Since the GOP primary has already produced a harrowing result, The Scrapbook has turned its attention to the ongoing Democratic primary and begun rooting for chaos. Despite the fact that Bernie Sanders has approximately zero chance of winning, he persists in staying in the race both to call attention to the fact that the Democratic primary process is more or less rigged and to build more support for his socialist agenda.
This persistence has started to cause unrest: Senator Barbara Boxer rather amusingly scolded a hall full of Democrats at the recent Nevada Democratic convention for booing her, and actor Wendell Pierce—who played Bunk on The Wire and has lately been signing his name to DNC fundraising appeals—was recently arrested for battery after he allegedly tried to force his way into the hotel room of a Sanders supporter following a political argument. Both the Hillary and Bernie camps are claiming they have been the target of a barrage of intra-Democratic harassment and threats. This includes many charges of sexism and racism, which we were previously led to believe was an ontological impossibility for members of the Enlightened Party.
However, since Sanders isn’t going to win, most of the Democratic establishment, along with liberal media institutions such as the Washington Post, has started berating Sanders for staying in the race and destroying party cohesion. And herein, we detect a silver lining. Sanders may have succeeded in pushing Clinton to the left on a number of issues, but increasingly it seems many of her supporters are souring on Sanders’s socialist policies as they sour on his campaign.
The Washington Post, for instance, ran a heavily promoted piece of policy analysis—”Why Bernie Sanders may have picked the wrong year for a revolution”—arguing that Sanders is too radical in his demands for socialized medicine to be elected. And news broke last week that Burlington College is closing, because the college’s former president—Bernie’s wife Jane Sanders—burdened the institution with millions in loans it couldn’t pay off. More than a few people noted the high degree of irony, given Sanders’s enthusiastic support from college students and his radical rhetoric on student loans.
Sanders has made it a standard line in his stump speech that it is unfair that student loans require higher interest rates than auto loans and mortgages, and he promises to fix this disparity. Of course, default rates on student debt are much higher than on mortgages or car loans because of the difference between secured and unsecured loans. Banks can’t repossess college degrees—but they can, to pick an apropos example, repossess a bunch of ivy-covered classrooms in Vermont used to secure millions in ill-advised loans. The closure of liberal arts colleges run by avowed socialists—is there any other kind?—is illustrative of exactly the sort of economic lessons colleges no longer teach.
