Gene Debs, not Che Guevara

The Democratic Party’s Growing Radicalism

This just about sums up what burns both the right and so many on today's left about Bernie.

Bernie Sanders — democratic socialist, 73-years-old, a man who is on the outer edges of American politics and on whose wall hangs a portrait of Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist Party presidential candidate of the early 20th century — is setting Democratic hearts aflutter. 

True enough, it's in large part a question of dosage, but despite the picture on his wall Bernie is far more a social democrat than Gene Debs, while the latter was indisputably a socialist, properly so-called.

And the Progressive movement beloved of Democrats was and still is less socialist than even mere social democracy, devoted only to more democratic government and to government control of our capitalist economy for the public good.

Think Wilson, Taft, and TR, not Gene Debs.

For that matter, think both Roosevelts, in fact, and LBJ, and Nixon, and Obama.

Everything the progressive movement from the late 19th century to our own time has done for America the right loathes and wants to undo, and persistently smears as radical, revolutionary, anti-American, totalitarian, socialist, and even communist.

Hence their rage, today, at Sanders, De Blasio, and Warren.

All the same, it is absolutely telling that BS has a picture of Gene Debs on his wall and not a picture of Che.

The politics of Debs himself, committed democratic socialist and Socialist Party leader, anti-interventionist, repeated presidential candidate, and bold defender of free speech before and during Wilson's war America, were far from those of that Leninist revolutionary totalitarian, Che Guevara.

Like Debs' but even more so, Bernie's politics are profoundly gradualist and democratic rather than revolutionary and dictatorial, as well as Old Left rather than New.

Like all the progressive presidents and the entire Old Left, Sanders' is a politics of class rather than identity.

And he seems to fall in as well, perhaps more so than Obama and certainly more so than those more influenced by the New Left and its ideas, with the practical nationalism of historic socialism, social democracy, and progressivism, aiming as an American politician and office holder at harnessing the American economy to the good of the American people.

Does he do better among seniors than Hillary?

Would he do better than any Republican?

Bernie Sanders’s Message Resonates With a Certain Age Group: His Own

Bernie Sanders: A Man With a Cause

But it's not just Republicans who have no political memory.

Welcome to the United States of Amnesia.

Sanders is running for a cause—a resurgent progressivism that was conceived during decades of wage stagnation and rising inequality, born during the great financial crisis of 2008, and announced on the political stage by the street protests of the Occupy Wall Street movement and the widespread public support they engendered.

Really?

Progressivism - even resurgent progressivism - was born in 2008?

His commitment to it was born in 2008?

Oh, my.

To the extent this is true, by the way, Bernie is not yet getting seniors previously Republican to come home to progressivism and the Democratic Party.

During a general election, almost all of Sanders’s supporters would vote for Clinton over Jeb Bush or any other Republican[.]

But I think he would, in the general, if he got to be the nominee.