Bernie Sanders Is Selling a Socialist Fantasy
A listener to his speech would never know that socialism has gone wrong or that capitalism has done good.
The speech was pretty empty too.
Photographer: Sarah Silbiger/Getty Images
In 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt said that America should protect “four freedoms”: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear. As he runs for president, Senator Bernie Sanders is presenting his “democratic socialism” as a way to finish FDR’s work. Judging from Sanders’s speech defining the concept, he has added a fifth freedom: freedom from facts.
Wednesday’s address was a long denial of reality. Through evasion and distortion, Sanders pretends that socialism has never proved oppressive to freedom, and that capitalism has never led to widespread progress.