Bashing Bernie

Senator Bernie Sanders has won the popular vote in all the three of the primary contests so far. Starting with Iowa, he has won by a larger margin in each successive election and in three very different states, Iowa in the Midwest, New Hampshire in New England, and Nevada in the Southwest. The first two have overwhelmingly white populations but Nevada has a big Latino population as well as significant numbers of African Americans, Asians, and Native Americans.

Bernie Sanders is on a roll. Everyone knows it, and many supporters of the status quo are upset. Some have lost their minds. Exhibit A is Chris Mathews, a veteran pundit and a host on MSNBC, the liberal cable news channel. He regularly takes shots at Sanders, but his latest attack on Sanders was so far over the line—wrong, vile, illogical, and just plain stupid—that droves of people have called on the network to fire Matthews.

Matthews compared Bernie Sanders’ big victory in Nevada with the Nazi invasion of France in World War II. What parallel could possibly exist between a win in a clean democratic election and a savage invasion of a sovereign democratic country by a nation led by a genocidal tyrant and engaged in a global war of aggression? Only the ease of victory.

Sanders rolled over Biden (by more than a 2-1 margin) and the others because more Democrats voted for him. He won it without resorting to brazen lies, dirty tricks, foreign patrons, or rich donors. The Germans rolled over the French because they had been preparing for war for nearly a decade and had made huge investments in modern military hardware. Sanders’ win in Nevada was legitimate in every way, Hitler’s was part of a mad, malevolent quest to take over the world, cleanse it of inconvenient people, and impose German rule for 1,000 years. It was 100 percent an illegitimate enterprise.

To add insult to injury, Sanders is a Jew who lost members of his family in the Holocaust. The Nazi occupation, with the help of the collaborationist Vichy government, resulted in the slaughter of tens or hundreds of thousands of French Jews in Nazi death camps. Matthews’ outburst was extremely insensitive, intolerable, unpardonable. Apology or no, MSNBC needs to fire him.

Matthews’s nonsensical blast at Sanders is reflective not only of his own nearly obsessive animosity toward Sanders but also of the bias and fear of many middle-of-the-roaders who dislike what Sanders stands for.  They are trying to portray him as a dangerous radical because of his self-definition as a democratic socialist, even resuscitating the ghost of Fidel Castro.

Some of these people know nothing about democratic socialism and don’t even know the difference between Olof Palme (the late social democratic Swedish leader) and Lenin. Others do, but they have high incomes and would have to pay more in taxes to fund health care for all, for example. The Republican Party is the party of organized selfishness. But why are so many other Americans (compared to other people around the world) opposed to paying taxes for universal health care? Yet, they are OK with spending much more for-profit health care and a bloated military?

The issue is not, as Mayor Pete—I thought you were better than that—claims between a Sanders who would throw the baby out with the bath water (the good things in the system along with the bad) and the “moderates” who want to make changes while appealing to the majority of the electorate. The issue is whether Americans are going to grow up and admit that the savage form of capitalism, that only we among the rich democratic countries of the world have been living under for decades, is a sorry system that can never be reformed but only replaced by capitalism with a human face, which amounts to the same thing Bernie Sanders calls democratic socialism. A society where profit is not the equivalent of the Prime Directive in Star Trek. A society where profit is still a value but secondary to life, limb and freedom. A society where not so many are homeless while others have lost count of how many houses they own. A society in which corporate bosses do not have all the authority and workers have almost no rights. A society where some people don’t own a fleet of yachts and airplanes, while others can’t afford insulin to save their lives.

That is democratic socialism. Revolutionary? Radical? Or just fair and decent.