Our Revolution by Bernie Sanders

Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In by Bernie Sanders
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Part 1 of this book is a rehash of Sander's 2016 presidential run and Part 2 is his beliefs and policies on a number of issues. Part 1 is not so good, and the book overall is probably too long, but Part 2 makes the whole endeavor worthwhile for me.

I've been a big Warren fan for a long time, I really want a female president, I was so annoyed at Sanders in the 2016 election, and I was doubly annoyed when he announced his 2020 run. But, oh boy, do I love this entire policy section. He goes issue by issue, campaign finance reform, banking reform, health care, higher education, the environment, racism, immigration, the economy and government programs, and more, and for each issue, he calls it as he sees it, even when it makes Democrats look bad. And I've been watching C-Span since the 1990s, I know this is who Bernie Sanders really is and always has been. The rest of the left is just starting to catch up to him.

I haven't necessarily switched my allegiance to Sanders, rather just put him up there tied with Warren for now. Warren's policies and Sander's policies are not that dissimilar, so for me, it will really come down to how the early stages of the primaries go.

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The Vanishing American Adult by Ben Sasse

The Vanishing American Adult: Our Coming-of-Age Crisis—and How to Rebuild a Culture of Self-Reliance by Ben Sasse
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Ben Sasse is a Republican United States Senator from Nebraska since 2015. At first, I thought this was going to be a really interesting read. Throughout the book, I felt myself agreeing with many of the individual sentences that Sasse wrote. He's highly intelligent so these sentences certainly sound good and are true... in a way. For example, I agree with his advice for middle-class young people to expand your view of the world by traveling and reading classics. Though, I think the latter is more important and financially obtainable for most of the population. Note that our current President is very well-traveled but very poorly read and the result is less than ideal. Also, note that this is not a millennial issue but an American-of-all-ages issue.

The problem is that many of Sasse's ideas are actually in contradiction with each other, and more importantly, in contradiction with how he votes in the Senate. He doesn't make an overall argument which is clear or compelling.

For example, Sasse states: “I'm a conservative but not because I care very much about the marginal tax rates of the richest Americans, rather I'm a market-oriented localist because I believe in cultural pluralism and I believe in the First Amendment, in voluntarism over compulsion whenever possible, and in as much decentralized decision-making as is conceivably feasible.” There's a lot in this run-on sentence to unpack. First of all, I'm a liberal and I would say that I think capitalism is better than the alternatives (with regulation), and I believe in cultural pluralism and "I believe in the First Amendment, in voluntarism over compulsion whenever possible, and in as much de-centralized decision-making as is conceivably feasible.” I agree with many of these ideas, in whole or in part, so I don't particularly understand why this set of values makes him conservative.

Let's break it down a little more. He says, "... I believe in cultural pluralism..." what he's really nodding to is state's rights, not "cultural pluralism,” because in Chapter 5 he makes it pretty clear that the only culture he believes in is the historical Puritan work-driven culture. What makes this ethic superior to say, the European ethic of working to survive, but having ample vacation, family, and sick leave. He leaves this unexplained.

Yes, no one likes the entitled younguns' who demand praise and high salaries without earning it and leave work early and write obnoxious emails to superiors. But can we take a minute to discuss the CEOs and bankers who get paid millions even when they fail astronomically, bankrupt their companies, and lose the savings of investors? Can we compare these relative evils?

So let's talk more about the millennials who are having trouble in the current economy and compare them to Sasse's grandma who was an exceptional human being that strapped her baby to a plow” and just dealt with all of life's troubles. Can we just embrace that she's a superior person, and not hold everyone else to her standard? Did everyone else behave like her during the Great Depression and just rise to the challenge? No. Suicide rates averaged 12.1 per 100,000 people in the decade prior to the Depression, jumped to 18.9 the year of Wall Street's crash and remained higher than normal throughout the the Great Depression. (from Historical Statistics of the United States: Bicentennial Edition, Colonial Times to 1970, Vol. 1 (Washington DC: 1975), via https://www.shmoop.com/great-depressi....) So maybe we should celebrate that these millennials are surviving at all, especially when so many of them are getting shot at by automatic weapons of war, and worry less about how much they're spending on iPhones- arguably just doing their part for King Capitalism. (Full disclosure: I paid $35 for my iPhone. I do not regard it as a necessity.)

I agree with Sasse's anti-consumerism, see Chapter 6. Oh boy, do I! The problem is, I don't think he believes these things as they appear to be in contradiction with his voting record. Also, he states he's "market-oriented." It's as if Sasse doesn't understand how conservative deregulation capitalism works or what drives it. It's extremely confusing and he doesn't sound like a conservative at all in this chapter. NOT AT ALL. But we know how he's voting for big corporations in the Senate right? We know he's just feeding us a bunch of nice-sounding sentences right? He just voted "yes" to rolling back some bank regulations put in place by the Dodd-Frank Act (67-31).

Okay, maybe you're thinking that's because he's for "as much de-centralized decision-making as is conceivably feasible.” Um, except, he just voted "Yes," to banning abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy. As anyone who has read about these abortions knows, these abortions are extremely difficult to obtain and expensive- often requiring upfront payments that may not be reimbursed by insurance- and as such almost always involve a problem that developed later in pregnancy and risk the life of the mother.

So to be clear, banks should not be well-regulated by the federal government even though they have the power to destroy the entire economy. But the potential life-and-death medical care of an individual pregnant woman should be regulated by the federal government. Personally, I don't think he makes a lot of sincere, persuasive, nuanced, or -let's just say it- "adult" arguments.

See his voting record here:
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/...
https://ballotpedia.org/Ben_Sasse

P.S. I'm moving to Nebraska this summer.

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Lies & the Lying Liars Who Tell Them by Al Franken

Lies & the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair & Balanced Look at the Right by Al Franken
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I first read this in 2004, but I recently re-read it because I couldn't remember it and Franken has a new book that I'll have to wait to get from the library. This book is actually really well-argued and researched, probably because Franken had an entire team of Harvard students to fact-check and edit his chapters. But the most remarkable thing is how inaccurate the purposefully conservative media already was by 2003- and how they have always (ironically) accused the mainstream media of having a bias. Fox News had already been in operation for about 6 years- since October 1996. You know what distinguishes real news from "fake news?" Fact checking, fact checking, fact checking!

Twenty years later we are living through the disastrous results of the right wing's attack on truth, which turned out to be an attack on American democracy.

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