Bernie Sanders, Old-School Socialist or Retrograde

Senator Bernard Sanders (I-Vermont) visits the VA’s Connected Health Showcase, July 30, 2013. Photo courtesy of VA.

Uh-oh. Bernie Sanders has some serious flaws, and most of them are unfixable: Mr Sanders is

• White
• Male
• Old
• Straight

Or as Progressives would remind you: “cisgendered Sanders is burdened by the utter lack of intersectionality,” NRO’s Rich Lowry writes.

The situation is one of delicacy. Evidently Bernie announced his presidential candidacy on Vermont Public Radio and was asked to explain how he can lead a diverse Democratic Party.

Citing the famous MLK quote on judging people by content of character, Bernie replied “We have got to look at candidates, you know, not by the color of their skin, not by their sexual orientation or their gender and not by their age. I mean, I think we have got to try to move us toward a nondiscriminatory society, which looks at people based on their abilities, based on what they stand for.”

Who would have thought, ponders Mr. Lowry, that something that would have been  considered a simplistic sentiment just a few years ago would earn Bernie the ire of the Left?

The Left’s Thunderous Denouncements of Bernie

• Neera Tanden (Center for American Progress) on Twitter: “At a time where folks feel under attack because of who they are, saying race or gender or sexual orientation or identity doesn’t matter is not off, it’s simply wrong.”
• Jess McIntosh, former Clinton aide: “This is usually an argument made by people who don’t enjoy outsized respect and credibility because of their race, gender, age and sexual orientation.”
• Stephen Colbert: “Yes, like Dr. King, I have a dream—a dream where this diverse nation can come together and be led by an old white guy.”
• Symone Sanders. Bernie’s former press secretary: “As a young black millennial “I don’t like hearing it because it speaks to a fundamental misunderstanding about race and gender and what people are looking for.”

The sniping at Sanders (some of it motivated by lingering bitterness over the 2016 primary campaign) is especially bizarre given his long history of advocacy of civil rights, including his attendance at the 1963 March on Washington.

Sanders Seen as a Retrograde

The root of the problem is that Sanders is an old-school socialist who attributes primacy to a class struggle that crosses racial boundaries, rather than to race (or gender or sexual orientation) as such. A highly intellectual and starker version of his worldview can be seen in Adolph Reed, the University of Pennsylvania professor who complains, as he put it in an interview last year, “Any claim or proposal concerning durable patterns of economic inequality is now taken as being tantamount to making excuses for white supremacy.

Read more here.