Bernie Sanders is a Fraud
Revolutionary politics are like playing with fire. They require a figurehead, who must be followed at all costs. Sure, they may hide behind an ideology, but the reality is that they are backing the person, not the ideology. Revolutionary politics, and those who subscribe to them, always need an enemy. It may start as billionaires and the powerful, but it always creeps. It moves to those who report negative stories about the movement. It moves to moderates, who are not as radical as those within “the movement.” They’ll attempt to frame enemies, and then paint opponents who share their values as those enemies. Revolutionary politics will paint everything as “the struggle,” glossing over details and plans of how to achieve their goals. Those who subscribe to these politics are uncompromising, they’re unwavering, and they’re zealous.
But in a revolution, you must first and foremost have allegiance to the revolutionary leader. They can do no wrong. Take their position, lock, stock, and barrel, and fight for them. The leader will never do the dirty work, they must stay clean, but everyone around them will work night and day to be in the mud to make sure that the mud stays off of the leader. They’ll do all of the dirty work, so that the glorious purpose can be achieved by their dear leader. It’s cult-like, it’s obsessive, and it’s exceptionally dangerous to democracy.
We’ve seen a movement like this before in politics. It wasn’t 2016, despite Trump’s vicious following of trolls, bots, and morons. He broke the cardinal rule, he got into it himself. There was no sympathy for Donald Trump. No, the movement we’ve seen like this before was in France in 1789. The Jacobin Revolution consumed the country with populist politics and a general struggle. It ended with their leader’s head in a basket, because they won their fight and didn’t know where to go. So the revolutionaries turned on their leader.
But we’re seeing a similar trend in 2020. Bernie Sanders doesn’t speak in specifics. For most of his career in American politics, he’s been the annoying voice in the back of the room. He’s a do-nothing, a lazy legislator with no motivation other than getting re-elected. A man who has passed a total of 7 bills in his 30 years, and five of them were re-naming post offices. He rushes into bills, he spurns support so he can claim to be first, and he doesn’t do the work required to build consensus and get things passed.
Yet despite these facts about his record, Bernie Sanders stands on stage and promises Medicare-for-all and student loan debt forgiveness. Despite having “written the damn bill,” for Medicare-for-all, Sanders has done nothing to attempt to build support around it in the Senate. It has never seen a vote. Despite supporting cancelling student loan debt, Bernie Sanders has done nothing in the last 5 years of being on the national stage to advance that cause beyond writing a bill and putting it in a drawer. It’s never even seen a vote, either. Despite his radical agenda for immigration, he backtracks on deportation moratoriums. Despite his radical stance on taxing Wall Street, he doesn’t want to end the unethical practices, he’s simply demanding a cut for the government. Despite his stances on the environment, he has yet to answer for his votes to keep open a toxic waste dump in Sierra Blanca, Texas. Despite his rhetoric against the NRA and his vociferous argument for gun reform, he voted against the Brady Bill five times and refused to hold gun manufacturers accountable for the crimes of those who use their product to commit mass murder.
Though, as he glides past these critical failures in government, it’s important to note why. His supporters gloss over them. They explain away and justify his actions and backtracking. They conveniently forget what he has supported in the past. We’ll get back to his supporters. But there’s one person I want to highlight in particular that’s troubling, among many others.
His name is Shaun King. If you haven’t heard about him, you’re probably luckier than most.
The prominent face of the early Black Lives Matter movement gained notoriety for calling out the racial injustices in Ferguson, MO. It was a worthy cause, but many questions about King have been raised since, largely by prominent black activists and voices like racial justice activist and former Baltimore mayoral candidate DeRay McKesson and Rewire News senior legal analyst Imani Gandy. They both lay out the receipts better than I ever could here.
But there is a pattern to his actions. He starts an idea, raises money, then disappears. He did it in Atlanta, as was called out by prominent activist Johnetta Elzie. He did it with Justice Together, a group founded to raise money for the mostly-decentralized Black Lives Matter movement, and was questioned by McKesson, who was a Justice Together board member, as to why he needed to raise money for a group that did its work mostly online. He blocked McKesson on Twitter for asking this question. Questions still remain about what he did with the money intended for BLM and the families of the victims of police brutality.
One time is a mistake. Twice is a concern. More than that is a pattern. He’s Harold Hill with a political megaphone. He’s a grifter and a con man, who uses “activism” to raise money and move on. His ties to the Sanders campaign are concerning to say the least.
Bernie’s wife is also a shady character who shouldn’t be anywhere near real power. She’s been his best political advisor forever, she was involved in a shady deal surrounding the now-closed Burlington College. Accounts vary of her time there, but it was her land deal that put the college on shaky ground. After leaving the college, as students who attended continue to pay student loan debts for their time at the defunct school, she and Bernie purchased a “summer camp” in upstate Vermont on Lake Champlain, as Bernie downplayed to Mayor Mike Bloomberg in the Nevada debate. It is, in fact, a $600,000 cabin. Bernie has long bristled about bringing his personal life into his political life, but the fact of the matter is that as the Sanders’ were purchasing the cabin and Jane got a $200,000 severance from Burlington College, students were still paying student loans from that school.
His supporters are another story completely. This isn’t just people being mean online, as they like to point out. They’re a dangerous contingent of radicals who believe that they are fighting a revolution to put Bernie Sanders into the Oval Office to fight for them. This is, of course, the lit fuse of the time bomb of Bernie’s dangerous revolutionary rhetoric. It is also a danger that has already faced people in power, with Sanders supporters shooting Congressmen who disagree with them. They have had the police called on them for harassing the chair of the Nevada DNC at home. His staff has harassed other candidates and their supporters online. It’s incidents of vandalism at competing candidates’ offices. It’s the constant smears of a candidate who shares their values. These people don’t care about progressive politics, they care about getting Bernie elected.
Just to illustrate that point, let’s look at his signature issue: Medicare-for-all.
Bernie has long been arguing for the program. I say arguing, I mean shouting into the wind. (See above, and how no votes have been taken.) When questioned, he offers no specifics or numbers or how to pay for it. He simply talks about how it’s a human right and bristles at any push back. His tax on Wall Street speculation would be an ineffective solution at best, and completely infeasible at worst. It’s borderline unpassable in its current state, and wouldn’t help anyone as it wouldn’t pass.
Then, like divine assistance, Elizabeth Warren jumped on the grenade for him. She provided a plan that offered all of the same benefits, with all of the details and numbers filled into the places Bernie wasn’t knowledgeable enough to fill them. She offered a plan that did not raise taxes on the middle class, and provided a path to get the bill passed. Bernie jumped all over it, he adopted her plan and recognized the work that went into it.
Except that’s not what happened at all. He continued on his path of not providing details, and instead of praising Warren’s plan as she does with so many of her competitors and former fellow candidates, he sent his attack dogs after her. He was the starting gun. He attacked her on it first. He dragged her plan, which was originally lauded by activists as a massive step for getting it done, without providing a payment plan of his own. Then, for the next three months, she would be smeared and battered by his team and supporters until her polling numbers dropped into the single digits.
Revolutionary politics. They’re conquest-minded, and demand that those who agree fall in line. No original thought, no new ideas. We follow the leader, and that’s the end of the discussion. Bernie’s Army of arrogant, entitled cosplay socialists attack and smear every other candidate who approaches their leftism, as they must be the only answer for those on the left, regardless of the validity of the claims they’re making. And Bernie doesn’t just allow it, he leads it. He hires people like Nina Turner, who insinuates that candidates like Warren are imposters and copies, despite the fact that Bernie’s team has been behind on every major plan and with less detail than Warren and her team have since the beginning of the race.
She’s Peter Pan, he is the shadow. He want to take the lead, but he lacks the details and knowledge to get it done.
When I was coming into the Minneapolis-St. Paul theater, speech, and debate community, I had a mentor named Keith Roberts. He was a teacher for 30 years. He served on school boards, and he was my speech coach in high school. I had a friend with whom I was very close. There were some red flags on how he treated women, and how he treated others when he was in shows with them. Keith told me plainly, “don’t put your hat too close to his if you want to make it around here. He has a reputation, and you’re better than that.”
He was right, and the words ring true in Democratic Party politics right now. We shouldn’t put our hat too close to Bernie Sanders. He’s a fraud, a liar, a backstabber, and a con man. He’s done nothing to further progressive ideas within an ideology that is fundamentally based on the idea of progress, which is dependent on getting things done. We can’t elect someone who will sit in a crisis and tell us what the problems are, we need someone with a plan to fix the problems. If he wants to continue to simply sit and talk about the problems, he should remain in the United States Senate, where inaction is excused as being within a body that has opposition. In the Presidency, where it would all fall on him and there is no one else to blame for his failures, Sanders’ revolution will soon come to him as he played with fire and didn’t have a plan to put it out.