Left tenant Sanders

I discovered the other day that it's still easy to annoy me, 3+ months into Donald Trump's presidency, by saying "Bernie Sanders would have won". Or at least by saying it really condescendingly; I might react better if it were said in other ways, but it doesn't appear I'll find out. The first problem with this claim is, of course, that we'll never know; our reality lends itself poorly to controlled tests involving experimental Earth and control Earth. But the other problem is that I *believe* the claim to be preposterously wrong. I think Bernie would have been crushed, solidly losing the popular as well as the electoral vote. Since my own politics are by American standards far left and anti-corporate, and basically share Sanders's goals, I think this delusion is harmful.

The case for "Bernie would have won" is, I admit, simple.

#411: Queensryche, "Revolution Calling" (1988)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNdOsL4Xe7Q

In high school, tales of dystopia are oddly thrilling. We're shown a dictatorial world in which teens are forced to memorize official fictions and have few choices over the content of their lives, and we get to pretend this is escapist fiction, full of heroic resistance, instead of our daily routine. (I suspect dystopia becomes a more and more attractive theme the more assigned homework a given student completes.) These days dystopias dominate Young Adult novels (the Hunger Games and Divergent and the Giver and Chaos Walking and Maze Runner series, and on, and on), and get turned into hit movies as often as not. In 1988, we mostly just had Aldous Huxley and George Orwell -- winning us over through sheer persuasive brilliance in the absence of targeted marketing. Joined, occasionally, by a rock band taking inspiration from them.