Yesterday, Bernie Sanders endorsed Hillary Clinton as the Democratic candidate for the presidency. In doing so, he disappointed many followers and surprised some who might have believed his five week old vow to fight until the convention. We shouldn’t’ be surprised, and his loyalists should have expected this.
Sanders is a socialist. Or, if we are to use the soft-peddled, Madison Avenue terminology, he’s a democratic socialist. Nomenclating shenanigans aside, Sanders is a statist. He believes that government is the preferred means for addressing societal problems, whether they be real, imagined, or fabricated. This means he embraces authoritarianism and hierarchical structure. Some people of this bent want to be at the top, others want someone they admire at the top, and still others don’t care as long as they don’t have to be responsible for anything. All statists, however, embrace the idea of statist structure itself, so we should expect that, ultimately, they subordinate themselves to it.
The spin machines cranked into full gear, of course. The first narrative is that Trump is so awful that he must be stopped no matter what. The second is that Sanders had promised all along to fall in line once the process was complete. The third, in a rather “lemonade from lemons” take over at the Washington Post, is that Bernie took a victory lap after getting Clinton to embrace his anti-Wall-Street platform.
Lets consider these. First – if Bernie was a man of principle, which some considered his chief selling point, his embrace of the practical, coming after a year and a half of Clinton-bashing, is a very odd thing. In comparison, Ron Paul, also embraced as man of principle, did not fall in line and endorse his party’s eventual nominee in 2012. A man of principle would honor his promises, stick to his ideals and refuse to endorse someone he deems unfit for the presidency, even if he thinks the alternative would be worse. Second – see First. Third – Clinton’s free pass from James Comey has reinforced her “above-the-law” invulnerability, and it’s laughable to think that the promises she’s making to Sanders today will be honored should she win the presidency. Why would she do anything other than what she wants to do? Why would anyone believe that Clinton will be tough on Wall Street when Wall Street is pouring millions into her campaign coffers, when she and her husband made a substantial chunk of their [$153 million] in speaking fees from Wall Street, the big banks, and Corporate America? The willful blindness is astonishing.
This sordid episode is a teachable moment. There’s a long list of reasons that statism hasn’t worked and cannot work. In this instance, we can see how principle gets subordinated to submission to the state. Bernie could have chosen to hold to his beliefs, to continue his narrative that Clinton is the antithesis of what he thinks a leader should be and do, and lay groundwork for future principled challenges to the cronyists and sell-outs. Instead, he exacted some meaningless promises and fell in line. Principle knuckled under to power.
Geneticist Richard Dawkins noted that biological altruism is susceptible to subversion from within. Statism faces a similar susceptibility. Those with noble intent and purpose tend to lose out those with selfish motives, and a statist system creates much greater opportunity for reward for the selfish than a small-government system does. Even if a great, noble and wise leader manages to reach the pinnacle of power, and even if this leader somehow manages to avoid being corrupted by power, those who follow are far more likely to leverage the extensive power apparatus that statism creates to their own benefit and to the detriment of the people. History provides countless examples of this pitfall and no examples of its avoidance.
Bernie’s capitulation and reversal of his pledge to fight, a mere two weeks before the Democratic National Convention, tells us (again) that, no matter how lofty their promises and no matter how principled their appearance, statists will always disappoint us. Big government will never fulfill the promises that it makes and the hopes that people assign it. Just as Obama has failed to deliver on the grand vision he sold, Sanders betrayed those who embraced him for his principles. He turned out to be just another statist politician, selling snake oil and selling out.
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