“Bernlennials” as many of them call themselves, or Millennials who heart Bernie Sanders, are channeling the same Ayn Randian purity that lures many a young free marketeer.
“He answers to ‘We the People,’ rather than the corporate and financial sectors,” the youthfully exuberant Millennials for Bernie site touts, ignoring that those same sectors are comprised of We the People, workers with jobs and families and livelihoods that corral capital to enable human flourishing.
Justin Bieber, step aside. Sanders won the “Swipe the Vote” contest sponsored by the dating app Tinder, some Tinder users lure unsuspecting admirers into campaign pitches to Feel The Bern, and one high school girl even brought a cardboard Sanders cutout as her prom date. Sanders’ young acolytes reflect a recent Harvard University survey showing 51 percent of adults between the ages 18 and 29 say they don’t support capitalism, versus just 42 percent who say they do.
Sadly, more than half of young people lack an adequate grasp of history and economics, somehow thinking they can beat the laws of mathematics and maintain their high quality of life. Europeans, whom Sanders seek to emulate, are poorer, and far less innovative than Americans (at least, for now).
Yet magical thinking swings across both sides of the aisle. Like many others, impressionable and fresh out of college, I arrived in Washington, D.C. as an idealistic libertarian. Within a year or two, I abandoned this wholesome objectivism when confronted with the harsh realities of human behavior.
Yes, Washington is crawling with lobbyists seeking to snag the latest crony capitalistic handout, from oil subsidies to “clean energy” boondoggles. But it’s also a place where vital policies have been crafted to protect the most vulnerable among us. It’s a place where justice, in all its blindness, ensures rule of law, a basic need for societal stability.
In practice, unfettered libertarianism doesn’t mean that cherubic members of Ron Paul clan play harps and Gary Johnson feeds you grapes while you exchange goods and services in a perfectly efficient souq. One need only look at chaotic developing nations where tribalistic anarchy stunts human progress to see that government’s absence does not equal utopian dreams. Not to mention returning to the gold standard is totally unworkable, just ask Winston Churchill when he tried that disaster in 1925.
Yet I still admire the heart of libertarian matriarch Ayn Rand’s philosophy of self-determination and personal responsibility. Her works like Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged have inspired many a young policy wonk, including House Speaker Paul Ryan, to public service. Ironically, perhaps she would have eschewed that and encouraged them to stay in the private sector.
Sanders also inspires young people to public service, but he’d love to see an ever-expanding government workforce. His passionate rhetoric about “free” college, government housing and other products and services utterly ignores their schlerotic effects on societal well-being. His perfectly executed policy dreams would result in comparable human misery seen in the perfect libertarian world.
The power of Rand’s narratives, rhetorically, rather than substantively, mirror Sanders’ speeches. Yet in an embarrassing New York Daily News interview, Sanders could not describe just how he would break up banks, a central theme of his soaring stump speeches. He essentially said they should regulate themselves — a positively Randian idea. Why this inconsistency fails to register with his young fans is unfortunate, but it’s utterly human nature. Because for many, voting is an emotional choice. And sadly, reality sometimes is flat-out boring, or at least harder to propagandize.
Just as facts don’t matter to many Donald Trump supporters, they don’t matter to Sanders’ young disciples. And they don’t matter to Rand fans, either. Both Sanders and Rand are about rhetoric, not results. Both Sanders and Rand purists are stuck in arrested development. Who can help them metamorphose?
Atlas Smirked
May 14, 2016 at 11:31 am
Carrie, you’re spot on about Bernie, but for the record, Ayn Rand was not an anarchist. She believed in limited government, one of our nation’s founding principles (though, sadly, long-forgotten.) . Keep up the good work!
The Objectivist
May 17, 2016 at 12:12 am
Like atlas said, it was utterly bizarre to suggest that developing nations’ trouble with anarchy would have anything to do with capitalism, which the author should know if she’s read even a tiny bit of rand’s work as claimed. Also, nothing matters more to ‘Rand fans’ than facts and results. That’s why we always stand up for freedom and human rights. The moral is the practical.