"Sinclair was an outspoken socialist and ran unsuccessfully...

[NNadir]

Last edited Sat Mar 12, 2016, 09:34 AM - Edit history (1)

...for Congress as a nominee from the Socialist Party. He was also the Democratic Party candidate for Governor of California during the Great Depression, but was defeated in the 1934 elections."

This makes him a little different than Bernie Sanders of course, since Sanders ran as a socialist and won. Whether he will become the Democratic candidate for President and whether he will win, is entirely another question.

The quote above, of course, is only from Wikipedia, the wonderful but sometimes suspect source on which we have all come to depend, the page devoted to Upton Sinclair.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upton_SinclairWikipedia, Upton Sinclair.

I've been thinking about Sinclair a lot lately, because I attend the wonderful "Science on Saturday" lectures at the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab with my family, and whenever fusion energy is discussed there vis a vis fission energy - I'm a huge supporter of fission energy, I am reminded often when they bad mouth fission over there of what may be Sinclair's most famous remark:

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"

It occurs to me that Sinclair is relevant to present times in a disturbing way. Plus ca change...

I am old man, a tired old man, an aging baby boomer who is deeply distressed about the world my generation is leaving behind, ashamed of our illusions and our delusions that have brought the planet to a kind of abyss whose depth cannot be measured.

As far as this election goes, I feel like I'm watching a train wreck of the worst sort, an election dominated by petulance, sloppy thinking, innuendo, and yes, a healthy dollop of old fashioned straight up grotesque racism.

I'm sure that some brittle people will vilify me for saying as much, but I am terrified at the thought that the next President of the United States will be anyone but Ms. Clinton. I'm not sure that Ms. Clinton is the greatest person on earth; I'm not sure I even like her; I certainly do not agree with everything she has said or done.

But she's the only grown up on the stage right now. The only one.

Good luck to the United States, but even more importantly, good luck to the world, and, as we hurtle out of control to the 2016 election, I wish all future generations that they will survive what we have done.

[HDavis]

1. I agree,

NNadir I agree with you 100%!!!!!!!!!!

[Recursion]

2. WJ Bryan is probably a better comparison for Sanders than Debs or Sinclair

(Subtract the religious lunacy, of course)

[NNadir]

3. Bryan lost. Of course McKinley wasn't quite Donald Trump.

From the tenor of the conversation here however I fully expect to hear Hillary is the same as Trump.

I heard very much the same in the year 2000, about a fellow named Al Gore. I would imagine that the families of the dead in Iraq might disagree as to whether the statement of equivalence in that case was a fair representation.

I really don't think that Mr. Sanders is anyone other than himself, and I respect his honesty to the extent that he claimed he wished to run a positive campaign, but from what I see here many of his supporters are making the world safer for the likes of Trump. It's almost uniformly negative.

That's very disturbing to me. To my thinking, if Sanders proves to be the sort of example that Bryan was, it would be far more tragic than even 2000, and 2000 was one of the most tragic political events of my lifetime, and I'm not young.

[Bestuserever]

4. I don't think Socialism had as much of a stigma until the Russian Revolution