Philadelphia
He shouted from the dais in a thick New York brogue, painting a dystopian picture of America. An America suffering a “40-year decline” of its middle class. An America whose “younger generation will have a lower standard of living than their parents.” An altogether Cormac McCarthy-esque America, where people are “scared to death” and “struggling to survive.” And when he wasn’t busy running the state of the country down, the septuagenarian also took time to blast “the media.”
Donald Trump, and his famously “dark” Republican convention speech? No, this was Bernie Sanders on Monday night at the DNC.
In some sense, comparisons between Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump were overdone during the primaries. Yes, both ran as self-styled outsiders (though Sanders is in actuality as much a career politician as Hillary Clinton is), and both were loathed by their party establishments.
But Trump is a fan of garish displays of wealth; Sanders is contemptuous of capitalism. Sanders screams that the county needs to “invest in education and jobs for our young people, not more jails” (as if individual choices have nothing do with a person landing in prison); Trump is running as a “law and order” candidate. Sanders even abandoned his relatively sensible immigration stance early on in the campaign in the face of a Democratic party in thrall to identity politics.
And yet, it’s instructive, in a way, that while both Trump and Sanders share a decidedly negative view of the country and its current state, it’s Trump that endlessly gets tagged as “dark,” dystopian,” and “disturbing.” Sanders, meanwhile, a joyless ideologue who has an easier time praising Cuba than his own country, is invariably labeled an “idealist.”
Now why would that be?
