Kevin Williamson explores for National Review Online the particular brand of socialism Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders is peddling on the presidential campaign trail.
In the Bernieverse, there’s a whole lot of nationalism mixed up in the socialism. He is, in fact, leading a national-socialist movement, which is a queasy and uncomfortable thing to write about a man who is the son of Jewish immigrants from Poland and whose family was murdered in the Holocaust. But there is no other way to characterize his views and his politics. The incessant reliance on xenophobic (and largely untrue) tropes holding that the current economic woes of the United States are the result of scheming foreigners, especially the wicked Chinese, “stealing our jobs” and victimizing his class allies is nothing more than an updated version of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s “yellow peril” rhetoric, and though the kaiser had a more poetical imagination — he said he had a vision of the Buddha riding a dragon across Europe, laying waste to all — Bernie’s take is substantially similar. He describes the normalization of trade relations with China as “catastrophic” — Sanders and Jesse Helms both voted against the Clinton-backed China-trade legislation — and heaps scorn on every other trade-liberalization pact. That economic interactions with foreigners are inherently hurtful and exploitative is central to his view of how the world works.
Sounding more than a little like Donald Trump — and that’s not mere coincidence — Bernie bellows that he remembers a time when you could walk into a department store and “buy things made in the U.S.A.” Before the “Made in China” panic, there was the “Made in Japan” panic of the 1950s and 1960s, and the products that provoked that panic naturally went on to be objects of nostalgia. Terror of the Asian Economic Superman is a staple of modern American politics: A quarter century ago, the artist Roger Handy published a book of photographs titled Made in Japan: Transistor Radios of the 1950s and 1960s. We all remember Captain Lion Mandrake’s account of being tortured in a Japanese prison-of-war camp: “I don’t think they wanted me to say anything. It was just their way of having a bit of fun, the swines. Strange thing is they make such bloody good cameras.”
Like most of these advocates of “economic patriotism” (Barack Obama’s once-favored phrase) Bernie worries a great deal about trade with brown people — Asians, Latin Americans — but has never, so far as public records show, made so much as a peep about our very large trade deficit with Sweden, which as a share of bilateral trade volume is not much different from our trade deficit with China, or about the size of our trade deficit with Canada, our largest trading partner. Sanders doesn’t rail about the Canadians and Germans stealing our jobs — his ire is reserved almost exclusively for the Chinese and the Latin Americans, as when he demanded of Herself, in the words of the old protest song, “Which side are you on?” The bad guys, or American workers “seeing their jobs go to China or Mexico?”
