Biden repudiated his long-standing record on all issues (for real?) and advocated the Bernie Sanders’ program, reduced by at least 55% to protect the wealth of his billionaire contributors and patrons, and protect the status quo, all in hopes of conning Latinos and the numerous American underclasses to vote for his prospective administration, which like the 2008-2016 Obama-Biden Administration would be a protect-the-Wall-Street-Banksters-and-the-high-end-and-the-status-quo administration. Bernie delivered his unchanged and continuing message, which Elizabeth Warren and now Joseph Biden have been poaching on to the minimum extent they think would boost their bids to power in the eyes of the public, while protecting their sponsors.
The mainstream media say Biden “won” the Biden-Bernie debate of 15 March 2020. This is bullshit. Even at the debate itself the hostility of the CNN-UNIVISION questioners towards Bernie was barely concealed, and they never called out Biden on any of his endless stream of egregious and easily refutable lies. But of course we know this is the ‘mainspeak’ standard operating procedure (‘mainsop’). However, Bernie does have gaps in his support despite his appeal far beyond the Democratic Party base with many (most?) Independents (the numerically largest bloc of voters), as well as disaffected (Trump hating) Republicans (similar to Nader’s appeal to the anti-corruption sliver of Republican voters). And those gaps are likely impossible for Bernie or even a reincarnated FDR, or Eugene V. Debs, or Lenin to win over.
They are people who are afraid to “go all the way” to Bernie’s platform and vision. Why?, because: they fear being scolded by the power structure for disobeying (e.g., old Black voters); because they imagine they have some beneficial connection to the power structure that they fear losing (e.g., their moneymaking games, preferential subsidies, “redlined” protections); because of an identity voter association including their bigotry (e.g., can the “Christian” voters of the Deep South, of all types, bring themselves to vote for a Jew?); because of their Trump-like narcissism and denial (why does climate change not get a response with the same kind of urgency that COVID-19 is getting?); and because of a masked sense of personal inadequacy preventing them from seeing past themselves and having any sense of responsibility for ensuring decent futures for the younger generations.
All such people who also have any Democrat-leaning proclivities will find any excuse to interpret events like the Biden-Bernie debate as a “win” for Biden. This would have been true regardless of whatever Bernie had done, and regardless of however ludicrously Biden had performed. Most people do not make voting decisions on the basis of logic and the choices of policy options offered (including those beneficial to them!). They choose on the basis of fear of change, and identity (their as-wished identity as reflected by the candidates). In general, people don’t think, they rationalize; they don’t evaluate, they react. Just look at Trump’s moralizing evangelicals for an extreme example of such mass self-deception.
So to any honestly thinking non-Trumpian, Bernie did not “lose” the debate. There simply may not be enough thinking non-Trumpians who do not imagine, feel nor want a connection to the corrupt establishment, in America’s voting population.
“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.”(William Shakespeare, spoken by Cassius in the play Julius Caesar, I, ii, 140-141).
As a misanthropic socialist all I have to say to the rest of my fellow Americans is: I’m sorry I have to rely on the rest of you dumb fuckers for the outcome of my fate and that of my family.
I’m a scientist and have lived by testing my ideas, and throwing away the bad ones. My own preference is that Bernie get the chance to test whether my claimed deficiency among American voters is true, with the November 2020 general election. A victory there would be extremely sweet because it would mean overturning Trump and his Republican troglodytes as well as their allied by class-and-graft-interest Democratic Party establishment, like that apocryphal old Jew, Jesus, who overturned the money-changers’ tables in the Jerusalem Temple during the reign of Tiberius.
