By Kevin D. Williamson
Monday, July 20, 2015
Marshalltown, Iowa — “All foreign-made vehicles park in
designated area in rear of building.” So reads the sign in front of United Auto
Workers Local 893 in Marshalltown, Iowa, though nobody is bothered much about
the CNN satellite truck out front, a Daimler-AG Freightliner proudly declaring
itself “Powered by Mercedes-Benz,” nor about the guys doggedly and earnestly
unpacking yard signs and $15 T-shirts and rolls of giveaway stickers from a
newish Subaru, all that swag bearing the face and/or logo of Senator Bernie
Sanders, the confessing socialist from Brooklyn representing Vermont in the
Senate who is, in his half-assed and almost endearingly low-rent way,
challenging Hillary Rodham Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination.
The bumper stickers on the mainly foreign-made cars of his followers tell the
story: One of those “Peace” (not the more popular “Coexist”) slogans made of
various world religious symbols, “Clean Water Is for Life!” and “The Warren
Wing of the Democratic Party,” sundry half-literate denunciations of “Corporate
Oligarchy” . . . “Not Just Gay — Ecstatic!”
The union hall, like the strangely church-like auditorium
at Drake University the night before, was chosen with calculation. Bernie —
he’s “Bernie,” not Senator Sanders or Mr. Sanders or that weirdo socialist from
Soviet Beninjerristan, just lovable, cuddly “Bernie,” like a grumpy Muppet who
spent too much time around the Workers World party back in the day — our Bernie
may not be the slickest practitioner of the black arts of electioneering, but
he’s got some smart people on his small team, and they are smart enough to book
him in rooms with capacities that are about 85 percent of the modest crowds
they are expecting, thereby creating the illusion of overflow audiences. At
subsequent events in New Hampshire and Arizona, they’ll report crowds in excess
of 10,000; litigating headcounts is one of the great stupid amusing political
pass-times, but, for purposes of comparison, Herself draws a crowd not much
larger than Bernie’s a few days later in Des Moines.
Team Bernie is trying to make this a real race, but it
isn’t — not yet, anyway. As of mid-July, Bernie was sitting at 12 percent in
the Iowa polls, Herself at 54 percent. Bernie’s best showing is in New
Hampshire, immediately adjacent to the state he represents, and Herself still
leads him by a fat margin there. Team Bernie does all the usual tedious stuff,
such as planting volunteers in the audience to shout on cue, “Yes, yes!” and
the occasional Deanesque “Yeaaaaaaah!” It’s all very familiar, but there is a
sense that what’s going on here isn’t really politics, but kids play-acting at
politics. Sanders, as stiff a member as Congress has to offer, repeatedly
refers to the audience as “brothers and sisters,” and the union bosses greet one
another as “brother,” and you get the feeling that after a beer or three one of
these characters is going to slip up and let out a “comrade.”
If it’s anybody, it’s probably going to be the
grandmotherly lady in the hammer-and-sickle T-shirt. She’s well inclined toward
Bernie, she says, though she distrusts his affiliation with the Democratic
party. “He’s part of . . . them,” she says, grimacing. “Yeah,” says her friend,
who stops to think for a moment. “He’s a senator, right?”
Aside from Grandma Stalin there, there’s not a lot of
overtly Soviet iconography on display around the Bernieverse, but the word
“socialism” is on a great many lips. Not Bernie’s lips, for heaven’s sake: The
guy’s running for president. But Tara Monson, a young mother who has come out
to the UAW hall to support her candidate, is pretty straightforward about her
issues: “Socialism,” she says. “My husband’s been trying to get me to move to a
socialist country for years — but now, maybe, we’ll get it here.” The socialist
country she has in mind is Norway, which of course isn’t a socialist country at
all: It’s an oil emirate. Monson is a classic American radical, which is to
say, a wounded teenager in an adult’s body: Asked what drew her to socialism
and Bernie, she says that she is “very atheist,” and that her Catholic parents
were not accepting of this. She goes on to cite her “social views,” and by the
time she gets around to the economic questions, she’s not Helle
Thorning-Schmidt — she’s Pat Buchanan, complaining about “sending our jobs
overseas.”
L’Internationale, my patootie. This is national
socialism.
In the Bernieverse, there’s a whole lot of nationalism
mixed up in the socialism. He is, in fact, leading a national-socialist
movement, which is a queasy and uncomfortable thing to write about a man who is
the son of Jewish immigrants from Poland and whose family was murdered in the
Holocaust. But there is no other way to characterize his views and his
politics. The incessant reliance on xenophobic (and largely untrue) tropes
holding that the current economic woes of the United States are the result of
scheming foreigners, especially the wicked Chinese, “stealing our jobs” and
victimizing his class allies is nothing more than an updated version of Kaiser
Wilhelm II’s “yellow peril” rhetoric, and though the kaiser had a more poetical
imagination — he said he had a vision of the Buddha riding a dragon across
Europe, laying waste to all — Bernie’s take is substantially similar. He
describes the normalization of trade relations with China as “catastrophic” —
Sanders and Jesse Helms both voted against the Clinton-backed China-trade
legislation — and heaps scorn on every other trade-liberalization pact. That
economic interactions with foreigners are inherently hurtful and exploitative
is central to his view of how the world works.
Sounding more than a little like Donald Trump — and
that’s not mere coincidence — Bernie bellows that he remembers a time when you
could walk into a department store and “buy things made in the U.S.A.” Before
the “Made in China” panic, there was the “Made in Japan” panic of the 1950s and
1960s, and the products that provoked that panic naturally went on to be
objects of nostalgia. Terror of the Asian Economic Superman is a staple of
modern American politics: A quarter century ago, the artist Roger Handy published
a book of photographs titled Made in Japan: Transistor Radios of the 1950s and
1960s. We all remember Captain Lion Mandrake’s account of being tortured in a
Japanese prison-of-war camp: “I don’t think they wanted me to say anything. It
was just their way of having a bit of fun, the swines. Strange thing is they
make such bloody good cameras.”
Like most of these advocates of “economic patriotism”
(Barack Obama’s once-favored phrase) Bernie worries a great deal about trade
with brown people — Asians, Latin Americans — but has never, so far as public
records show, made so much as a peep about our very large trade deficit with
Sweden, which as a share of bilateral trade volume is not much different from
our trade deficit with China, or about the size of our trade deficit with
Canada, our largest trading partner. Sanders doesn’t rail about the Canadians
and Germans stealing our jobs — his ire is reserved almost exclusively for the
Chinese and the Latin Americans, as when he demanded of Herself, in the words
of the old protest song, “Which side are you on?” The bad guys, or American
workers “seeing their jobs go to China or Mexico?”
But for the emerging national socialist, dusky people
abroad are not the only problem. I speak with Bernie volunteer McKinly
Springer, an earnest young man whose father worked for the UAW local hosting
the rally. He’s very interested in policies that interpose the government
between employers and employees — for example, mandatory paid maternity and
paternity leave. He lived for a time in Germany, first studying abroad and then
working for Bosch, an automotive-parts company. He is a great admirer of the
German welfare state, saying: “I ask myself: Why do they have these nice
things, and we can’t?” I ask him to answer his own question, and his answer is
at once familiar and frightening: “Germany is very homogeneous. They have lots
of white people. We’re very diverse. We have the melting pot, and that’s a big
struggle.”
Donald Trump has some thoughts on that.
That the relative success of the Western European welfare
states, and particularly of the Scandinavian states, is rooted in cultural and
ethnic homogeneity is a longstanding conservative criticism of Bernie-style
schemes to re-create the Danish model in New Jersey and Texas and Mississippi.
The conservative takeaway is: Don’t build a Scandinavian welfare state in
Florida. But if you understand the challenges of diversity and you still want
to build a Scandinavian welfare state, or even a German one, that points to
some uncomfortable conclusions. Indeed, one very worked-up young man confronts
Bernie angrily about his apparent unwillingness to speak up more robustly about
his liberal views on illegal immigration. Springer gets a few sentences into a
disquisition on ethnic homogeneity when a shadow crosses his face, as though he
is for the first time thinking through the ugly implications of what he
believes in light of what he knows. He trails off, looking troubled.
Bernie, who represents the second-whitest state in the
union, may not have thought too hard about this. But the Left is thinking about
it: T. A. Frank, writing in The New Republic, argues that progressives should
oppose Obama’s immigration-reform plans because poor foreigners flooding our
labor markets will undercut the wages of low-income Americans. Cheap foreign
cars, cheap foreign labor — you can see the argument.
‘Conservatives can identify each other by smell — did you
know that?” He’s an older gentleman, neatly dressed in a pink button-down
shirt, his slightly unruly white hair and cracked demeanor calling to mind the
presidential candidate he is here to evaluate. He’s dead serious, too, and it’s
not just Republicans’ sniffing one another’s butts that’s on his mind. He goes
on a good-humored tirade about how one can identify conservatives’ and
progressives’ homes simply by walking down the street and observing the
landscaping. Conservatives, he insists, “torture” the flowers and shrubbery,
imposing strict order and conformity on their yards, whereas progressives just
let things bloom as nature directs. I am tempted to ask him which other areas
in life he thinks might benefit from that kind of unregulated, spontaneous
order, but I think better of it. One of Sanders’s workers, a young Occupy
veteran, shoots me an eye-rolling look: Crazy goes with the territory.
Here in a dreary, rundown, hideous little corner of Des
Moines dotted with dodgy-looking bars and dilapidated groceries advertising
their willingness to accept EBT payments sits Drake University, where Bernie is
speaking at Sheslow Auditorium, a kind of mock church — spire, stained glass, double
staircase leading down to the podium for communion — that is the perfect
setting for the mock-religious fervor that the senator brings to the stump. He
is a clumsy speaker, pronouncing “oligarchy” — a word he uses in every speech —
as though he were starting to say “à la mode.” He’s one of those rhetorical
oafs whose only dynamic modulations are sudden shifts in volume — he’s the
oratorical equivalent of every Nirvana song ever written — and he is
undisciplined, speaking for an hour and then pressing right through, on and
on, feeling the need to check off every progressive box, as though new orbiters
in the Bernieverse might think him a Rick Santorum–level pro-lifer if he didn’t
lay his pro-choice credentials out on the table at least once during every
speech. “Brothers and sisters, . . .” repeatedly: global warming, $15 minimum
wage, putting an end to free trade, gays, gays, abortion, gays, lies about
women making only 78 cents on the male dollar, mass transit, gays and abortion
and gays, Kochs and Waltons and hedge-fund managers!
He does not suggest that conservatives can literally
sniff one another out pheromonally, but the idea that his political opponents
are a tribe apart is central to his platform, which can be summarized in three
words: “Us and Them.” And, contra the hammer-and-sickle lady, Bernie is pretty
emphatic that he is not one of the hated Them.
And this is where the Bernieverse is really off-kilter,
where the intellectual shallowness of the man and his followers is as
impossible to miss as a winter bonfire. The Scandinavian welfare states they so
admire are very different from the United States in many ways, and one of the
most important is that their politics are consensus-driven. That has some
significant downsides, prominent among them the crushing conformity that is
ruthlessly enforced on practically every aspect of life. (The Dano-Norwegian
novelist Aksel Sandemose called it “Jante law,” after the petty and bullying
social milieu of the fictional village Jante in A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks.)
But it is also a stabilizing and moderating force in politics, allowing for the
emergence of a subtle and sophisticated and remarkably broad social agreement
that contains political disputes. Bernie’s politics, on the other hand, are the
polar opposite of Scandinavian: He’s got a debilitating case of Tea Party envy.
He promises not just confrontation but hostile, theatrical confrontation,
demonizing not only his actual opponents but his perceived enemies as well,
including the Walton family, whose members are not particularly active in
politics these days, and some of whom are notably liberal. That doesn’t matter:
If they have a great deal of wealth, they are the enemy. (What about Tom Steyer
and George Soros? “False equivalency,” Bernie scoffs.) He knows who Them is:
The Koch brothers, who make repeated appearances in every speech; scheming
swarthy foreigners who are stealing our jobs; bankers, the traditional bogeymen
of conspiracy theorists ranging from Father Coughlin and Henry Ford to Louis
Farrakhan; Wall Street; etc.
He is steeped in this stuff, having begun his political
career with the radical Liberty Union party in the 1970s. Liberty Union
sometimes ran its own candidates but generally endorsed candidates from other
parties, most often the Socialist Party USA, making a few exceptions: twice for
Lenora Fulani’s New Alliance party and once for the Workers World party, a
Communist party that split with Henry Wallace’s Progressives over its view of
Mao Zedong’s murderous rule and the Soviet Union’s invasion of Hungary — both
of which it supported. The radical political language of the 1970s and 1980s
spoke of a capitalist conspiracy or a conspiracy of bankers (a conspiracy of
Jewish bankers, in the ugliest versions), a notion to which Sanders pays
ongoing tribute with the phrase “rigged economy.”
His pose is not the traditional progressive
managerial-empiricist posture but a moral one. He is very fond of the word
“moral” — “moral imperative,” “moral disaster,” “moral crisis” — and those who
see the world differently are not, in his estimate, guilty of misunderstanding,
or ignorance, or bad judgment: They are guilty of “crimes.”
And criminalizing things is very much on Bernie’s agenda,
beginning with the criminalization of political dissent. At every event he
swears to introduce a constitutional amendment reversing Supreme Court
decisions that affirmed the free-speech protections of people and organizations
filming documentaries, organizing Web campaigns, and airing television
commercials in the hopes of influencing elections or public attitudes toward
public issues. That this would amount to a repeal of the First Amendment does
not trouble Bernie at all. If the First Amendment enables Them, then the First
Amendment has got to go.
F. A. Hayek’s Road to Serfdom notwithstanding, corralling
off foreign-made cars does not lead inevitably to corralling off foreign-born
people, or members of ethnic minorities, although the Asians-and-Latinos-with-their-filthy-cheap-goods
rhetoric in and around the Bernieverse is troubling. There are many kinds of
Us-and-Them politics, and Bernie Sanders, to be sure, is not a national
socialist in the mode of Alfred Rosenberg or Julius Streicher.
He is a national socialist in the mode of Hugo Chávez. He
isn’t driven by racial hatred; he’s driven by political hatred. And that’s bad
enough.
“This is not about me,” Bernie is fond of saying.
Instead, he insists, it’s about building a grassroots movement that will be in
a permanent state of “political revolution” — his words — against the people he
identifies as class enemies: Kochs, Waltons, Republicans, bankers, Wall Street,
Them – the numerically inferior Them. His views are totalitarian inasmuch as
there is no aspect of life that he believes to be beyond the reach of the
state, and they are deeply illiberal inasmuch as he is willing to jettison a
great deal of American liberalism — including freedom of speech — if doing so
means that he can stifle his enemies’ ability to participate in the political
process. He rejects John F. Kennedy’s insistence that “a rising tide lifts all
boats” — and he is willing to sink as many boats as is necessary in his crusade
against the reality that some people make more money than others.
Part of this is just a parting sentimental gesture from a
daft old man (Occupy Geritol!) — soupy feel-good identity politics for aging
McGovernites and dopey youngsters in Grateful Dead T-shirts. That an outlier of
a senator from Vermont wants to organize American politics as a permanent
domestic war on unpopular minorities is, while distasteful, probably not that
important.
That Herself made the same speech in Des Moines a day
later, on the other hand, is significant, and terrifying.
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