Topic: Liberal Fascism
The lazy man’s explanation for the popularity among Millennials of Bernie Sanders may be summarized in two words: free stuff. And as far as it goes this explanation is valid enough. Considering all the goodies that he’s promising, Sanders really should consider adopting as his campaign logo the Horn of Plenty. But there’s more to his appeal than mere envy and greed. Free college, elimination of student loan debt burdens, gratis healthcare for all etc. are beguiling promises but what really sends a thrill up the legs of Millennials is the branding: social justice.
Everybody like flattery, of course, but when it comes to the young you should lay it on with a snow shovel. Whether consciously or not the Sanders campaign recognizes and acts upon this great truth of life. To inspire emotions of hatred, envy and greed, then to market them in the name of justice, equality, progress, is a strategy well calibrated to appeal to the judgmental self-righteousness of the young.
It helps also that the young are largely ignorant of history. They praise the concept of “democratic socialism” while having no idea in the world what it means. To Millennials Sanders’ proposals sound bold, innovative, radical. That the candidate is, in reality, a standard-issue leftie progressive whose ideas date from the 1930s is a truth they cannot grasp because they inhabit a perpetual present. To them the past is a blank slate and everything that has happened up to now is irrelevant. What counts is the future—a future destined to be brightened by the radiance of youthful idealism.
This fog of ignorance reflects poorly on American public education, which has largely abandoned the teaching of history and civics in favor of ideological indoctrination. In New York, for example, students are taught that the men who crafted the United States Constitution merely copied the constitution of the Iroquois Confederacy. There’s not a scrap of real evidence to support this claim but there it is, polluting the curriculum, because racial/ethnic grievance politics trump the facts every time. No wonder, then, that today’s young people so easily swallow Bernie Sanders’ specious claptrap: They’re incapable for lack of information of judging his proposals on their merits. That’s bad for them but good for Bernie Sanders for as George Orwell put it: Ignorance is Strength.
It may seem remarkable that after the great disappointment of Barack Obama, Mr. Hope & Change of 2008, young people are falling for Comrade Sanders’ line of bull. But, after all, today’s twenty-four-year-olds were only fourteen or fifteen in 2008. They weren’t really paying attention then; thus Obama’s failure to deliver on his lofty promises hasn’t tempered their idealism. Like the evidence that Sanders is full of it, that sorry episode dwells in the disregarded past.
It’ll be interesting indeed to see how Millennials react when, as is likely, their hero fails to win the Democratic Party nomination. Will they hold their noses and vote for that champion of crony capitalism, the opportunistic and inauthentic Hillary R. Clinton? That, no doubt, is the Clinton campaign’s (increasingly desperate) hope. But I wonder, because Bernie Sanders has raised the hopes and expectations of young people to such a height that when they come down again, the crash will be shattering.
