Sanders is not Trump

[TBF]

Does it matter that Sanders and Corbyn are lifelong leftists who’ve won multiple popular mandates from various constituencies while Trump is an openly bigoted, cartoon plutocrat who’s never been elected by anyone? To the various liberal and centrist pundits penning such comparisons, it evidently does not.

In the burgeoning genre of think pieces linking the rises of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, Stephen Marche’s vapid Guardian essay over the weekend is perhaps the definitive contribution.

Over the past several months, the two have been variously equated on the basis of their policy positions, hostility to party establishments, and allegiance to political “extremism” — in other words, as somehow equivalent political phenomena.

Both Trump and Sanders, we are ceaselessly told, are essentially vehicles for outrage, addressing discontent through demagogy, and are therefore similar. As David Brooks wrote last September: These sudden stars [Sanders, Trump, Ben Carson, and Jeremy Corbyn] are not really about governing. They are tools for their supporters’ self-expression. They allow supporters to make a statement, demand respect or express anger or resentment. Sarah Palin was a pioneer in seeing politics not as a path to governance but as an expression of her followers’ id.

All “populists” are created equal, you see ...

More here: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/01/bernie-sanders-trump-populism-marche-corbyn-politics/

[daleanime]

1. They reek of desperation.....

searching for any way to diminish or belittle.

[Nyan]

2. Trump grew up as a boy king tyrant

with everything handed out to him on silver platter. He probably got everything he wanted all of the time.
As early as a child, he assaults his teacher who I suspect was trying to make him into a decent human being.
His dad sends him to the military school, which made him worse, I think. In those places, obedience to power and authority is taught as absolute good. That's how he admires the boy king in North Korea, because unlike Trump, he has no one reigning in on his tyrannical tendencies.
Bernie faced economic hardship and discrimination as he was growing up.
Out of that experience he learned how to empathize with those inflicted with pain and suffering. And his policy platform reflects that capacity for empathy.

I take offense to this particular bullshitting.
Those brain-dead pundits so glibly putting Bernie and Trump in the same box is offensive.

[guillaumeb]

3. Also from the article:

The Bernie Sanders rally in Davenport was the precise opposite of the Donald Trump rally in Burlington and yet precisely the same in every detail . . . The same specter of angry white people haunts Sanders’s rally, the same sense of longing for a country that was, the country that has been taken away.

My Anglophone cousin overlooks one thing, that Trump appeals to a vision of the US, a vision that only existed in rich households. In the real US, that US inhabited by 90% of the people, life was endless work with no prospect for relief except death. There was no golden age of US history, except for those who had the gold.
These angry old white people are like the Southerners who romanticize slavery and the South, dreaming that they and their families would have lived on a plantation, when the reality is that most Southern whites were poor sharecroppers.

Sanders is talking about a US that could be, and that is the difference.

As a metis, I also liked this part,

The piece opens with a cringeworthy bit of smug Anglo-Canadian nationalist liturgy in which Marche — who, like this writer, hails from Canada’s largest city — waxes poetic about the country’s “inert virtue of tolerance” that, he tells us, is “the most prominent inheritance of the British Empire.” (It is unclear where Canada’s lengthy history of racism — including the state’s attempted cultural genocide of the country’s indigenous population — fits into Marche’s historical narrative.)

Canada has had a long history, mainly among the Anglophones, of racial and linguistic intolerance.

[Omaha Steve]

4. Thanks for posting

K&R!

OS

[rpritchard93]

5. Thank you!

Getting quite tired of the comparison...