Mindful
Diamond Member
- Banned
- #1
The Vermont Senator has squandered left-wing populism for phoney anti-capitalism.
A couple of days before settling down to read Bernie Sanders’ new book, I saw one of those video clips of Jeffrey Marsh, the crazy they / them fella off TikTok. ‘It’s okay to be angry’, Marsh said, in his typically creepy style, like the lovechild of Norman Bates and Oprah Winfrey. And now here was Bernie, everyone’s favourite avuncular socialist, the mitten-wearing moral conscience of millennials the Western world over, also telling me it’s okay to be angry. It’s Okay To Be Angry About Capitalism, his new book is called. Would this be yet more TikTok-level therapy, only delivered by a he / him with principles rather than a they / them with issues? Sadly, yes, it kind of is.
Bernie’s tome feels like a self-help book for upwardly mobile leftists. It’s a book whose aim is not so much to radically change Western society as to flatter and inflame the moral revulsion that graduate radicals feel towards ‘dog-eat-dog’ capitalism. Or ‘vicious dog-eat-dog’ capitalism, as Bernie brands it. Anyone hoping for cool, Marx-style analysis of the social relations that pertain under capitalism will be sorely disappointed. This is less a study of the capitalist mode of production and its contradictory consequences and more an explosion of East Coast abhorrence at the ‘uncontrollable greed’ and ‘grossly immoral’ behaviour of the captains of our ‘uber-capitalist’ system who ‘lie, cheat, bribe and steal’ to make a buck. Sanders seems less interested in getting the working classes revolting than in massaging the middle classes’ belief that the hyper-rich are revolting people.
Bernie’s brimstone is relentless. It’s anti-capitalism as church sermon. He slams the ‘greed, corruption and rampant self-interest’ of the madly wealthy.
A couple of days before settling down to read Bernie Sanders’ new book, I saw one of those video clips of Jeffrey Marsh, the crazy they / them fella off TikTok. ‘It’s okay to be angry’, Marsh said, in his typically creepy style, like the lovechild of Norman Bates and Oprah Winfrey. And now here was Bernie, everyone’s favourite avuncular socialist, the mitten-wearing moral conscience of millennials the Western world over, also telling me it’s okay to be angry. It’s Okay To Be Angry About Capitalism, his new book is called. Would this be yet more TikTok-level therapy, only delivered by a he / him with principles rather than a they / them with issues? Sadly, yes, it kind of is.
Bernie’s tome feels like a self-help book for upwardly mobile leftists. It’s a book whose aim is not so much to radically change Western society as to flatter and inflame the moral revulsion that graduate radicals feel towards ‘dog-eat-dog’ capitalism. Or ‘vicious dog-eat-dog’ capitalism, as Bernie brands it. Anyone hoping for cool, Marx-style analysis of the social relations that pertain under capitalism will be sorely disappointed. This is less a study of the capitalist mode of production and its contradictory consequences and more an explosion of East Coast abhorrence at the ‘uncontrollable greed’ and ‘grossly immoral’ behaviour of the captains of our ‘uber-capitalist’ system who ‘lie, cheat, bribe and steal’ to make a buck. Sanders seems less interested in getting the working classes revolting than in massaging the middle classes’ belief that the hyper-rich are revolting people.
Bernie’s brimstone is relentless. It’s anti-capitalism as church sermon. He slams the ‘greed, corruption and rampant self-interest’ of the madly wealthy.
It’s okay to be angry about Bernie Sanders
The Vermont Senator has squandered left-wing populism for phoney anti-capitalism.
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