Bernie's Primary Setbacks Show 'Muricans Aren't Ready For Socialism

Bernie campaigning in Michigan yesterday.

Trump made it clear from the opening bell of this 2020 primary campaign that he relished Sen. Bernie Sanders as his Dem opponent and would use his socialism against him.  I believe the fear of this among huge swaths of Democratic voters is what mainly led to Bernie Sanders' drubbing in at least 4 states yesterday, including Michigan,  which he desperately needed.  That drubbing has now given Joe Biden effectively an insurmountable lead no matter what transpires in the Dem debate Sunday.

Why would so many millions of voters fear that Trump would succeed in trashing Bernie to a far thee well? Mainly because Trump is a clown, an entertainer who thrives on roping in victims to daily episodes of his "Trump show".  In such shows - thanks to a clueless media (that pays him way too much respect) - he is usually able to paint targets in whatever way he desires and essentially converts them into political pinatas.  This is what he'd do to Bernie, because most Americans are totally, seriously ignorant about democratic socialism. 

Add that to the fact he'd have an eager capitalist propaganda machine (such as FOX News, but also mainstream pundits) doing his work for him and we know Bernie wouldn't  stand a chance.  And it wouldn't even necessarily be to paint Bernie as a commie socialist. Recall, for example, a majority of Americans are so desperately ignorant they still think Hitler's national socialism is a true form of socialism like the democratic socialism of Bernie. Hence back in 2010 Tea baggers portrayed Elaine Kagan as a raving Hitlerite National Socialist when she was being considered by Obama for a Supreme Court position, e.g.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

And who can forget how even mainstream pundits and cartoonists have come after socialism, i.e.

So this is the sort of crap Sen. Sanders would face in any presidential campaign vs. Trump.  (And why, if he had any chance of winning, he'd have to use TV ads similar to what Bill Maher imaginatively developed for his Real Time audience,  e.g.

https://lastnighton.com/2020/02/03/bill-maher-new-rule-democrats/

The fake ad, "There will be mud" was televised along with Maher's  advice that the Ds needed to play as dirty as the Reeps.  The fake ad itself included a terrific deep fake of the fat slug Trump in an imitation of what we envisage the notorious pee tape to be like.  Yeah, Sanders would need to use lots of ads like this if he had any chance to beat the Dotard.  He'd need to prove that having Trump again was vastly worse than having a democratic socialist.

But as I've pointed out in previous posts, what Bernie calls democratic socialism (for him) is actually closer to "Rhine Capitalism".  This is a market economy  but with high taxes and large redistribution component.  Indeed this is what most of those branded "Reds" by the Right, including Bernie  and AOC, aspire to, as opposed to outright democratic socialism.  (Which I embrace). To this end they have suggested using the tax commons to support such things as single payer health care, which the present system can't allow based as it is on Pareto capitalism, see e.g.

Brane Space: Is the U.S. Economic System Pareto-Compromised?

  

In truth,  a primary litmus test for whether U.S.  citizens are anywhere near actual democratic socialism would be their degree of happiness. We already know from The World Happiness Report ('Americans are becoming more miserable and data backs it up', Denver Post, p. 8A, March 24, 2019) the U.S. places at No. 17, down 6 places (probably coinciding with Trump's ascension).  Meanwhile, the Scandinavian nations that top the happiness list all practice democratic socialism - a point about which  even the great Oprah had to be educated.  See e.g.

Oprah got perfect response from Danish woman  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5izFoyZkTI

 What is instructive to see in this video is the transformation of Winfrey's visage to one near panic and disbelief, before the women straighten her out on socialism, and the more relaxed, rational countenance after.  Oprah appeared to have a mental readjustment in the wake of her brief  interview, but sadly such  an awakening would not apply to most Americans.  They've been conditioned by the Right's PR tanks to be virulently anti-tax and also suffer from the rampant commie paranoia and hysteria that's existed since the 1950s and McCarthy's "UnAmerican" activities crusade.  I've dealt with this in previous posts, e.g.

Skewering 'Muricans' Myths About "Commies"

Also, taking away their existing health insurance and replacing it with something they have no idea of (Medicare for All) would not have worked. 

The lack of interest of the Young also contributed to Bernie's demise as he himself put it last night:

"Let me tell you the bad news, to be honest with you, young people vote at much lower rates than older people. That is the facts. I hope all of the old people vote, that’s great, but I want young people to vote at the same rates.”

And further, as we learned from a post election NY Times article::

"Through Tuesday’s voting, his theory of the election has not proven true. The surge of new voters in the Democratic primaries has featured mostly older people, moderate suburbanites and African-Americans disinclined to support his campaign."

So what happened to all the young voters, the Millennials and Gen Z's who were supposed to turn out?  Well, they clearly believed the effort wasn't worth their time or energy, or perhaps there were too many hurdles - such as obtaining the  right IDs to be able to vote.  But what most of us (older voters) don't want to hear now is any more whining (whigning?) from the young uns about their student debt, oldsters getting all the benefits, and so on.  If you don't vote, don't participate, you don't get to complain - or say "OK, Boomer."

But maybe most of the young  were also not as enamored of socialism as Bernie led us to believe.  Or,  in  the most  benign take, maybe they believe Bernie is simply too old to be its standard bearer.

See  Also:

2020 Elections | Bernie Sanders | Joe Biden

Biden and Bernie, the Democrats' Binary Choice for Our Future

And:

Bill Blum

2020 Elections | Joe Biden

The Democratic Party Surrenders to Nostalgia

And:

2020 Elections | Bernie Sanders

'In a Dark Time, the Eye Begins to See': The 2020 Bernie Campaign Represents a Fight That Must Continue

• Biden tells gun nut that he’s 'full of shit.' America (objectively) agrees 

And:

2020 Elections | Joe Biden

Blowing in the Whirlwind: As Ye Sow, Joe Shall Ye Reap

Excerpt:

"So yes, I think it’s very possible for Biden to beat Trump. Because for so many people, it doesn’t matter what Biden says or doesn’t say, how incoherent he is, how many outright lies he tells, how atrocious his record is or how diligently he is serving the domineering elites who have blighted our society to such a degree. It doesn't matter that he has made it clear that he is not going to do anything about climate change, student debt, the healthcare crisis, rampant militarism, police brutality, economic injustice, low pay, ICE, and on and on. What matters that he is a fresh screen where our most unworthy fears and unrealistic hopes can be projected, for a time; where we can forget, for a time, the massive disasters that are looming ahead and pretend that things can somehow go back to “normal.”

The Younger Demographic Abandons Religion - It's About Time!

As I've noted in earlier blog posts, religion is distinct from the belief in a transcendent Being. While the endless search for the latter is likely rooted in the brain, i.e. the brain’s orientation and association area(OAA) ,  see e.g. http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2014/01/peeling-back-layers-of-religious-brain.html

religions are cultural-social creations, arising from particular ethnicities and geography.

That is, while the brain and OAA engender the God-concepts which we embrace, these concepts are not dependent on having a religion.


Religion - by contrast- is an entirely human artifact generally contrived for the purpose of control of a population via mind viruses.  Religion has been described as a "reaction to the experience of the transcendent" - and this may carry more truth than all the religious books one could ever read in a lifetime. It means that at some phase religion short circuits itself by inveighing against the natural instinct for spiritual self-discovery in most humans. It means that religion's warp and woof is to filter out the transcendent so its power implications are dispersed into assorted secondary human channels or  "media" (e.g. priests, popes, rabbis, ministers etc.)  as opposed to being allocated to the individual to exercise on his own. (Which would allow him to become too much like the ancient Gnostics).

Thus, religion FEARS too much self-autonomy, independent thought and questioning which is why it often retains an absolutist stance regarding the nature of the transcendent- and has historically held out assorted punishments when it beholds any transgressions of concept, or "belief", i.e. for heretics:















Heretics undergo torture at the hands of the Inquisition, for their rejection of basic Catholic tenets.

The mind virus basis for most religions (except the impersonal) was first articulated by biochemist Jacque Monod in his book Chance and Necessity. On page 155 Monod observes:

"The human group upon which a given idea confers greater cohesiveness, greater ambition and greater self-confidence thereby receives from it an added power to expand which will ensure the promotion of the idea itself. Its promotion value' bears no relation to the amount of objective truth the idea may contain."

He goes on to note (ibid.):

"The might of the powerful armament provided by a religious ideology for a society does not lie in its structure, but in the fact that if this structure is accepted, that it gains command".

And indeed, we already detect this playing out on the national stage as a group of powerful religious interests, as embodied in 'Hobby Lobby' - seeks to have certain contraceptive provisions in the ACA overturned by the Supreme Court so that they do not have to comply. As Justice Elaine Kagan noted in one of her ripostes, "What next? Will another religion choose to reject vaccinations? Another choose to reject sex education? Where does it end?"

But this is the point given that the most powerful and insidious memes- mind viruses are those dedicated to the spread of religious beliefs.  The most pervasive as well as pernicious are those that hijack political or social power  using what Monod, for example, calls their innate "infectious power", or how easily they are spread.  (One reason one must always be wary of proselytizers in any form! They all clearly seek to enhance the "propagation value" of the virus)

All of this is why it's so gratifying to now learn that of those aged 18 to 35, three in 10 say they are not affiliated with any religion, while only half are “absolutely certain” a god exists. These are at or near the highest levels of religious disaffiliation recorded for any generation in the 25 years the Pew Research Center has been polling on these topics.

In fact, the numbers could be even more favorable, and they might be closer to 4 in 10 unaffiliated with a religion. Why? A clue is provided by columnist Tina Dupuy, who  observes. “When it comes to self-reporting religious devotion Americans cannot be trusted. We under-estimate our calories, over-state our height, under-report our weight and when it comes to piety—we lie like a prayer rug.”

So 'Muricans are too chicken shit to divulge their real leanings and predilections in many polls- namely those bearing ultra-sensitive topics like weight, religious belief etc.. So what's new?

Anyway, even more satisfying is that e very piece of social data suggests that those who favor faith and superstition over fact-based evidence will become the minority in this country by or before the end of this century. In fact, the number of Americans who do not believe in a deity doubled in the last decade of the previous century according to both the census of 2004 and the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) of 2008, with religious non-belief in the U.S. rising from 8.2 percent in 1990 to 14.2 percent in 2001. In 2013, that number is now above 16 percent.

If current trends continue, the crossing point, whereby atheists, agnostics, and “nones” equals the number of Christians in this country, will be in the year 2062. All of which is terrific, except that I will likely not be around to see it.

How did this turnaround from specious religious faith happen? Perhaps many reasons, including the emergence of the "New" atheists prepared to take on religionist bullies where and when they see fit - as opposed to cowering. And also the overreach of the religious politicos - as in the 2012 election with assorted nitwits talking about "legitimate rape" and other nonsense.

But it likely began even earlier. Political scientists Robert Putman and David Campbell, the authors of American Grace, argue that the Christian Right’s politicization of faith in the 1990s turned younger, socially liberal Christians away from churches, even as conservatives became more zealous. “While the Republican base has become ever more committed to mixing religion and politics, the rest of the country has been moving in the opposite direction.”

Nowhere is this being played out more than in the arena of abortion and contraception, and one can see again how the religious will likely overplay they their hand with this new round at the Supreme Court. Whichever way the Court rules, the non-affiliated demographic is likely to grow and that is a good and healthy thing for this nation!