I am not a conservative per se — as a Jew, a woman and a first-generation American, it wouldn’t be becoming of me to join the openly racist, sexist and xenophobic right wing. But if conservative could mean something else, it might mean this: Things exist, and exist for reasons, and we’d better think about what they are before we burn it all down.
I am not a revolutionary by circumstance nor by personality. I’m a risk-averse person with nihilistic tendencies. If I believe in the politics of anything, I believe in incremental, material change. I don’t buy dented cans or mix alcohol and Tylenol, and supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., annoy the hell out of me.
In the world of media everything is becoming homogenous, disposable and uniform. When Marx said all that is solid melts into air, could he have even dreamed up metaphors as glorious as the “cloud,” where all that was old ascends into the ether of efficiency and flexibility?
Both the left and the right are retreating into their ideological caves to stare at shadow puppets. Just as some Americans are ecstatically guzzling down the sweet, sweet promise of glamour and a Slovenian girlfriend, many in my age bracket are inhaling the rarefied air of political revolution and democratic socialism. It is simply a feeling, and like all feelings, I don’t trust it.
I don’t think it’s brave to support Bernie Sanders without looking into whether his policies are feasible. I don’t think it’s resistant to support Bernie Sanders despite his lack of knowledge and interest in foreign policy. I think it’s lazy and cowardly. I think it shows a profound political hollowness and, ultimately, indifference.
Sanders can do nothing more than hammer home that Hillary Clinton voted in support of the Iraq War 14 years ago to distract from his terrifyingly idiotic proposals, including an Iran-Saudi Arabia coalition against ISIS — Iran and Saudi Arabia don’t have diplomatic relations. Sanders can do nothing more than remind us he supported single-payer health care decades ago, and so did Hillary. He therefore proposes to destroy the hard-fought Affordable Care Act provisions — and replace them with one that has no political feasibility in a Republican-controlled Congress. This would certainly require reduced services to break even, has no provisions for veterans, and would, according to Ezra Klein, lead to massive hospital bankruptcies, and to Harold Pollack, reproduce most current inefficiencies .
The cult of Bernie is a cult of ideological purity. Insisting on perfection, it dismisses all criticism as pessimism, and all naysayers as ideological enemies. For this reason, Hillary is irrevocably stained. Her problem is that she has done things, ever, in her life. In his idiotic innocence, Bernie is untouchable. In the world of Bernie, we can cut out the bankers, carve up their bloated, baleine corpses and fete ourselves in the new and irradiated landscape. Once campaign finance laws are reformed, the backdrop will change, the actors will don new costumes and we will march into the Technicolor sunrise of tomorrow.
This politics of perfection — of blind acquiescence to optimism, of deaf kowtowing to hearsay — disgusts me. The Sandino Manifesto mixed bloodlust with hatred for pessimists, the Great Leap Forward and the Khmer Rouge’s four-year plans entailed lying at every level to avoid any hint of anti-regime backwardness and every mass movement has demanded the so-called bravery of stepping into line. Socialism is morally hazardous. In a Venn diagram, I’m confident that Bernie supporters would overlap with American adolescents who identify as Stalinist.
We should be open to criticism. We should be pragmatic. If we truly care about the impoverished and disadvantaged, we should seriously consider questions like: Will this require legislation that a Republican Congress might not pass? Will this alienate the American center? Will this incur serious budgetary problems? We must grapple with politics, not consider ourselves outside it.
Ann Manov is a UF French, English and Spanish senior. Her column appears on Mondays.
