Yes but how does this relate to me?

Ryan Landry says that from whatever angle you look Ctulhu has moved leftward in the past decades. Compelling evidence for this case is the success of democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders who almost toppled Hillary and is seen by Dutch youth as a swell guy. Landry points out that this is weird because (((Sanders))) is pretty much an out-of-the closet communist. Wasn’t communism retarded?

Sanders-021507-18335- 0004
Interestingly Sanders is likeable in his speeches but not so much in pictures

Yes, communism was retarded. But we tend to forget that kind of abstract stuff. I mean, what was communism anyway? Something about the workers of the world right? About how they are treated unfairly by the elite? That really doesn’t sound too bad. Sounds quite noble in fact. I mean I know Stalin and Mao killed a bunch of people but they were crazy anyway. It’s not like Sanders would ever do something like that. Sanders is likeable!

Guess who was also likeable

Yes, Sanders is likeable. Were Sanders a college professor he would be beloved by his students. He’d be the kind of professor that with a friendly smile would argue that communism gets a bad track record because it has never been done in the right way, which is akin to saying that while people tend to die when they jump out of a 10-floor window this does not mean that you won’t be able to fly like an eagle when you try it the next time.

In political perception charisma trumps content because the Overton window by its nature is a taboo. We are not evolved to understand reality, we are evolved to survive. Survival depends for the greatest part on our capability to get along with our main competitors: other humans. We easily form an opinion on people. Ideas by comparison are difficult to understand and easily distorted. The popularity of Sanders was never the result of his brilliant ideas; instead his fame was a direct result of his likability combined with the fact that his in fact very stupid ideas happened to fit with the 2016 Western Overton window.


3 thoughts on “Yes but how does this relate to me?

    1. There’s different ways to peel a banana and similarly there’s many different ways in which Bernie is a communist. He shares many communist viewpoints:
      – expand universal healthcare
      – expand minimum wage
      – expand free (mandatory) education
      – expand welfare state

      But most importantly I’d say he embodies the typical communist narrative: the story that we are on the brink of a revolution in which the proletariat (students) will rise up against the bourgeoisie (corporations). Workers of the world, unite!

Leave a Reply to Dolf Cancel reply


You are commenting using your account. Log Out /  Change )

Google photo


Twitter picture


Facebook photo


Connecting to %s
