Rage Against the Machine

Camille Paglia nails the reason for the unlikely rise of Bernie-mania. It’s a strike against the “soulless juggernaut”:

“A vote for Bernie Sanders is a vote against the machine, the obscenely money-mad and soulless juggernaut that the Democratic Party has become. Perhaps there was a time, during the Hubert Humphrey era, when Democrats could claim to be populists, alive to the needs and concerns of working-class people. But the party has become the playground of white, upper-middle-class professionals with elite-school degrees and me-first values. These liberal poseurs mouth racial and ethnic platitudes, acquired like trophy kills at their p.c. campuses, but every word rings hollow, because it is based on condescension, a patronizing projection of victimhood onto those outside their privileged circle. There is no better example of this arrogant class bias than Wellesley grad Hillary Clinton lapsing into her mush-mouthed, Southern-fried dialect when addressing African-American audiences.

According to Paglia, “Sanders is no Communist, bent on seizing centralized control of business and industry.. Rather, “he is a democratic socialist in the Scandinavian mode, where social welfare is predicated on cooperation and shared sacrifice. Whether such a system can work in the vastly larger and more culturally diverse U.S. is another matter.”

She is realist enough to wonder about the practicality of his agenda: “The financial viability of his proposals would certainly be stringently vetted by Congress, which holds the purse strings of the national budget.” But she also realizes that policy isn’t driving the enthusiasm for Sanders: ” But Sanders’ attack on the crass excesses and unpunished ethical lapses of Wall Street is a great awakening call, at a time when the U.S. has disastrously lost its manufacturing base and when the super-rich have accumulated proportionally more wealth than at any time since the Gilded Age of the late 19th century.