Bernie the red?

The Guardian on Bernie. A bio and rehearsal of his "mind."

They describe him as "hard left," which seems more suitable for Mao and Brezhnev than for a democratic politician, and especially inappropriate for a social democrat, since the members of that tribe are committed both to political democracy and to a heavily regulated "mixed" but mostly and indeed overwhelmingly capitalist economy and, in America, opposed the communists, back in the day.

Is he not committed to those same things, after all?

Well, if he is true to his own past, as reported in The Guardian, as it seems he may be, he may be neither a democrat nor a social democrat, and those of us who thought otherwise - a whole lot of us, including the likes of George Will - have been mistaken.

The Guardian writes as though his views and the fundamentals of his agenda remain unchanged from his activist college days, calls him a "strident progressive" (imagine The Guardian calling anybody a "strident progressive"), and relates his history of urging socialization of various parts of what socialists used to call "the commanding heights" of the economy.

He is and always has been quite unabashed, after all, about his wholehearted admiration for Eugene Debs, probably the most famous leader of America's Socialist Party, personally committed to both democracy and true blue socialism, the real thing, complete socialization of the means of production.

Gene Debs's best run for the White House was in 1912, when he ran in a four-way race against Wilson, Taft, and TR.

He made no secret of his views and took every occasion to damn capitalism, urging the necessity of the total abolition of private ownership of the means of production and the progressive nationalization of them all, beginning with the then "commanding heights" of the economy, in the United States.

But he also ran on an agenda of progressive reforms that were both much more readily realizable and of much more widespread appeal.

PBS

At the 1912 Socialist convention, Debs proclaimed the Americanness of Socialism. 

He pursued an agenda including woman suffrage and restricting child labor, but was most concerned with worker rights. 

He advocated the right to unionize and strike, and was a strong spokesman for workplace safety. 

During a time of disparity between the haves and have-nots, Debs' appeal rested in his charismatic advocacy of the disenfranchised. 

Sound like anybody we know?

From The Guardian's piece.

Given his aversion to intellectuals, it is ironic that two of the senator’s best friends are leftwing academics at the University of Vermont.

One is Gutman, 71, an English professor. The other is Richard Sugarman, 70, who teaches Jewish philosophy and existentialism. 

Two Sundays ago, the trio was on a picnic bench in Burlington’s Ethan Allen park, reflecting on the hectic turn of events.

The previous day Sanders had been in Keene, New Hampshire. Like every other event the senator has attended since announcing his campaign, the town hall was packed.

Sanders spoke for an hour, railing against growing economic inequality, the corporate media, millionaires and billionaires, global warming, Barack Obama’s Pacific trade deal and the Iraq war. 

The Vermont senator promised equal pay for women, tuition-free colleges and universities, an equitable tax system, the right to healthcare for all, an expansion of social security for the elderly, and tough action against Wall Street banks.

Seeing Bernie in that light, certain features of his agenda appear, as the old Stalinist saying goes, "no accident."

For example, he makes no bones about his admiration for the British National Health model - actual socialized medicine, the real thing - but urges for America in his current campaign a much improved Medicare for all, mere socialized health insurance.

And a Debs-like commitment to real socialism rather than mere social democracy would explain why his education program is a clear attack on private higher education and would involve massively intrusive further subjection of state public higher education to federal control.

Perhaps he only comes short of Debs in his so far - to my knowledge - complete reticence about the abolition of capitalism, gradual or sudden, piecemeal or all at once.

Other parts of the article in The Guardian show Bernie in a different light, that of a young activist committed to the sometimes absurd national and global causes du jour.

Unfortunately, on many occasions during the Cold War those causes indicated a clear prioritization of socialism over democracy, as in his alignment with the Sandinistas against President Reagan's ultimately successful efforts to end their dictatorial rule in Nicaragua.

Bernie aligned himself pretty firmly and publicly with the Leninist, anti- and undemocratic leftist regimes of that time in Latin America, and their fellow travelers.

Even in that, he still seems to be the same guy.

BS may in fact prefer democratic social democracy, Scandinavian style, to just about everything else (I think it's too socialist) while preferring various forms of Leninism to many versions of capitalism, democratic or not.

Which makes everyone who thinks of him as a social democrat right only with heavy qualifications.

But while he preferred Allende to Pinochet and I, though regretting the General's lurch toward neoliberalism and deploring his ferocity, took the opposite view all the same, he also preferred Allende to the democratic and moderately progressive capitalism of the Chilean status quo ante, which I most certainly did not.

And that preference order makes you wonder about the solidity of his social democratic credentials.

Perhaps his radicalism is really as strident and "hard" as The Guardian says, though you have to wonder what they are playing at, so many pots denigrating a kettle.

And he would certainly not be alone in all that, in today's American left, nearly all of the leading lights of which preferred Allende to Pinochet, the Sandinistas to what came before them and what came after, Uncle Ho to the leaders and regimes of South Vietnam, and so on and so on.

Update.

As I have written before, not only his heart-of-heart politics but even his reformist agenda is too far to the left for me.

I dislike Hillary and will not vote for her in the Pennsylvania primary when the time comes.

But as I reflect further on the matter I may well not vote for Bernie, either, if I vote at all.

And then there is the underlying, painful truth that the nominee does have to defeat a Republican.

It's not at all clear Bernie could do that, anyway, being too far left in the end for most white Democrats and utterly without appeal for non-whites.