And yes, this necessarily extends to describing the naivete of his followers. One of whom is my own teenaged son. He has become politically active for the first time as a Bernie acolyte. It is heartwarming to see, even as I take the role of cynic/realist in trying to gently push back on some of his conceptions while trying not to crush his enthusiasm for progressivism.
But my mother and most of my friends are also hardcore Bernie supporters, and they are full-fledged adults, highly educated, who ought to know better. I’ll let Chait take it from here. The whole column is a great read, but the money quotes are in the last two paragraphs:
Sanders’s story provides a comforting fable for his party. Not only are Democrats not hemmed in by the Republican hold on Congress, but they don’t even need to do the laborious work of persuading the political center to come to their side. They need only to rise up and break the grip of moneyed interests on the political system.
There are many reasons to doubt Sanders’s promise that he can transform American politics. Perhaps the most fundamental is that he does not actually understand how it works.