(I Would Rather Not Go) Back to the Old House

Bernie Sanders is running as a Democrat even though he's only really been one since he decided to run for president. Normally this would cause skepticism or even outrage, but when you're competing in a race that includes a Republican frontrunner who thought of himself as a Democrat until five years ago, when he realized the level of blind devotion he could garner just by being willing to say the dumbest shit to the dumbest people. This isn't really "conservatism" as much as it's "populism," something the Founding Fathers took a good hard look at and thought: "Let's temper the wild and fickle moods of the masses with some mechanisms that provide a healthy, thoughtful distance in governance, like a representative Congress and the Electoral College. Also, if they get too unruly, let's sometimes shoot them."

Bernie calls himself a socialist, but is he really? I don't think he's really advocating for the nationalization of most (or really any) of the sectors of our economy, like manufacturing or transportation. Mostly he thinks things should be pretty similar to how they are, just that when we talk about taxes, we should be unafraid of thinking of it as redistribution of wealth and, if we're going to go through the trouble for making laws about regulation in banking or whatever, we should really really mean it. He's less of an outright socialist and more of a closet Norwegian.

But look, these are labels that, in the end, won't really matter since the conventional wisdom right now is that both Bernie and Donald Trump are going to end up, one way or another, not being the nominees of the parties they each really only joined on the days they announced their candidacies.

As different as their movements are, I can see how they're somewhat related. After Sanders' upset win in Michigan this week he showed his enduring appeal to the youngest demographics of voters, most of whom prefer socialism as an ideal to unadulterated capitalism. These are people born after the Cold War, who grew up watching their parents struggle in the late-2000s economic meltdown caused by greed and a lack of financial regulation. The last time we swung toward socialism, it was approved by the voters traumatized by the Great Depression. All that gave us was Social Security and the government guaranteeing the banks. OK, so both of those are sort of giant problems now,* but at the time, they were the half-measures that defused the social bomb at the heart of 19th century pure capitalism that Marx was the first (or at least loudest) to drone on and on and on about. Communism still exists, but only as a threat to undergraduates.

And the Trump voters, they were blindsided by the same economic catastrophe, but have had their response to it hemmed in and honed, groomed really by post-Reagan "conservative" ideology centered around American exceptionalism and the prosperity gospel, all messily fused together by the fire of 9/11 (because they skew older and thus remember), but made irreconcilable with the government establishment by the objective failures like Hurricane Katrina and, like I said, the 2008-ish Great Recession. The result is a betrayed, paranoid, rudderless mob of angry-to-violent self-disenfranchised weirdos and fringe-dwellers driving each other in their aimless rage to express the worst aspects of the American psyche, on the road to victory or a conflagration so white-hot intense it leaves everything, all of us, in ashes.

Doesn't help that the only alternative the "establishment" has to offer is the smackable face of Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, whose only qualification as far as I can tell is that at some point, he was able to successfully use the Zoltar machine to make himself big.

And on the other side, Option A seems to be Hillary, for whom I will likely vote, but less as an act of enthusiasm for her** than prophylaxis against a world where Ted Cruz is president and we all slowly die of embarrassment.

---

*The former running into some long-term funding questions and the latter because of the way it was used to propagate acts of objective evil.

**I'm sure I'll get there, but it's just that right now, I'm spending all my political energy convincing myself that the proto-fascist nature of Trump rallies are probably exaggerated and I shouldn't worry so much. Who's got time for anything else?