A recent “warning” editorial in The Economist cautioned against a Sanders presidency, and the unicorn fart/pixie dust basis (my words, not the Economist’s) for his massive expansion of government largesse. I added a comment of concurrence, pointing out that Bernie’s promising Scandinavian social welfare results with Venezuelan policy ideas.
Of course, this being the open-to-the-world portion of Facebook, I was immediately denounced by the Bernie Bros. Several told me to “stop lying,” even though I detailed the disconnect between what Bernie plans to do and promises to achieve (for more on the Nordic model, go here). Several more replied, to me, and to others who argued the same points, that the Bernie-Venezuela link was absurd, deceitful, wrong, etc., and that those making it knew they were lying. One respondent even called me “Petey-poo,” as if doing so would somehow cause me to take my ball and go home.
One helpful fellow suggested I read up on Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) (I have, it’s garbage word salad that’s being used to justify expanding government recklessness). His apparent ignorance of the fact that MMT isn’t even being properly applied by Bernie and the rest of its proponents did little to dissuade that suggestion, of course.
All this and more, knotted together with a commercial-grade dough hook and left to rise/fester, elicits a particular conclusion: that Sanders’ supporters are engaged in their own cult of personality. They’ve found someone who is telling them what they want to hear, and have translated the fact that he’s been peddling the same junk for decades as proof of his sincerity, his goodness, his speaking truth to power, and so forth. They then took all that earnestness and converted it into some sort of “proof” that he has the answers, that he knows how to fix this terribly broken nation.
I’d posit that many or even most of these people roundly denounce Trump’s staunch supporters as blind to their guy’s faults and engaged in their own cult of personality, wholly oblivious to the obvious irony.
As I recently wrote, there is no way that Sanders can fund all his grandiose plans of universal health care, green new deal, and the like, merely by taxing the rich and taking their accumulated wealth. The Scandinavian model doesn’t do that, nor does MMT call for it, but those disconnects don’t matter to the Bernie Bros. The Scandinavian model does tax the bejeezus out of the working and middle classes, and tends to leave the billionaires alone (compared to both Bernie’s ideas and America’s current tax code).
Considered rationally, citizens of Sweden, Denmark, and Norway themselves pay for the benefits they receive from the government. Bernie isn’t telling his followers that reality. Instead, he tells them that he can give them free health care, free college, free this, and free that, simply by taking money from other people. This is either a lie or deliberate ignorance, and believing it is itself deliberate ignorance, given how readily available all this information is.
But, of course, politics isn’t about working within facts, history, empirical data, or what’s worked and hasn’t worked in the past, so much as it is about selling a tale in order to get elected. The funny thing is that Bernie Bros know this – their support for Bernie as the guy who’ll fix things reflects that – but don’t recognize that they are being sold the biggest whopper bill of goods in US history.
With apologies to Steve Winwood, Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker, and Ric Grech (no one remembers the bassist, of course), Bernie Bros are steeped in blind faith in a man whose ideas have been proven wrong, spectacularly so, time and time again.
Today is Super Tuesday, with fourteen states holding primaries. Biden won big in South Carolina on Saturday, bigger than expected, and many pundits who quietly feared that a Sanders nomination would make the election a cakewalk for Trump suddenly got loud. The whiff of sausage-making emerged since then, with Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar suddenly dropping out of the race ahead of today’s votes, and the gambling markets, which had Sanders running well ahead of Biden for the nomination, flipped around and now favor Biden.
Will the party rescue itself from the Bernie Bros’ blind faith and fervency? Will Bloomberg, who is now poised to be spoiler to Biden’s resurgence instead of white-knight-rescuer from a Bernie-pocalypse, remove himself from the picture? We’ll have many more tea leaves to read after tonight.
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Peter, just last October we were exchanging on the brain chemistry that is the subject of “Why We Believe in God(s): A Concise Guide to the Science of Faith.” I said that I agreed that much if not all of what we believe is governed by the balances of various chemicals in our brain. I further said that for me the key to knowing why we believe in religion as opposed to something else was probably determined by specific formulas or mixes of those chemicals, or some other combination of molecules and molecular structures in our brains.
At the time I think you were skeptical about the “as opposed to something else” part but I can’t recall where we had that exchange so I am not sure. On one thing I have evolved, however, and that is that our human capacity to form and carry narratives or stories that we can actively refer to or what I call frames of reference, is very limited, much more so than I had believed in my eight decades. I think that what you describe in this post is no different than a religion. It is a belief system in which Bernie has become his followers’ god.
Of course we all carry more than one frame of reference and its related narrative, starting with the professional and home frames but note how relatively narrow they really are. As long as we stick to discussing “objective” facts, behaviors and analyses within our narrow frames with likeminded people we are okay. The whole thing breaks down when we deal with people with different frames.
I had always thought that the realm of politics is where people discuss matters that have not yet been determined with any degree of certainty and are thus subject to different interpretations or risk aversion profiles. Now I realize that it also involves somehow getting people with entirely different frames and realities to come together on something for mutual advantage even if it means something entirely different to each.
If I am right this could have real nasty consequences for this country because we are on the path to multiple realities or narrow frames about whom we are as a nation. Moreover, the narrower the frame the easier will be for various gods to capture large enough groups of followers, and the larger number of them that will be running around challenging each other. Already the Democrat Party is a mess.
The politics of reconciliation between groups with totally different frames I believe is a quantum leap we really know little about. Look at Europe and how the EU is having difficulties staying together. There at least each group is still bounded by relatively smaller cultures. But remember that the EU is an artificial creation originally intended precisely to keep all of those different groups off each other’s throats.
I generally concur with everything you wrote. That said, I think that the increasingly global nature of our communications and information transfers causes us to reduce our consideration of how deeply-encoded tribalism affects behaviors, and specifically to this conversation, politics. This is why I supported Brexit, and why I believe the EU is a bad idea that’s ultimately going to break down.
Domestically, on the Republican side, I think this speaks to the rise of Trump (who, as I’ve noted before, is a symptom, not a cause). Trump’s big differentiator from the balance of the 2016 Republican field was a strong ‘commitment’ to a nativistic stance regarding immigration, and in my Internet travels, I’ve seen no issue that riles many on the Right up more than illegal immigration (I think the “illegal” part is a convenience – push past that, and many come out as “shut the borders, we don’t need more immigrants”). Facts or logic chains have little to no impact. I don’t know that this is about different “frames” so much as it is about the visceral trumping the intellectual.
On the Democratic side, I’m increasingly of a mind that the fracture between the “traditional” Dems and the Bernie socialists is the product of our educational system, and specifically the inexcusable failure to teach kids about the enormous damage done to the world by collectivists. I don’t see that getting better, because neither side of the divide sees much political capital in trying to break the intellectual monopoly in education.
“Facts or logic chains havelittle to no impact. I don’t know that this is about different ‘frames’ so muchas it is about the visceral trumping the intellectual.”
What I am trying to say is thatit is about both but it is not easy to articulate; I am not even sure Iunderstand it fully myself. Let me give it another try using the immigrationexample. First my assumptions: the Trump right still shares two common frames(forgive the generalizations) in the form of their deeper Christian beliefs ANDtheir patriotism and belief in the Constitution.
Notice that those two framesclash. I don’t remember my Christian teachings but giving shelter to strangersis a very important part of the ritual, at least in Catholicism. I thereforethink that the “illegal” part is not just a convenience but a fundamental partof the equation and is what allows the reaction on the right to be visceral. (Ijust figured that one out which I think goes to show how important it is to tryto go back to the frames that animate our thinking at that moment.)
On the left it is a bit moredifficult because they don’t have much in common among them other than theirlatest craze, whether it is Bernie’s socialism or the many new weird ideasabout sex. There is no question that they are a product of a broken educationalsystem but in a way it is bigger than that. I think it is a search for a largerbelief system to replace religions, and most specially a shared religion.
So, I’m back to religion as a setof common laws or rules that we can all agree on to guide our lives, particularlyour interpersonal relations without having to think intellectually about everythingwe do. I’m still going to convert you ;).
Notice that I could have just aseasily picked the Constitution as that set of common laws and rules. I didn’tbecause we have not been brought up that way. The Constitution was notinculcated into us in the same ritualistic ways that religion or its more domesticderivatives were as the answer to who we are, something which is common to allof us, or at least I believe it is (another assumption).