Ideological Drift

For John, BLUF:  I blame this drift on [poor] education; education in school and in the home.  We don't remember where we have been and we can't project where we may be heading.  It is the long march through the institutions.  One would think Senator Sanders would have known better.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Bernie Sanders is The Corbynizer

Here is the sub-headline:

A true socialist, Sanders has been poised on his Marx all his life for this moment

From The Spectator (US edition), by Mr Dominic Green, 23 February 2020.

Here is the lede plus three:

Historians of the future, if there are any, will note that though the demieducated youth of the United States shed their belief in God, they still believed in Father Christmas.  Uncertain of their futures, and in no hurry to pay off their student loans, the young entrusted their faith and debt jubilee to the Santa Claus of socialism, a little man with fluffy white hair proffering gifts from a big sack of other people’s money.

In Victorian England, this traditional figure was known as Jeremy Corbyn, a vegetarian who gave every worker a lump of nationalized coal and scourged the Jews because they would not recognize him as their savior.  In the United States, where people are wealthier and more generous in spirit, young Americans know their redeemer as Bernard Sanders.  Every four years he descends from one of his homes in Vermont, which is not far from the North Pole, to hail spittle-flecked imprecations upon the heads of the rich and regale the children with fantastical tales of nationalization.

As a stopped clock is right twice a day, so socialism again looks right a century after 1917.  Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren have offered the young middle class only the parental bromides of Clintonism.  Sanders, however, still possesses the freshness of the truly passé.  The subversion of humanities education by the radical left has scoured the tarnish off 20th-century history and restored the gleam of ideals to ‘actually existing socialism’.  Americans born since the end of the Cold War have grown up thinking that a gulag is a Hungarian stew and a White Russian is just a cocktail, if only because their parents made them watch The Big Lebowski.  Meanwhile, the Democratic party’s abandonment of American workers has done more to create a genuine proletariat than all the New Left’s xeroxing and leafleting ever did.

A true socialist, Sanders has been poised on his Marx all his life for this moment.  His first order of business is to make war on his own party while ranting about essentially middle-class obsessions like zero-emissions reindeer in order to pacify his juvenile followers. Sanders could well win the most votes in the Democratic primaries and, the DNC and his coagulated arteries permitting, become the Democratic nominee.  American workers being in no hurry to go the way of the bison, Bernie would lose to the bourgeois capitalist Donald Trump, quite possibly in a landslide of the kind that pulverized Jeremy in last December’s British elections.  But whatever happens in November, Sanders will have won the battle for the spot where his party’s soul should be.

Sadly, this and the rest of the article are spot on.  We don't know our history and we have been failed by the Democratic Party.  Maybe it is just me, but I long for the heroes of the past, the Governor Adlai Stevensons and the Vice Presidents Hubert H Humphrys.  I thought of them as politicians who understood the American system and the American Dream.

The important thing is to not get cocky.  "There's many a slip 'twixt the cup and the lip."  For example, the Coronavirus could cause major economic and social problems for President Trump and the Republicans.  It is possible that Nancy the Ripper could come out of this looking good.  Unlikely, but possible.♠

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff

♠  No, I wouldn't raise the issue of Senator Chuck Schumer.  He is a _ _ _z.  I am sure lots of people do like him, but he is what he is.