The trouble with Bernie is that he might just win
Visiting someone last week, I stumbled across by Norman Macrae, then the deputy editor of In the report published in 1974, Macrae breathlessly – and with an unflinching certainty familiar to anyone who reads the magazine – reports on how the world will be transformed in the ensuing half-century.
Unsurprisingly, given the author’s day job, he posits a kind of neo-liberal utopia where ‘‘small, self-ruling communities buy such services as crime prevention or environmental protection from entrepreneurial performance-contractors, or can choose participatory government by referendum’’. What’s more, according to Macrae, the workers of tomorrow (or four years from now) will ‘‘telecommute via personal computer terminals from homes in equatorial sunbelt countries’’; we will be taking six-month holidays each year, and most fathers will take 10 years off work to rear children.
It’s easy to mock a 46-year-old set of predictions but, to his credit, he presciently dates Soviet Russia’s collapse to 1989 (two years shy) and predicts an ‘‘erratic libertarian regime’’ emerging in its wake – pretty much what happened.
And, while he overstates the liberating power of technology, he was right to foresee its centrality in our economy and personal lives. He was certainly closer to the mark than, say,
A dozen years ago, I interviewed author and former options trader Nassim Nicholas Taleb about his influential 2007 bestseller,
Taleb made the case that, since rare, outlier events are, by definition, near impossible to foresee, and often hugely consequential, it renders useless our powers of prognostication.
He offers 9/11 as one example and, a year after the book was published, the Great Recession seemed like another case in point. Coronavirus is another.
So, you could argue, was Donald Trump’s election. Nobody was more guilty than me of misreading the signals on the 2016 election. I covered the election results live on radio with Duncan Garner, and it hadn’t even occurred to me that Hillary Clinton might lose until every last state and county had tallied the votes. I was, and remain, shell-shocked – both at the horror show that the Trump presidency was bound to become, and at my embarrassing failure, as a lifelong follower of US politics, to see it coming.
Likewise, 12 years as member, activist and staffer for the Australian Labor Party didn’t stop me from entirely misreading last year’s election across the Tasman just as badly.
Time to give up election forecasting, I thought. This is why I’m not going to make the familiar electability case against Bernie Sanders, the current frontrunner in the race to be the Democratic Party nominee against Trump. As to whether the 78-year-old socialist from Vermont can actually win, I throw my hands up in the air. If Trump can be elected president after the revelation of the ‘‘grab ’em’’ tapes, anything’s possible.
My issue with Sanders is not that he can’t beat Trump – he might, who knows? – but that he would be ineffectual and insufferable as president.
Sanders’ career to date has mainly involved yelling – resolutely on-message yelling, but yelling nevertheless. Over his years in the Congress – first in the House, then as a senator – he has shouted his way to one of the least impressive records of any legislator.
During his lengthy tenure, he has managed to pass just three bills – one to do with the benefits of military veterans, and two involving the renaming of post offices. The rest of the time he has bloviated from the far Left, a self-styled voice in the wilderness, as if irrelevance were a virtue.
Sanders has demonstrated none of the votewrangling skills an effective president needs. How on earth, for example, does he hope to achieve Medicare-for-All, his signature health plan that abolishes private health insurance, when only a handful of congressional Democrats support it?
How can he hope to pass any budget that funds free university tuition, free childcare, student debt abolition, and any number of multibillion-dollar boondoggles? What politician, apart from diehard allies like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is going to risk their own career by supporting the tax hikes that such a programme would necessitate?
What’s more, Sanders has shown neither appetite nor aptitude for compromise – as such, his plans will never see the light of day in the Congress. His agenda will be dead on arrival.
Bernie, like Jeremy Corbyn, is most comfortable barking into loudhailers at people who already agree with him. Whether, as with Corbyn, this means he will lose in a landslide is a question to which I will not posit a response.
He will, however, be a pretty useless president at a time when the country needs an outstanding one.
My issue with Sanders is not that he can’t beat Trump but that he would be ineffectual and insufferable as president.