Bernie Sanders’s Forty-Year-Old Idea. The New Yorker (HRC GROUP) [View all]

[Her Sister]

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/bernie-sanderss-forty-year-old-idea

Last paragraphs:

Almost across the board, Europe’s Social Democratic parties have lost ground in recent years. Some say that this is precisely because they abandoned their core commitment to the kind of egalitarian society that Sanders envisions. But it’s also true that the parties were formed in a different era, when issues like immigration and free trade were not so pressing and divisive. Whereas Sanders opposes the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership being negotiated between the U.S. and the European Union, saying that it’s bad for American workers, European Social Democrats have defended it on the ground that their countries need to be competitive. And while Sanders has vowed that, as President, he would sign an executive order to grant illegal immigrants in the U.S. a path to citizenship, Europe’s Social Democratic parties are fractured by the immigration issue. The Dutch party has been steadily losing voters to Geert Wilders, the country’s Trump-like, anti-Muslim populist politician (who even has his own funny hairdo).

Sanders sometimes refers specifically to Europe’s Social Democratic parties, but just as often he calls himself a “democratic socialist,” which is something else entirely. As an old lefty, he surely knows the difference. The manipulation of leftist terminology allows him to pick and choose elements that suit a given moment on the campaign trail. Socialism is an ideology of dramatic change; young people respond to the rhetoric of “revolution,” and aren’t scared away by “socialism” in itself (though they aren’t nearly as excited about the idea of redistribution of wealth). Yet Sanders has no intention of trying to engineer a state takeover of the means of production. What he seems to want is a return to the era of his own youth, when his ideas were shaped by Europe’s Social Democrats in their heyday, politicians who dreamed of a society that was both egalitarian and capitalistic, and who erected vast social-welfare states. In Europe itself, those days are gone, while rampant inequality in the heartland of capitalism has fuelled Sanders’s run. Says Cas Mudde: “I think it’s ironic that the last real Social Democrat would be in the United States.”