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I Finally Understand Bernie Sanders
Having written about Bernie Sanders a couple of times in the past, I think it’s safe to assume that I’m not exactly Bernin’ with enthusiasm for his candidacy. Observing my Facebook feed reveals that many of my acquaintances and friends have a different opinion about the Junior Senator from Vermont. They aren’t alone.
(Brief aside: Bernie Sanders is a 74 year-old man but he is nonetheless “Junior” to Sen. Patrick Leahy in the Senate Hierarchy. Heaven help us. End Aside.)
At first, I was under the impression that the attraction to Bernie was nothing more than a passing fancy, the kind of brushfire rebellion that sometimes happens to entitled, powerful people whose hubris makes them appear ripe for comeuppance. Add to this that Bernie himself speaks to these disaffected people in the language to which they’ve become accustomed. He promises them justice. Their attraction to him (which originally mystified me) is cleared up if you recall the old Russian parable of the peasant and the lamp:
A peasant, starving and freezing, was digging in the ground with his bare hands, looking for something – anything – to eat. In the icy mud he found a corroded old lamp and proceeded to rub the verdigris from it, when a genie spewed forth from the lamp.
“I will grant you anything you wish on one condition: I will give twice as much to your neighbor,” said the genie.
The peasant sat down in the snow next to his hole and thought. He looked around his hovel and then looked at his neighbor, toiling in the mud and imagined him having twice as much of anything than he and said:
“I want you to poke out one of my eyes.”
Sound familiar? The impulse driving their support seems to be little more than grotesque envy. That’s fairly simple to understand. What I didn’t get was the man himself. What forces create a Bernie Sanders? How could he come to the conclusions about life that he’s reached?
Investor’s Business Daily has helped us in that regard. As it turns out, an alien from Uranus may have more in common with you or me than Bernie Sanders.
Nonetheless, here are what I’m sure are some of the points of commonality between Bernie’s life and yours:
- Honey Bear Bern moved his first wife into his Maple Sugar Shack … complete with dirt floor. She promptly left him. You know women, so fickle. Apparently, she had different ideas about being gang-raped.
- Despite being unemployed, shiftless, and recently split from his wife, he fathered a child out of wedlock. Who hasn’t been there?!?
- The senator never held a job of any substance in his life until he was somehow elected mayor of Burlington at the tender young age of 39. Being as I’m 36, there’s clearly still time for me to live down to his example.
- Despite being 74 years old, one of Bernie’s largest assets (aside from his congressional pension) seems to be $65,000 of credit card debt. At least he’s consistent in wanting to run the country like he’s run his life!
Read it and weep, America. This paragon of personal achievement has a non-zero chance of becoming President of the United States.
I said that I finally understood Sanders and the forces that created him. We as a nation made Bernie Sanders, through a combination of foolish tolerance for failure and an underlying desire to see our neighbor’s goat die.
What created Bernie Sanders? A life that could only be described as the inverse of mine: a life devoid of the need or desire to be personally responsible for any of his actions. A life where the notion of creating things and providing value to society are as foreign as the landscape of Venus.
Bernie Sanders has gotten all of the wrong feedback. It’s no surprise that the wrong things occupy his mind.
Published in General
I think that misses the point – the point was that the peasant wasn’t satisfied to wish himself rich because his neighbor would be twice as rich. He’s provincial.
Rather, his aim is to see his neighbor suffer. That’s what this is about – not equalization of outcome as much as it is distribution of misery. Nothing can compensate these people for the psychic trauma they believe they’ve endured except for seeing those who’ve “tormented” them laid low.
At this point, it isn’t even about material success, because Jamie Dimon and a poor college kid could each get the same cell phone, have air conditioning and get a cold beer. These simplest of creature comforts aren’t denied to them.
Another aspect of this that is so troubling is just how blase Bernie is in his denunciations of wealth and his advocacy for higher tax rates.
He comes by these things honestly: he is innumerate, economically illiterate and has never earned enough money to feel the sting of tax rates high enough to discourage work, savings and investment.
Bless his pointed little head – the notion of “incentives” hasn’t occurred to him yet. Being as Bernie is about at the 2-minute warning of his life, I doubt he’s going to have any last-minute epiphanies.
You’re right. That’s actually more terrifying than even I expected. That’s saying something.
I don’t frequently decide to “go for the head” in these types of debates, but in this case it seems appropriate.
By any fair measure, Bernie Sanders is a loser.
The catch here is that he’s managed to make a career out of being a loser by putting on display his aggressive loser-ish-ness, claiming that his being a loser is a symptom of a broken system and thus turning the energy of society against itself, judo-like.
He has never accomplished a single thing of substance. He’s lazy. Shiftless. Unemployable (outside of the Senate, which is disgusting) in any normal, productive portion of the economy.
At less than half of his age I can point to numerous accomplishments that I have which dwarf this picayune poser’s total output in 74 years.
The idea that he should be President transcends absurdity; It’s immoral.
Great point.
It wasn’t enough to end his competitor peasant, he wanted to make him suffer. I can’t really even think in those terms. It would never occur to me.
The question is, does this explain the appeal to millennials or is it paradoxical? On the one hand, younger people have fewer accomplishments of their own against which to judge loser Sanders. On the other hand, they must have ambitions that soar much higher than loser Sanders, a burn-out hippie of no recognizable merit.
Or maybe they don’t.
Relax – nothing to worry about! The Democrats have already fixed it so that Bernie won’t even get close to being nominated: Super Delegate(s) to the rescue!
Sanders I think is the Genie. He promises them psychological pleasure at the discomfort he will inflict upon the people they don’t like.
I think that a significant portion of them have been lied to as well. The lie comes in the form of: “The route to a happy, upper middle-class existence goes through getting a college degree – any college degree.”
So, when we are flooded with interpretive dance and women’s studies majors who have no marketable skills which would recommend them for anything more than administrative tasks and also have $50,000 in student loan debt and they can’t get jobs good enough to eat ramen and service their loans… they get pissed off.
College administrators from the Deans on down to advisors are guilty of peddling this noxious lie. It should come as no surprise that different college majors produce wildly different outcomes in terms of return on investment.
If Republicans were smart they would allow lenders to price student loans just like they are in the used car market. Generally, the older the vehicle, the higher the interest rate, because the lender needs to extract his interest as quickly as he can from a depreciating asset.
In the case of college, higher interest rates could be applied to lower rate-of-return majors (like Early Childhood Development) in order to send the signal that they’re relatively undesirable compared to, say, petroleum engineering.
Surely you are not suggesting graduates with interpretive dance degrees have limited job opportunities. ;) It amazes me that this even needs to be articulated.
The two cases are somewhat different. Now that even bankruptcy does not discharge student loan debt, it’s no longer a question of differential risk. I take your point about signals but students are already oblivious to signals given that they major in interpretive dance in the first place. It’s all viewed as free money regardless of the interest rate. On a hopeful note, there are signs students are waking up.