Baron Wormser: Bernie

It seems fitting that in the vast, “great” United States of America only one politician has come forward with a coherent response that he has taken to the people concerning what is occurring in the second administration of Donald Trump. That person, Bernie Sanders, has been around a few tough blocks but has stuck to his message, a message uncompromised by the forces of money that have put a very serious dent in American democracy. I rush to say that it would be wrong to say he is above money. No one is. He has, however, made it a point in his so-called socialist way – and by European standards he is a very mild socialist indeed – to try to put first things first. This is a huge undertaking although, as it should be, Bernie has kept it simple. 

   He has harped on health care for understandable reasons. I recall a friend of mine who was a doctor in the Soviet Union after praising everything he could praise about living in the United States, sadly shaking his head and saying, “The health care system, though. It is a failure.” We use that phrase “health care system” because there is no system beyond what money dictates. What Bernie is getting at is the well-being of each citizen. In the capitalist scheme of things this well-being is supposed to be determined wholly by money. Everything else is window dressing, however much hullabaloo is devoted to various social issues. To say that money should not be the arbiter of a person’s well-being is, truly, a radical proposal in the American scheme of things yet one that almost should go without saying if the government is composed of “we the people,” who, as people, want to live their lives in a reasonably healthy way. 

   Bernie of course is tilting at the economic engine that cannot be tilted at and that as he likes to understandably stress, is the producer of oligarchs (who so often are arch manipulators of that engine), an engine that holds both parties in thrall. He has shown that billionaires can buy you and that you can tell the American people that is just fine. After all, if we all worship money shouldn’t we worship a demigod of money and believe everything he does is somehow in our best interest? Won’t most Americans go to the wall to defend the right to make an unlimited amount of money, as if that were the chief blessing that went with living in the United States? Since Americans can wave the flag of their putative individualism, which given the nature of mass society is an unhappy joke, isn’t that enough? Don’t we each die on our own? Why pretend otherwise? 

   Things get bleak pretty fast when you look at the moneyed picture, but that picture has been in place since the industrial age kicked in big-time after the Civil War and has only kept kicking all the stronger as time has gone on. The supposition is that moneyed industrialism will go on forever and that Americans as a God-blessed people (begging the issue of what God has to do with money) will reap the benefits, though, admittedly or not, some reap a whole lot more benefit than others. All of which is to say that the door Bernie has kept knocking on is the door of consciousness, a very big door in which,  to put it at its starkest level, money, as more than one psychoanalytic historian has noted, represents death and is locked in a struggle in the human psyche with the forces of life that speak to the foundational health of everyone. Can you put a price on your loved ones? Can you put a price on the well-being of the planet? Can you put a price on a life span? The moneyed answer is “Yes, yes, yes.” This is offered in the name of no-free-lunch, get-real pragmatism, but the real issue is whether Americans want to believe that their own well-being is tied in with others’ well-being, that well-being, as in your oxygen is my oxygen, is based on sharing and cooperation.

   Both those words are anathema to people who believe in controlling as much as they can possibly control. Hence the Earth is seen as a “resource” to be commandeered by the forces of capital and used to capital’s ends. Any further thought is worthless beyond how best to maximize extraction. The mind-numbing aspect of this is how empty-headed it is, how vacant the forces of capital are, how spiritually bankrupt, how lacking in any sense of well-being that goes with the simplest human acts of caring and nurture, whether it be taking care of an infant or tending a plant or walking a dog or reading a poem to someone. Yet if money defines every dimension of life then those acts are more or less worthless. They certainly aren’t the stuff of political capital and the spurious excitement that gets crowds whipped up. They certainly don’t savor of the thrill of blaming whomever you feel like blaming when you wake up in the morning, as if the infantile act of blame were an achievement.

   Have I strayed from Bernie Sanders, the maverick senator from Vermont (where I live)? I don’t think so. Bernie is broaching the issue of consciousness, as in “What do you make of your life? What do you want from your life?” And he is very much intimating a big truth – people have to deal with money one way or another, but money is not health, love, caring, culture, food, to say nothing of the daily miracles of day and night, photosynthesis, the precious atmosphere that sustains life, and the myriad creatures, trees, and plants humans share the Earth with. Money is much more akin to fear since once you have it you’re afraid of losing it and thus makes for a desperate sense of security, the belief that if I make a lot of it I somehow won’t die. Or at least I’ll die comfortably. Or at least I showed a profit. Profit? And that’s the rub Bernie is raising. You don’t have to look closely to understand the goal of profit is a specious one, a sadly reductionist approach to the enormity of the gift of life. Is that the planet’s epitaph: They made a profit? Are we good for anything else? To my mind, you have to cheer for Bernie Sanders because he is stubbornly optimistic about Americans. He believes they are good for a good deal more. They show it in their daily lives time and again. Their daily acts of decency are the genuine news. The credo is not “we the quarterly earnings” nor “we the efficient” nor “we the techno-serfs” but “we the people.” Bernie embraces that phrase. I take that to be the gist of democracy. 

Copyright 2025 Baron Wormser

Baron Wormser currently resides in Montpelier, Vermont. His many books include The History Hotel (CavanKerry, 2023).