certain I would have said this in 2016 and nothing has changed my view on his absolute unfitness for the office, but…

Donald Trump has not yet ruined the country. He, like Bernie, is a symptom of what is wrong with the country in the first instance. By and large, American life is indistinguishable from American life at the end of Obama’s presidency. Yes, certain policies will benefit this or that group, but nothing Trump has done in office three years in has changed America in permanently deleterious fashion, at least if you’re not permanently stuck watching the clown show in the CNN/MSNBC/news entertainment complex.

We are not experiencing the greatest cultural fissure in our Nation’s history. Far from it. People of good nature and good faith will heal the culture. What cannot be healed is a society-wide turn to the socialist agenda Bernie Sanders supports. While Donald Trump is profoundly inept at passing policy, stymied by our country’s political system combined with his own disinterest and total lack of ideas, due to his sole organizing principle: “benefit Donald Trump”, Bernie has no such problem. Bernie’s commitment to socialism is unwavering. His thirst for the power to enact it is unquenchable. He’s been at it for sixty years. The only way not to recognize Bernie Sanders for what he is, is to ignore what one would not ignore for any reason in a different candidate. It is, in full, the same unjustifiable and unrelenting support enjoyed by Donald Trump, the religious fervor whipped up by the meaner-sounding of the two egomaniacal, Manichaean demagogues.

Back in 2016, as the fallout from Bernie’s refusal to quit the Democratic race became apparent, I began writing and speaking out against his candidacy, hoping people would stop throwing more coal in his engine as the party barreled into a brick wall. That didn’t work. My outspoken opposition to not only what Bernie represents politically, but to the man himself, caused countless rifts with friends and acquaintances. I was told by a (non-immediate) family member that my support for Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders meant that I was “for the deaths of brown people across the Middle East”. Needless to say, we haven’t spoken since.

Support for Bernie’s style is founded at bottom on the belief that Bernie is good because of what he says and that what he says is good because Bernie himself has said it, and he wouldn’t ever mislead us. It’s simply not possible that Bernie has the same flaws and tendencies as other politicians.

Bernie and like-minded Democrats all make the same error. They accuse their opponents of simply not caring about those society might be leaving behind. The truth is that every politician will have to draw that very line somewhere, even Bernie. These days, the political play is to do and say whatever it takes to avoid this. If the message is to prioritize loyalty within the party, meaning division from the other side, politicians will never be forced to say just where on the slippery slope they, too, have to say, “no, we simply cannot provide that for you.” At what point does the case for the ‘worse-off’ stop being effective? This isn’t a simple question to answer. People’s lives and livelihoods are indeed at stake. Compassion without practicality, realism, and genuine honesty, is impotent.

Impotent compassion is not compassion, it’s performance.

Were I to agree that Sanders is as pure of heart as his fans say, I still would not support his candidacy, nor his proposed restructuring of society. Once that much power, not to mention money, is extracted from the people and transferred to the government to use as they best see fit, the idea that we must depend on the purity of each of Bernie’s successors to stave off the same sort of corrupt descent that has doomed Venezuela is downright laughable.

It’s not a radical idea to believe that a radical idea — one that’s been tried repeatedly, but never succeeded — won’t work. It is, however, a radical idea to elect the socialist version of Trump. It’s a radical idea to think that this is the solution.