The Ride of the Berniecrats

As I woke up this morning, I read that there had been an assassination attempt on the other guy. I opened up Instagram and a post by Senator Bernie Sanders was presented to me. He wrote, “Political violence is absolutely unacceptable. I wish [the other guy], and anyone else who may have been hurt, a speedy recovery.” 

As you can imagine, the comments to this post have been rather hilarious. I mean: 

“can we have political violence just this once as a treat” 

“Thoughts and prayers for the bullet” 

“Pretty sure funding a genocide is ‘political violence’?” 

“Someone almost made America great again” 

But Bernie Sanders has always been the kind of guy who plays nice, even when he should perhaps get a bit mean. Remember, for example, when he said that the people were tired of hearing about Hillary Clinton’s emails. 

His latest book, It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism, published by Crown Books in 2023, seems to further illustrate his personality as a smart, capable, but somewhat humorless man. 

As always, I will be as biased as I possibly can. Not that I could help to be otherwise. After all, I first became interested in American Politics partly because of Bernie Sanders, and I shall never forgive him for it. I remember watching his speech at the 2016 at the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and being absolutely stunned. He walked up on stage and the crowd went absolutely nuts. All the white girls started crying and for the first time I thought that I would quite like to give a speech at the Democratic National Convention one day. 

It was like when I first saw the “November Rain” music video and witnessed Slash walking out of that church and playing that solo. I wanted to learn how to do that. 

I more or less learned how to do that, but I have still not given a speech at a Democratic National Convention. As a weak compromise, I have begun reading whatever piece or book about National Conventions I could get my hands on, including those by Norman Mailer, so Bernie’s influence remains clear and a comprehensible sense of degeneration can be charted. 

Perhaps that’s what I could’ve been for Bernie Sanders, a less problematic Norman Mailer. It’s too late for that. This is definitely not a “Superman Comes to the Supermarket” kind of thing, and even if it was, it wouldn’t have done anybody much good. 

We need to search for a a new Bernie Sanders, but I don’t believe we will soon find one. The scene that Bernie came out of no longer exists. It’s like trying to find ourselves a new Sex Pistols. Frank Carter sings very well, of course, but it’s just not the same. 

Bernie is (was?) the kind of guy you’d expect to appear as an extra in The Trial of the Chicago 7. He wasn’t necessarily a hippie or a yippie or even a member of the SDS, but he was with them in spirit. Politicians often get in trouble with the law, but Bernie got in trouble with the law for taking parts in Civil Rights protests. During one of those protests, on August 12th, 1963, Bernie was charged with resisting arrest and was found guilty and paid a fine of twenty-five dollars. That makes him way cooler than any other presidential hopeful since Eugene Debs. (Not that there was much hope for Eugene Debs.) 

I don’t mean to waste your time here. If you’re the kind of person who reads these kinds of essays, you already know all this stuff about Bernie. You might also know what his book is like, without having read it. But since I have read it and you very likely haven’t, I can now spend a few minutes of my time telling you about it. Let me put on the serious book reviewer voice. 

Ahem. 

In contrast with the DeSantis book I reviewed a few months ago, Mr. Bernie Sanders of Vermont has procured himself a co-author. Mr. John Nichols, a journalist for The Nation, may not have gotten his name on the cover, but he is credited on Amazon and other such platforms as contributor. To be fair, I’ve read claims that Mr. Nichols merely “edited” the book, and that Mr. Sanders did most of the actual writing himself. I don’t know. 

In any case, the result of their cooperation is a very readable book. Mr. Sanders gets every point across with seemingly just as many words as it was necessary. It could be argued that the book goes on for a little too long, but that’s only because Mr. Sanders has so much to say. The whole thing can be a bit repetitive, it’s never a challenge to guess what stance he might take on any issue — just look at all the options and pick the most common sense one. He doesn’t go around in circles like his Mr. DeSantis does, throwing around the same rhetoric and hoping it sticks. Also unlike DeSantis, he took the time to read the audiobook himself. 

I keep making the comparison, partly because I read both of their books, but also because they seem to be some of the most famous politicians to lose their parties’ primaries. 

It may be too late for Bernie, but DeSantis may yet get a second chance. That’s a bit worrying, but we still have to get over this election first before we can allow ourselves to worry about any other political troubles. 

Shit sucks. 

The serious book review voice is already wavering, but let’s try to get over that and carry on with the comparions and the takeaways. Of course, I don’t mean to give Horseshoe Theory enthusiasts any ammunition, but there are some more similarities I noticed and I believe they are worth reporting on. Like how Mr. Sanders likes throwing around the words “Corporate Media” just as much as Republicans do. I get it. It’s an easy target. My favorite shot against this target is when Princess Carolyn asks BoJack if he’s watching MSNBSea (ha), and he replies, “Great question. Well, I didn’t fall down on my remote, randomly changing the channel to MSNBSea while simultaneously crippling myself, thus physically forcing me to watch MSNBSea, so no. No, I’m not watching MSNBSea right now.” 

The way Mr. Sanders talks about the “Personalities” employed by the “oligarchs own that media” is kind of unintentionally funny, considering how many of these personalities he’s had to interact with just to promote this book. (And speaking of promoting the book, there has been some controversy because of the national tour that Mr. Sanders embarked on around its release. Some right-wing pundits with nothing better to do called him a hypocrite because the tickets to this tour could cost as much as ninety-five dollars, as if performers have control over Ticketmaster and their greed. The fact that Mr. Sanders was paid around a hundred seventy thousand dollars for the book has also been cited as evidence of the author’s alleged hypocrisy, but that’s what politicians do. They release books and hope somebody buys them.) 

Unlike a lot of Republicans, though, Mr. Sanders seeks to be fair in his clashes with these so-called personalities. 

For example, he talks about a rather conflictual exchange he had with Jake Tapper during the Democratic presidential debate in 2019, when Tapper questioned whether Sanders could “guarantee those union members that the benefits under Medicare for All will be as good as the benefits that their representatives— their union reps—fought hard to negotiate.” 

He offers a retort, saying “What I am talking about and others up here are talking about is no deductibles and no co-payment,” and then adds a few more things, but the reason I am quoting this to you is at the end of the anecdote. He half-heartedly defends Tapper against the hypothetical guillotine, writing: “I don’t want to be too hard on Jake Tapper. I have known him for years and like him. He is a knowledgeable and serious journalist who does a better job than most. The exchange we had on that night in July 2019 could have occurred during any of the debates and with any other moderator — or in any of the other town halls, forums, and interviews on cable news shows.” 

I couldn’t imagine DeSantis’ book — or any of the books credited to the other guy but ghostwritten by people who are now surely regretting the life they’ve head — containing such a paragraph. 

Like I said, Bernie Sanders is a fundamentally nice guy. Coming off as a nice guy is a tough break in politics. The fact he’s so good at it and has managed to get elected to several positions while not ruining his appeal is rather wondrous. Still, I wish he came off as a bit more clever. 

I’m not saying he’s stupid or anything, he’s obviously very smart, but he sometimes seems a bit in over his head when it comes to philosophical and intellectual discussions. 

Consider this passage where he gets a bit literary: “In the 1920’s, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about the very rich: ‘They are different from you and me.’ That was true then, in the years just prior to the Great Depression. It is even truer now. The oligarchs of today live in a world so separate from the experience of ordinary mortals that their lifestyle is beyond the imagination of most Americans.” 

Now, everybody interested in the writers of the 1920’s and 1930’s knows the short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” by Ernest Hemingway, originally published in the August 1936 issue of Esquire. In Esquire version of the story, Hemingway uses Fitzgerald’s real name, and offers a funny rebuttal to that oft-misquoted line: “The rich were dull and they drank too much, or they played too much backgammon. They were dull and they were repetitious. He remembered poor Scott Fitzgerald and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, ‘The very rich are different from you and me.’ And how someone had said to Scott, Yes, they have more money. But that was not humorous to Scott. He thought they were a special glamorous race…” 

This is what I mean when I call Bernie “humorless.” I’m sure he can crack a joke and laugh at one, but he takes things very literally. For someone whose cultural mindset seems to be stuck in the 1960’s, he seems to have no use for postmodernism. 

But of course, I only criticize him for this because I admire him greatly. I hold him to much higher standard than I do any other U.S. politician. 

I wish he was president right now, and maybe he could’ve been. Some have argued that, if he had stayed a registered Democrat instead of going back to being an independent, and had built bridges with other significant members of the party, he could’ve become their nominee in 2020. But that frames it as if the Democratic establishment would’ve just sat idly by and let his nomination happen. That sounds like a fantasy. Even before his unfortunate heart attack in October, 2019, it was clear that he was going to be fought against tooth and nail. You can’t have a self-proclaimed socialist as your party’s nominee in the United States of America and expect to win. Or at least, that’s the way conventional wisdom goes. I am not sure I agree. But when it comes to elections I am almost always in the minority. The candidate I intend to vote for in the next Romanian election will not become President of Romania. She probably will not even reach the second round. The party I want to vote for might not even enter Parliament. But the struggle for progress is continues as long as I don’t have anything better to do. I often daydream of not having anything better to do as a left-wing student in the United States, working as a volunteer for Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or other such people. 

But I am unable to do that, so I sit alone in a dimly-lit room and I listen to audiobooks and I read books and I clack away at my MacBook keyboard. 

That’s as good as segue as any. Let us return to the audiobook, for now I wish to make a few comments on Bernie’s performance throughout the recording of the audiobook. 

The voice of an old, angry Jewish man from Brooklyn is quite calming to me. It’s how my inner voice might sound one day. The way he reads this audiobook reminds me of Robert Christgau’s review of Atom Heart Mother, where he writes: “…at least the suite provides a few of the hypnotic melodies that made Ummagumma such an admirable record to fall asleep to.” 

I have not attempted this, but I would imagine that falling asleep to It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism might be quite pleasurable. 

Overall, his reading is fairly good, but there are a few quirks, most of which, I admit, are rather endearing. 

He always says “Quote” before every quote, which can be useful but also a bit grating, and I’m surprised the director of this production didn’t tell him to cut it out. 

Also, he has a strange way of pronouncing the word robots, spreading it out and morphing it so that it sounds like he’s saying “Ro-butts.” One can imagine him uploading an open letter to Jeff Bezos as video on YouTube, and saying, with great conviction is his tone: “You promised the American people, that you are going to give them free Ro-butts.” 

He also pronounces the word “Controversial” kind of weirdly. I didn’t know where else to place this fact, so there you go. 

Now, I’m aware that am attracting attention to the most irrelevant of observations, but to paraphrase The Onion, the most important issue with undecided voters is bullshit. 

I wish to be a master of bullshit like all the other serious journalists who’re covering this election right now are. Reading books by politicians helps with that. 

To help spread the knowledge contained herein to the people, I thought to upload both this book as well as Joe Biden’s Promise Me, Dad onto YouTube. Bernie’s book got blocked while Biden’s book posed no issues. I also had no issues uploading DeSantis’ book. Thus we can ask the question who the real capitalist is. 

Speaking of Biden, the sort of alliance that he and Bernie have managed to put together is kind of interesting. I recently got shown an ad of the two of them looking at clips from the other guy’s speeches on an iPad and being bamboozled by the nonsense being said. 

Bernie seemed to be much more of a steadfast ally to Biden than he was to Hillary Clinton. 

The Biden and Sanders campaigns created several “task forces” in an attempt to reach some sort of consensus between the two of them. The way Bernie describes the process in his book is as follows: 

“The task forces provided a rare opportunity for the moderate and progressive wings of the Democratic Party to debate, collaborate, and look for areas of agreement. The discussions were serious, and often animated. Our campaign’s task force members pushed aggressively for an agenda that would represent working families, protect the environment, and take on powerful corporate interests. Sometimes our ideas prevailed. Sometimes they failed. Most times, the two teams found middle ground on which progress could be achieved.” 

The Sanders side of the task force succeeded in getting the Biden side to agree to: Raising the federal minimum wage to fifteen dollars an hour, having Medicare negotiate prescription drug costs, being aggressive in combating climate change and creating a Civilian Climate Corps, lowering the age of Medicare eligibility to sixty, and ending private prisons and detention centers. 

They failed to agree on: moving forward toward a Medicare for All single-payer program, legalizing marijuana, forgiving all student debt, making public colleges and universities tuition-free, and impose a wealth tax on billionaires. 

Still, for a candidate who lost the primaries fifty-one percent to twenty-six percent, Bernie seems to’ve had a great influence on his party’s platform, and in my opinion, that is only a good thing. In a piece for the Fox News website (ugh), Paul Steinhauser called it the “the most progressive platform in the Democratic Party’s history and pushes the party to left on many issues including health care reform, combating climate change, trade deals, and fighting racial injustice.” 

That’s not to say that it was all gravy. In that same piece, Steinhauser reports on dissent from progressive Democrats like Representative Rashida Tlaib on the lack of general support for Medicare for All and the Green New Deal. 

Obviously, I agree with Representative Rashida Tlaib. In fact, I think it’s absurd for any country with a GDP over the price of a carton of choccy milk and a pack of gum not to implement some sort of Medicare for All and a Green New Deal. 

In case you were wondering, Jean-Paul Sartre defined the absurd as — quote! — “the universal contingency of being which is, but which is not the basis of its being; the absurd is the given, the unjustifiable, primordial quality of existence.” In that sense, Bernie Sanders comes off as the only reasonable serious contender for the U.S. Presidency in recent history — the only one who fought against the unjustifiable way things are done in America right now. 

To be honest, I used that previous paragraph not only to make a point but to illustrate the way Bernie misuses quotes and ideas to push for his policies, like he does with the aforementioned F. Scott Fitzgerald line about the rich. 

It’s a bit annoying, but with policies this good, you can get away with mild intellectual dishonesty. 

That’s how Republicans manage to sell the other guy. His tweets may be mean, but he will cut our taxes, so we’ll vote for him. 

If only Democrats were a little bit better at being hypocrites — Bernie Sanders would be the President, Al Franken would still be a Senator, and along with their progressive colleagues in Congress, they could put that twenty-seven trillion dollar GDP to good use.