Mac-7
Diamond Member
- Oct 9, 2019
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A wise man once advised, judge what people do, not what they sayI'll tell you what. You give me any quote citing Bernie that the US needs to emulate Soviet Russia. I'll look for quotes of him saying we need to take lessons from other Western Democracies. Let's see who can find the most?Bernie is not a sweden or a norway worshiperI think it's a direct result of the simple fact that in the US in general and on the right in particular Socialism, Communism... even Fascism get conflated. To the point that nobody knows what they mean....Americans. That’s a problem.
And an article from of all places...
Slate ^ | February 24, 2020 | William Saletan
For the past month, the centrist Democrats running against Sen. Bernie Sanders have begged Democratic voters not to nominate him. Former Vice President Joe Biden, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and Sen. Amy Klobuchar have argued that putting a socialist atop the ticket would help President Donald Trump and hurt Democratic candidates down the ballot. These warnings are well-founded, but they haven’t worked. Sanders has won the popular vote in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada.
Why, despite the warnings, is Sanders still winning? One reason is that a lot of people like him and what he stands for. Another reason is that other candidates are splitting the votes of moderate Democrats, leaving him with a plurality on the left. But there’s a third reason: Socialism doesn’t freak out Democratic voters the way it freaks out other Americans. On this subject, Democrats are very different not just from Republicans, but also from independents, who represent about 40 percent of Americans and about 30 percent of the electorate. Socialism is a loser among independents, and this makes it a liability in a general election. But Democrats don’t feel an aversion to socialism. So perhaps they don’t see the extent of the political danger.
The detachment starts with Sanders voters. In a September poll taken by Data for Progress, 37 percent of them identified themselves not as progressives or liberals, but as socialists, democratic socialists, or communists. Nearly all of them endorsed democratic socialism. In a January NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, most Sanders voters endorsed socialism even without the word “democratic” in front of it. Only 4 percent of them opposed it. These people aren’t likely to buy the argument that nominating a socialist is an unnecessary risk. For them, electing a socialist is the ballgame.
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There's a very interesting novel written in 1888 by Edward Bellamy regarding the perfect (socialist) Utopian world in the year 2000.
In the 1930s, it was declared by a number of magazines to be the most important novel of the previous 50 years.
Check out the plot summary in the Wikipedia article below.
Looking Backward (Wikipedia)
In a Gallup poll taken last month, Democrats didn’t differ much from independents in their stated willingness to vote for a black, female, gay, or atheist presidential nominee. For a Muslim nominee, the gap was more then 30 net percentage points. For a socialist, it was more than 60 points.
So the right opposes it, even when what Bernie is suggesting is simply a form of Social Democracy like in Europe, which is Capitalism with a strong social safety net. they condemn it as Communism which it surely isn't.
The left supports it even going as far supporting Communism which I'm pretty sure those that say they support it know nothing about.
From a political standpoint keeping it nice, a vague makes sense. It's much easier to attack somebody for being Communist than having to explain to people why it's not in their best interest to have access to healthcare regardless of how rich you are. Or to explain why it is in their best interest to have a healthcare system that makes you pay twice as much for worse results compared to other Western nations. Or to explain why it makes sense to pay back loans for 20 years to go to college.
This is the conundrum for Bernie. How do you explain to people what you actually represent when there's a huge echo chamber misrepresenting what you stand for?
when he traveled abroad he took his honeymoon in moscow not copenhagen
bernie went to moscow not copenhagen because thats where his mind and his heart were