https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.buzzfeednews.com/amphtml/waleedshahid/why-msnbc-cant-comprehend-bernie-sanders
Opinion: Why Pundits Can't Comprehend Bernie Sanders
It's the last gasp of a political elite that’s been radically out of touch with the lives of normal people for most of the 21st century.
If you were watching cable TV on the night of the Nevada caucuses, you might have heard Chris Matthews compare Bernie Sanders’ electoral victory there to the rise of the Third Reich. While Matthews has since apologized, it was an astounding and unconscionable moment: one of the country’s most prominent political commentators disparaging the campaign of a man who could very well be America’s first Jewish president. And it revealed something powerful.
A few hours earlier, one of America’s most celebrated Democratic strategists, James Carville, went on air to say the winners in Nevada were Sanders and Vladimir Putin. As I watched, I realized these weren’t just random or offhand comments; they’re the last gasp of a political elite that’s been radically out of touch with the lives of normal people for most of the 21st century, increasingly inept at explaining the enormous pain and discontent felt by the working- and middle-class voters who make up the base of the Democratic Party.
To put it another way, a generational transition is happening in the Democratic Party — and it’s clear that many of its current leaders and talking heads don’t understand why.
ADVERTISEMENT
From my perspective, the reason a party stalwart representing the last half-century of Democratic politics is losing to an independent, anti-establishment outsider is pretty straightforward. After all, millions of Americans are suffering from the consequences of a generation’s worth of bad decisions made by the political establishment, both Democratic and Republican. The communities torn apart by deportations, those jailed by the rise of mass incarceration, the families reeling from the toll of the war in Iraq, young people trying to live their lives under the yoke of crushing student debt, and everyone suffering from skyrocketing inequality after the financial crisis now simply understand that these crises required the willing complicity of leaders in both parties, including even prominent Democrats like Joe Biden.
The actual problems facing Americans have gotten really bad, and people rightly blame consultants and elected officials, both Democrats and Republicans, for bringing our society to the brink.
Simply put, this is why people are drawn to Bernie. They’re looking for new leaders who either didn’t contribute to those crises or — even better — have spent their entire careers opposing the policies that led to them. They are looking for leaders whose solutions actually scale up to the problems facing our society, because they understand there’s an entire generation of politicians who were on the wrong side of some of the defining fights of our lives, and Joe Biden embodies them.
And yet, it’s clear that few of the people you see discussing politics on cable TV understand that. They insist Biden’s poor showing has been the fault of lackluster debate performances. Just as they failed to understand Trump’s rise, they fail to see that their theories have been discredited. And they’ve all but called Democratic voters stupid, because these talking heads are unable to grapple with the obvious: Sanders is winning by speaking to the hopes and fears of a rising generation of Democrats who look and think a lot more like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez than Joe Biden...
