Why This Vermonter Does Not Feel the Bern
Of the potential Democratic candidates running for president in 2020, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders is the most unusual. His insurgency campaign that had no image handlers almost defeated the Clinton political machine, and he did it while being an open “democratic socialist.” Unlike 2016, he will not have to fight for name recognition since his 2016 campaign brought him considerable fame.
Part of his appeal is that he is considered “anti-establishment,” and therefore sincere. However, his reputation is disconnected with reality. Senator Sanders’ record is similar to that of every other politician he has condemned as being part of the “establishment.” Indeed, it is a festering amalgamation of hypocrisy and deception.
Senator Sanders likes to portray himself as the champion of the average American worker. For example, on his own website, he condemns the “proliferation of millionaires and billionaires at the same time as millions of Americans work longer hours for lower wages,” and in order to mitigate the “greed” of “the billionaire class,” he proposes “[i]ncreasing the federal minimum wage…to $15 an hour,” “[r]equiring employers to provide at least 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave,” and “[m]aking it easier for workers to join unions.” Regardless of the merits of his proposals, a cursory glance at his website would lead one to conclude that Senator Sanders is a sincere advocate for worker’s rights. Thorough investigation, however, reveals that he rarely supports his rhetoric with any meaningful legislation.
Despite having been in congress since 1991, he has only been the primary sponsor of three bills that became law, two of which were renaming post offices in Vermont. For someone who is so troubled by the plight of working Americans, he does not seem to want to help them with any legislation at all.
His historical revisionism regarding his record is worse than his hypocrisy. Sanders argues that his self-described political philosophy of “democratic socialism” is equivalent to the policies practiced in the Nordic countries and is unreservedly different from the variants of socialism that are culpable for the deaths of more than 100 million people. Indeed, he said in a 2016 Democratic Party town hall: “When I talk about democratic socialism, I’m not looking at Venezuela. I’m not looking at Cuba. I’m looking at countries like Denmark and Sweden.” However, with that statement, Sanders divorced himself from his history of praising those very same regimes.
In 2011, he wrote in the New Hampshire newspaper, Valley News, that “the American dream is more apt to be realized in South America, in places such as…Venezuela.” In 2011, Venezuela was ruled by the despotic Hugo Chavez. By almost every economic indicator, Hugo Chavez’s policies — continued by his personally appointed successor, Nicolás Maduro — destroyed the Venezuelan economy. Chavez’s socialism — as is the case in all of history — did not produce prosperity: it produced misery. According to Reuters, as a result of Venezuelan socialism, the average Venezuelan lost an average of “11 kilograms (24 lbs)” in 2017, and Venezuela has a poverty rate of “almost 90 percent.”
Additionally, in 1985, Sanders defended Fidel Castro in a televised interview: “Fidel Castro… educated their kids, gave them health care, totally transformed the society.” Sanders is correct when he says that Castro “totally transformed the society”: Castro, according to The Guardian, “tolerated little dissent,” created an “intrusive, suspicious state security apparatus,” imprisoned people because they were “homosexuals or dressed the ‘wrong’ way,” and implemented policies that consequently created “shortages of basic foodstuffs.”
For someone who is “not looking at Venezuela,” he is seemingly quite inspired by it. Despite his attempts to say otherwise, Bernie Sanders is not advocating for a mainstream political philosophy: he is an apologist for the same radical and pernicious ideology that is responsible for the oppression and starvation of the Venezuelan and Cuban people.
Sanders can portray himself as the champion of working-class Americans, and he can pretend that he advocates for a version of socialism that is dissimilar from the morally bankrupt ideology that is directly responsible for the murder of more than 100 million people throughout history. The facts, however, demonstrate otherwise. While Bernie Sanders did not invent hypocritical and dishonest politics, he has certainly perfected it. As a Vermonter, I accept that he is my senator. Even if we do not like our elected representatives, we must honor the choices of our fellow voters. However, I am infuriated both by his shameless revisionism of his appalling record and the left’s willingness to be misled by it. His record is not an example of statesmanship: it is indefensible.
Greg • Feb 13, 2019 at 1:27 pm
Excellent piece. While I tend to agree with Sanders when he blames and chastises Corporate America and particularly Wall Street, his analysis tends to be skin deep and he often reminds me of a freshman leaving his first-ever Econ 101 seminar. Also, as you point out, his knowledge and understanding of conditions and events in other countries is appallingly lacking. I hope that he and his policy proposals receive far closer scrutiny this time around than they received in 2016. If so, I believe his campaign will be (rightfully) rejected by Democrats and even by many of his past supporters who did not look closely enough last time.
Billy Irving • Feb 7, 2019 at 7:26 pm
The Communist Manifesto isn’t meant to be an instruction manual, it was more of a motivational call to action that would be disseminated among the proletarian class to explain the most basic tenants of Marx’s Scientific Socialism and encourage the development of a class consciousness. I would recommend reading some of Marx’s other pieces, his various essays on the Value Theory of Labor, and the like. In these essays, Marx explains the crux of his ideas, that when you enter an employment contract, you’re actually essentially selling your labor in exchange for wages, which you then use to purchase essential and non-essential commodities. Obviously, it is within any employer’s interest to pay you /less/ than what your labor is worth, because otherwise they wouldn’t make a profit. He also explains the distinction between private property (the means of production: factories, farms, etc.) and personal property (your toothbrush, etc.). It is the former, which he foresees the proletariat commandeering during the revolution, that is, the workers claiming and cooperatively managing factories, so that can fairly reap those factories’ production. This is the “stealing” that you describe.
This “dictatorship of the proletariat” is actually supposed to be democratically run. It’s a direct democracy run by the proletarian class, hence the dictatorship, since the workers are the ones dictating the society. It’s also supposed to be a temporary stage that gives way to a classless, stateless society once all private property is socialized. This eventual anarchistic society would then finally be “communist”. It’s hard to imagine this happening, and Marx says that it would take place far in the future. Until then, society would only be “socialist”.
The “running out of other people’s money” adage could easily be applied to capitalism. Eventually we will run out of new markets and resources, and demand will greatly outweigh supply. Vladimir Lenin expanded on Marx’s writings, and described how imperialism results from capitalism. Once an isolated country like England runs out of new markets, it needs to imperialize other nations to find new resources to build markets.
You may be interested to know that Lenin actually introduced “free markets” to the Soviet Union after the Russian Civil War. It came through the form of the New Economic Policy, and it was introduced in order to keep the economy of the Soviet Union viable. This is a policy that completely contradicts anything that Marx says, so I’d have to disagree with your argument that the Soviet Union, among other countries, applied Marxism in an orthodox manner. My disagreement is compounded by countries like China, which is founded on the Mao’s “Third Worldism”, and North Korea’s Juche (a sort of nationalism). Both of these ideologies cannot be called “Marxist”.
Onto your point about violence: While it is true that self-described socialist countries have taken part in state violence, this is not an attribute reserved for leftist ideologies. Some of the biggest crimes in history have been undertaken in the name of capitalism. Consider Leopold II’s genocide in the Congo Free State, with a death toll between 2 and 13 million. This violence was perpetrated for the sake of ivory extraction and transport to Belgium, to be sold in capitalist markets. This is a perfect example of capitalist state violence, and speaks to Lenin’s theories about imperialism. We might also consider some of the atrocities committed by our own country in the name of colonialism and capitalism, and those of other Western countries.
Finally, I would bring up the point that problems that occur within so-called socialist countries is sometimes a result of external influencers. Right from the get-go, the U.S. saw the Soviet Union as a threat and actually sent troops to Russia to try to change the tide of the Civil War in the former monarchy’s favor. We saw socialism as a threat, because if the idea gained too much popularity in the U.S. it could result in business owners losing their factories and other means of production. Doesn’t it make sense that a ideology which espouses the collective ownership of the means of production would scare the few that currently own those means? Wouldn’t want to make such an ideology look evil, and fight it wherever it crops up? This is why we engage in economic war against any country which decides to be socialist, only making their economies weaker and their political systems more fragile. This is also why the United States has imprisoned American socialist leaders like Eugene Debs have been imprisoned for sedition, why McCarthyism occurred, and why the FBI engaged in COINTELPRO to destroy leftist groups like the Black Panther Party.
I’m not trying to defend any state-violence perpetrated by these so-called socialist states. State-violence is bad no matter who commits it. I’m just trying to provide a little more context for this very nuanced issue.
Modern day liberals who call themselves socialist, like Bernie Sanders, still support a capitalist economic system. They are better called “Social Democrats”, who still believe in Liberal philosophies like the free market, but also support social welfare and government programs.
Not all socialism is Karl Marx. There are a lot of other great writers who have totally different ideas for a socialist society. Marx is special because of the way he applied Hegelian dialectics to economic history, to illuminate this trend of class-conflicts. Some other socialist philosophers like Rosa Luxemburg built off of his theories. Others, like Kropotkin and Bakunin have totally different ideas. Even Albert Einstein wrote an essay about socialism, called “Why Socialism?”.