Bernie Sanders is receiving tons of praise from both “left” and “right” establishment figures for his words regarding Charlie Kirk, about the meaning of democracy.
Here is the video of Sanders speaking the words
and below are the words in question here written out.
A free and democratic society, which is what America is supposed to be about, depends upon the basic premise that people can speak out, organize, and take part in public life without fear, without worrying that they might be killed, injured, or humiliated for expressing their political views. In fact, that is the essence of what freedom is about and what democracy is about. You have a point of view. That's great. I have a point of view that is different than yours. That's great. Let's argue it out. We make our case to the American people at the local, state, and federal levels. And we hold free elections in which the people decide what they want. That's called freedom and democracy. And I want as many people as possible to participate in that process without fear. Freedom and democracy is not about political violence. It is not about assassinating public officials. It is not about trying to intimidate people who speak out on an issue. Political violence in fact is political cowardice. It means that you cannot convince people of the correctness of your ideas and you have to impose them through force.
Every American, no matter what one's political point of view may be, must condemn all forms of political violence and all forms of intimidation. We must welcome and respect dissenting points of view. That's what our Constitution is about. That's what our Bill of Rights is about. That in fact is what freedom is about.
The murder of Charlie Kirk is part of a disturbing rise in political violence that threatens to hollow out public life and make people afraid of participating.
I can understand why many people think what Sanders said is just wonderful. He is indeed right about people now being more afraid to speak out, and about how terrible that is. But when Sanders speaks about what democracy is all about he is wrong.
Here’s why Sanders is profoundly WRONG.
What Sanders is describing, what he calls a “free and democratic society,” what I and no doubt you would love, is and can only be a society of, by and for people amongst whom there is no fundamental conflict. By obscuring this fact, Sanders is propagating a lie, as I will now explain. Bear with me please.
An example of a fundamental conflict is when people disagree about whether there should be chattel slavery or not.
Another example of a fundamental conflict is when people disagree about whether or not there should be capitalist class inequality (e.g., some rich and some poor with the rich owning the means of production and the poor owning only their labor that they must sell to the rich for a wage just to survive.)
An example of a non-fundamental conflict is whether the new school should be painted blue or green.
Another example of a non-fundamental conflict is whether or not same-sex marriage should be legal.
Here’s what the difference is:
A fundamental conflict is one that, in contrast to a non-fundamental conflict, cannot be resolved peaceably because neither of the two opposing sides will voluntarily agree not to have its way just because of some peaceful decision rule such as “the side that wins a majority of the votes gets to decide the issue.”
In the United States in 1860 there was no way in hell that the slave-owners, who wanted chattel slavery, would ever agree to the abolition of slavery just because they lost an election. That’s why the conflict over chattel slavery was a fundamental conflict. (I gave above the conflict over same-sex marriage as an example of a non-fundamental conflict because it doesn’t seem that either side is refusing to accept a peaceful majority-vote decision on the question, but if either side did refuse to honor such a decision and use violence or its credible threat to get their way then the same-sex marriage conflict would rise to the level of being a fundamental conflict.)
Now consider what Bernie Sanders is saying:
Bernie Sanders says: “You have a point of view. That's great. I have a point of view that is different than yours. That's great. Let's argue it out. We make our case to the American people at the local, state, and federal levels. And we hold free elections in which the people decide what they want. That's called freedom and democracy.”
Do you understand that when one person’s point of view is “I have a right to own chattel slaves” and the other person’s (perhaps a slave’s) point of view is “Nobody has a right to own chattel slaves,” then there is no way in hell that either side is going to voluntarily agree to “argue it out” and let the question be decided by a “free election.”
In real life, the way such a fundamental conflict is resolved is that the side that can bring to bear against the other the greater violence or credible threat of violence makes the decision. This is why there was a Civil War in 1860 in the United States despite the fact that there was (supposedly) a system for deciding questions peaceably by majority vote.
Likewise, today our society is riven by a fundamental conflict: Should there be capitalist class inequality (e.g., some rich and some poor with the rich owning the means of production and the poor owning only their labor that they must sell to the rich for a wage just to survive.)?
The people who say there should be class inequality will NEVER put the question up for a vote. Never! The people who say there should not be class inequality are forced to accept that class inequality by violence (the cops and military) or the credible threat of violence.
The only way to make our society be the way Bernie Sanders describes, in his words, “a free and democratic society” is to have what I call genuine democracy as described here. A genuine democracy is NOT a “democracy of ALL the people.” No. A genuine democracy is a democracy of, by and for ONLY the people who are opposed to class inequality. Amongst the people who are opposed to class inequality decisions are made and disagreements resolved peaceably by the kind of free and open debate followed by voting that Bernie Sanders describes.
In a genuine democracy the people who are opposed to class inequality use whatever violence or its credible threat is required to forcibly prevent those who want class inequality from imposing it. The people who want class inequality, however, have no say in the matter.
The reason we need an egalitarian revolution now is because the people who want class inequality have the real power, a virtual dictatorship of the rich that falsely describes itself as a democracy of ALL the people. What Bernie Sanders describes as “a free and democratic society” can only exist when we who want to abolish class inequality have removed those who want class inequality from power, with whatever force/violence that requires. (Here’s how we can do it.)
Bernie Sanders obscures the fundamental facts discussed above. He obscures these facts with his Our Revolution rhetoric. Sanders writes on his website: “The worst fear that the ruling class in this country has is that Americans — Black, White, Latino, urban and rural, gay and straight, young and old — come together to demand a government that represents all of us, not just the wealthy few.”
No! A government that represents “all of us” is a government that represents the “wealthy few” and if it does that it absolutely does not and can not represent the rest of us. It is one or the other and NEVER both because the conflict between the wealthy few and the have-nots is a fundamental conflict, just like the conflict between slaves and slave-owners was.
According to Bernie Sanders’s specious reasoning, what was needed back in 1860 was to make the American government be one that represented all Americans, not just the slave-owners. Absurd! If it represented the slave-owners (by not abolishing slavery, the minimal thing it would have to do in order to be representing the slave owners at all) it absolutely would not be representing the slaves at all.
It is a huge lie to say otherwise, as Sanders does. In fact, the reason Sanders is permitted by the rich to be a senator is precisely because he helps the rich maintain the lie that he and the rich both propagate, the lie that says “No! You do not need to make a revolution. You do not need to remove the rich from power in order to have genuine democracy. You just need to win a vote to maybe tax the rich more.” (Sanders wants to tax the rich LESS than President Eisenhower did, by the way.)
Bernie Sanders is also profoundly wrong about freedom of speech.
Sanders says, “You have a point of view. That's great. I have a point of view that is different than yours. That's great. Let's argue it out.”
Sure, there are some things that should be “argued out” like this. But there are some things that should NOT be argued out like this. In societies of class inequality the rich use propaganda—"their point of view”—to oppress people, and this they have absolutely no right to do. They have no right to do it for the same reason—a reason that almost everybody and surely you too understands—that in a war the enemy (the people who are trying to conquer and oppress you, such as the Nazis in World War II) has no right to use any form of communication that helps it to win the war. The side fighting against an oppressive enemy has every right to prevent the enemy from using ANY communication; it has the right to block radio communication by jamming it, for example. It even has the right to shoot down enemy spy planes that are sending perfectly true reports back to the enemy headquarters.
We are in a CLASS WAR today. We’re in a class war between ordinary people—the have-nots—against a small rich upper class that oppresses us, that treats us like dirt and uses mass murder against us. Our enemy has no right to do ANYTHING (including using speech) to oppress us and to win its war against us.
For example in the United States during slavery years the slave-owners created lots of racist propaganda to make ordinary whites view blacks as an inferior race that ought to be slaves. This racism was their “point of view,” and they had absolutely no right to express it.
Likewise, in the 1930s the Nazis created tons of antisemitic propaganda to make Germans (including elementary school children) view Jews as an evil threat that needed to be exterminated. This antisemitism was their “point of view,” and they had absolutely no right to express it.
I have written about what’s profoundly wrong with the bogus “Freedom of Speech” notion that Bernie Sanders (and the ruling class) promotes here and here and here. The oppressors advocate “Freedom of Speech” in order to protect their “right” to do what they do to oppress us.