“They think with the Liberals and dine with the Tories.”
— Oscar Wilde
Conservatives make a recurring mistake when confronting figures like Bernie Sanders: we argue policy while our opponents argue morality. We respond with spreadsheets while they, like medieval priests, traffic in absolution. This is why Sanders survives contradictions that would doom any ordinary politician. He is not primarily an economic thinker. He is a moral broker. And his success has less to do with envy among the poor than with guilt among the comfortable.
Intellectual incoherence is a hallmark of socialism, the stated aim of which is to create a society of equals by placing a few privileged people in charge of everyone else. Any centralized economy requires planners, regulators, enforcers, administrators, and moral custodians; an elite class empowered to decide what is fair, what is excessive, what is necessary, and what must be taken, and how the rest of us may live. The many are promised equality; the few are entrusted with power, privilege, and authority. The rhetoric is horizontal, but the structure is unmistakably vertical.
This is why socialism has never abolished hierarchy. It has merely frozen it, sanctified it, and placed it beyond challenge. Socialists, however, remain undeterred, never allowing visible outcomes, common sense, or obvious contradictions to interfere with their ambitions.
Sanders is the apotheosis of socialist hypocrisy, railing endlessly against wealth concentrated “in the hands of a few,” while demanding that it be controlled by a few politicians and bureaucrats in Washington. Listen to any of his speeches and it becomes instantly evident that the real issue for Sanders is not whether wealth is controlled by a few, but which few control it: the makers or the takers. He, having never made anything other than a career for himself by taking what others have earned, sides with the latter. So he demands consolidation on a scale unknown to any private enterprise, and the transfer of wealth, authority, and decision-making into the hands of a few Washington elites, federal agencies, and permanent bureaucracies. The market may produce powerful men with billions of dollars, but Sanders proposes something far more powerful: the further enrichment of an unaccountable ruling class already in charge of trillions of dollars, armed with legal control over the nation’s economic life.
The same inversion defines his complaints about a “rigged economy.” What Sanders calls rigging is simply the uncomfortable reality of an economy insufficiently rigged to his liking, one in which free markets produce unequal outcomes shaped by talent, discipline, risk, failure, innovation, and yes, luck. His remedy, therefore, is not fairness but control; not justice but management; not an unrigged economy, but one rigged by himself and a few others, protected from disfavored outcomes and administered by people who share his moral preferences.
A free economy distributes outcomes unevenly. A planned economy distributes outcomes politically.
His entire political project, therefore, exists to do precisely what he claims to oppose: formalize hierarchy, concentrate wealth in the hands of a few approved actors, and override organic results with a rigged economy imposed by political elites. That should be self-evident.
But beneath the surface there is an even more perfidious and familiar misdirection at work, one the rich have used since the dawn of the Enlightenment to preserve their status, an aristocratic trick that survives every revolution by merely changing its language. Did you ever wonder why so many wealthy people, in particular celebrities support Bernie? As Oscar Wilde understood, the ruling class has persisted not by renouncing luxury, but by moralizing it. It says, simply, “My kind of rich is not the problem.” The problem is always someone else’s wealth: vulgar wealth, unearned wealth, insufficiently enlightened wealth. The aristocrat denounces the merchant; the intellectual sneers at the industrialist; the celebrity scorns the entrepreneur. In every age, a ruling class emerges to explain why its own privileges are morally justified while others are obscene.
This is where Sanders’ real appeal emerges, not as a political or economic theorist, but as Bernie Sanders the guilt merchant, Patron Saint of the Privileged.
Supporting him functions the way buying indulgences from the medieval Church once did: not as repentance, but as transaction. Be as rich as you like. Be as greedy as you please. Enjoy every luxury capitalism affords. Do absolutely nothing to make the world a better place. So long as you support Sanders, so long as you vote for him, donate to him, repeat his slogans, or endorse him, your money is cleansed. Your sins are made white as snow. You may keep the lifestyle and outsource the penance. You are the right kind of rich.
This is not justice. It is actually a perverse form of capitalism, spiritual salesmanship masquerading as moral reform.
The pattern is common on the Left. Carbon credits for environmentalists who fly private jets. Hashtags for a Hollywood class that claims to support women while profiting from their objectification. A handful of diversity hires exploited by corporations that congratulate themselves for “representation” while doing nothing to improve the lives of the poor and marginalized. In every case, symbolic assent replaces moral action. The ritual is observed, the conscience soothed, and nothing of substance is required.
And that’s the beauty of it: Sanders does not demand righteousness from his followers; he sells righteousness to them. He sells indulgences to the self-indulgent and the over-indulged. He offers moral cover to those who have no intention of changing how they live, only how they posture. Like the money changers outside the temple (Matthew 21:12–13), he converts guilt into currency, turning unease into donations and donations into virtue.
The ancient admonition that “faith without works is dead” applies with particular force here. Sandersism allows people to imagine themselves righteous while remaining unchanged. It promises baptism without repentance, virtue without discipline, and compassion without cost. It flatters the moral vanity of the elite while claiming to speak for the downtrodden. And the more lavish the lifestyle, the louder the denunciation of “the system” from those who profit most from it, as though condemnation itself were a form of sacrifice.
Which, of course, it isn’t.
Sanders’ true genius then is not economic theory (no kidding!), but moral outsourcing, the illusion that someone else — the state, the bureaucracy, Washington itself — will do the hard work of virtue on your behalf, if only Sanders wins, which he almost certainly will not. “Don’t blame me, I supported Bernie!” And that is the final piece of the shell game. It is easy to support the crackpot when the crackpot is unlikely to prevail and make good on his promise to take from you. So you can feign sacrifice without actually making any. Genius!
The deal, then, is simple: keep everything you have, condemn the system that gave it to you, and demand that privilege and power and wealth be transferred to people who think like you. Above all else, nothing must change; not the system, not one’s status, and especially not one’s character.
That is why Sanders is so attractive to the well-heeled and the hypocritical alike, and why he is so dangerous, not because he is wrong about economics, but because he is right about guilt. He has mastered the art of converting moral unease into political loyalty, of assuring the comfortable that their comforts are not the problem so long as they make a public declaration of faith in him.
Conservatism rejects this bargain. It insists that virtue cannot be outsourced, that character cannot be legislated, and that no amount of political posturing can substitute for personal responsibility. Sandersism promises moral innocence while demanding nothing in return, in what is perhaps the purest manifestation of the socialist ethos of forever promising something for nothing. And that, more than any tax plan or spending bill, is the real fraud.
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