September 4, 2015
Weekend with Bernie:
Leftist Demagogue
Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton’s main opponent
on the Democratic side of Campaign 2016, is
a demagogue.
My Democratic friends balk at this, contending
the term better applies to Donald Trump. But,
no matter how different these men may be, their
differences don’t mean that only one of them
can be a demagogue.
Perhaps demagogues of very different stripes.
First, definitions.
A demagogue (from French “demagogue,”
derived from the Greek “demos,” for “people”)
is, my dictionary says, a political leader in
a democracy who appeals to the emotions,
fears, prejudices, and ignorance of the lower
socioeconomic classes in order to gain power.
The charge makes sense because Senator
Sanders has made wealth and income inequality his main issue, and because he relentlessly attacks higher-income Americans as a source of
America’s current woes — whose wealth Sanders targets as the cure (provided it goes through his hands, first).
True, he appeals mostly to college-educated middle-class folks and bohos. But he uses the code-phrase “everyday working Americans” as a
wedge, and the poor as an innocent shield, to advance what are, in fact, elitist solutions.
Like most self-professed socialists the Senator is only faux-prole, workingman manqué. Intellectuals, collegians and government workers have
long dominated the socialist movement.
Though Sanders rightly attacks the plutocracy,
he never attacks the government half of the
plutocrats’ power structure. Never admits that
unions are plutocratic in nature, too.
Instead, he appeals to the emotions, fears,
prejudice and ignorance of those who, against
all evidence, see more government only as a
solution and never as a problem.
Par for the socialist course. That, remember, is
a word Sanders chose.
For its historic demagogic appeal.
Socialist demagogues play on our. . .
1.
Emotions: Socialism has always been a philosophy of hatred of business, free
markets, the rich, and private property.
2.
Fear: The rich “buy” our elections. Now, specifically “the Kochs” do the
buying. Sanders’s solution is to essentially repeal the First Amendment.
3.
Prejudice: It’s always “the rich” and “the one percent” — as if all are alike, and
there is no diversity in how fortunes are made.
4.
Ignorance: Ask a socialist to define marginal productivity and consumer surplus, or explain the idea of mutual benefit through trade. They are belligerently
opposed to economic wisdom, and always have been.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
On the web at: thisIsCommonSense.com
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