Sorry, I don't share those sentiments. If CNN crushes Bernie's chances, that is the one and only good thing they will have done since 2016. What they did to him in the debate was completely low, but that doesn't change the reality of just how pernicious the Sanders' movement is. His followers are totalitarian zealots who not only would destroy the economy but clearly exhibit murderous and even genocidal intentions.
Didn't you see the new Project Veritas video of a Bernie Sanders' campaign manager celebrating the murders committed by Cuban Communists, defending the idea of gulags, and calling for re-education camps in America? Why exactly should we feel any sympathy for such people? It would be like finding out that someone stole a $50 bill from Hitler or Stalin. Petty theft might be an unethical act but it doesn't mean that we have to slobber over the victim for deserving so much better in life. Do you really want me to feel bad for people like this white male disgrace to humanity?
I pretty much know the kind of people shown in this video, and please note that I said I sympathize (in a limited sense) with Sanders and not with Sanders supporters -- or at least with a specific sub-group among them, and again I stated explicitly that I am not for his ideas (or for his ideology).
Guys like the one in the video are complete idiots -- but those bark much more than bite. On the other hand, "Warren supporters" (if we are to compare the crowds), at least a specif and extremely powerful group, will bite much more than bark.
I could give a long reply (and this is a good discussion to have), but I simply do not have the time (please believe me). So I will just add two points:
1) Make a comparison and/or analogy to Trump supporters: You have a sub-group of them who are indeed white supremacists and belong to the KKK. Do they represent the group (Trump supporters, either vocal or silent) as a whole? No. But the "left"try to paint everyone with the same brush, which bares some resemblance to what is happening here, even if I agree with the thing that I know you are going to reply, that the extremist portion of Sanders supporters is probably more statistically relevant than the extremist portion of Trump supporters.
As I put in other posts, for me a politician is as effective as how much he can control the mad dogs in his base -- in real life politics he cannot afford to complete cut free from them and/or simply cannot shake them off. Trump is proving to be more efficient than I thought he would be in that regard. It remains to be seen how Sanders would fare.
In Brazil we had 3,5 terms of a left wing government who had a rhetoric which was far more extreme than Sanders' (years before first election and immediately before the first election they won). After elected they were far, far less radical, tending actually to real center in long stretches. Not that I believe they made a good government as a whole, but people feared that private property would be challenged by those guys and it did not come even close to that.
But, yes, there is always a risk when you have people with that discourse in your base, I get that, the only thing is that I assess that risk differently.
2) Guys like the one in this video are completely lost in time. His words were outdated already in the eighties, as a Marxist take on the economy was outdated already 100 years ago. Good part of the left literally lives in the past. But part of the critics of the left
also live in past. Take the Cuban revolution for example:
Batista's Cuba was a corrupt dictatorship of an irrelevant and submissive client state of the US. I completely understand and
do not morally condemn an armed opposition, and thus a violent revolution, against such government. I simply find invalid to impose generally on the "left" the supposed crimes committed during a bloody revolution. However, I am fully aware that the post-revolution Cuban government slowly (or not so slowly) turned into a violent dictatorship itself, as is so common in extreme left wing governments. I agree that left wing governments structurally are much more prone to dictatorships than almost any other kind of government. My only point is that is incorrect to say that it is inherent to the "left" the explicit totalitarian extreme. Historically, yes, there were strong and once important currents that were openly totalitarian, but nowadays people who support that approach are pretty much marginalized, or, in other words, the kind of totalitarianism imposed by "PC people" is a much more real threat IMO. Again, you will reply that the guy on the video has an active role on Sander's campaign. The question is how much power guys like this actually have.
Know that I think of it, yes, it is a bit scary to think about the "Bernie" crowd getting to the government, but I do think that in any real world scenario the "adult" compromises needed to actually win an election would naturally remove most radicals from the real nucleus of the group that will end up getting to power.
Again, I could be wrong, and I get the option of not wanting to run that risk at all costs. Part of my "sympathy" for Sanders (again, not for his ideas, I could write pages on why he is wrong in a lot of topics) comes from the fact that I felt that the guys is smart enough to understand how disconnected from the world a good part of his base is (and, again, I know this is a complete subjective and unsupported by facts opinion).
This answer ended up long, and going in a different direction than I first imagined, and it probably sounds way less critical of an extreme left government than I actually am. If I would put it in just one phrase, there is a huge difference between a Stalinist regime and a welfare state. In normal times I would probably delete most of I what I wrote and complete re-structure it, but not today...
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