Preemptive Preamble
Let me begin by saying that if Bernie Sanders would be the strongest candidate for the Democrats to put forward, I’d be for him, and that if he would be a weak candidate for the Democrats to put forward, I wouldn’t want him to get the nomination.
Next let me describe myself as someone who has worked full-time for more than 15 years now in an effort to beat back the “destructive force” I saw rising on the right, and that I see this upcoming election — and the necessity of preventing this consistently destructive would-be dictator, Donald Trump from winning a second term — as a kind of ultimate culmination of the battle against that destructive force.
I see the defeat of Trump in November as being a necessity, because his re-election would be a national disaster of the first magnitude, jeopardizing our future as a democratic society ruled by law.
My reason for that pre-amble is that I’ve learned that it can be a bruising experience to publicly raise questions about Bernie Sanders’ candidacy to be the Democratic nominee for President. Unless one relishes being the target of people’s hostility — and after 15 years on the political battlefield, I have had more than enough of that — it feels risky to cite potential dangers for the nation if Bernie comes away with the nomination.
Beyond the “Democratic Socialism” Issue
Let’s assume for the moment that Bernie can deal successfully with the problem of his having described himself with a phrase that contains the word “socialist.” (That may be assuming a lot, given that the forces of capitalism in America have worked for more than a century to make the word “socialist” into a hate-word that bypasses rational thought. As one who has followed American politics closely for more than 60 years, I’ve seen that word used successfully as a weapon in a way that younger people wouldn’t have.)
Let’s assume that it would work for Bernie to hold up the excellent and prosperous Scandinavian nations (the social democracies of Sweden, Norway, and Denmark) as defining “democratic socialism” and that the American people don’t fall for the propaganda and accept Bernie’s self-description as benign and maybe even attractive.
But it seems that Bernie has some other history that seems potentially to compound the “socialist” problem considerably. At this week’s debate, Bernie correctly called Bloomberg’s gesture with the word “communist” a “cheap shot.” That’s true, so far as anything to be found in Scandinavia is concerned. However, Bernie’s history contains some troubling things, such as described here in a column that appeared in the Washington Post this week by Megan McArdle. (And the fact that McArdle is a libertarian, and has major ideological differences with Bernie does not diminish the vulnerabilities that she exposes— some of which are more problematic than others.) McArdle refers to
an inconveniently well-documented Early Bernie Sanders, with his calls to nationalize“utilities, banks and major industries,“ his kind words for left-wing dictatorships, and his “very strange honeymoon” in the U.S.S.R. — where he blasted U.S. foreign policy before returning home to say “Let’s take the strengths of both systems. … Let’s learn from each other.”
One should be forgiven almost any number of youthful flirtations with bad ideology. But Sanders was in his early 40s when he went gaga for Nicaragua’s brutal Sandinista regime, and 46 during his sojourn on the Volga. In February 2019, when he was refusing to describe Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro as a “dictator,” Sanders was 77.
Forty years seems enough to cultivate skepticism about what you’re shown while visiting a Communist dictatorship. And 77 is certainly old enough to have read the 2019 Human Rights Watch report on Venezuela, which noted that “polls had not met international standards of freedom and fairness,” and went on to state that no “independent government institutions remain today in Venezuela to act as a check on executive power. … The government has been repressing dissent through often-violent crackdowns.” All of which sounds positively dictatorial.
I’ve lived in every time-zone in the continental U.S., growing up mostly in the Midwest, living also in Arizona and New Mexico, now residing in rural Virginia. I don’t claim to have my fingers firmly on the pulse of the American electorate. But I can envision Trump and his propagandists making use of some of the actual truth about Bernie’s history against him all too effectively.
If I were Bernie’s campaign manager, I’m not sure what I’d advise him to do to neutralize such attacks.
And so I would like to ask Bernie’s supporters: How would you suggest that Bernie protect himself from such vulnerabilities, that would be sure to be exploited if he becomes Trump’s opponent in the general election?
And if there were no way Bernie could protect himself, and if this vulnerability would make him a weak candidate against Trump, what should the Democratic Party do?