The Senator from Moscow: A Political Obituary

On April 8, 2020, Sen. Bernie Sanders, the socialist gadfly from Vermont, withdrew from the Democratic presidential nominating process after concluding that he had no path to the nomination. This most uncharacteristic acquiescence to reality will not, unfortunately, mark the end of Sander’s long career of “public service”. However, this rejection by the members of the party Sanders had declared half-hearted allegiance to only twice in his thirty years in Congress marks the decisive end of his political future; and this occasion offers us a chance to reflect on the esteemed senator’s career.

Sanders began his political career as mayor of Burlington, Vermont, during which time he began a “sister city” relationship with Yaroslavl, a city in the then Soviet Union. After visiting this sister city, Bernie praised the Soviet Union's affordable public transit and “worker’s programs” — and so began Bernie’s long career as a useful idiot for some of the worst despots on Earth. A document from the Soviet Foreign Ministry described this program and others like it as “One of the most useful channels, in practice, for actively carrying out information-propaganda efforts.”

“Bernie’s has been a legislative career filled with quiescence punctuated by ideological grandstanding.”

Leaving behind the mayoralty of Burlington, Bernie won election to the House of Representatives and, a decade and a half later, he left that office behind for the United States Senate.

To hear his acolytes speak of it, Bernie’s time in Congress has been nothing short of extraordinary. A more honest look reveals a different story. 

Bernie’s has been a legislative career filled with quiescence punctuated by ideological grandstanding. Bernie has sponsored seven bills which have subsequently become law — not one of them significant in any meaningful sense of the word. Bernie’s supporters often counter this point by citing his propensity for passing amendments on other people’s bills. How revolutionary.

Bernie Sanders is a rigid, uncompromising ideologue. The Lugar Center ranked him the least bipartisan senator in 2017, and the fourth least bipartisan senator overall of the 150 current and former senators scored. Sanders is, in short, one of the least effectual, and therefore most useless, legislators of the last several decades.

While Sanders has not done much legislating over the course of his career, he has devoted plenty of time to advocating. He has spent decades praising and defending every left-wing tyrant and communist regime he could find, including Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, and Fidel Castro in Cuba — not to mention his well known love affair with the Soviet Union.  

On two occasions Sanders came very close to securing the presidential nomination of a party he has nothing more than a parasitic relationship with, and was thwarted by the Democratic establishment both times. 

Still, his quixotic and futile presidential campaigns have pushed the Democratic party further to the left; simultaneously toxifying the party of Kennedy and revivifying the ideology of Marx.

Sanders is survived by a newly energized progressive movement, which is as efficacious at wokescolding and winning primaries as it is bad at winning elections; by a legion of sycophantic acolytes who are obsessed with ideological consistency and frighteningly quick to dispense with any constitutional norm that stands in the way of their fictitious workers paradise; and an expanding cohort of hard-left legislators whose progressive bona fides are exceeded only by their ignorance of public policy and basic economics.

Rare it is for a man to at the same time accomplish so much and so little. The day will come when Sen. Sanders withdraws from public life; and when it does, he will be able to look back on a career which has yielded no significant legislation, and yet inaugurated a new generation of progressive legislators who, by virtue of the terrifying fecundity of their ideology, will no doubt see the enactment of several policies he did not.

Sanders leaves behind an army of bereft supporters, and I am sure that, true to form, they are already blaming everything from Tom Perez to the temperature in Michigan for Sanders’ loss. 

The truth is that Sanders lost because he is a bitter socialist fueled by greed and envy, who has been willing to ignore the brutal repression of countless nations by communist regimes to score political points domestically, and whose entire career has been devoted to pitting American citizens against each other. He will never be President, the power he so desperately hungers for will forever be denied to him; this is cause for celebration.