Crazy Bernie

The historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. claimed in 1949 that progressive liberals had abandoned their proximity to socialist approaches in order to regain the centre, in the face of the political calamities brought about by the expression of Soviet practice on the ideological territory of the left. Bernie Sanders is accused of rummaging through the trunks of the past to recover a socialism that in the United States has never existed in practice. He defends himself by saying that he wants to be like Denmark and not like Cuba and Venezuela.

But the question is whether the voters, first the Democrats, prefer to be Danish and socialist, or American and prosperous, in a country that borders on full employment, whose economy has been growing for eight years with non-socialist governments of one sign or another, and whose stock market is on fire despite the coronavirus, even though for President Donald Trump, it is cheap. Sanders' landslide victory in Nevada has raised expectations of a possible victory for the left-most wing of the Democratic Party to confront Trump. There is much talk in Europe about the creation of a social movement to demand that opposes, win or lose, the alleged plundering of the rich. A sort of 'Coffee Party' which, just like the Tea Party in Obama's time, would lead the pressure of public opinion from the Left and counteract what the opponents couldn't counteract then, and it seems they can't counteract it now either: defeating the president electorally. 

The Tea Party, which was basically created to prevent tax increases, albeit with Americanist slogans, just as Sanders' movement is now created to raise taxes with progressive slogans, led the Republicans to political weakening and ideological radicalism. Some of the most incompetent ultra-conservative politicians of the decade led the Tea Party and then disappeared, leaving Donald Trump free to pursue the path of supremacist populism mobilised and willing to vote for him. Bernie Sanders' manoeuvre to incorporate marginal sectors of society, non-participating minorities, young people lost in ideological superficiality... is a risky bet that could lead to permanent mobilisation and the loss of the centrist and liberal identity of the Democrats, which was in the majority for decades and also before 1949. Crazy Bernie," as the president calls him, is like a new electoral toy for Trump. If you wind him up, he wants to break everything; but, if he gets up at the polls, he'll keep breaking everything from the junk cupboard.