Upon seeing the way young voters flock to Bernie Sanders, the temptation is to grab them all by the shoulders, shake them until they think they’ve been in an earthquake, and demand proof that they actually have brains.
To support an avowed socialist like the Vermont senator is to be historically illiterate — indeed, willfully ignorant on that front — and arithmetically inept to boot. Sanders and his agenda are a spasm of self-deluding fantasy, a phantasmagorical utopia utterly unmoored from reality. It’s a bad political acid trip, a daft dream descending into a nihilistic nightmare.
At some point, adults should be expected to think and act like adults. Adults exercising citizenship rights should do the basic five minutes of research necessary to discover that socialism hasn’t, doesn’t, and cannot work. Plus, basic common sense and simple math expose Sanders’s promises as nonsense of the 2+2=95 variety.
With promises variously estimated to cost between $60 trillion and $97 trillion over 10 years, meaning as much as 70% of GDP, even before accounting for any slowdown in economic growth that his taxes and regulations would likely cause, Sanders could not possibly keep this nation economically viable while trying his radical, wealth-leveling schemes.
As for the historical record, nobody need slander Sanders as a genocidal megalomaniac to say there’s nonetheless good reason socialist utopias have consistently led to death and destruction — the deaths of 100 million people last century. As we are seeing again in Venezuela today, poverty, famine, and destruction are merely socialism’s natural results.
Meanwhile, the attempt of most Sanders backers to draw a distinction between the hard socialism of the Chavez-Maduro Venezuela and the supposedly “democratic socialism” of Scandinavian countries is pure myth. Not only are the Nordic nations not socialist, but they have prospered in recent decades in almost direct proportion to the distance they have moved away from socialism, toward free markets.
In fact, a near-socialist experiment for 20 years left Sweden in the early 1990s where Greece and Portugal found themselves more recently — basically bankrupt, with a collapsed economy. In response, Sweden embarked on what amounted to a free-market revolution, resulting in a remarkably good standard of living. In fact, today, Sweden boasts a perfect “freedom” rating in Freedom House’s annual rating.
Furthermore, Sanders’s own history is not that of someone who made big distinctions between the mythic soft socialism of Sweden and full-fledged communist states. From honeymooning in the Soviet Union to supporting strongly the vicious Sandinista government in Nicaragua and extravagantly praising Fidel Castro’s murderous Cuba, Sanders at best has worn blinkers to block out the horrors of totalitarianism. One can only hope he was a dupe and not a willing apologist for necessary evils on the road to utopia.
All the evidence suggests that a Sanders presidency would be not just deluded, but dangerous to American prosperity and freedom. Yet here he is, leading the Democratic pack on a wave of support from voters aged 44 and younger. Even in a multicandidate field in New Hampshire, for example, he received more than half of the votes from those between 18 and 29, and a field-leading 36% of those aged 30 to 44.
One would ask what these young voters are thinking, but the obvious answer is that they are not thinking at all. Their electoral emanations are inexcusably irresponsible. Sanders’s supporters need to get real and abandon his “revolution” to the same pathetic fate as Leonid Brezhnev’s late, unlamented Soviet prison state.
