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By Jeff St. Clair
Where Trump blustered about “making America great again,” Sanders
actually presented himself, symbolically at least, as being from a time
when America thought of itself not only as great but also as good.
Sanders stood behind his podium like a kind of Old Testament embodiment
of the rapidly eroding Codes of the New Deal and the Great Society. In
an age of accelerating national anxiety, the metaphysical promise of
Bernie Sanders seemed to be that perhaps America could at least be humane.
But as the election proved, it’s a thin line between hope and hate. If
Trump acted like an existential pest, a confidence man manipulating the
basic impulses of a Hobbesian mob, Sanders offered, in his opaque
manner, the soothing notion that the rusty gears of a long-neglected
government machine could still be retooled to comfort and uplift. In
this way, he revealed that he really was an antiquated Democrat,
preaching socialism for a collapsing middle class.
Here then was the key to unlock the appeal of Bernie Sanders and his
ultimate failure. At one of those rare, epochal moments, when the
nation, preoccupied by the nature of its identity and obsessed with its
engagement with the world, seemed to be searching desperately for a new
logic to its existence, Sanders was punching a collective ticket back to
a past that never existed.
full:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/02/22/that-magic-feeling-the-strange-mystique-of-bernie-sanders-2/
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