The Bernie Perplex

The 2020 Democratic presidential campaign is down to two candidates - Bernie Sanders and everyone else.

I should be for Sanders, because he supports single-payer health care, taxing the rich to the level they were taxed at back in the 1950s, and pushing a moon-shot-type program to move to renewable energy.  But I, like many others, fear he can't beat Trump  because he's too far to the left.  A lot of people are afraid that, as President,  he'd spend too much money on free amenities and give away the store.  But Sanders' supporters don't want to hear that.  They are as loyal to him as the MAGA crowd is to Trump, they nitpick to death every flaw of Sanders' opponents for the Democratic presidential nomination, and they go nuclear on anyone who doesn't like him.  Even Michael Jackson fans - the Islamic State of celebrity fandom - aren't as brutal to their idol's detractors.

The zealotry exuded by Bernie bros is getting pretty scary, but after what happened to Sanders in 2016, it's understandable. After all, he got screwed by Hillary Clinton supporters back then, but Hillbots screwed Martin O'Malley, too, and I'm doubly pissed off about that because Bernie bros disrespected and laughed off O'Malley as much as Hillbots did. We onetime O'Malley supporters, who did not in fact have meetings in a broom closet, are still smarting over that, and we have long memories and short fuses. We were angry at both camps, and we're not happy to see Bernie bros carrying on again like they did four years ago. It's worse than 2016.  I mean, how do you reason with guys who taunt Joe Biden by bringing a fake coffin to a Biden fundraiser?

Or those attacks on culinary workers in Nevada?

Okay, I'm going to conclude this blog entry from the perspective that it is unfair to paint Sanders supporters with a broad brush, and that not all Sanders supporters are jerks, and the Sanders supporters I know wouldn't do a thing like this.  So here it is:  Sanders currently leads Trump in head-to-head poll match-ups, he has momentum, and he's right on most of the issues.  And even though a comparison of his policies to Roosevelt's New Deal proposals in the 1932 presidential campaign is probably a nervous one at best, given that the economy in 2020 is far different than what it was in 1932, when one out of four people were unemployed but we still had a strong industrial base, I'll take at face value the idea that Bernie can defeat Trump in November as the Democratic presidential nominee, which is what my Sanders-supporter friends have been telling me.

Okay, my Sanders-supporter friends, I'll accept your arguments.  I'll accept the idea that Sanders, as the Democratic presidential nominees,  can defeat Trump.  But if he is the nominee, you'd better be right about this!