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Bad Bernie takes: ‘A socialist can’t win’
№3 of a multi-part series deconstructing the worst bad-faith arguments against Sen. Bernie Sanders
During a CNN debate in October 2015, Anderson Cooper asked Bernie Sanders a particularly loaded question: “You call yourself a democratic socialist. How can any kind of socialist candidate win a general election in the United States?”
“We’re gonna win because we’re gonna explain what democratic socialism is,” Sanders replied before launching into his standard elevator pitch. He decried the concentration of wealth held by the “top one-tenth of 1 percent” and railed against capitalism’s systemic failure to deliver in other areas, such as health care and education.
Cooper’s question contained a lot of baked-in assumptions about the American voter. Why would Americans vote for a socialist? You could easily ask the opposite questions: Why the hell not?
If the S-word is truly an anathema, then one would expect Sanders to lose support by admitting on national TV that he’s an…
