jason1637 said:
"When I ran for the Senate the first time, I ran against the wealthiest guy in the state of Vermont. He spent a lot on advertising — very ugly stuff. He kept attacking me as a liberal. He didn’t use the word ‘socialist’ at all, because everybody in the state knows that I am that." |
He can call himself what he want, but the policies he suggested when he ran in the primary weren't socialist so it doesn't really matter what he claims to be. If Bernie Sanders is a socialist, then Norway is a communistic country. And Norway is not a communistic country.
EDIT: But if you by socialist mean that he wants to impose certain regulations on business, you know, like pretty much every politician in the world except for anarcho-capitalists/other types of anarchists, then yes, Bernie Sanders is a socialist, along with all the other politicians sitting in the US Senate and in the Congress including Donald Trump.
EDIT #2: As to why I believe Bernie chose to call himself "socialist", it's simply because that was a name he was going to be branded with which could easily have been used against him during his entire political carreer, and thus the best move for him was to embrace it and refer to himself as it. That way, any political opponents trying to attack him by calling him a socialist would have a lot less effect because he already did so himself. Or maybe he's trying to redefine socialism into a new concept, separate from the classic marxist view of it. In fact exactly that is suggested in the article you linked me, and it also says:
"These policies include "strong labor rights, progressive taxation, a robust array of public goods like child care, health care, and higher education," all advocated by Sanders, said Schwartz. With these positions, Sanders is technically a social democrat — he isn’t calling for a red revolution, just "a way of making capitalism humane," according to Peter Dreier, a leftist political theorist at Occidental College. So he’s not really a socialist, at least by the strict definition of the word."
If you actually read through the entire article you linked (and you should), you'll find a very good explanation as to why Bernie Sanders isn't a socialist (unless you choose to redefine the word, but then you have to drop all the other connotations you have with the original meaning of "socialist" as well).
