Bernie Sanders’ Problem With Public Fear and Friendliness
By Kevin C. Peterson
In the wake of his under performance during Super Tuesday’s multi-state primaries, Bernie Sanders, presumed until now to be a presidential frontrunner, is facing two problems: fear and friendliness.
Let’s take fear first.
Sanders is an avowed socialist — which in theory, is not a problem. His brand of democratic socialism simply happens to remain an American problem, a shunned system of governance believed to be antithetical to the American way of life.
Socialism has for a long time been associated by Americans with communism. For decades, Soviet Union communism was used by US political leaders as an example against which American democratic exceptionalism has been highlighted. Opposition to communism and its socialistic tenets has become an American rite of political passage.
It was in the 1950s and 60s that Russian statecraft— and the brand of collectivist economic practices employed by nation states like China — that turned socialism into pariah political status on the international stage, where the priorities of centralized statism and the control of the means of production within the economy displayed a glaring contrast against American forms of individualism, capitalism and private ownership.
The problem for Sanders is that the themes he has constructed during his presidential campaigns are largely sifted from socialistic ideas that are preoccupied with efforts at social security: those ideas that promote free healthcare, highly subsidized university education and substantial rearrangements within the national economy that reduce income disparity. But it is unfortunate that these themes are tainted.
Americans, in response to their fear of European socialism of the kind practiced in the former Soviet Union and China, remain morbidly fearful of socialism because they were conditioned toward a great suspicion about its ability to solve basic human problems within the American society.
As an American politician Sanders’ ability to allay the fears of socialism so far has failed. The macro-orientation pertaining to managing economic and social conditions in the American state still preference laissez-faire slant, with only some…
