I have no issue with people, especially “liberals”, wanting to debate me about Bernie’s programs and vision. Bring it on. They can only think about little teensy steps, and put their faith in a fraudulently packaged candidate, versus thinking big and bold. Fine.

But, where I draw the line is a sleazy attack on Bernie that is nothing but red-baiting dressed up as  concern-trolling about the effects of his plans.

Welcome to the bottom-of-the-pond world of Paul Starr. I debated this guy last week on NPR for an hour. Aside from failing to disclose, either on air or apparently to NPR (I’m trying to verify the latter and have asked for an explanation but the program, On Point from WBUR, seems to be stonewalling/trying to make it all disappear) that he was a senior advisor to Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton during their health care “reform” effort (maybe he’s embarrassed because it was such a debacle, partly because they refused to kill the insurance and drug industries) and aside from being completely wrong on the facts (citing, for example, the now entirely discredited attack, amped up by an incompetent NYTimes report, on Bernie’s economic proposals by hedge-fund/financial industry shills Laura Tyson and Austin Goolsbee et al, as blown apart here and here), Starr reached back into the playbook of Republicans and a whole lot of red-scare nonsense to smear Bernie.

If you want to get the full sense of this smear, which was repeated, in various forms, during the debate, the diatribe gets its play in writing, not surprisingly, in the establishment mouthpiece, Politico:

The excitement surrounding Bernie Sanders’ presidential bid has many on the left hoping that Americans are ready to embrace socialism. That would be something. After the Republicans renominated Richard Nixon in 1968, James Reston of the New York Times called Nixon’s victory at the convention “the greatest comeback since Lazarus.” If Sanders raises socialism from the dead, that resurrection will surely top Nixon’s.

And:

Democrats and independents attracted to Sanders ought to think twice before shrugging off his self-description as a socialist.

And then there’s a whole long crazy thing about Bernie’s history:

Sanders’ program reflects his life commitments. In some respects, his biography recapitulates the journey of socialism itself. When he was in his 20s, Sanders worked on a radical kibbutz in Israel—the communal socialist phase. In 1979, he produced a video about the longtime Socialist Party leader Eugene Debs; on the soundtrack, released by Folkways Records, you can hear Sanders performing Debs’ speeches calling for an end to capitalism. In 1980, Sanders served as a presidential elector for the Socialist Workers Party, which supported the nationalization of industry and expressed solidarity with revolutionary dictatorships, including Iran (this at the time Iran was holding American hostages).

As he has pursued a political career in Vermont and as a member of Congress, Sanders has repositioned himself close to liberals, while denying he was a Democrat until the current campaign. But even now his worldview and the policies he is advocating are consistent with his old faith. He is still calling for a “revolution” to achieve socialism, blasting the “ruling class,” endorsing taxes at confiscatory levels and proposing a health plan that would effectively nationalize a sixth of the economy. Summing up his proposals, left-of-center economists, that it would increase the size of the federal government by 40 percent to 50 percent.

Sanders is also doing what populists on both sides of the political spectrum do so well: the mobilization of resentment. The attacks on billionaires and Wall Street are a way of eliciting a roar of approval from angry audiences without necessarily having good solutions for the problems that caused that anger in the first place.

Oh, no…Bernie is mobilizing resentment…uh, you mean, resentment against the elites and wealthy who have robbed people of their hard work and drained the economy of the very money that could be used to implement most of Bernie’s programs. Heaven forbid.

He worked on a “radical kibbutz”…which means what exactly? Was it a gulag? I mean…seriously…what exactly is a “radical kibbutz”, other than a way of raising the specter of some terrible, threatening, evil force? I was waiting for “Bernie and his comrades were underneath the beds of unsuspecting little tykes”.

 

And, god forbid, we’d have free health care. Nationalization!!! Starr is basing his erroneous claim about increasing the size of the federal government on a now-discredited “analysis” by another Clinton-allied professor which “rests on several incorrect, and occasionally outlandish, assumptions”. And, by the way, single-payer here is pretty much the Canadian model—meaning, unlike the UK, where hospitals etc are owned by the state (god forbid), Bernie’s plan would keep all that in private hands and simply move the insurance processing to the government—and save trillions of dollars over the next decade and beyond.

During my debate, Starr whined repeatedly about “government control” of the economy, and particularly, health care (because, uh, the insurance industry controlling health care works so much better, uh-huh)…somehow forgetting that, for example, the government does exercise vast control over large institutions with big budgets…like the Pentagon. This is a “liberal”, people.

Now, I get that Starr, as a well-heeled denizen of Princeton University, which certainly elevates him into the one percent, is well-insulated from the “resentment” expressed by millions of people. I’m sympathetic that he doesn’t see the people who don’t have health care and pay outrageous premiums for inadequate coverage even under Obamacare (that’s not fair—he probably does bump into those people, though he may not actually notice them when they empty the wastepaper baskets in his office or swab the floor of that fine Princeton institution he inhabits)

But, woven through this claptrap is a very dangerous, insidious and not so insidious, McCarthyite tactic of red-baiting.

It doesn’t try to acknowledge what “democratic socialism” is nor want to grapple honestly with the facts about Bernie’s plans or even acknowledge that Bernie is proud of his roots but speaks in a very American way, with very concrete American-type approaches, to a whole list of challenges.

Beyond the pale.

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