A plain stupid attack on Bernie Sanders

Really, how can conservative, Republican propaganda against so modest a social democrat be anything but loony, stupid, or both?

Like Goldwater and Reagan telling us with a straight face before 1965 that Medicare is communism and its adoption will mean the absolute destruction of America as we know it, and all our American liberties.

Bernie Sanders' Foul Socialist Odor

It is interesting to recall that the Social Democrats USA and nearly all of the non-Communist socialist movement were firmly anti-communist and anti-fellow-traveler, too, back in the day, and how far they were from the fellow-traveling New Left radicalism, racial and sexual as well as economic - though of course they favored and took part in the Civil Rights movement of that era - that today dominates the radical left and even much of the not so radical left, throughout the Occident.

Generally, though with much fringy controversy, they and the DSA and other anti-communist socialists before and later rejected the Soviet model of a command and almost completely socialized economy in favor of a "mixed economy" dominated by publicly regulated private enterprise, although with a degree of regulation and socialization notably greater than called for by or acceptable to progressives like me who take more seriously the importance of freedom not only in the free market but in the culture as a whole.

And of course they rejected with horror, and more unconditionally than liberals like John Rawls, dictatorship in the name of socialism or the working class.

To my annoyance, they supported the Cold War and even the war in Vietnam, Michael Harrington publicly bolting only in 1972 and ultimately forming the DSA, of which I was a member until I was alienated by how many genuine reds, pinkos, left-wing tools, fellow-travelers, and New Lefters were among its membership.

Reality is much too complicated and nuanced for it to be well suited to right wing propaganda, though.

Or anyone else's.

At a guess, this is what really scares the right.

The media’s sickening Sanders double standard: How the socialist brings out their true colors

Income inequality and the distribution of wealth are two topics Sanders hammers away at constantly, and during the interview with Harwood he brought up the fact that the top marginal tax rate for income during the 1950s was somewhere around 90 percent. 

Sanders’ comment took Harwood aback. 

“When you think about something like 90 percent, you don’t think that’s obviously too high?” he asked. 

“No,” Bernie shot back. 

Sanders’ endorsement of the Eisenhower-era tax structure also raised eyebrows at the New York Times, which observed that Sanders “doesn’t flinch over returning to the 90 percent personal income tax rates of the 1950s for top earners.” 

In these reactions you can easily spy an undercurrent of incredulity that a politician would enthusiastically advocate for rich people to pay more – much, much more – in taxes.

Sanders is not the man to agree with the Clintons that "the era of big government is over."

And he is abundantly willing to require the rich to pay for it.