Think about it: What does Bernie promise the kids? Vote for me, and you’ll be able to spend your life doing cool stuff—saving the planet!—and other people will pay for it! Just what you’re doing now! Or at least, were doing, until you graduated and had to, you know, work for a living!
Sounds entrancing, doesn’t it? Yeah, so no wonder the kids love Bernie. Plus, you get to tell all those rich bastards on Wall Street to go fuck themselves.
Bernie has very much the brain of a college student who’s just discovered “truth” and can’t get over the fact that not everyone agrees with him. It must be because I’m good and they’re bad!
But the kids are only half of Bernie’s army. The other half are the not kids, the working stiffs who in 2016 find themselves fifteen years older and deeper in debt than they were in 2001. These people want a culprit, and unfortunately in these globalized times, no villain can match the cachet of the “foreigner.” Bernie so benighted he really thinks we can just raise the drawbridge and live in our little castle forever.
Hillary, to her credit, has said that “globalization is here to stay,” but at the same time she’s got to be wondering how to hold onto the Bern for the general election. Putting Bernie on the ticket, of course, is a total non-starter. He’d spend all his time telling Hillary what to do. If only Marco Rubio was available! He’d be perfect!
Afterwords
The percentage of the American workforce employed in manufacturing has declined for decades, but the absolute number remained almost constant until the turn of the current millennium at around 17.5 million. In the past 15 years, manufacturing jobs have dropped by almost 2 million, due to automation, foreign competition, and transfers of “American” jobs overseas. Back in the fifties and sixties, economists were frustrated at the inability of the “Third World” to catch up with the industrialized West. But now their dreams are coming true.
