David Brooks in the New York Times frets about a Bernie presidency:
I wrote that I didn’t think a President Bernie would turn the US into a Venezuela. But it’s worth considering what it would look like if he were able to implement all his policies. I’ll do that in a bit.
Meantime note the most upvoted comments are from young people. Gen Z’ers, ‘Zoomers’. Bernie needs to get more than 50% of them out to vote. Polls suggest that’s unlikely. In which case ‘oldies’ like Brooks will make the difference. And they are leery. Righty so, in my view. As one who has experienced first hand — China in the seventies — the miseries of socialism of exactly the type Bernie envisions.
We all start from personal experience. I covered the Soviet Union in its final decrepit years. The Soviet and allied regimes had already slaughtered 20 million people through things like mass executions and intentional famines. Those regimes were slave states. They enslaved whole peoples and took away the right to say what they wanted, live where they wanted and harvest the fruits of their labor.And gets hammered in the comments. Click screenshot below the fold to enlarge:
And yet every day we find more old quotes from Sanders apologizing for this sort of slave regime, whether in the Soviet Union, Cuba or Nicaragua. He excused the Nicaraguan communists when they took away the civil liberties of their citizens. He’s still making excuses for Castro.
I wrote that I didn’t think a President Bernie would turn the US into a Venezuela. But it’s worth considering what it would look like if he were able to implement all his policies. I’ll do that in a bit.
Meantime note the most upvoted comments are from young people. Gen Z’ers, ‘Zoomers’. Bernie needs to get more than 50% of them out to vote. Polls suggest that’s unlikely. In which case ‘oldies’ like Brooks will make the difference. And they are leery. Righty so, in my view. As one who has experienced first hand — China in the seventies — the miseries of socialism of exactly the type Bernie envisions.
