The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Nothing to shout about
Bernie Sanders cries conspiracy over his losing presidential bid – but were voters just bored of him? This book of class-war rants will win no converts
IT’S OK TO BE ANGRY
ABOUT CAPITALISM by Bernie Sanders
304pp, Allen Lane, T £19.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £22, ebook £9.99
The latest tome from Bernie Sanders, who has been representing Vermont in Congress since 1991, is essentially a biography of his 2020 presidential campaign – wildly popular, he says, but for the small detail that it didn’t win – mixed with some policy ideas should he run again in 2024 (when he’ll be 83). He jogs through the many evils of the American system that will be familiar to British readers though not achingly relevant: money buying elections, weak unions and a for-profit health system that leaves over 85million citizens “uninsured or underinsured”. A major obstacle to fixing this is the Democratic establishment. It was the party elites who blocked his nomination, he writes – and even when they captured the presidency, Senate and House, they blew a historic chance to reform due to a surfeit of caution.
Of course, one could interpret this very differently: Biden beat Sanders simply by winning more votes, and the Democrats watered down their plans because they spooked swing-state voters. As for Sanders’s insistence that the Left’s future lies in a working-class alliance, he never convincingly accounts for Donald Trump’s popularity among rural whites.
One detects that Sanders isn’t at his most enthusiastic when dipping into identity politics. He comes across as a 1930s class warrior, less interested in defeating transphobia than in paying people a decent wage. Good for him. The downside of his near-breathless anger, however, is that he doesn’t pause to define things. Anger about “capitalism” is qualified to “uber-capitalism” by page three, implying that
he’s fine with private property and trade, he just doesn’t like an excess of wealth. “Billionaires should not exist,” declares one chapter proposing taxing them to extinction. He dislikes the super-rich for their selfindulgence, for they “don’t row boats on lakes, or kayak on rivers. They cruise the oceans on yachts that cost hundreds of millions of dollars and are so large that bridges must be removed so that they can pass through.” It sounds great! Isn’t that what the USA is about, to drag yourself up from kayak to yacht in a triumph of talent and hard work? Or, as Sanders argues, maybe this old American Dream is ecologically unsustainable, unfair and immoral.
Another socialist author might advance a solid case in print, but Bernie hasn’t the finesse. The book reads like he’s shouting it – “Beyond pathetic!” Aside from the occasional human vignette, such as the heart attack he had mid-campaign or the mittens he wore to Biden’s inauguration, this is more a collection of speeches and position papers that Sanders might once have stapled together and handed out at train stations beneath a placard that read “Defeat the Man!”
He has certainly risen in the world. Sanders was recently spotted charging up to $95 a ticket for a book event in Washington DC, which suggests capitalism ain’t all bad.