At the end of 2015, looking ahead to what 2016 would bring, I found myself saying to one and all, "2016 is going to be ugly." It did not disappoint. Ugly it indeed turned out to be. Far uglier than most mortal imaginations could have envisioned.Yet, looking back, one event offered a truly pleasant surprise. After endless, unrelenting efforts by the mind watchers of the American people to bury socialism, communism, or even New Deal ideology, trillions spent on propaganda and fear mongering that continues to this day, millions of Americans--unfazed, heads unbowed, with perfect equanimity--voted for an old Jewish guy from Brooklyn who moved to the woods of Vermont and came to represent the state in the U.S. Senate proclaiming himself to be--are you sitting down?--a socialist and an advocate for a political revolution in America.
All those dollars and frenzied exhortations expended against socialism, yet millions of Americans blithely went to their polling places and pulled a lever (or whatever one does nowadays) hoping to propel Senator Bernie Sanders into the White House. And his wasn't just empty rhetoric. He proposed taxing the rich, free college tuition, a national health service and a lot more that Americans had long been told were policies that were the work of the devil. Even the demise of the Soviet Union, the turn to cowboy capitalism in China, and the moribund condition of holdouts like Cuba and North Korea seemed--shockingly--not to strangle the last breath out of those who stubbornly held onto their hopes for social justice, basic fairness and equality, and a smidge of dignity, who still clung to the quaint notion that schools and health care and transportation and infrastructure--let alone stuff like prisons and our water should be seen as public trusts and not opportune targets for the profit of a few.
As the votes rolled in, in state after state, for a while we dared to hope that a miracle was about to occur. That, in spite of what soon became clear was a concerted effort by mainstream politicians and media to disappear Bernie. The Democratic Party had taken all necessary measures to assure a victory for Hillary Clinton. She was the default candidate of the DNC. The first primaries were scheduled to take place in the deep South and the political map of her early support replicated the borders of the old Confederacy. She was armed with delegates committed to her in advance of the primaries. The mainstream press and its editorial writers considered her victory a foregone conclusion. As Bernie's campaign drew tens of thousands of enthusiastic supporters while Hillary often spoke to nearly empty auditoriums, the press--beginning with the nation's supposed "newspaper of record"--did its best to bury the Bernie phenomenon. Largely, it disappeared Bernie from its pages, with the Times instead daily publishing a bar graph indicating odds in excess of 90% that Hillary would be our next president.
With endless ink and electrons spewing forth to present careful analysis of the campaigns in the mainstream media, the Bernie Sanders phenomenon went without any real acknowledgement of what it actually meant about the political landscape in the United States. Even if they did not talk a great deal about it, they knew, and it made them visibly nervous. In spite of their best efforts, not just a handful of quaint leftists, but millions who had proven immune to the Kool-Aid were out there.
In the end, 2016 left me proud to be an American--and, dare I say it, with just a little bit of hope.
