A lot of “concerned” people, like New York’s Jonathan Chait and the Bulwark's Jonathan Last—Jonathan V. Last, as he likes to call himself1—are telling Bernie Sanders to get the hell out of the Democratic presidential race—Johnnie V, who once studied molecular biology, making the impeccable point that Bernie’s continued campaign is a danger to public health.
Well, everything both Johnnies have to say is true, but you don’t have to be as smart as either to know that Bernie isn’t listening. It’s pretty rude to say that Bernie Sanders lacks a sense of honor, but in many ways it’s true. All of his life Bernie has seen himself, quite seriously, as a revolutionary, and everything comes second to “the revolution”. At the start of the 2016 Democratic Primary campaign, Sanders surely never imagined he’d be where he is now, and he isn’t going back. He’s never shown any allegiance to anything except the revolution, and he isn’t going to start now. It was the Democratic Party, after all, that cheated him out of a victory that he won and deserved in 2016—so he believes—and the revolution doesn’t forgive, and the revolution doesn’t forget.2 They owe him everything, and he owes them nothing. Bernie, in my opinion, has always been a pissy guy, and he will enjoy being pissy to Joe Biden, who he surely doesn’t like very much, as long as he can.
Afterwords
As the American Conservative’s Daniel Larison points out, Sanders’ foreign policy record is infinitely better than Biden’s, and one can say the same, in general, for his position on civil liberties, but when Bernie natters on about locking up CEOs for being bad people, he loses me. Bernie shows a longing for absolute power—he can’t, or simply doesn’t bother to, control his fascination with totalitarian socialist governments like Castro’s Cuba, where “the people” rule, rather than the bosses, where you can throw people in jail for being greedy, or for polluting the planet. In 1985, Sanders said that the people of Cuba supported Castro because “he educated their kids, gave their kids health care, totally transformed society.” I don’t trust anyone who wants to totally transform a society. Sanders would make a poor candidate, and a worse president.
1. What does the “V” stand for? Damfino.
2. For politiques like myself, of course, it is the job of party officials to stack the deck in favor of the candidates they want to win, the ones they think can win in November, as long as they don’t push too hard. Sanders wasn’t even a Democrat, after all, so what duty did the Democratic Party owe him? But to Sanders’ conspiratorial frame of mind, only corrupt people can disagree with him.
