https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2019/05/id-love-to-meet-bernie-in-budapest/
Bernie Sanders very nearly won the US Democratic Party’s nomination in 2016, only losing due to Hillary Clinton jiggery-pokery of the party’s rules around ex officio voting entitlements. But here’s the thing. What does it tell you about core Democrat voters that so many, probably more than half, would support a self-proclaimed ‘socialist’? Look at young Democrat activists and it was a lot more than half who supported the long-time socialist Senator from Vermont.
What’s the big deal, you might ask? Well, I think it boils down to the man’s moral antennae vibrating at such a shocking and illiberal frequency. Sanders is the man who, in 1988, took his honeymoon in the then USSR. Some footage of the happy couple is below. Just to remind you, that was before the Berlin Wall came down, the collapse of all of the satellite Soviet regimes and, indeed, of Soviet Russia itself. New footage of that Sanders’ honeymoon trip has recently come to light, with Bernie sitting near or under portraits of Lenin (a mass-murderer himself, though not in the same league as Stalin, I concede) while praising the virtues of Soviet life. Was the man completely unaware of the activities of the secret police? Or did he just think a few eggs have to be broken to make an omelette?
And did you know Sanders was at that time already into his second term as mayor of Vermont’s biggest city, Burlington? Later, he would go on to support the Sandinistas in Nicaragua; to favour a massive warming of relations with Cuba; and to support the revolutionary policies in Venezuela, at least early on. Let’s put it no more harshly than this: Mr. Sanders is blinded by his own ideology and seems to think that life in a non-Western, non-capitalist country is better than it is in the US. I believe the scientific word for such beliefs is ‘bonkers’, but correct me if I’m wrong.