Bernie Sanders: Nobody likes him?
- The Youth Activist Club
- Mar 25, 2020
- 3 min read
By Sreejita Patra
“You know, we have, I want to say, right on our side. We also have the fact that we have been taken advantage of for many, many years, and it’s not happening anymore. Not happening anymore.” In 2018, Donald Trump spoke to a crowd of union workers at Port of Duluth-Superior, Minnesota, a solidly blue state that Hillary Clinton won by less than a 2% margin. If a member of MSNBC or CNN were to be asked why the white working-class came out to vote for him in such large numbers in 2016, they would clutch their pearls and decree that sexism towards Hillary Clinton had caused this disaster to happen, that Trump had won because of working people’s ignorance and contempt for social progress.
Then why did Bernie Sanders win 118,135 (61.6%) votes in the Minnesotan 2016 Democratic primary, as opposed to Hillary Clinton’s 73,510 (38.4%) votes? He extracted the highest voter turnout in the state from both the Democrats and the Republicans, with Minnesotan Republican primary winner Marco Rubio winning only 41,126 (36.5%) votes from his party. It’s not as if Minnesota is a drastically left-leaning state, seeing as 46% of the state identifies as Democrat, and 39% of it is registered as Republican. 44.92% of these Minnesotans voted for Donald Trump. But a self-identified Democratic Socialist, that has been attacked as “too radical” by right and left corporate media pundits alike, won votes from both the left and right working class in the same place Trump almost had. He won by a landslide.
Vermont Senator Bernard Sanders has managed to galvanize an entire generation, almost single-handedly shifting the Democratic base and its discourse farther left than corporate centrists could have ever dreamt of doing in 30 years. So what does this candidate, who Hillary Clinton claimed in her documentary that “no one liked”, understand that she doesn’t? The answer is simple: He understands that Trump is not a great menace that appeared out of thin air. His sole aim was not to ruin political “civility” as we know it. Rather, Sanders knows that Trump is the result of something much more insidious: he is the product of the continual rot of the working class, a degradation that began with the Reagan years, and the abuse of the free market, and corporate lobbyists in politics. In an era of inflation after liberal hero Obama’s stock market bailouts, where two consecutive generations are entering a ravaged economy due to the Iraq war, the 2007 recession, and now the Coronavirus, mainstream media is dangerously out of credibility and touch.
The American people are tired of partisan politics and bipartisan corruption, tired of a media that only talks about a culture war and Russia. They want a Democrat or Republican president who will bring about economic stability and safety to their lives. That is why they want Bernie Sanders, who firmly said he “gets a little tired of Democrats afraid of big ideas”. And, in a shock to upper class liberals around the country, that is why those same Americans voted for Trump. Because he, at least, claims to not be afraid of big ideas. He also knows that Bernie Sanders is his only real challenger, and would decimate him for the fraud he is on the debate stage. A modern-day FDR candidate for the masses, Sanders is what Trump pretended to be: a populist beholden to no special interests besides that of the average American worker. Medicare-for-all, free college, a green planet-- these are increasingly prominent ideals supported by the majority of Americans. It’s time for the candidate who has the guts to get us there.
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