Sandernistas on the March

Skeptical? Allow me to relate a single line from Outsider in the House, Sanders’s memoir of his 1996 congressional campaign: “I’m not sure how many of them actually heard my fourteen-second speech about the dangers of Newt Gingrich, given when I stepped out of my tiger costume.”

Sanders is describing his collaboration with the Bread and Puppet Domestic Resurrection Circus, “a political company whose accomplished theatrical productions are,” the then-congressman assured us, “truly radical”—radical enough to induce a sitting congressman to hold up the hind quarters of a tiger costume, anyway. “It’s better than being a horse’s ass,” Sanders writes, though whether he speaks from experience is not immediately clear.

Sure, the tiger-costume anecdote is a bit rich coming from the same guy who a few pages before slagged freshman Republicans who slept in their offices to save taxpayer cash back in ’95 as “total nuts” making “some kind of weird political statement.” But Sanders’s tale takes an even more absurdist turn as he recounts his address to the all-volunteer Mississquoi Valley Emergency Rescue Service later that same day. “Person after person,” Sanders notes, “talked about the trauma of seeing people die and the joy of saving people’s lives.” The contrast “from radical theatrics to community-based service,” he allows, “was striking.” Indeed. But “the differences strike me as more superficial than deep,” Sanders inexplicably feels compelled to add, as “both the rescue workers and the drama troupe are focused on .  .  . giving of themselves to build community.”

Even if he isn’t plotting to replace America’s first-responders with a puppeteer corps, Bernie Sanders is clearly delusional enough to be president. But is he delusional in the appropriate way?

Many of his erstwhile ideological allies are not so sure. Former congressman Barney Frank of Massachusetts, for example, snarked to National Journal, “I don’t understand what [Sanders] running for president would do other than frankly show that his viewpoint is not the majority viewpoint.” In a scathing Salon piece, writer Charles Davis averred that while, yes, Sanders “tosses rhetorical Molotovs at America’s 21st-century robber barons like few other national politicians,” he’s also “rather non-threatening, his politics reformist, not revolutionary—more old-school liberal than Leninist.” And in an open letter delivered to the Burlington Free Press on the day Sanders announced his presidential intentions in 2014, Ralph Nader declared the Vermont senator’s run unsafe at any speed, deriding him as “a Lone Ranger, unable even to form a core progressive force within the Senate,” “aloof,” and a narcissistic fearmonger using his office to cash in:

Alas, the charge of “insufficient Leninism” is not the campaign-killer it once was. The Sandernistas don’t care about realpolitik lectures from ex-congressmen or the bitter ravings of the man whose 2000 campaign on the Green party ticket robbed the nation of four-to-eight glorious years of prime-time PowerPoint presentations from President Gore.

Credit where credit is due: Sanders may have found success in his current contest primarily by marrying a Trump-like demagogic hatred of the “right” bogeymen to six or seven Complete Idiot’s Guide to the New Deal soundbites, but he has a Capra-esque political origin story.

Here is a man who seriously flirted with gadfly status throughout several losing early-to-mid-seventies campaigns under the Liberty Union party banner—U.S. Senate (1972, 1974), governor of Vermont (1972, 1976). After this he “retired” to build a small business before an old friend convinced him to make an independent run for mayor of Burlington—this despite the fact that, as he writes in Outsider in the House, “I knew very little about Burlington city government. I had attended two Board of Aldermen meetings in my life—and had fallen asleep at one of them. They were boring. When the campaign began, I hadn’t a clue where Ward 1 was, or the political difference between Wards 4 and 2.”

In a three-way race our political somnambulist won by ten votes. Recounting the glory in Outsider in the House Sanders treats modesty as if it were some distasteful reactionary idea Hayek cooked up:

There were other heady days to come, visiting Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua to commemorate the seventh anniversary of the Sandinista Revolution (“I was—believe it or not—the highest ranking American official present”) and Cuba (“I had hoped to meet with Castro, but that didn’t work out”) and jetting off to the Soviet Union to simultaneously “finalize our sister-city relationship” with Yaroslavl and celebrate his marriage. “Trust me,” Sanders writes. “It was a very strange honeymoon.”

When Sanders walked away from the office after four terms, however, civilian life offered little allure. “Unlike some former elected officials, I was not flooded with invitations to prestigious institutions,” he writes. “Actually, I didn’t get any job offers. My particular skills, it seems, were not too marketable.”

Though Sanders eventually landed a gig at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, he ultimately chose to become a corporeal illustration of Eric Hoffer’s maxim: “A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people’s business.”

After briefly considering another run for governor—”A ‘Sanders for Governor’ campaign would create a great deal of excitement, bring together the various elements of the progressive coalition, sharply raise political consciousness in the state”—Sanders settled on a congressional campaign against Republican Peter Smith in 1988 .  .  . and lost.

In the 1990 rematch, however, he won big and went on to serve in the House of Representatives for the next 16 years, until Senator Jim Jeffords retired in 2006. Sanders skated into the vacant seat. In 2012 the democratic socialist won reelection as an “independent” with an imposing 71 percent of the vote.

While Sanders is probably the most successful Vermont export since Ben & Jerry sold out to Unilever and almost certainly the most accomplished ex-producer of radical media, like, ever, to label the man the vanguard of a political revolution would be wildly inaccurate.

First, Sanders’s vanity and the idiosyncrasies of the Vermont electorate aside, his essential elements aren’t anything you can’t find on the periodic table of the mainstream left. Indeed, in 2005 then-Democratic National Committee chair Howard Dean laughed off both Sanders’s independence and socialist pretensions: “Bernie can call himself anything he wants—he is basically a liberal Democrat. .  .  . The bottom line is that Bernie Sanders votes with the Democrats 98 percent of the time.” But, but, but .  .  . “I almost always vote with Democrats because, of the choices available to me, their position is usually better than the Republicans’,” Sanders writes in Outsider in the House. “That’s the reality I live with in Congress.”

Of course. That’s the reality everyone lives with in Congress. All factions are forced to compromise; the nation has not yet been reduced to the sort of monoculture progressives claim to abhor yet keep working to coerce into existence. If a partisan distaste for congressional legislation is what defines one as “independent,” there are approximately 318 million independents in the United States. And if the primary obstacle to Sanders’s agenda is reality .  .  . well, good luck cobbling together a veto-proof majority to banish that.

Second, while Sanders is a colorful and entertaining proponent of standard-issue liberalism, he will not unite the working class for one simple reason: Like many self-styled progressives, Sanders exalts blue-collar Americans as noble savages when they subscribe to his hoary economic program, but denigrates and sometimes outright dehumanizes those who oppose or question it in any substantial way.

An example: Outsider in the House distills the Contract With America-era Republican agenda as a “vicious assault on working people and the poor, orchestrated at the behest of the most affluent and powerful people in America”; an attempt to “exploit .  .  . anxieties, to divide working people and set them at each other’s throats, to blind working people to the fact that instead of justice they are getting scraps from the rich man’s table.” They do this because “Poor people are a good target. .  .  . Exhausted by an increasingly difficult struggle for survival, they are not organized and can’t fight back. Seventy percent of welfare recipients are children, a constituency that cannot vote and has few civil rights. .  .  . It’s like shooting fish in a barrel.”

Setting aside the uncharitable take on the motives of the Republicans’ classist apocalyptic death cult and its desire for child sacrifice, Sanders’s psychoanalysis of those who fail to accept the saving gospel of government into their sinners’ hearts is not laudatory or respectful: “Blind” and anxious, because they possess neither the intellect nor discernment to fend off the siren song “orchestrations” of the affluent and powerful, easy targets “set .  .  . at each other’s throats” without any more prompting than feral dogs.

A working person simply cannot have a legitimate difference of opinion with Bernie Sanders—you either buy his insights into the nefarious machinations of capitalism or you’re a mesmerized dupe.

Naturally, this worldview is extraordinarily alluring and enlivening to those already within the Sandernista feedback loop. People who flatter themselves impervious to brand advertising are, after all, the easiest to market to—a superiority complex to exploit is a helluva foot in the door. But outside the circle of those inclined to agree with Sanders, the Stop being weak, stupid and/or evil approach to persuasion will be about as effective at organizing a cross-partisan super-coalition as Ted Cruz deciding to go to college campuses to rail against sociology majors’ brains being turned into tapioca by smarty-pants professors.

This inability to hide his disdain for a working person contrary enough to resist the Bernie Party Programme has made Sanders a poor political prognosticator in the past. “How could it be that a guy like George Bush is getting more than 6 percent of the vote?” Sanders asked in a program entitled “Socialist and Communist Perspectives on the 2004 Presidential Race” recorded shortly before that election. “This guy is a fringe candidate. If you look at his positions issue by issue the idea that any working person in America would be voting for this guy is absolutely insane.”

Insanity, that year, took 44 percent of the working-class vote—and the election.

But, some readers might fret, now that Sanders is so close to the big prize, won’t he become more pragmatic in his approach? After all, he used to treat flying commercial like some kind of revolutionary sacrament; isn’t he kicking back in charter planes now?

It will not happen. The Sanders campaign is a cult of personality masquerading as an earnest attempt to further the class struggle. And Sanders appears constitutionally incapable of seriously considering or engaging opposing points of view.

Take the following passage from Simon van Zuylen-Wood’s remarkable profile in National Journal:

Sanders might as well have banged on the table and said—me, me, me, me!

Further: When van Zuylen-Wood suggests that Sanders’s “vision for a new progressive base of old white guys runs somewhat counter to the conventional wisdom,” the senator snaps that he won 71 percent of the vote in Vermont, “a working-class state,” then moves to shut down his questioner: “So I’m glad you raised that, because your analysis is incorrect. And I’m right and everybody else is wrong. Clear about that?”

If Sanders can’t be gracious in sharing credit with his closest ideological ally in the Senate, or accept minor pushback from a friendly reporter, what are the chances he’ll humor the average working- or middle-class American who instinctively distrusts his vague promises of class vengeance?

Even if Sanders wanted to reach out, he does not possess the vocabulary to do so. He tells van Zuylen-Wood he gets his news mostly from Bill Moyers, Ed Schultz, Rachel Maddow, and the Nation. (“Those outlets’ highly ideological approach to journalism,” van Zuylen-Wood writes, “makes them more, not less, credible in Sanders’s opinion.”) Likewise, in his much–ballyhooed eight-plus-hour filibuster against the bipartisan (and awful) 2010 budget deal—later published under the self-effacing title The Speech: A Historic Filibuster on Corporate Greed and the Decline of Our Middle Class—one of the sources Sanders cites most frequently—aside from himself, of course—is “a very good book by a friend of mine named Arianna Huffington.”

It’s a blind spot that paves the way for hypocrisy on a grand scale. Sanders—who decries “sanctimonious breast-beating,” sheds crocodile tears over “the tenor of national politics,” and frets over bad-faith actors with “nothing real to say .  .  . dividing this country in a horrendous way”—shows no self-awareness as he recounts “commiserating” with Bill Clinton “about the savage attacks he had been receiving from the media.” He asks the then-president to “think about the very serious problem of corporate control of the media and what, if anything, could be done about it.” Then, in the very same book, he writes the following: “John Boehner, chairman of the House Republican Conference, threatened to kill himself if a minimum wage increase was passed. He didn’t. Where is Republican honor when you really need it?”

Further, when Sanders loses the legislative argument on the first Iraq war, he attacks the “servile” media for abetting the “more or less totalitarian system” that was “kicking into effect.” When the coverage of a powerful Democratic party figurehead is less than flattering, the problem quickly transforms into a lack of servility to power and the need for federal bureaucrats to bring the critics to heel.

Contrast the above with Sanders’s account in Outsider in the House of a 1995 “anti-Contract [with America]” press conference in the House Radio-Television Gallery organ-ized by the Progressive Caucus: “We notified the media and waited. That day, the room was so mobbed with reporters and TV cameras we had to fight our way in. They had come to hear some of the first voices of opposition against the Republican agenda in the Capitol.” And here’s his assessment of the impact of his 2010 budget filibuster, from The Speech:

Bernie is a very important man with an impressive social media presence—if he does say so himself—and the media understand that when he is on the march the revolution must be televised.

A pattern is developing .  .  .

Turn the camera on Bernie—Good media; must praise!

Turn the camera away from Bernie—Bad media;

must regulate!

In 1996, a Vermont television station refused to run advocacy ads from a coalition of Bernie Sanders’s opponents. He writes about his reaction:

Isn’t it about time we had a president who isn’t afraid to put the phrase intellectual consistency in scare quotes? The type of public servant willing to put civil liberties in the backseat behind political expedience?

What’s sauce for the plutocratic goose is most definitely not sauce for Sanders.

Shawn Macomber is a writer in New Jersey.