Back in the summer of 2015, I predicted that Bernie Sanders would not get the Democratic Party’s nomination for the presidency in 2016. I was correct on that front, but I was wrong in how close Sanders got. I thought one of the few other candidates would emerge to challenge Hillary Clinton, but her only competition in the primaries ended up being Sanders.
If not for the Democratic Party establishment (and the establishment in general), Bernie Sanders could have possibly gotten the nomination in 2016. It is impossible to say how he would have fared against Trump in the general election, but it would have certainly been a different dynamic.
Sanders, at the age of 77, is again running for the presidency. But there are a lot more candidates this time around. Sanders is near the top of the polls, but the percentages for each candidate are low because there are so many, and because it is so early. The only person who currently beats out Sanders in the polls is Joe Biden, who will likely be the establishment’s choice.
But the establishment is not as much against Bernie as it was 3 or 4 years ago. If they had known that Sanders could have beaten Trump, they would have much preferred Sanders. Clinton was the ultimate establishment candidate, and she was unable to beat Trump.
Just as many on the left fear Trump, many on the right fear Sanders. This includes conservatives and libertarians. After all, Sanders is a self-identified socialist, and one thing that unites conservatives and libertarians, at least in rhetoric, is their opposition to socialism. (We won’t go further into the fact that most conservatives support the socialist military and the socialist entitlement programs.)
From a libertarian standpoint, there are a few things about Bernie Sanders that a libertarian might like. It is hard to say that he is anti-war, but he is certainly less enthusiastic about war. He also tends to be better than the average politician (which isn’t saying much) on some issues of civil liberties.
Unfortunately, Sanders follows the Murray Rothbard rule where a politician tends to focus on the issues where he is the worst.
How often do you hear Sanders harping on the issue of war and foreign intervention? He will talk about it briefly if he is asked a question about it, but then he’ll return to talking about free healthcare, free education, etc.
The reality, though, is that Sanders is going to moderate all of his positions if he is elected president. He will already moderate them to some degree if he just gets the nomination.
Barack Obama II
No matter the rhetoric, every president seems to just be mostly a continuation of the last one. Trump has been a little different because of how crazy he drives the establishment. But most of his policies are just a continuation of the past. He hasn’t started any new major wars, but he has continued on with the old ones, and he has continued on with the empire.
If Trump is not bold enough to face down the establishment when it comes to foreign policy, what makes anyone think that Sanders will be able to do it?
It is so obvious to me, but I don’t think it is obvious to others who invest their time and energy in politics. Sanders will not be much different than anyone else we have seen in the presidency in modern times.
We will essentially get Barack Obama II. If Sanders becomes president, he will basically have some of the same leftist rhetoric as Obama. He will be politically correct, which will be somewhat of a change from Trump. When it comes to policy, Sanders will be similar to Obama, which isn’t all that far off from Trump.
He won’t be exactly like Obama because the world will be different in 2021 than it was from 2009 to 2017. If anything, Sanders will “accomplish” even less than Obama, especially if the Republicans maintain a majority in the Senate.
Obama came into office as the peace candidate, and he gave us Libya, Syria, and Ukraine, along with a continuation of the previous wars. He did not dismantle the empire. He expanded it. Did anyone expect anything different when he appointed Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State?
On foreign policy, Sanders will be controlled by the establishment. How do I know this? He already told us in 2016. After being cheated out of the nomination by the Clinton camp and the DNC, he went on to campaign for Clinton. He wanted to make sure he kept in good standing with the establishment.
Anyone who can support the bloodthirsty warmonger that is Hillary Clinton is not going to be a peace president once in office. I don’t know if Sanders will start any new wars because of budget reasons. I don’t know if he will be able to wind down any of the current wars. But for the most part, Sanders will be controlled by the establishment on foreign policy. I have no doubt about this.
On civil liberties, we may see a few minor changes in the right direction. Maybe the federal government’s war on marijuana will finally be brought to an official end. That would just be Sanders going along with the times, just as Obama came around to loosening the government’s grip on going after marijuana users.
Sanders may do a few other things in a positive direction. Maybe mandatory minimum prison sentences for drug users will go down or be loosened in some way.
However, Sanders is not against the whole idea of the government’s war on drugs. He is not a constitutionalist. He is not a decentralist. He is certainly not a libertarian. His bedrock principles lie in the use of more government violence, which is why he considers himself to be a socialist. He is not going to end the federal war on drugs.
Regarding his socialist philosophy, I don’t think Sanders is 100% socialist. I don’t think he is arguing for the government to own all of the means of production. I don’t think he wants to completely abolish private property. He is basically advocating a bigger welfare state.
I’m not saying that we shouldn’t’ be fearful of even more government interference in the domestic economy, but I feel like we are getting that anyway. Trump has done some good things in regards to tax cuts and reduced regulations, but he has also been quite bad on many things. The federal budget (along with the debt) keeps going higher. Spending was already out of control, and it has only gotten worse. Also, Trump has raised tariffs and caused something of a trade war, which is terribly bad for American consumers.
I think the best Sanders could hope for is to take another step towards fully socialized healthcare. Obama gave us Obamacare. It was called the Affordable Care Act, but it has been anything but affordable. That was his signature achievement in the eyes of the left, and it was a complete disaster.
About 80% of the budget is taken up by Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, the military, and the interest on the national debt. The rest of the budget is mostly made up of things that the American people believe are necessary, along with things that are paid out to satisfy the lobbyists and special interests.
Where is Sanders going to cut anything out of the budget? Maybe he can take out a little from the military. Maybe he can take out a tiny fraction from foreign aid, but it is doubtful he would even go that far. Meanwhile, more baby boomers continue to retire while the entitlement programs go further into the hole.
Sanders can say he will raise taxes on the rich, but this wouldn’t be anywhere close to raising enough money for any of his pet projects. It is also doubtful whether he could actually raise taxes directly in any significant way. If we go into recession, he isn’t going to raise taxes. He will turn into a Keynesian, if he isn’t one already. Even Keynesians will say that you shouldn’t raise taxes in a recession. They say that a recession is a time to run big government deficits. Of course, we already have big deficits.
Sanders is on the far left, politically speaking. But so was Obama. Obama was in national office for a very short time before he became president. He didn’t have that much time to expose himself. But if you go back to when he first became a senator, he sounded like a Marxist at times. He moderated his message for the presidency.
Maybe Sanders truly does consider himself to be a socialist. But he is a politician first, just like Obama. He won’t be a socialist president. He will moderate his message. He values power too much, and he values the opinions of the establishment.
If you are worried about a President Bernie Sanders, I think you should stop worrying so much. We are going to have problems no matter what. Whether Trump is re-elected or anyone else gets in there, we still have an empire overseas, and we still have massive debt and entitlement promises that won’t be fulfilled.
When the ship sinks, maybe it would be better to have a self-identified socialist as the captain. At least it will make it more difficult to blame free markets, although they will still try their best.
Sanders is a politician first. He is unlikely to get his socialist proposals enacted into law. If he does, then that is the fault of the American people for allowing it to happen.