Misreading Bernie's blather
Col Mike walker, USMC (retired)
All,
The rise of Bernie Sanders is much more troublesome than most appreciate.
Yes, he is a guy who has no chance of becoming president and I dismiss him for what he is: an eighty-year old ideological refugee of the Soviet past; an appealingly willful man joyfully wallowing in the mud of a tragic era.
But at another level, that dismissal is a mistake.
We who have seen one-party socialism at work know it well. We know it is a stale, sterile and endlessly destructive system. We well know of the hundreds of millions of people who unjustly endured lifetimes of poverty and the millions more who perished under its bloody "enemy of the people -- enemy of the state" political madness.
Here is the danger: Many young Americans have no similar understanding.
Socialism collapsed twenty-five years ago denying them a frame of reference to gage the merits of our system.
The only political failures they are familiar with are ours and their concept of economic failure often begins with the Great Recession -- a failure of the democratic free market system.
Socialism, on the other hand, is new, novel and to them, untried.
In that experiential vacuum, socialism’s wicked past is swept clean and the young are presented with political-economic theory rich in simplistically false promises. Without an understanding of its past, it rises again as a dangerously seductive evil.
We are facing a horrible new version of Back to the Future and we ignore that reality at our own peril.
Mike
