Does Anyone Actually Listen to Bernie Sanders?

(Originally published on Medium - February 27th, 2020)

A moment during CNN’s recent New Hampshire town hall with Bernie Sanders struck me the way many of the Bernie Sanders-related moments of the last five years have. I sit in my chair thinking, “Did anyone else just hear that?”

Forty-one minutes into the linked video, a woman in the audience asks Senator Sanders, “Why do you care so fervently about economic inequities?” A relevant question, no doubt, for a man whose raison d’etreseems to be, ostensibly, the elimination of inequities everywhere they exist.

Sanders paused, looking deep into his soul, his voice dropping into a more somber, emotive tone and says:

“Umm… well, maybe it starts with the family that I… my family. It starts with the fact that my father came to this country without a nickel in his pocket, couldn’t speak a word of English, never made any money. We grew up in a three-and-a-half room rent-controlled apartment in Brooklyn. And my mother’s dream was to own her own home. That was her dream. She died at the age of 46, never fulfilled that dream. And you know, we struggled economically, uh, and I saw what it did to my family — the tension, the arguments about lack of money, and I was made more than aware as a young person that that was not my family alone. There were millions of families in the same boat. And as somebody who is a United States Senator from the great state of Vermont, and I hear what people have to say, their stress, their families, the fact that people are working, in some cases, two or three jobs, the fact that, you know, moms and dads have to tell their kids that they can’t afford to go to college, it’s unnecessary. And look, if we were a poor country, we would not say, ‘Hey, everybody can have health care. Everybody can have a quality education. We’re a poor country.’ We are not a poor country. It is not acceptable to me, it really is not, from a moral or an economic point of view, that three people in America own more wealth than the bottom half of all the people in this country. That 49% of all new income is going to the 1% when so many of our people are struggling economically. So, to answer your question, it’s in the richest country in the history of the world, it is not all that hard to say that all of our people can have a decent standard of living. Yes, if you work 40 hours a week, you can make at least fifteen bucks an hour. Yes, your kids, regardless of your income, can go to college. Yes, of course, health care is a human right. Yes, of course, you don’t have to spend half of your income for housing, we’re gonna build affordable housing. This is not utopian stuff. This is stuff we can do, but it means we don’t give tax breaks to billionaires. We don’t spend more on the military than the next ten nations combined. We don’t have all kinds of corporate welfare in this country. We invest in our people. So, my views maybe come from where I grew up as a kid and maybe because I see what I see in my own state and all over this country.”

Sanders looks to the ground, pensive. ‘Nailed it’, he’s thinking. Anderson Cooper follows up, asking the current Democratic Party frontrunner what 1940s Bernie Sanders would say if he could see 2020 Bernie Sanders. Answering, Bernie first contrasted himself with those children of privilegewho go into politics and then admits brags that his parents would’ve found it ‘incomprehensible’ and ‘unthinkable’ for him to have reached his current political standing, as if politics are only home to the rich. He never did answer what 1940s Bernie would’ve thought, but you’d have to guess it’s along the same lines.

I imagine every conservative reading along will have noticed the irony dripping off Bernie’s quoted response from the very first sentence, but somehow it evades the Senator himself, the media whose job it is to question him, and his legion of credulous fans. Unfortunately, it also seems to go over the heads of most moderates and all ‘elites’, for whom these stories are like a late-night commercial for the ASPCA: ‘Please, just take my money! Make it stop!’

For those who hear this story and think, ‘What a lovely story of American achievement. He really does care from a profound place in his soul’, and then move on, I’d like (to attempt, at least) to convince you that you’re not actually listening to Senator Sanders.

First, some family history. Bernie says his father came to the US with no money and no English. Doubtless, a tough way to start out. His father made a living selling paint and while, according to Bernie’s older brother, Larry, they were never lacking for food or clothing, extravagant purchases like curtains or rugs weren’t an option. His mother was a Bronx-born stay-at-home mom until her death after a failed second heart surgery when young Bernie was 18 years old.

Listening to his town hall response, I began wondering if I might be getting a different feed than everyone else, or perhaps we’re living in a simulation and there’s a bug in the system.

The die-hard, lifelong socialist’s foundational belief came from the experience of being born to an immigrant father and an American mother in the country’s most vibrant city, growing up in a 3.5 room apartment, and getting by on one income. His mother’s hospital care was provided pro bonoby a hospital that accepted patients referred by labor and religious (primarily Jewish) organizations. Bernie left Brooklyn to attend the University of Chicago. Larry attended CUNY for undergrad and Oxford for a masters in social work, followed by Harvard Law which he left before finishing to attend to his sick mother. Bernie has spent decades in political office. Larry has as well, albeit in the U.K.

Does this sound to you like a pitiful story of societal failure? Does this seem like a symptom of a system so callous and unjust that it makes sure the least of us cannot succeed? What does it mean to answer ‘yes’ to these questions as Senator Sanders does?

In the town hall and elsewhere, Bernie remembers with sadness that his mother never got the chance to fulfill the dream of having her own house. We can leave aside the notion that this “dream” was for a material good, one that simply is not achievable for everyone in any system that values the freedoms requisite to success — which necessarily implies that same freedom must result in some people failing to “succeed”. If achieving all of one’s dreams of material success is the only standard by which we can judge the success of a society, then there is no successful society anywhere. And that includes in our imagination.

This is only half the issue here, the other half being the stress and tension of worrying about finances and the parental fights arising from monetary concerns. The implication is that these should have been eliminated, that the Sanders brothers having to endure the pain this caused was somehow undue.

My own grandfather immigrated to the United States from Italy in the early 20th century. He spent his life as a blue-collar worker in Pittsburgh, providing for his five children, and seeing them grow to become hard working, successful adults who went on to raise their own families. My mother’s family had been in America for a few generations, but she was raised sharing bedrooms in a house in small-town Pennsylvania with her three siblings. I remember vividly my father’s frustration when I would leave the refrigerator door open for too long, as the waste of electricity meant a waste of money, and that was simply not something he would tolerate. We weren’t poor by any measure, but there was little extravagance to our living. My parents didn’t travel abroad until they were in their late fifties. They carried a mortgage on our home in a rural New York town of some five hundred (or so) people. They took out loans, as my brothers and I did, for their children to attend college. We were firmly middle class.

I cannot imagine my father, or my grandfather before him, thinking that society owed them more. Rather, the feeling was pride in their accomplishments. They literally embodied the American dream. My parents, wonderful match they are, are still married after nearly fifty years. It wasn’t because there was no financial tension in my home. My father stayed at a job he was far from enamored with because it had pension and benefits and afforded his family a degree of comfort, allowing my mother to stay home and raise their three sons. The choice to make do with one income was theirs, the tradeoff being the ability to have my mother around to care for us, teach us, and comfort us.

My parents emphasized values — honesty, integrity, commitment, and of course, hard work. But hard work extended beyond just employment. The belief, reinforced countless times, was that these values should be applied to all aspects of life, particularly their relationships, and more particularly, my parents’ marriage. Their mutual happiness was not a product of financial comfort, it was a product of how they approached their lives. Frustrations, when they arose, were not the product of unfairness (after all, we were often told, life’s not fair) they were obstacles that must be dealt with, worked through. Financial stresses weren’t causes of family friction; they were simply circumstances.

Like Bernie, I wish that every child could grow up in comfort with loving parents, but that is not now, nor has ever been, nor ever could be, reality. What is this vision other than “utopian stuff”? Bernie believes his parents would’ve found his current station in life to be incomprehensible, unthinkable. Why?

Bernie’s classmates remember the neighborhood where Bernie grew up as safe, solidly middle-class, and having good schools. Bernie remembers his childhood as a life of material lack bordering on poverty because his mother, who married an immigrant who arrived not knowing a word of English and then stayed home to raise her two children, never got her own home.

Come again?

In a prior age — you know, circa 2008 — politicians with a family background similar to Bernie’s would’ve told their story as one of American success. A child of a foreign-born father with a humble beginning navigating life’s struggles to attend the country’s most prestigious universities and reaching the precipice of the American presidency was described as a journey that ‘could only happen here’. It was proof of the value of values, not proof that the cards were stacked against people in a land where only those with generational wealth could ever hope to have a nice television.

Bernie and his parents couldn’t have comprehended where he is now based on where he came from. Doesn’t it behoove us, eventually, to point out that they were wrong?

Most people would assume that such a meteoric rise, from the child of an immigrant to sniffing distance of the Democratic Party’s nomination for President of the United States of America must be an outlier story of success, the product of extraordinary hard work of a type few could actually muster. But that is also wrong.

Bernie achieved all of this without ever having had a regular job in our economy. He spent his 20s and 30s as a pauper in rural Vermont, living essentially off the grid in a shack in the woods where he would annoy everyone around him with talk of revolution. He got by for a while doing odd carpentry work for which he had no skill or training. He produced ‘radical film strips’ and videos touting the glories of socialist Eugene Debs, a man who ran for president five times as a socialist. Bernie became involved in local politics in Vermont, eventually becoming the mayor of Burlington at 39, besting an incumbent who didn’t even bother campaigning by ten votes. Ten. He accomplished this on the backs of volunteers and endorsements by college professors, social welfare agencies, and unions. Sound familiar?

After serving 8 years as mayor, Bernie lost in his initial bid to secure a seat for himself in the House of Representatives after Jim Jeffords vacated his seat, moving on to the Senate. Bernie won the rematch two years later and has spent the last three decades in Washington. He is now a multi-millionaire with three houses, all as a result of his political career.

He rails against professional politicians leaving office to become paid lobbyists, using the influence accumulated over decades in public “service” to enrich themselves by influencing the country’s politics, but proudly bristles when his net worth is remarked upon, as if selling a book about your socialism is an inherent good, worthy of windfall compensation, but that lobbying is by definition bad, and a symptom of the problem.

The lessons Bernie has taken fromhis own life don’t support his positions. He doesn’t crisscross the country saying that he dreams every American could have the opportunities he had, because his opportunities were, apparently… scant? The man was raised in a two-parent family with a stay-at-home mother, went to a first-rate university, didn’t bother working for twenty years, and has now spent nearly forty more being paid by taxpayers. He is mere steps from the presidency. Yet, he complains.

He’s white, old, male, decently raised, well educated, lazy, and survives on other people’s work yet he complains about his position in life. Isn’t this exactly what his supporters mean when they say someone is “privileged”? Is anyone actually listening to the man when he speaks?

I’m not a psychiatrist, but I feel pretty safe saying that it is, in fact, possible to have misconstrued the meaning of the events of one’s own life. It’s not Bernie’s ‘poverty-stricken’ childhood, nor his mother’s death, nor the fact that she never owned a house that informs his socialism. It’s the lens of self-satisfied, whiny selfishness (present in the minds of so many of his college-attending fans) through which he sees the world that produced his socialism.

Bernie reiterates this misconstrual again and again in his, essentially, one speech. That singular speech has been updated very little over the decades he’s been giving it, almost always for the sake of political expediency. He’s waffled occasionally on gun issues, being from a state where roughly 3-in-10 Vermonters own firearms, having won his first congressional seat with support from the NRA and having hewn closely to their agenda for his first two decades in national office. He’s also backtracked on immigration, as his restrictionist stand no longer works in the Democratic Party, the party of which he’s never been a member, and one he supports only for his political ambitions. He rails against money in politics but has refused to say he wouldn’t take campaign money from Michael Bloomberg, assuming he bests Bloomberg for the nomination. Those aside, the substance of his one speech remains the same: the wealthy horde money to the detriment of society, corporations abuse their workers and the environment, and anyone who disagrees with him is immoral and part of the problem.

Sanders says the same things now as he did 50 years ago even as quality of life has improved in countless ways. His pitch has always been a dire warning that if the revolution doesn’t happen, if drastic changes are not made immediately, the country will launch itself over the precipice into a bottomless pit of despair at any moment. One could ask, ‘when might we expect this bleak hellscape to appear?’ Much of the left, including Sanders himself, sang the praises of the socialist reforms in Venezuela as recently as 2013 as Hugo Chavez, and Nicolas Maduro after him, drove the country with the largest oil reserves in the world to ruin. If there is a fast path to the total annihilation of quality of life, it is the one Senator Sanders supports and has supported for his entire life, not the one he’s spent that life complaining about. But what am I saying? Every comrade knows that the Venezuelans just did it wrong.

Asked in the same town hall to name something he’s recently changed his mind about, he doesn’t critique his former views on guns or immigration — he doesn’t actually answer the question at all. He says that in the 2015–16 campaign, he didn’t realize that he should’ve been paying more attention to foreign policy, but no matter. Now he is. What exactly did he change his mind about? Who knows? But this ‘admission’ passed for an answer because he was ‘forthright’. Anderson Cooper could’ve challenged him, but that would’ve been unseemly, perhaps. Realizing that your platform is too thin to be practical, much less win, isn’t anyone’s definition of ‘changing your mind’, but then again, no one bothers actually listening.

Wednesday night, in the Nevada debate, evil billionaire Michael Bloomberg said the no-no word. The c-word. No, not that one. He said COMMUNISM, gasp. Bernie called this a cheap shot and quickly moved on. But why is it a cheap shot? Is the word ‘communism’ off limits for Bernie, or is it now just ‘red-baiting’ since it’s politically toxic and by the way, he’s not a communist, he’s a democratic socialist?

In a quote from the recent prop-up of the Sanders campaign published in Newsweek, Notre Dame political science professor, Dr. Eileen Hunt Botting, explains that democratic socialism “aims to use democratic government to promote a more fair and egalitarian distribution of social goods and opportunities among all people in a society”. It’s not like communism, she says, in that it allows for private property and the existence of class distinctions.

Pardon me if I’m unconvinced. There is nothing in Bernie’s record or rhetoric that would tell anyone he accepts class distinctions. From everything available, it seems like his goal is the exact opposite.

Of course Bernie can’t ever answer on which issues he might find a point of compromise with the other side — in his mind, he already has. Does anyone doubt that Bernie imagines he’s already moved to the center?

During his “victory” speech amid the Iowa caucus debacle, Sanders guaranteed a national minimum wage of $15 per hour, higher quality health care for everyone, free college tuition for everyone, forgiveness of student loan debt, the redirection of money from the military budget to ‘fix’ climate change according to the ludicrous ‘Green New Deal’, in addition to ‘taking it to’ major industries like banking and fossil fuels. There’s plenty more on his website.

His list of policy proposals reads like a veritable Christmas list for everyone who wants the government to fix their lives much the way he dreamt of fixing his parents’ lives, if only he could force the tech sector to finally get us that longed-for time machine. Apart from his plans being wholly impossible to pass, much less implement, the price tag is staggering. By some estimates, it prices out at a 70% of the country’s entire GDP, and that imagines that the economy keeps chugging along as it is in our evil capitalist system.

He is right about one thing: this is not utopian by any measure.

Sanders often mentions the Nordic countries as reference points for where he sees the United States under his iron maple-syrup-fisted rule. While these countries combine market economies with high taxes and vast welfare states supported by a sort of social cohesion not present or possible in multicultural America, none of those countries combine all of the elements of his plans in one place, as he intends to do.

Let’s imagine, though, that all this was possible, passable, and happened. Even minor growth on the cost side for his programs would push that 70% of GDP ever closer to 100%, and there is no reason to assume those cost estimates would not rise, nor that GDP would continue to. If a government that requires nearly every cent of what its citizens produce so it can redistribute that sum in various forms of social ‘service’ is not communism, I’m not sure what name it could take. Comrade Bernie chooses the priorities and chooses which industries should pay for their implementation. He chooses which rich people will be relieved of the heft of their bank accounts and stock portfolios (not millionaire politicians/authors, please). He envisions a nation of students attending state universities where they learn things like, well, whatever he decides is necessary.

Give him a break, you might say. But why? Has he somehow earned it? How could he? Surely not on account of his zero real-life experience in the economy or business. Not with the intellectual rigor he’s shown over the years as he’s implemented virtually zero new ideas. If you ask these questions of a Bernie fan, you’d get one of two answers.

First, they’d makes pleas to your conscience, as Bernie himself does. How can you sleep at night while people are hungry, or homeless, or sick?

Well, the same as everyone else, I suppose. We’ve made it this far. I don’t mean to sound insensitive, but it’s true. The world turns, we do our best, we help when and if we can. We do not have the ability as individuals to cure all of the world’s problems. That is a fact of life. When problems get too big, it simply is not good enough to throw up our hands and say it’s the government’s responsibility. This is the adult equivalent of asking your dad to send more money because you can’t afford rent and you wasted the last $500 he sent on shoes and video games. Why deal with a problem when you can make it someone else’s? It’s a way of relieving the existential guilt we feel for having more than someone else. If we just vote for Bernie, we’ve done our part. If that doesn’t work, well, it wasn’t because of us.

The second answer they give is that we need to trust in Bernie, because his heart is in the right place. But, no it isn’t. The man has sought political power for 40+ years. He pictures himself as the leader of a revolution. We’re supposed to believe that this person is doing this all for our benefit while his lifelong political commitments have been to ideas that have literally destroyed every country dumb enough to put their futures in the hands of people exactly like him. He’s not a dictator and never would be, they say. He’s too nice for that, but… does Bernie seem nice?

To absolve Bernie of these parallels to communism and socialism, we need look no further than the word ‘democratic’ that he, at some point, began layering onto the word ‘socialism’ once ‘socialism’ alone became untenable, we’re told.

Our Founders knew better than to create a direct democracy in the United States. Hell, the Ancient Greeks knew direct democracy was no way to govern a free society. If you’re interested in a glimpse of how poorly direct democracy works in practice today, look no further than California’s ballot initiative system. Even The New Republic calls it “a joke”. The Hoover Institution agrees. Direct democracy, in fact, is one of the worst ways to look after the interests of marginalized groups. If people vote in their own best interest, as Democrats so often instruct us to do, and people are solely concerned about the good of their own race or gender, as Democrats claim we all are, how exactly does direct democracy provide even the dimmest light in the darkness for any minority group? That’s not the worst of it.

Bernie Sanders’ entire pitch is that the majority has been wronged and he has arrived to inflict harmjustice on anyone the majority has decided they’re upset with. This encourages tyranny of the majority. It’s also just tyranny. He claims the people are on his side about every issue, even when they’re not. He acts as though they’re unconverted because they just haven’t heard him clearly remind them that “it’s not a radical idea”. (It is.)

In the New Hampshire town hall, a woman in the audience asked Bernie to rectify his platform with the horrors of socialism that her own parents fled in Soviet Russia. The closest he came to an answer was saying that he believes in the Bill of Rights (does he?) and that he never supported “authoritarian communism”. I’m not sure if his problem is with the authoritarianism or the communism. I’d say it’s my fault for not knowing, but I can’t find evidence of him being opposed to either. He claimed the election he lost in 2016’s Democratic primary was “rigged” even though he had millions less votes than his opponent and even though the Super Delegate system was already in place when he decided to co-opt the party from the get-go. Likewise, he stood on the debate stage in Nevada and was the only candidate to say that whoever has the most delegates at the convention, regardless of coalition, super delegates, etc… should be the nominee. But that’s not how the rules work. The party whose candidates want to abolish the electoral college won’t have much ground to stand on when that moment arrives, but they wouldn’t be wrong to do so.

Bernie plays by the rules when they benefit him. The system is rigged when they don’t. The quasi-religious fervor of his fans suggests that his candidacy will not go quietly if the party chooses to exercise its power according to the rules of the system. He’s said many times that he would issue executive orders in place of a willing coalition in Congress. He’s claimed victory in a state he lost. He said he expects to be the nominee if he has the delegate lead at the convention. That doesn’t sound like someone who’s content with working within our Constitutional system to realize his agenda. It sounds like a dictator in the making.

Are we expected to content ourselves with a leader who ticks every box of concern expressed in horror at the notion of a Donald Trump presidency because he says he’s the nice guy and has our backs? Wait, Trump said that, too.

In my utopia, a debate moderator will ask this of Bernie on a national stage: “Senator Sanders, can you give us your critique of communism and tell us which parts you’re firmly against? How about socialism?” Saying that there are too many rich people and too many poor people isn’t an answer to those questions, it’s simply a point of view. If he can’t answer these questions, and I’ve seen no reason to believe he can, then calling Bernie a ‘communist’ isn’t a cheap shot, it’s calling a spade a spade.

I don’t believe in winning arguments on my own terms. If an argument is to be legitimately won, it should be won on the terms of one’s opponent. The conclusions I reach about Bernie Sanders are reached on what Bernie himself says, who Bernie himself is.

I look at my peers in Hollywood, at the media, and at his fans and wonder: Does anyone actually listen to Bernie Sanders?

Does Bernie?