By Jim Geraghty
Monday, February 24, 2020
Michael Brendan
Dougherty offers a qualified defense of Bernie Sanders’s three houses and
argues:
I don’t see a great deal of
‘capitalism for me, but not for thee’ behavior. Despite a few years of living
down and out, Sanders has had steady employment for 40 years. He has been in
federal office for a little over thirty years… He and his wife have pursued
jobs with good benefits and pensions — the kind of benefits they’d like to see
extended to all workers — they’ve lived modestly for their class, and Sanders
has been blessed with unusual longevity and energy.
MBD is partially right; Sanders’ behavior is more accurately
‘wealth for me, but not for thee.’
If you heard just about any Bernie Sanders speech from
2016, you heard his denouncing millionaires and billionaires and big banks —
or, if you prefer to imitate him, it was “thah millionayuhs and thah
billionayuhs and thah big banks.”
From his opening announcement speech, Sanders made it
clear that the growing number of millionaires in the United States was
“something profoundly wrong” as long as poverty persisted: “There is something
profoundly wrong when, in recent years, we have seen a proliferation of
millionaires and billionaires at the same time as millions of Americans work
longer hours for lower wages and we have the highest rate of childhood poverty
of any major country on earth.”
Bernie Sanders did not say that some millionaires and
billionaires and big banks were okay or good people. He didn’t acknowledge that
some millionaires and billionaires accumulated their wealth in fair ways, or
that they way they built their fortune helped societies. Sanders clearly
believed that millionaires and billionaires didn’t pay a “fair” share of taxes,
even though almost all of them paid what they were legally obligated to pay
under the law. There was no room for moral nuance in the Sanders message of
2016. The Guardian summarized it simply: “Bernie Sanders is waging war
on millionaires and billionaires, one gymnasium at a time.”
Sanders didn’t single out one group of multimillionaires,
such as hedge fund managers, or corporate chief executives, or Hollywood stars
or professional athletes. If Sanders ever acknowledged that some millionaires
and billionaires were good people, who supported many great charities, I missed
it. (In 1981, the newly-elected Mayor Sanders told the local United Way
fundraiser that “I
don’t believe in charities.”) The Sanders narrative of American life was
simple and clear: The villains of our national story were “millionaires and
billionaires and big banks.”
It turns out that becoming a national political figure
builds a huge potential audience for book sales, and driven primarily from
sales of books, Sanders and his wife earned $1.06 million in 2016 and $1.13
million in 2017. Sales cooled by 2018, and the couple earned “only” $561,000
that year.
Many noticed that once Sanders started running again in
the 2020 cycle, he dropped the millionaires from his mantra and started
lambasting only the “billionaires and the big banks.” Sanders appeared to
realize that he looked somewhat ridiculous denouncing millionaires while being
one.
In Bernie Sanders’ mind, he earned that money: “I wrote a
best-selling book. If you write a best-selling book, you can be a millionaire,
too.” (Credit where it’s due: Sanders did not use a ghostwriter, as many busy
elected officials do.) As far as Sanders is concerned, he deserved every last
penny of those revenues from book sales. No one, in his mind, was exploited,
shortchanged, or treated unfairly in those transactions — not his editor, or
the printers, or the promoters, or anyone else employed by the publisher.
Everyone was treated fairly, and Sanders received a hefty fortune that he
deserved.
But during the debate, Sanders argued that Mike Bloomberg
did not earn his fortune: “You know what, Mr. Bloomberg, it wasn’t you who made
all that money. Maybe your workers played some role in that, as well.” Many,
many people worked for Bloomberg over the years, under freely-negotiated
contracts, and were free to leave to work for other employers. If Bloomberg’s
workers felt they were underpaid, they could seek better deals elsewhere. But
in Sanders’s mind, Bloomberg’s fortune is at least partially undeserved;
somewhere along the line, he must have exploited some employee.
Regarding his houses, we’ve all seen Sanders denounce
other people’s conspicuous consumption, and again, doesn’t carve out any
discernable exceptions for a well-earned indulgence: “How many yachts do
billionaires need? How many cars do they need? Give us a break. You can’t have
it all.” Keep in mind, you don’t have to be a millionaire or billionaire to be
engaged in forms materialist consumerism that Sanders finds morally abhorrent:
“You don’t necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants or of 18
different pairs of sneakers when children are hungry in this country.”
Bernie Sanders is irked by the variety of deodorants at
your local convenience stores, or the diverse assortment of sneakers available
at Foot Locker or DSW. In his mind, you don’t need that, so you shouldn’t have
that. But he insists his owning three houses shouldn’t bother anyone. He
needs them.
During the debate, Sanders seemed to find the idea that
anyone could object to his three houses ridiculous.
SANDERS: Well, you’ll miss that I
work in Washington, house one.
BLOOMBERG: That’s the first problem.
SANDERS: Live in Burlington, house
two.
BLOOMBERG: That’s good.
SANDERS: And like thousands of
other Vermonters, I do have a summer camp. Forgive me for that.
By the way, that “summer camp” is four bedrooms, two
bathrooms, 500 feet lakeside with a dock, 1.13 acres, with a separate guest cottage.
What makes Sanders’s millionaire status and three houses
so insufferable is the senator’s adamant insistence that his wealth is earned
and that his summer home is a well-deserved luxury, but just about everyone
else’s are examples of “something profoundly wrong” with America, and
inherently exploitative, harsh, cruel, and unjust.
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