Page 43 - American Conservative September/October 2015

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BILL KAUFFMAN
Bernie Sanders—Yes or No?
The 58th Presidentiad, to use Walt Whitman’s coinage, is upon us, and among its big- gest surprises is the spirited
campaign of Bernie Sanders, socialist senator from the Green Mountain State. I asked three of my favorite Vermonters for their impressions of Sanders.
John McClaughry of Kirby, self- described “decentralist agrarian Rea- ganaut,” offered the harshest assessment: “I have watched Bernie in Vermont for the past 35 years, since he and his radi- cal hippie pals took over the tiny dirt- poor town of Stannard. To his credit, Bernie has defiantly called himself a so- cialist from the beginning, even under pressure to ‘tone it down.’ He remains fully committed to 1960s (if not 1860s) Marxism, and every morning he sets out to advance the socialist movement and defeat its enemies.”
“His performance as mayor of Bur- lington was overall innovative,” Mc- Claughry concedes, “although he still takes flak from his radical comrades for promoting a corporate redevelopment of the city’s waterfront, and for arrest- ing his radical friends protesting at the GE armaments plant (who were trying to keep union workers from their jobs).”
“On the down side, Bernie is im- pervious to facts. He’ll say anything to advance the movement, and he’s not technically lying. You have to know the truth before you can lie, and for Bernie the Truth is what is required to be true by Marx’s scientific theory of history.”
Is there a decentralist tinct to Sand- ers? “Only in the sense that the left must seize control of local institutions of gov- ernment to advance the movement. Ul- timately all power must be centralized in the national government, to advance
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the movement, correct inequality of wealth, defeat the little yellow and brown people who are taking American jobs, and thwart the evil Koch Brothers.”
Rob Williams, yak-herding Cham- plain College professor and publisher of 2VR, has worked with Sanders “on issues of corporate control of our U.S. imperial media culture.” He admires “Bernie’s independence, his outspo- kenness, his impatience with bullshit.” Sanders’s “ability to ‘live and let live’ with politicians on both sides of the D.C. aisle ... makes him Vermonty. Other than this, he’s a Brooklynite through and through.”
“I like his slightly unkempt and ca- sual appearance and his uniquely com- pelling charisma,” says Williams. “He is easily the best ‘honest deliverer of bad news’ we have of any of our elected pol- iticians in D.C.—climate change, Wall Street takeover, collapse of the middle class, corporate greed—and he’s been saying all this for decades.”
“On the other hand, Bernie’s un- equivocal support for the Pentagon’s F-35 Burlington-based joint strike fighter baffles and infuriates me. I find his cozying up to Lockheed and San- dia Labs perplexing, and his support for Israel maddening.”
“Bernie knows I am a secession- ist,” says Williams. “I have often sug- gested he run for president of the 2nd Vermont Republic. I’m not sure he appreciates this.”
Williams is “proud Bernie the Ver- monter is roaring,” but he believes that “no single program, party, platform, or politician can keep the U.S. empire from its lumbering debt-driven collapse. Not even Bernie—and he knows this. As a remedy to imperial ills, his campaign is,
rationally speaking, a dead end.”
Frank Bryan, professor of political science emeritus at the University of Vermont and author of Real Democ- racy, the classic study of town meeting, has done radio and television ads for
Sanders in previous campaigns. Sanders, says Bryan, is an “intense partisan” who is “imprisoned by his own ideology.” He is “driven by a com- bative personality prone to hyperbole,” but Frank finds it “refreshing to have a congressperson who truly understands the plight of the working class get up
on his soap box and pull no punches.” “Bernie in Burlington or Starksboro or any town in Vermont’s governance: ‘Yippie!’ Bernie in Washington—aside from constituency service—so what? He may be able to nitpick here and there but in the final analysis he’s sim- ply one more vote for what is all too often a mishmash of political com- promise that the center (Washington) churns out to be structured and imple-
mented by the bureaucracies.”
“I guess from a therapeutic point of view, Bernie is good for the left in America. But unfortunately it’s the centralized left. (You and I might think that’s an oxymoron and we’d be right.)” “But here’s the real problem,” con- cludes Bryan. “Bernie is either too old to realize he’s too old to be president (I doubt that) or he’s just doing this to ‘send a message.’ Ranting and raving on a grand scale by an old man (who most of us in Vermont really like) would be akin to me also at age 74 making a pass at Scarlett Johansson at a cocktail party. I might have plenty to say but the whole thing would be sad to witness—especially for those who
care about me the most.”
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