Hillary Clinton chose to withhold her work emails from her employer for six years. Now her campaign is paying the price. But Bernie Sanders is enjoying surprising success.
Despite his far-left views — or perhaps because of them — the self-described democratic socialist senator from Vermont is drawing the largest crowds of any presidential contender. He is closing the gap against Clinton in polls of Iowa, leading her in New Hampshire, and already winning a majority of white Democratic support nationwide.
What’s more, Sanders is doing it on a shoe-string budget. His is a people-powered campaign – not one of image, glamour, big money or super PAC support. It matters little to his supporters that he would be inaugurated at age 75 were he to win, nor that America has never had a president who looked like the mad scientist from Back to the Future.
One more serious misstep by Clinton could turn Sanders into the nominal front-runner for the Democratic nomination — at least temporarily. So it is worth asking what happens if Democrats choose this path, refusing to hand their party back over to the Clinton family.
In other words, is America ready for Sanders’ brand of socialism?
Sanders’ positions are no mystery — he loves government. In recent years, he emerged as the strongest defender of the federal bureaucracy when it was least defensible — during the Veterans Affairs scandal. Undeterred by the failure of his own state’s short-lived experiment, he wants to create a national, universal single-payer government healthcare system. In an era when most politicians are scrambling to save a poorly designed Social Security system from its coming insolvency, Sanders proposes to increase its benefits.
If he has ever repudiated his four-decade-old comment that “in the long run, major industries … should be publicly owned and controlled by the workers themselves,” there is no obvious evidence. He is an economic nationalist, hostile toward free trade agreements. He supports higher corporate, payroll, and income taxes and wants to create a new climate tax on businesses. He would double the national minimum wage to $15 per hour.
Sanders hopes to fund free college tuition from the U.S. Treasury, going well beyond Clinton’s promise to end student borrowing. He is also a devout social liberal, albeit with a Vermonter’s tolerance for gun rights. He hopes to remove money from politics by weakening the First Amendment’s near-absolute protection of political speech, strictly limiting free associations of citizens who would pool their resources in the pursuit of political change.
Are Americans ready for this brand of change — packaged transparently and without the good looks or youthful optimism of a candidate like Barack Obama? We doubt it, and the “socialist” label itself is only part of the problem. In Western Europe, socialism is just another political brand. In America, it makes people look deeply into the shadows of every grandiose promise for the classic drawbacks — compulsion, servitude, dependency, economic weakness.
Pessimistic conservatives may look at the Obama era as a first step along such a road. But there is another possibility. The Obama presidency has hardened Americans’ skepticism of government.
Obama entered office with grand promises to make Americans regain their faith in government — to demonstrate that government could build the economy, revolutionize healthcare, and do “big things” such as expand high speed rail and lead an alternative energy revolution. “There are some who question the scale of our ambitions, who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans,” Obama said in his first inaugural address. “What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them, that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply.”
Yet Obama’s ambitions gave way to a stimulus package that was riddled with waste and corrupted by cronyism; a bungled launch of his signature health plan; and high profile scandals involving the VA, IRS and the Office of Personnel Management (where a data breach exposed the personal information of 22.1 million Americans).
Public trust in federal domestic and international policy hit all-time lows in 2014. Years of government incompetence and abuse of power isn’t exactly fertile ground for a socialist revolution.
