It Berns, But Not in a Good Way

Is Bernie Sanders my best choice?

I sat out the 2008 election. I couldn't bring myself to vote for either McCain or Obama. The 2012 election wasn't that bad. Obama had turned out not to be the socialist destroyer some people thought he was, and Romney was a classic example of a rich dickhead. Voting against Romney wasn't hard to do.

Now I'm feeling like sitting out again. The GOP has built itself into a party-first marketing organization that doesn't practice any of the principles it claims to champion. Hillary Clinton is a packaged, scripted politician who waits for others to clear the road before she jumps in front and pretends to be leading. As for Sanders, I kind of like the guy, but he seems like the classic problematic progressive. He thinks that having good ideas and good intentions is enough, but it's not.

I'm about ready to not vote for any presidential candidate this year. The problem is that I have this nagging feeling that sitting out this election would be abandoning my responsibility as a citizen. Even though I don't like the candidates we're being offered, they're not all exactly the same. I feel like it's my duty to pick one, even if my choice is based on who would do less damage rather than who would do the most good.

Judged that way, Sanders name keeps floating to the top, and that makes me feel kind of creepy.

See, I'm a second-generation Cold Warrior. Fighting communism was kind of the family business, and it's hard to escape that kind of background. I have a gut reaction to words like socialism, even if it's a mild form of socialism. Sanders, as a democratic socialist, generates the same kind of reaction within me.

Does that eliminate him from consideration? Maybe not.

For one thing, I understand that sometimes people need to take collective action to solve collective problems. I understand that for large-scale problems, government is the best way we've come up with to deal with such problems. I don't see the government as my master, it's just a group of people we've chosen to organize those large-scale collective solutions.

But collective action is not inherently socialist. America has taken all kinds of collective actions without turning into a socialist country. Those actions include everything from a national military to interstate highways to public schools to environmental regulations. These things are kind of socialistic, but they haven't changed our nation's fundamental capitalist nature.

That brings us to Sanders. He sounds like he'd turn the socialism dial up a little higher than I like, but could he actually make us a socialist nation? I don't think so. Americans love capitalism too much, and as long as we can make that system work, we're not going to give it up. We love our shopping malls too much.

There's another factor at work here. I think we need to shake up the mainstream political establishment, which seems to have lost touch with the American people. This is probably the same motive that drives a lot of Trump supporters. They aren't happy with the way things are going, and they want someone to knock some heads and rattle some cages.

The problem with Trump is that he's a salesman, and I trust salesmen even less than I trust politicians. To me, nothing that Trump says can be trusted, not even in theory.

So what about Sanders? He's a politician, so there are limits to how much trust I'll put in his words. But his election might shake up the political establishment in ways that could work out for us.

That brings me to today. If the presidential election was held today, I might pull the lever for Sanders, and that bothers me. I'm anti-leftist to the core, and he represents left-wing thinking. Voting for Sanders feels like it would be a rejection not only of my principles, but also a rejection of my father's anti-communist legacy.

On the other hand, he might rattle some cages that badly need rattling, and both the structure of our government and the character of the American people limit the amount of damage he could do. He's kind of like a muffler patch. It's not a permanent solution, but it will keep you going long enough to get a proper repair done.

I'm going to have to decide soon. I'm going to have to make a decision that I can defend, at least to myself if not to others. Is Sanders really the best choice for an old-fashioned conservative like me?