by William Skink
The Missoulian likes to remind its readers of important people’s birthdays, and usually that means a celebrity, but today I was informed that it’s Bernie Sanders’ b-day. Now that I know Bernie is a fellow Virgo, I feel compelled to bring attention to a non-critical article amplified by those political scoundrels at Counterpunch, titled The Sanders Paradox: a Brief for Bernie.
This part in particular about why the far left are such self-defeating scolds some readers of this blog may appreciate:
How to awaken tens of millions of people from the entrapments of mass hypnosis, prostration, and indifference and into the first halting steps toward recognition and self-emancipation? The quandary is as old as the parable of Plato’s cave—that mythic netherworld of darkness and illusion inhabited by us fallible mortals. The solution—the way out of the cave into the liberating light of knowledge—is as stubbornly elusive now as it was then. But simply naming the problem of the “false consciousness” that stymies the oppressed—as endlessly and vehemently reiterated by the legions of the far left for a small eternity—does not by itself yield a solution, as the long history of leftist impotence and isolation attests. It is understandably frustrating for the leftist sects and sages to have all the answers except that most important one: how to lead the “masses” out of the darkness of ignorance and ideological deception into enlightenment. The leftist groups—with their obscure tomes of theory, their blogs, their conferences and meetings, their tinker-toy bureaucracies, their streams of manifestoes and critiques, their insular feuds and splits and fiery excoriations of left, right, and center—are self-declared leaders without followers, generals with an invincible plan for battle who lack only one small detail: an army.
Happy B-day, Bernie.