In Search of the End of Bernie’s Campaign

[KoKo]

7. It was a fun read....a couple of snips...

I confess I can’t prove this, but I have a hunch that a lot of the mainstream, center-left media sort of wants Bernie to go away. Maybe it’s because we think he can’t win in November. Maybe we deem his policy proposals pipe dreams. Maybe we wish he’d quit dinging Hillary, because it helps the other side. Whatever the reason, while we spent a whole lot of time rubbing our hands together at the prospect of chaos in Cleveland, I haven’t seen many left-wing pundits give succor to Bernie’s call for a contested Democratic convention—even though his case is at least as legit, or maybe moreso in a strict delegate sense, as John Kasich’s or Ted Cruz’s ever was.

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I took a breath and reminded myself about the Kaldor-Hicks criterion, and how American consumers benefit from trade deals, and how capital will always move faster than labor so maybe these steelworkers ought to, like, suck it up and retrain to be home health care aides, and how, yes, Hillary has put forth some fairly sensible initiatives to help struggling manufacturing communities.

But a targeted tax incentive doesn’t stir the soul quite the same as an old man shrieking with righteous anger at the top of his lungs. And Bernie’s right: It is fucking outrageous. Our country is a vicious swamp of greed. It’s very hard to fault laid-off steelworkers for wanting to lynch the oligarchs and burn the whole goddamn system to the ground.