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Home The Day the Bernie Dream Died

The Day the Bernie Dream Died

Near Philadelphia’s City Hall, an obese woman wearing a marijuana leaf bikini was telling a television reporter why she supported Bernie Sanders. City Hall, once the tallest building in the world, is a gloriously magnificent edifice whose pillars are held up by representatives of all the races of the world and whose clock tower is topped by a 37-foot statue of William Penn, was besieged by Sandernistas.

The Democratic convention was underway. Bernie Sanders had endorsed Hillary Clinton. But his followers still believed. If not in Bernie, then in the radical movement that had coalesced around him.

A cheerful woman wearing a “Bernie or Bust” t-shirt told me that even if Bernie won, she would be voting for Jill Stein and the Green Party. It was unclear how Bernie Sanders could possibly win. Let alone how Jill Stein could win. But Bernie and Jill were against drones, banks and GMOs while Hillary Clinton was for them. And the mood grew uglier as the temperature approached one hundred degrees.

The crazier elements had converged around the historic Arch Street United Methodist Church which was “training” activists to protest non-violently. There were illegal aliens in green t-shirts laughing uproariously and scowling elderly Trotsky fan club members wearing BDS buttons surrounded by posters denouncing America for its “ongoing war” in Iraq (against ISIS) not to mention Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan and most of the rest of the world. The Revolutionary Communist party marched angrily past.

There were also “Bernie Peacekeepers” wearing plastic placards proclaiming that they do not support violence of any kind. If anyone doubted their seriousness, the placards had a rainbow peace sign.

But the core Bernie elements had gathered around City Hall. They had marched the day before when there was no convention. And they were going to march today. A giant banner denounced the “racist drug war”. The ragged crowd carrying it had clearly found themselves on the wrong end of that war. Younger fans wore Bernie t-shirts. Entire families with dreadlocks held up handmade signs.

There was something millenarian and apocalyptic about the scene. Everyone knew that Bernie was going to announce that the revolution was over. And no one wanted to go home.

Officially the Democrats were here to coronate Hillary. MSNBC had set up a giant stage outside the Independence Visitor Center where tickets were being distributed to Independence Hall and its recreations of the rooms where the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were signed. MSNBC personalities leered at viewers from giant video monitors and NBC staffers had swamped the Independence Hall bathrooms. But on the ground, it was all Bernie, Bernie and more Bernie.

There were no Hillary shirts in the streets. It was all Bernie. Silhouettes of Bernie’s glasses, Bernie and his bird, Bernie as a strapping young socialist and Bernie speaking to the masses. He was their Stalin or Saddam. His image was on shirts, signs and banners. Meanwhile elderly DNC delegates wearing blue lanyards nervously shuttled between bars eagerly catering to delegates. The painted donkeys in the squares, a tired gimmick, mostly went ignored. Even an “I’m With Her” button was a rarity.

In a hushed voice, a DNC delegate told me that it was important to elect someone in the middle. But the message in the streets was dramatically different. It wasn’t even about Bernie anymore. Bernie Sanders had tried to address his supporters asking them to behave and they had booed him. And that made the booing of Hillary’s name at the convention inevitable. Bernie the politician had sold out. But the radical left had already created Bernie the character who would go on fighting even when the politician wouldn’t. Bernie could start the revolution. But he couldn’t stop it. Because it was never
about him.


The most extreme Sandernistas had converged on Philly certain that they would win. And for all of Hillary’s elaborate organization, her networks of influential cronies, she couldn’t stop them from ruining her coronation. The DNC was on the run. Debbie Wasserman Schultz had resigned. And DNC delegates were outnumbered by angry radical leftists waving signs denouncing capitalism.

The radical left was trying to devour the Democratic Party ahead of schedule. And it wasn’t a pleasant sight. Sandernistas crowded the 30th Street Train Station holding forth on a rigged election. They had arrived on stuffy Amtrak trains clutching wadded up cardboard signs. There were angry grad students down from Yale upset about income inequality and anti-war activists from New York City toting models of drones and photos of crying children. Meanwhile the temperature kept on climbing.

Philly was an oven. The locals apologized for the weather as if they had somehow caused it. But the sullen unforgiving heat seemed to echo the mood of Sanders supporters. The hotter it got, the louder and crazier the chants became. At the heart of what was supposed to be a celebration of Hillary, a passionate portion of her party’s base was demanding that she be sent to jail. It was a secret wish that Bernie Sanders had been forced to swallow and abandon, but his supporters had not forgotten. And they would not forget.

Even before Bernie Sanders could sell out his followers at the DNC, the rising tension reached a crescendo and broke. The heat that had been growing all day could continue no more. Torrents of rain gushed down from the sky. Lightning flashed past skyscraper scaffolding and thunder boomed louder than the loudspeakers. Furious gusts of wind blew rain past a handful of umbrellas that had been used as parasols against the sun. The MSNBC stage was quickly deserted. And the Sandernistas, like drowned rats, raised up their cardboard signs as makeshift umbrellas against the rain.

Hours later, the final betrayal took hold. Bernie Sanders spoke at the DNC and sold out his loyalists. But they too had been preparing for the end.

More than one Sandernista spoke wistfully to me of Jill Stein and the Green Party. One leftist messiah had failed them. Bernie Sanders had put the Democratic Party ahead of the radical left’s agenda. But there were always uncompromising leftist radicals who would never be practical no matter what.

Sanders’ own supporters booed him. They booed any mention of Hillary. And they rode Amtrak home clutching wet signs calling for socialized medicine and an end to capitalism. Whether it is the Soviet Union or the Sanders Union, the left never recognizes that its revolutions have failed. It never learns anything from history except how to hate harder.

The Democratic Party had allowed the left to take over. And the left has no sensible stopping point. It is an endless cycle of revolutions, of mad political agendas and madder personalities that will not stop. Leftists like Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders unleash revolutions that they cannot control.

That is what always happens to the left. It is what happened at Berniegeddon in Philadelphia.

The Bernie dream is dead, but the dream of a totalitarian revolution of the left lives on. Next to the great historical monuments of America, the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall, Benjamin Franklin’s grave and the Tomb of the Unknown Revolutionary War Soldier, the left vented its hatred for this country and its desire to erase its existence and its freedoms from the earth.

Comments

  1. Infidel28/7/16

    One small point is that they stiffed us for $23,000 in law enforcement/fire costs which has already been paid out (a lot of money for a small town,believe it or not :)

    This was perhaps the most pro-Bernie area in California, the whole county voted for Bernie when the votes were finally counted. He drew hugely enthusiastic crowds when he came here.

    Well, as the saying goes "Promising is one thing, paying is another" :) The real fault is the city council members who didn't realize how they were getting conned by the big city slickers. They still don't realize, believe it or not. They expect they will get paid when Bernie finds out :)

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  2. Infidel28/7/16

    Great article, by the way :)

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  3. There was never a dream there was never a movement. Bernie was a tin god with zero followers. At best he was a rallying point for Q-tips and their NPR totebags, dirty hippies and glint eyed fanatics of no coherent views at all. But be clear Bernie was not the point. He could have been anyone he could have been a potted plant.

    There was only one movement - the movement to trick dumb incurious yet eager young people into voting for Tony Soprano. And that movement has succeeded. The DNC couldn't arm twist the un-twistable. They couldn't race bait white college kids. They couldn't class warfare the middle class who's first on Hillary's chopping block. All they had to do was appeal to their vanity by letting them chatter on about whatever they liked and not turn them down flat.

    Bernie served two fundamental purposes. You can argue about how he was knowingly complicit he was but at its root the Bernie phenomenon accomplished two things. 1 - it created the necessary fiction that there is a legitimate primary process with real candidates and votes and things that actually matter where people get their say and they party nods sagely and feels their pain. This of course is complete nonsense. None of that was real. Hillary was going to be the nominee no matter. No matter the votes, the speeches the debates. Done deal. Always going to happen. She bought it fair and square. People can 'vote' and 'caucus' and that's fine. But it's theater. You can't tell leftists to their faces you don't take them seriously. You can insult them, beat them, steal their wives, but you if you fail to take them as seriously as they do, you're toast. So the fiction must be maintained.

    The second important aspect is in the nature of the fiction of the Democratic party itself. The Democrats live amid a fake hagiography of gritty folk fighting their noble battles, stalwart against the forces of The Man. The tools of that battle are from the far left. The further left the better. If the government is evil the answer is more government. If college is too expensive make it free. If black people are dying like flies from abortion then the answer is more abortion. If poor people are hungry then burn down the nearest grocery store. If their neighborhoods are too violent, get rid of the cops. But again it's hard to say that outright, in clear terms. You have to trick people into concluding that they came to all these wonderful solutions on their own. And this is the role that Bernie plays. Let the radicals be radical. Let them march around and complain an make absurd propositions and demands. This way they can be under the snuggling blanket of Mother Democrat w/o having any of the stick to Hillary. But as with most things the beauty is in the timing. Get rid of Bernie the fake candidate at the right time and wait for his flock to flock to Hillary. After all where else are they going to go? 97% of them don't know who Jill Stein is. Most of them have been told there's no daylight between the T-Party and Libertarianism. So they sniff the tears, since up their rucksacks and head off to Hillaryland. Sure she's a psychopathic criminal, a Mussolini fascist, a liar, a hack, a failure and a babbling incompetent, but she's ours and we'll grit our teeth and 'love' her. At least she's got a uterus and with any luck we'll have Bill Clinton running things in the background.

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  4. Devotion to socialism has to be a mental illness. I think all the Sandernistas need to be transported to Venezuela to pour out their great self-righteous compassion on the starving citizens of failed socialism.

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  5. Anonymous28/7/16

    The Left comprises by design, disaffected single issue groups. Their members only see their lives as making the world conform to them. The members, inflexible and impatient, rudely elbow members of other groups, alienating them.

    Consider discourse versus debate. Discourse can possibly result in better mutual understanding and even agreement. Debate has the goal of humiliating an opponent before an audience. Political egos crave resounding debate victories. And here is the hate.

    Traditional wisdom excludes three topics from polite conversation: Politics, Sex, Religion. I'm starting to see why.

    ABSJ1136

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  6. Anonymous29/7/16

    E.O. Wilson, the entomologist and father of the much denigrated sociobiology, explained it when talking about ants. ‘Marx was right, socialism works only he got the wrong species…’ Now wait a minute, could it possibly happen that HHH (Her Highness Hillary) peace be upon her, considers us all to be ants, the working kind?

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  7. Y. Ben-David29/7/16

    I considered myself a Democratic in my earlier years. I even voted for Jimmy Carter, something I still feel I have to repent for to this day. However, I couldn't bring myself to even look at the convention or listen to the speeches, except for one. That was Sarah Silverman. Having someone as vile and repulsive as she is speak at their convention shows how low the Democrats have sunk. She managed to restrain herself and throw in only one profanity, but a party that showcases someone as disgusting as she is has lost any moral legitimacy. It also demonstrates their utter contempt for mainstream America that still objects to gutter language and demagogic politics, which was earlier expressed in Obama's contemptuous of of conservative Americans "who cling to their guns and religion". It is truly demoralizing to think that Obama was elected twice, in spite of that and they sank so low to nominate Hlllary as his successor.

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  8. Excellent article, especially the element about revolutions have failed and the only end up hating harder.
    Also, commenters here are excellent.

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  9. Excellent article. I especially liked the comments by Empress Trudy. Spot on!!

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  10. Is there any way we could give all of these protesters free tickets to smoggy, oppressive China? Or Venezuela? How about a strict Islamic republic?

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  11. I loved Empress Trudy's response.

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  12. Fabulous eyewitness report, Daniel. Wish I had been there. Also, great article as always. The Bernie-files will hold firm against Hilda. Hoping that will HURT her ...please....

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  13. Perhaps I should clarify. Hurt in the sense of losing the
    race for the WH. There's a lot of Bernie supporters who will never vote for here. Bigger wish is we don't have a slew of Mickey Mouse/ Donald Duck ballots carrying her across the finish line.

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  14. DenisO29/7/16

    Another great article, this time the "man-on-the-street" view of programmed madness. Could the programmers have expected anything else? Only rich Countries can tolerate children playing with fire, if you think about it. Wisdom can't be passed on from teachers who are unwise, but confidently superior and morally correct about everything they haven't actually thought about. We all had a chance to look behind the "curtain" and see the hand-wringing wizards painfully allowing the show to go on.
    When corruption isn't even a worry that needs hiding, and dividing the Country is the only tactic the Left has to rely on, after successfully dumbing-down two generations of voters, the inevitably of change is gradually being recognized as the only alternative to total anarchy, and unhappy children.

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  15. Please get through to your folks over there. There really is an existential threat to Western Civilisation. Hillary would hasten the process; speed up the vortex. This isn't about partisan politics, its about survival. Hillary has chosen a running mate who is bought and packaged by the Muslim Brotherhood, apart from being a facile ninny with low teens IQ. He is yet another shill. Obama was the last one. Wake up America; the Atlantic Ocean is a smaller pond than it once was. Europe is a goner and, the plebiscite notwithstanding, the UK will not be allowed to Brexit. Already the machinations are in place to thwart the vote.

    The unholy alliance of The Muslm Brother Project and Gramsci's Long March continues apace. Londonistan is now in the thrall of a Muslim Mayor. Many provincial cities are down the tubes. You still have time to turn the tide. Europe has clearly had it. Trump may not be the perfect answer, but he's worth a try. Go Trump. Save the freakin' Anglosphere.

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  16. Thank you for not posting a picture of that obese woman wearing a marijuana leaf bikini... The mental image was bad enough!...

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  17. Excellent writing and insights.

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  18. The DNC makes me sick. Not a patriotic American among them. They are willing to vote themselves the death and destruction that will follow for America. The Clintons have made themselves above the law, and when that happens, the America we knew is over. People, especially the left, will always say I'm nuts. Nothing bad could possibly happen. That's because they live in walled communities or in rich suburbs. Following their idiot "girl power" leader, they hate black people and want them to go away, after the election because they need their vote. Bernie has to be the biggest clown on the planet. All he needs is a red nose. I would like to know what security they offered him in the future to just drop his pants and give up. When they show Hillary on the news, it's always closeup because she has no crowds. She is a female Hitler, selling racism and a Third World status for America while she sits at the top having people killed. She never speaks of specifics. This is not going to fly. I predict there will be a Civil War, and it's not going to be a pretty fall to total Third World status.

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  19. I got a great laugh today. I happend to park next to a Jeep emblazoned with the usual assortment of leftist claptrap bumper stickers. Prominent among them was one that said "Billionaires can't buy Bernie!" My first thought was "That's right, it only took one very corrupt, lying old millionaire!"

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