To call it hypocrisy is to misunderstand the very specific role Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) plays among a youth-driven progressive activist base that dominates the Democratic Party today. Back in the halcyon days of 2016, “Feeling the Bern” was supposed to mean attracting young voters to a determined economic agenda designed for working-class Americans. It has long since degraded into massaging the already easy consciences of young leftists happily locked into their comfortable, well-heeled urbanite bubbles.
Sanders has become the subject of immense ridicule for appearing April 12 at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, an Indio, California, gathering in which demonstrably non-impoverished young progressives toss around thousands of dollars to watch their favorite musical acts perform and interact in person (if only from far) with social media influencers and other cherished celebrities.
“Bernie Sanders making a surprise appearance at Coachella to sermonize on the evils of wealth in front of a crowd of people who paid at least $600 a ticket to be there is peak 21st century Democratic Party,” an X poster by the name of Enguerrand VII de Coucy wrote in an apt slap at the one-time would-be working class hero. The ridiculousness of Sanders’ performance politicking does indeed speak volumes about the state of affairs in a party that has been pilloried since the Kamala Harris debacle of 2024 for trying to pass off empty emotional posturing in place of genuine ideas.
There is no better person to blame for allowing this wholly corrosive development to take hold than Bernie Sanders himself.
Campaign of Ideological Self-Destruction
After losing the 2016 Democrat nomination in no small part due to establishment shenanigans by Democratic National Committee officials to prop up a deeply unpopular Hillary Clinton, Sanders at some point made a willful decision to pander in totality to the worst aspects of the Democrat base in his resumed run for the brass ring in 2020.
Sanders went intentionally shallow due to a correct perception that an emotion-driven social leftism held overwhelming sway among the core Democrat base. The evidence is everywhere to be found with a cursory glance back at his failed 2020 campaign.
The lead sentence of an August 2019 article at Democrat-aligned establishment news outlet Politico is particularly damning:
“Bernie Sanders, who was criticized by liberal activists in 2016 for not focusing more on racial injustice, is unveiling a sweeping plan on Sunday [Aug. 18] aimed at slashing the country’s prison population in half and ridding the criminal justice system of ‘institutional racism and corporate profiteering.’”
Note this move came almost a full year before the Summer of George Floyd, when Democrats, countless big-brand corporations and other cultural entities hurtled themselves en masse onto the “systemic racism” express train to anarchy.
The Sanders criminal justice reform plan, which Politico stresses was a result of leftist pressure put upon him, reads like a manifesto to the infantile mindset of spoiled youth excess. It would have created “safe injection sites” where drug users could shoot up “under medical supervision” without worrying about a dirty needle or an overdose.
Sanders, the stated champion of working Americans, that same month of August 2019 also unveiled a climate change “Green New Deal” plan so wildly ambitious that Bill Gates-funded UK establishment newspaper The Guardian wrote in headline lettering that it was “far more aggressive than rivals' proposals.”
“We’re fighting for the future of the planet,” Sanders declared as he officially announced his plan. The costs would have been so staggering for the average American he once professed to be most concerned about that massive government subsidies were to come into play.
“Highlights of the plan include $2.2 trillion in spending on need-based grants to families and businesses to weatherize homes and businesses; $2.1 trillion to help people replace gasoline-fueled cars and trucks with electric vehicles; $526 billion to rebuild the US electricity grid; and $407 billion to buy electric buses for schools and other public transit,” The Los Angeles Times reported at the time.
Sanders Shift and Follow
It's easy to forget now, but Bernie Sanders once forcefully spoke out against open borders, calling massive unchecked immigration a “Koch Brothers proposal” to feed cheap labor to corporations at the expense of American workers. “It would make everybody in America poorer – you’re doing away with the concept of a nation state, and I don’t think there’s any country in the world that believes in that,” Sanders told a visibly crestfallen Ezra Klein of leftist news outlet Vox in 2015.
Four years later, Bernie had learned his lesson. Democrats don’t want to hear things like that.
At the very first debate of the 2020 primary season, Sanders, like a school child, dutifully complied along with every other blue rival on stage with him when asked to “raise your hand if your government [health care] plan would provide coverage for undocumented immigrants.”
Once again, the monumental cost to American households be damned. Bernie had a nomination to capture, and acceding to bizarre progressive emotions over basic common sense was the path he chose to doggedly pursue to reach that goal.
He was not above going full tacky to get there. In March 2019, he hopped on the fringe Democrat transgender rights bandwagon that proved such a godsend to Republican candidates in 2024.
“Discrimination has no place in our society. I am proud to display this flag as a symbol of my support for transgender people across the country. We must stand with transgender people in all of our communities,” he wrote in an X post above a picture of a transgender flag placed alongside a US flag at the front of his congressional office. The trans flag had obvious creases and folds, looking for all the world like it had just been taken out of the box.
“Toss it in the dryer for like a minute, Bern” and “You don’t own an iron, bro” were among the numerous mocking replies.
This is how we got here. Bernie Sanders very much helped steer Democrats into the ditch they find themselves in today. There is nothing contradictory about him dancing on stage as these young leftists scarf down their $100 nachos. Quite the opposite. It’s the only function imaginable for a man eager to remain a part of a construct that has abandoned concrete thought for silly and faddish passions.
