I was surprised to see this on TV yesterday. Especially on MSNBC.
ANAND GIRIDHARADAS: Last night was an historic win [for Bernie Sanders in Nevada's presidential caucus] that a lot of us are still struggling to understand. Historic not just because you now have three victories in a row. It's not historic only because Bernie Sanders is now decisively proving he can win in milk-white America and in the emerging superpower of color that we are becoming in the coming decades, but I really would argue that it is historic because we are starting to see that we may be paddling through a bend in the river of history here.
Something is happening in America right now that actually does not fit our mental models. It certainly doesn’t fit the mental models of a lot of people on TV, it doesn’t fit the mental models of a lot of people in the parties, it doesn’t fit our cultural mental models. You have someone talking about, in a way we have not heard, genuine, deeper democracy, popular movements, human equality in a meaningful way, and a politics of love in the tradition of Dr. King, and winning elections, in America, the United States of America.
And I just have to say — I’ve been encouraged watching you on-air talk about your own rethinking of things, which I think we all have to be in this work. I think this is a wake-up moment for the American power establishment. For Michael Bloomberg to those of us in the media, to the Democratic Party, to donors, to CEOs. Many in this establishment are behaving, in my view, as they face the prospect of a Bernie Sanders nomination, like out-of-touch aristocrats in a dying aristocracy. Just sort of ‘How do we stop this How do we block this?’ And there is no curiosity.
Why is this happening? What is going on in the lives of my fellow citizens that they may be voting for something I find it so hard to understand? What is happening? What is happening? This is a moment for curiosity in America. I think about this network, which I love, you love, and I think we have to look within.
Why is a lobbyist for Uber and Mark Zuckerberg on the air many nights explaining a political revolution to us? Why is Chris Matthews on this air talking about the victory of Bernie Sanders, who had kin murdered in the Holocaust, analogizing it to the Nazi conquest of France? The people who are stuck in an old way of thinking, in 20th-century frameworks, in gulag thinking, are missing what is going on. It is time for all of us to step up, rethink, and understand the dawn of what may be, frankly, a new era in American life.