Bernie Sanders: making socialism acceptable?
“Sooner or later, the Democrats’ decades-long march to the left was bound to end in the explicit embrace of socialism,” said the National Review. That moment appears to have arrived. The first two contests of the primary season have established Bernie Sanders, the self-described democratic socialist Senator from Vermont, as the indisputable front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination. With the party’s other candidates splitting the moderate vote between them, the 78-year-old Sanders is the one to beat. He has “strong supporters nationwide”; he has momentum; and, as the top fundraiser in the Democratic primaries, he has the money “to go the distance”.
The rise of Sanders represents a sea change in US politics, said Russell Berman in The Atlantic. For years, the Republicans have successfully “weaponised” the term socialism against liberals in order to portray them as dangerous radicals, but the tactic is no longer working. Young voters are open to Sanders’s ideas today. “Socialism as an epithet has lost its sting.” More than his ideology, it’s Sanders’s sincerity that really appeals to liberal voters, said Megan McArdle in The Washington Post. His speeches, like those of Donald Trump, appear to come from the heart. Authenticity is an overrated virtue in politics, but when you “look back on the past two decades of politicians who promised everything would be different, then delivered more of the same, only somehow worse”, you can see why so many voters now prefer “honest devils over two-faced saints”.
If it’s any consolation to moderate Democrats, the US is not the only country where a radical socialist has eclipsed the floundering centre-left, said Rich Lowry on Politico. Sanders, who honeymooned in the Soviet Union, bears a close resemblance to “his equally aged, gruff and dishevelled ideological cousin from the UK, Jeremy Corbyn”. His electoral prospects are about the same, too, said Thomas L. Friedman in The New York Times. “On what planet” is an avowed socialist – one who wants to take away the private health care coverage of some 150 million Americans, and replace it with a huge, untested, national health system open to illegal immigrants – “going to beat the Trump machine this year”? Liberals talk excitedly of a revolution. Here’s a revolution: “four more years of Donald Trump, unencumbered by the need to get re-elected”.