The Discreet Charm of the Never-Bernies

How can wealthy liberals, anxious to protect their fortunes and their heirs from the predations of the poor, destroy Bernie Sanders without being seen as destroying Bernie Sanders? That is the delicate question.

The current tactic is the playing of the hypocrisy card. With revelations (by Sanders himself) that he is now a millionaire, thanks to his book sales, his fellow millionaires and not a few actual billionaires point to this fact as being "problematic."

It is especially "thorny" because Sanders is acting so damned "prickly" about it whenever the topic of his new membership in the One Percent Club is brought up - say, about every 10 minutes in the video chat rooms known as cable news shows and in the pages of such elite gossip rags as the New York Times.

"Good-natured" ribbing from late night pseudo-comedians is an integral part of this new front in the  destruction crusade, with the New York Times breathlessly reporting on Wednesday that Jimmy Kimmel observed that Bernie appears to have spent none of his fortune on personal grooming or couture.

The same article quotes Stephen Colbert, fresh off his London junket fawning over Michelle Obama in the latest leg of her book tour, as drawling:

“Yesterday Bernie Sanders released 10 years of his tax returns. Finally, now we can get the answers to all of our Bernie-related financial controversies. Like whether he writes off mothballs as a business expense or a snack.”

The Times is once again doing what it arguably does better than any other corporate media outlet: it is engaging in a personal destruction crusade in such an arch, knowing, nuanced way that it does not seem to be engaging in any personal destruction crusade at all. 

The problem which the Gray Lady and her corporate media cohort now face is that Bernie has gone mainstream, and most important of all in their world, he has more cash on hand than any of his Democratic rivals. It's certainly a long way from the good old days of 2016, when all the Times had to do, personal destruction-wise, was to alternately ignore Bernie and deride him. It's even a long way from last year and early this year, when the propaganda tropes that he is not liked by women and black people went nowhere fast, given that public polls have shown the exact opposite to be true.

So now it's on to how Bernie Sanders is causing such great angst among the altruistic liberal rich that they might even be inconvenienced by a dreaded Brokered Convention next year.

Times reporter Jonathan Martin engaged in some good old fashioned shoe leather reporting as he pounded the pavement on both coasts to plumb the plutocratic depths of the "Stop Bernie" movement 

Parachuting down to Flyover Country for a day or an hour is, let's face it, nothing but lazy stenography. The rich love to read about themselves and not about some deplorable out of work factory laborer, even if the literature is not always as flattering to them as they might like. It was the rich, the class which could afford to buy books in the 19th century, who helped make Thackeray's satiric Vanity Fair, for example, the enduring bestseller that it came to be. And what 21st century PBS fan wouldn't kill to live in the snooty Downton Abbey?

Anyway, satiric critical portrayals of the venal rich sometimes have a way of turning such conniving grasping characters as Becky Sharp into admirable heroines whenever the corporate entertainment world gets hold of them. When Vanity Fair was made into a TV movie in 2004, for example, Reese Witherspoon magically transformed her into a plucky, adorable, rags-to-riches ingenue. Did I mention that Witherspoon had also recently played a celebrity softball-pitcher at one of those spunky, rags-to-riches Michelle Obama book tour appearances, where front row seats go for thousands of dollars a pop?

Anyway, I digress.

Martin's faux-satiric characterization of Bernie Sanders fans as "an unwavering base" of "fervent supporters" who endanger party unity had the desired effect of eliciting nearly 3,000 outraged responses from readers who are still smarting from the newspaper's cavalier treatment, three years ago, of both themselves and their candidate. These responses seem designed to be an "I told you so" cathartic moment for the nervous rich, proving once and for all to the sensitive elite class that Bernie Sanders supporters are, in fact, a fervent and unwavering mob... and so veddy, veddy unreasonable and dangerous.

Secondarily, Martin's surface-snide portrayal of the rich donor class as selfish pearl-clutchers and canape-gorgers who are  terrified of Bernie's "avowed socialism" seems designed to plant the very tiniest seed of doubt into the minds of progressive readers. Never mind that Bernie is no socialist, but rather a de facto FDR Democrat who sees nothing wrong with wars or the arrest of Julian Assange or with a better-regulated capitalistic system in general. If you can only plant that seed in these early days, it might even sprout and thrive by the time any actual voting takes place a little under a year from now.

Comparing Sanders with Trump is still tops on the "Stop Bernie From Eating the Oligarchy!" agenda. Martin posits that Bernie is just as paranoid as Trump, probably because Bernie (rightly) believes that the Democratic Party and its media sycophants are aiming for his personal destruction.

The main weapon, therefore, that centrist corporatists plan to wield against Sanders is Trump himself. Even the Sanders campaign acknowledges that beating Trump is their top priority, before passage of a single payer health care bill and other policies can even be seriously discussed. The wealthy backers of the party are taking solace in the fact that, just as he did in 2016, Sanders has vowed to support the eventual nominee. Which, if they have anything to say about it, will not be Bernie Sanders. It is only his promise to be an avowed player that permits him to stay in the game. Thus, his calculated silence on the Julian Assange arrest. He is silent even though it was WikiLeaks which revealed that the corporate Democrats were really out to get him in 2016.

So, there's this important nugget in the Times's cautionary tale:

“Bernie Sanders believes the most critical mission we have before us is to defeat Donald Trump,” said Faiz Shakir, Mr. Sanders’s campaign manager. “Any and all decisions over the coming year will emanate from that key goal.”
Or, as former (my bold) Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri put it: “One thing we have now that we didn’t in ’16 is the uniting force of Trump. There will be tremendous pressure on Bernie and his followers to fall in line because of what Trump represents.”

If the anguished wealthy liberal donor class needs a slogan, here's a suggestion for them: 

Never Bernie! Never Trump! Always the Plutocracy - Always!

When you finally wake up the golden drops of their beneficence trickling down upon you after they nominate one of their own in a super-delegate-rigged second ballot, they tacitly confide to the Times, you'll realize just how abjectly grateful to them that you truly are, and should have been all along.