Indeed, Running Sanders Would Be Insane

Allow me to quote heavily from an article by Jonathan Chait that I truly felt puts  out the very best case against Bernie Sanders being the Democrat nominee. Chait may be a liberal, but he goes far more into depth on this than I ever could and provides some very compelling arguments that deserve to be shared far & wide:

In the field of political forecasting, almost nothing is a matter of certainty, and almost everything is a matter of probability. If Democrats nominate Bernie Sanders — who currently leads the field in Iowa and New Hampshire, and appears to be consolidating support among the party’s progressive wing, while its moderates remain splintered — his prospects against Donald Trump in November would be far from hopeless. Polarization has given any major party nominee a high enough floor of support that the term “unelectable” has no real place in the discussion. What’s more, every candidate in the race brings a suite of their own liabilities Trump could exploit.

That said, the totality of the evidence suggests Sanders is an extremely, perhaps uniquely, risky nominee. His vulnerabilities are enormous and untested. No party nomination, with the possible exception of Barry Goldwater in 1964, has put forth a presidential nominee with the level of downside risk exposure as a Sanders-led ticket would bring. To nominate Sanders would be insane.

Sanders has gleefully discarded the party’s conventional wisdom that it has to pick and choose where to push public opinion leftward, adopting a comprehensive left-wing agenda, some of which is popular, and some of which is decidedly not. Positions in the latter category include replacing all private health insurance with a government plan, banning fracking, letting prisoners vote, decriminalizing the border, giving free health care to undocumented immigrants, and eliminating ICE. (I am only listing Sanders positions that are intensely unpopular. I am not including positions, like national rent control and phasing out all nuclear energy, that I consider ill-advised but which probably won’t harm him much with voters.)

Not every one of these unpopular stances is unique to Sanders. Some have won the endorsement of rival candidates, and many of them have been endorsed by Elizabeth Warren, Sanders’s closest rival. In fact, Sanders seem to have overtaken Warren in part because she spent most of 2019 closing the ideological gap between the two candidates, which made Democratic Party elites justifiably skeptical about her electability, thereby kneecapping her viability as a trans-factional candidate. Sanders probably wasn’t trying to undermine Warren by luring her into adopting all his policies, but it has worked out quite well for him, and poorly for her.

But Warren at least tries to couch her positions in a framework of reforming and revitalizing capitalism that is intended to reassure ideologically skeptical voters. Sanders combines unpopular program specifics in the unpopular packaging of “socialism.” The socialist label has grown less unpopular, a trend that has attracted so much media attention that many people have gotten the impression “socialism” is actually popular, which is absolutely not the case.

Compounding those vulnerabilities is a long history of radical associations. Sanders campaigned for the Socialist Workers’ Party and praised communist regimes. Obviously, Republicans call every Democratic nominee a “socialist.” But it’s one thing to have the label thrown at you by the opposition, another for it to be embraced willingly, and yet another thing altogether to have a web of creepy associations that make it child’s play for the opposition to paint your program as radical and dangerous. Viewing these attacks in isolation, and asking whether voters will care about Bernie’s views on the Cold War, misses the way they will be used as a stand-in to discredit his entire worldview. Nobody “cared” how Michael Dukakis looked in a tank, and probably not many voters cared about Mitt Romney’s dismissive remarks about the 47 percent, but both reinforced larger attack narratives. Vintage video of Bernie palling around with Soviet communists will make for an almost insultingly easy way for Republicans to communicate the idea that his plans to expand government are radical.

Sanders has never faced an electorate where these vulnerabilities could be used against him. Nor, for that matter, has he had to defend some of his bizarre youthful musings (such as his theory that sexual repression causes breast cancer) or the suspicious finances surrounding his wife’s college. Democrats are rightfully concerned about attacks on Hunter Biden’s nepotistic role at Burisma, but Sanders is going to have to defend equally questionable deals, like the $500,000 his wife’s university paid for a woodworking program run by his stepdaughter.

 It is interesting to think of some of these more scandalous moments of Bernie Sanders -- both of them are really compelling. The nepotism toward his family and potentially using his politics to get big windfalls for them is very damning and is so easy to spin into an anti-Socialist message. It feeds directly into the idea that the whole system is a fraud because the leadership themselves are not satisfied with just a regular life and a regular income, and they will gladly take advantage of their political connections to enrich themselves.

Moreover, the video of Sanders with the Soviets is a bit off putting... but what I found even more strange were his meetings with Sandinistas and talking about how they are radically misunderstood and saying to a CBS reporter (and journalists in general) you are worms. Let's also remember that punching the press is something that Trump gets into trouble for regularly.

While he can mount a defense of this that is appealing to his own base, there is really no way that this will appeal to moderates -- even to many moderate Democrats. Maybe if there was no Venezuela to point to right in this moment and the only socialist reference point was Sweden, it wouldn't be so bad, but that doesn't describe now.

But the truly compelling part of the article is below:

But Hillary Clinton’s surprising defeat created an opportunity for the party’s left to promote an alternative theory for how the party could and should compete. It deemed Donald Trump’s win a sign that capitalism had created such distress that voters were now rejecting conventional politicians altogether and open to radical alternatives who might promise to smash the failing system. Indeed, by this reasoning, Democrats would do better, not worse, by nominating more left-wing candidates, who could distance themselves more credibly from the discredited Establishment.

Yet this theory has had two clear tests, and failed both of them spectacularly. Numerous activists and intellectuals in the Sanders orbit held up Jeremy Corbyn as proof of concept for his viability. Anticipating a Corbyn victory, they argued over and over that Corbyn was showing how socialism would attract and mobilize, not repel, voters. Corbyn is more extreme than Sanders, but Sanders enthusiasts themselves drew a connection between the two, and his massive defeat obviously casts serious doubt on the model he was supposed to vindicate.

A second example, closer to home, is even more relevant. In the months leading up to the 2018 midterm elections, the Democratic Party was the subject of bitter and widespread criticism from its left wing. The party’s strategy was to flip the House by recruiting moderate candidates who would avoid controversial left-wing positions and instead focus attention on Trump’s agenda, especially his effort to eliminate Obamacare. The left predicted the strategy would fail — only an inspiring progressive agenda could mobilize enough voters to win back the House.

“Their theory of the case is to recruit old white guys who are longtime Establishment insiders who will run on a boring agenda Democrats would have run on 20 years ago,” complained Adam Green, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. “The DCCC is doing it wrong,” insisted Democracy for America’s Neil Sroka. “In district after district, the national party is throwing its weight behind candidates who are out of step with the national mood,” proclaimed a long piece in the left-wing Intercept attacking the party’s House recruitment strategy, “The DCCC’s failure to understand the shifting progressive electorate is costing the party.” Zephyr Teachout was quoted saying, “Their strategy is stupid in the first place and bad for democracy, but then it’s really stupid because they have 26-year-olds sitting around who don’t know anything about the real world deciding which candidates should win.”

Ryan Cooper, a socialist columnist, cited the Intercept piece to ruminate just why the Democrats would advance such an obviously doomed strategy. “Their naked self-interest and bourgeoise ideology is camouflaged behind a technocratic facade of just doing ‘what it takes to win’ — but it’s a facade they generally believe wholeheartedly.” The Democratic plan was obviously doomed to fail, so perhaps their motivation was actually to enrich themselves and advance neoliberalism, while claiming it was a good strategy to win the House.

As we now know, it was a good strategy to win the House. Democrats flipped 40 seats. Tellingly, while progressives managed to nominate several candidates in red districts — Kara Eastman in Nebraska, Richard Ojeda in West Virginia, and many others — any one of whose victory they would have cited as proof that left-wing candidates can win Trump districts, not a single one of them prevailed in November. Our Revolution went 0–22, Justice Democrats went 0–16, and Brand New Congress went 0–6.* The failed technocratic 26-year-old bourgeoise shills who were doing it wrong somehow accounted for 100 percent of the party’s House gains.

Had Democrats failed to win back the House, their left-wing critics would have claimed vindication. Instead, the entire debate sank below the surface without a trace. Indeed, what happened instead was something peculiar. The leftists chose to focus on a handful of left-wing candidates, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who defeated center-left Democrats in deep-blue districts. The conservative media strategically elevated her in a bid to make AOC and her squad the party’s face. The mutual interest of the two sides made AOC the narrative center of the election. The fact that the party had just run a field experiment between two factions, and the moderate faction prevailed conclusively, was forgotten.

Intelligencer 

It's amazing to see how this trope of Socialist progress in America is completely destroyed with these observations, especially on the heals of AOC making stupid remarks about how the Democrats really aren't left. Like the pushes for the normalization of homosexuality and transgenderism in the 2010s was just moderate thing that happened, and like Obamacare was not also potentially a radical step in a new direction.

Jonathan Chait is also completely right: the debate did just kind of slink off into some corner. None of the candidates have seem to have gotten the memo on this one, either, because every single one of them has attempted to stay relevant by going to the hard left of Biden, as if Biden is bumbling because he isn't flexing hard as a far left socialist and he is totally out of the current meta.

I think it can be argued that, because of online culture and echo chambers, many people feel like the populace is more representative of their own opinions than they think. Everybody is biased to seeing some glimmer of hope that there is a popular thrust in the direction that they want. Moreover, the sort of people who give their opinions on the internet tend to not be too representative of Joe Sixpack or Tanner Marijuana-Occasional-Partaker. Many people do not sit with their eyes glued to the political poop chute and are not really big into nuanced arguments for Socialism -- for that matter, they are not big into nuanced arguments for any third position of any kind.

At the end of the day, the candidate has to appeal to a broad swathe of Americans while motivating their base. Sanders can motivate his base, but his weird meanderings into the far left will completely doom him just as how any praise for race realists or rubbing-of-shoulders with, say, an apartheidist or the BNP would destroy Trump.

Anarchy Is Sophistry, Governments Are Certainty

One of the interesting lines that is dangled out before us by anarchists and minarchists is that humans are basically good and can function without government.

Point taken. 

Generally speaking, humans tend to be able to resolve problems without a centralized authority. If the local police force totally were to shut down and the government announced it was going out of business forever, I do not imagine total chaos erupting in my neighborhood at all. I am completely confident that the barbershop ajae would become a central contact point -- he's a smart, charismatic guy who cuts half the men's hair and has a good rapport with everyone. His wife makes sure that everyone is using the right trash bags and recycling in the right manner, and their beloved dog is friends with our dog and all the other dogs in the neighborhood. He would be our default neighborhood hetman. 

He is also intimately aware of the troublemakers. There's an ajumma behind our building who starts petty fights over parking all the time, even when it seems incredibly irrelevant, and he warned us about her. There's another woman who will claim that people are always looking into her window when the real thing that could make people uncomfortable is the fact that she is always looking out of her window. 

I can imagine him being able to settle disputes fairly. I also imagine that he would command enough authority to get myself and other men out en force  to stop some guy from beating his wife or kid, or to set up patrols if thievery became an issue.

A default order exists.

But order demands organization, not just for the sake of the authority who wishes to be more efficient, but because the men & women that empower the authority want it codified to protect themselves, and the authority himself (believe it or not) has an interest in protecting himself from the mob as well. He wants his job description to be clear, and he wants the tasks at hand to also be familiar. He wants a reliable means of how to act, and he wants a document that he can rest his authority on.

The very thing that makes anarchy manageable - the way that humans come together to do the right thing - is exactly what makes anarchy untenable and irrelevant.

Everybody wants a contract. Everybody wants to clear up the matter. Everybody wants certainty, and that is what governments basically are: structured certainty.

Any argument for anarchy is inherently sophist because it banks on extrapolating out from man's inclination to do right but then tries to drastically limit man's desire to be doubly right by creating formal standards and codes to ensure the continuation of justice.

Greta, Intersctional Environmentalism, and Green Stewardship

Greta is the perfect poster girl for the Green Left

Shes' a 17-year old with psychological problems so severe she had to be pulled out of school, ending her Swedish celebrity mother's career. She refused to eat. She refused to talk. It took her hours to consume the one dish that she would eat: gnocci. 

E. Michael Jones postulates that the initial thrust of her selective eating disorder and mental break was to get her mother back in the home. Lacking a mother and being raised by the state can be daunting -- perhaps doubly so if your father is a bit of a beta and your mother is always trying to femme flex. Whether or not this is is the case for sure cannot be known, but nobody would be surprised to hear that it was. 

Regardless, her speeches are like short performances. They remind me of the kids I used to see participate in speech contests back in North Dakota. Polished, professional, sleek, talented. The content isn't particularly deep and the message isn't very profound, but that isn't the point. 

Persuasion through sensationalism is the point. 

Because her delivery is flawless, she is a hero to her fans and to tens of millions of impressionable youth that do not feel the need to think much further than what is presented to them. Moreover, because the message is simple and the difficult parts of the argument are all unloaded to the amorphous group of "scientists" that are expected to dispel any criticisms with the mere mention of their name, she has no real burden. She's a one trick pony -- maybe she will not always be, but that is all she has to be for now. 

This is actually one of the more brilliant aspects of the climate change debate for the left: no one really has the time to unload all of the data and begin discussing it. Indeed, much of the data that we are even familiar with has actually become irrelevant by the month, and a huge amount of it is simply about change in general and does not deal directly with whether or not the climate change is necessarily anthropogenic. Of course, nobody can be blamed for a topic being full of difficult points, but it has to be pointed out that one side here tends to benefit from the fact that it is near impossible to discuss this in person because there are too many data points and counterpoints that are constantly evolving and changing. 

More Than Meets the Eye

Greta was not an accident. She is not a little girl who got famous by chance. She has an activist PR man by the name of Ingmar Rentzhog who has been active in climate change activism since at least 2017 with a lot of fancy speaking engagements (like SXSW). They claim to have no prior association, and maybe that is the case, but it seems fishy how he was among the first on the scene to break the story of her. He has also raised a lot of money while invoking her name for his NGO which is definitely not hurting for finances, though subsequently they have taken steps to distance themselves from one another, perhaps because critics have been getting too hot on their tails (news.com.au).

Greta was shoe-in for being a role as a spokesperson. Her youthfulness and childlike appearance makes her someone who is immune to a lot of the harsh criticism that activists normally face, and the fact that her mental disabilities are frontloaded makes it even harder to really dig in. But let us not be too cynical: she is good at what she does, and not some helpless loser being taken advantage of. She is from a family of influential performers, and it appears that the apple does not fall far from the tree. 

Her mental issues and awkwardness are things that also play to her advantages with her own crowd. We have witnessed over the last half-century (especially the last two decades) the emergence of a sort of victim worship in the West. We expect our heroes to be people who overcome some sort of burden. We expect them to surprise us by rising to this great occasion. We also want them to be actors in our active narratives: our society discriminates against women, minorities, and the disabled. Why should we listen to the white men who are the top of everything? Why should they be given more of a voice? While it is not explicitly a prerequisite to be gay, brown, diseased, broken, or a biological or imaginary female, it certainly helps to gain traction. 

In the new ersatz-religion of the Woke Left, the top clergy should be from the new class of heroes. They shouldn't be some sort of continuation of the past in an era that seeks more than anything the ability to break from history. 

Intersectional Environmentalism

Everything must be intersectional. 

I'd never actually begrudge the environmentalist movement. 

I am a big admirer of being good stewards of the Earth. While we are given dominion over animals (Gen. 9:2), we are expected to care for the Earth as well, for the Earth and nature itself is a source of knowledge (Job 12:7-10). Wastefulness and disregard for the rights of other things is itself is sinful. 

But what makes the environmentalist movement so unpalatable? 

Perhaps it is the way that it attempts to tie itself in with everything. There is something fundamentally holistic about it because it is incapable of detaching itself from a secular humanist theory of the universe. 

It's attached to humanism because it began as a critique of Capitalism. The Capitalist ideas of the 19th & 20th century very much held onto the idea of man's dominion over nature and this became the basis for celebrating advancements and the exploitation of nature. 

Initially, environmentalism was more about criticism of capitalism. I say this because "climate change" was not an issue in the early stages of environmentalism, but rather there was the naked appeal to the pristine beauty of nature and crying Indians. 

Obviously, man subsequently learns of climate change and understands that environmentalism is about much more than small patches of pollution & preserving habitats. It has become an existential question for humanity. But, until this realization, environmentalism was tied at the hip with the Left, for the Left criticizes capitalism in the West. 

And what does the Western left believe in? While there can be a lot of divergence among individual leftists, what is certainly true is that it is overwhelmingly secular and humanist, steeped in Enlightenment ideology. 

Because of this, Greta and her crew naturally fall into other political movements: 

The secular humanists believe that God is not an explanation nor does God play a role in our political life -- especially our political life. Many secularists are theists, but they build a high wall which God cannot pass over when it comes to politics. God is strictly forbidden, and all things within the political sphere must be explained through ideas and with a lexicon that is separate from God. All things must be secular, and they must conform to the perceived consensus that the secularists have been building in the Western world since the Enlightenment. 

Therefore, the modern day Green feels that they must understand themselves as a product of nature, and they are inclined to believe that whatever they feel is given to them by nature. This directly ties into the LGBTQ "Born This Way" concept which seeks to portray human sexuality as biologically determined and beyond our control. People often refer to this as Rogerian humanism. Carl Rogers generally believed that all humans are born with the complete capacity for growth and change, and did not view humans as being born into sin. Don't take my word for it -- check out Famous Davis, an ex-Christian who said that he found Rogers' ideas to be superior to the Bible because he could not view man as evil. Hence, Greta waves the rainbow flag. 

This can further be tied in with feminism with the suggestion that women are the mother of our species and of virtually all species. You must remember, the Greens do not take some hard evolutionist perspective that because woman was created physically weaker and with different psychological profiles it is justifiable to view men and women as having separate spheres, but rather they believe that there was a fundamentally flawed relationship between men and women before the Enlightenment. 

One of the fundamental characteristics of Enlightenment thinking is this desire to magically think yourself out of necessary conclusions. While atheists often view the theists as engaging in magical thinking, just as often we find the atheist pretend that the physical and psychological differences between the genders are unnecessary because they can argue that men and women both have access to the "scientific method" or "reason." Because women have access to Enlightenment thinking, and the Enlightenment dismisses everything before it as irrelevant and cruder, of a fundamentally different era that we should write-off, whatever gender modes existed before the Enlightenment are irrelevant. 

Or, as Pol Pot would say, hail the year zero. We don't need to acknowledge truths that may fit neatly into the framework of the times before us and that pose problems for our path forward -- we just need to think of the future. Everything is new now, and the old is gone. 

It is not difficult to then imagine Greta in her Anti-Fascist All Stars shirt based off of this. Enlightenment thinking and the Rogerian humanism. Fascism is really its own topic that we cannot get into here, and it is also something that we do not need to get into because Antifa types do not actually address Fascism in some robust way themselves. They treat it as a cartoon as Fascism is wont to be treated by everyone. Fascism isn't a serious ideology to anyone -- it's a pejorative that gets flung around. 

Fascism basically represents anything that is regressive or hostile to humanist modes of thinking. This of course refers to someone who is misogynistic or transparently a right wing authoritarian, but it also will refer to people who believe and think about sin and immorality. It will include even people who are obsessed with moral discipline in a classical sense. Anything that is focused on overcoming human failure has actually transgressed against the basic tenets of Intersectional Environmentalism: it believes that humanity is fallen. 

The environmentalism of the left is fundamentally intersectional and must be interectional. Intersectional people do not want non-intersectionalist company. Whatever they touch and interact with must be a part of their holistic vision. 

Green Stewardship

Conservative Environmentalism

While the Green Patriarch of the Orthodox Church has done his best to promote environmentalism among religious conservatives, it has not been something that has actually generated that great of a movement among the Western right wing.

In the Anglosphere, it is more of a trivia question than anything. The bulk of people do not know who His All Holiness Patriarch Bartholomew I is, and fewer still would even so readily associate him and Orthodoxy with the effort to protect the environment.

Every Green cause ties back not just to the left in general, but it ends up coming into close contact with feminism, LGBTQ, and that weird group of people who call themselves "Anti-Fascists."

To the Left, everything must be intersectional because everything is intersecting. There is no environmentalism beyond their own, small scope. Everything is defined in relation to their

But the concept an environmentalism that is beyond the clutches of the far left is emerging.

More and more, in Orthodox circles and in broader Christianity, you hear about regular conservatives who care about the preservation of the environment and value good stewardship. We are also witnessing the rise of the Dissident Right which is essentially a return of blood & soil nationalism, and we are seeing more and more people refer to themselves by that mysterious word "Traditionalist."

As significant parts of the Right Wing get a divorce from Capitalism (with a capitol C), we are seeing more people interested in protecting the environment -- and interested in doing it without going all in with secular humanism, LGBTQ, feminism, and Anti-Fascism.

I like to think of my own environmentalism as Green Stewardship. We want to be good custodians of the Earth because it is our obligation to what God has given us. We work a liturgy over it with our prayers, and we gain wisdom from all the earth. We even praise God on behalf of all of the animals, and animals praise God themselves, mentioned in Psalm 150:6, and more succinctly stated in Psalm 148:

7 

Praise the Lord from the earth,

    you great sea creatures and all ocean depths,

8 

lightning and hail, snow and clouds,

    stormy winds that do his bidding,

9 

you mountains and all hills,

    fruit trees and all cedars,

10 

wild animals and all cattle,

    small creatures and flying birds,

11 

kings of the earth and all nations,

    you princes and all rulers on earth,

12 

young men and women,

    old men and children.

Our relationship with the Earth has to be, by nature of our God's decree, positive and engaging, not one that is exploitative. For all that is created was created for singing praises to God. 

It has been a mistake for the Right to watch the Left alone be Green. It is time for us to have our own Green Right, and to divorce environmentalism and care for the earth from the suffocating grasp of the left. 

But this is not even the only lesson here: we have seen what the Left has done to the concept of environmentalism, and we have seen how it has become a dominant force, tying everything back to the specific narratives that it wants to promote right alongside it, until one would almost think that to love the Earth you couldn't be more than a few places divorced from Pachamama worshiping hippie. 

The stranglehold the Left has on environmentalism is not just a disservice to environmentalism, but it is honestly a threat to the earth itself because it has become so distasteful as to turn away plenty of conservatives from environmental consciousness. 

We have to actually work hard as traditionalists or other unconventional conservatives to integrate Green policies and consciousness among conservatives, and doing this is one of the perfect opportunities for bringing the faux droit into the real right. 

The essence of conservatism is not Liberty & Capitalism, but it is the throne, the plow, and the soil.