Bernie Sanders once occupied the role of gadfly of the left in a roughly analogous way that Ron Paul did for many years (I’m only comparing these two men in this very narrow sense, not in terms of their integrity or ideology or anything else) as the conscience of the more ideologically committed portions of the left and right, respectively.
And, once upon a time, Sanders garnered the same kind of grassroots enthusiasm that Paul did back in 2008/2012 and Trump did in 2016 and still does today, filling entire stadiums — the kind of popular support Joe Biden could only drool over in stupefied envy — and issuing calls for literal revolution.
Whatever one thinks of his politics, the appeal to the largely disaffected electorate (non-voters being the most overlooked and neglected electoral demographic) was that he was a.) genuine in his views and b.) an outsider devoted to reform — what might be called the leftist version of the “Drain the Swamp” platform.
Soak in the delicious, rabid apoplexy he once induced on the MSNBC airwaves — Bernie Derangement Syndrome, if you will.
All that to say: what a long, long fall from that spirited disposition to this: a basement endorsement of his former rival who took his 2020 endorsement (coerced by Obama) and then spit in his face with zero policy concessions of any kind, which looks more like a hostage video than a political ad:
While we may have our disagreements with Biden, it’s important to take a minute to think about what a Trump presidency would mean to our country and, in fact, the world. If you believe in democracy, and I know you all do, if you believe in science, if you believe in justice and workers’ rights…
Donald Trump is a pathological liar. He’s a racist, a sexist, a xenophobe, a homophobe, and a religious bigot…
Related: Biden Wanders Aimlessly in Rain, Karen Handlers Shoo Away Press
You know the thing; there’s no discernible difference between this screed and the standard Rachel Maddow monologue we’ve all heard a thousand times.
So what happened to Bernie Sanders? Something happened to this man if that’s what he can still be called in his neutered state.
There’s a lot of speculation, including that his wife got hemmed up Trump-style by the Deep State, which was used to threaten him into submission in 2016, in 2020, and now in 2024.
Via The New York Times (emphasis added):
A federal investigation into a long-ago land deal by Senator Bernie Sanders’s wife is threatening to take some of the luster off the senator’s populist appeal, attaching the phrase “bank fraud” to the biography of a politician practically sainted on the left for his stands against “millionaires and billionaires.”
Mr. Sanders, a Vermont independent, is still riding high on popularity from his presidential campaign, delivering rousing speeches to cheering progressives in Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia.
But he has been shadowed by talk of a deepening investigation into his wife’s role in a 2010 land deal for a Vermont college that ultimately contributed to her ouster as its president. His wife, Jane Sanders, has hired a lawyer to represent her as federal authorities look into a $10 million sale of about 33 acres of lakefront property by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Burlington to Burlington College. Ms. Sanders was hoping to relocate and expand the institution.
The couple and many of their supporters maintain that the investigation is politically motivated and that it was set in motion by the Vermont state chairman for Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign, Brady Toensing, who filed a complaint with the local United States attorney’s office in January 2016 on behalf of the diocese’s parishioners.
But the facts in the case do not fit well with Mr. Sanders’s populist image. The charges revolve around a $6.5 million bank loan, that was obtained with a promise that college donors would quickly pay back at least $2.6 million of the debt. They did not, Ms. Sanders was ousted, and the college went belly up. The senator had already taken some grief last year for purchasing a $575,000 vacation home on Lake Champlain, to complement his house in Burlington and his rowhouse on Capitol Hill.
Whatever the case, something or someone got to him, as the marked difference in his rhetoric between 2016 and 2024 cannot be overstated.
