Bernie Sanders: When Fantasies Crash and Burn

Contemptible you are in your wealth,
You kings of coal and steel!
You had your thrones, parasites,
At our backs erected.
All the factories, all the chambers –
All were made by our hands.
It's time! We demand the return
Of that which was stolen from us.

--The Internationale

The collapse of Bernie Sanders' campaign came as no surprise to Mad Dog.
Had Bernie been more successful, Mad Dog would have been astonished.

Whenever Mad Dog saw Bernie, the words of Mad Dog's father echoed in his ears from years ago:  The NFL players had gone on strike and these players, who were paid millions, were organizing as a brotherhood of workers.  

"I'm all for the workers," my father said. "My parents were union, through and through. But these are not WORKERS."

By which he meant, millionaires are not workers.  Working class people who live in working class homes in working class neighborhoods are workers. These were millionaires complaining about their ill treatment by billionaire owners.

Workers just aren't what they used to be.

In fact, likely, workers haven't been "workers" likely since the end of the Great Depression, or at least since the late 50's.

Workers of the world unite!

But, as Sanders himself as noted, sadly, the Democratic party is no longer the party of the working class. "The Democratic Party has become the party of the more affluent people, while the Republican Party has become the party of the white working class."

Bernie sought to rally all those idealistic young people who reminded him of his own youthful group, the kids who marched against the war in Vietnam, against "The Man" against the controlling, soulless Wall Street rich.  And he would bring them out to vote in numbers un-imagined. Well, not un-imagined, because Bernie imagined them, but the fact is, there were never enough of them.

An African American minister spoke of one of the members of his congregation who told him, "My Medicare isn't for all. I worked for it; it's mine. And now you want to give it away to someone else who hadn't earned it."

There you have in a nutshell, in a single congregant's confession, the nub of the problem: These workers are not singing kumbaya, locking arms with other workers, marching arm and arm for the greater good of the working man, singing "We Shall Overcome," or The Internationale.

This is a man who is not amenable to the idea of supporting someone else, when it comes to health care. He's got his. He earned it. He doesn't want to help deadbeats or people who didn't work as hard as he did.

It's the same thing we heard when a Danish woman was asked by her friend how she could stand to live in America, where they don't have universal health care and the Danish woman asked her friend, "Well, wait a minute. How would you feel if your taxes went to pay for the medical care of an Italian?"
Her friend started, blinking, a deer in the headlights. "Well, but that's different."
"No," said the Danish woman. "The white guy in Wisconsin doesn't want to pay for the healthcare of the Black guy in Kentucky. Same thing."

When Bernie was mayor of Burlington, Vermont, demonstrators picketed the factory which made Gatling guns which were sold to Central American dictators who mowed down demonstrators seeking  democracy. Bernie chose to side with "the workers" who were making the guns, but these weren't really "workers" by my father's definition: Real workers would never have made guns used to suppress other workers by autocrats.  "Remember," Lenin said, "A boyonet is a weapon with a worker at either end."

Workers who are despoiling the environment by fracking  in Pennsylvania or drilling in the Gulf of Mexico aren't dreamy eyed workers dreaming of a workers' paradise.  Bernie had to face the roles these workers played in destroying the climate and his response was "We'll retrain them and pay their salaries while they learn something new."

But that was just a dodge. That was like saying, "We'll convert them to Christianity" and once they have accepted the Lord Jesus, or the environment, they'll want to do good.

Bernie was beaten by the very working class people he claimed to want to fight for and liberate. 

Trouble was, they didn't want to be saved. They just wanted what they thought belonged to them.