Bernie Sanders' business class socialists

Winston Churchill is rumored to have said, “If a man is not a socialist by the time he is 20, he has no heart. If he is not a conservative by the time he is 40, he has no brain.” If that is true, then it’s understandable why Bernie Sanders, the Independent senator from Vermont and self-described democratic socialist, is doing so well among young people in the Democratic Party. He won the New Hampshire primary with 87 percent of the youth vote. In Nevada Saturday, he picked up 80 percent of the under-30 vote. But by the same measure, given that Sanders is now 74 years old, those same Sanderistas have trouble identifying the brains in the field of presidential candidates.

But more difficult to understand is Sanders’ appeal to the business and entrepreneurial class. These people make their living at making money. Their material success depends on a prosperous population with comfortable levels of disposable income. They should favor pro-growth policies, and they are all smart enough and savvy enough to know generally what those are. People tend to know what’s in their interest, and yet many of them support candidates like Sanders who advocate wealth-retarding, redistributionist policies.

For example, in the last quarter of 2015, Sanders raised more money than his rival, Hillary Clinton, among the largest Silicon Valley tech companies. These were not calculated donations by executives hoping to buy influence with perhaps the next president. Instead, they were largely smaller donations from ordinary-though-well-paid employees at Google, Apple, and Microsoft.

The rationale of one young software engineer quoted by The Wall Street Journal may shed light on their thinking: “I want things to be fair, and I feel the system, as it is, is not. I have done particularly well, and I have a lot of these advantages. If you don’t have them, it’s really hard to get ahead.”

His social conscience is common among decent, educated, accomplished people. He feels the weight of his moral responsibility to consider the effect of his decisions and advantages on his neighbors, especially the poor. But it’s not the modern, secular worldview that grounds these moral sentiments. Godless, evolutionary materialism—the cultural default among the non-religious—justifies only selfish climbing with a prudent mutual respect for equal rights. The impulse to neighbor-love comes from the influence of what remains of our Christian culture.

But instead of giving to the poor by personal sacrifice, as the Spirit of God moves His people to do, the kindly secularist invokes and empowers the modern state, a false god and a vain hope, to lift up the downtrodden by taking from those on top, whether they like it or not, and redistributing it downward. It assuages the conscience at minimal personal cost, but rather than strengthening human bonds, it frees us from them. It substitutes robbery for charity, resentment for unity, and self-satisfaction for self-sacrifice.

Augustine observed that Satan is God’s ape. He mimics God, but only to divide and destroy and enslave. God’s purposes for us knit people together in peace, but only when pursued in God’s ways with God’s love. To allow for that, however, government must guard the moral space for personal sacrifice in personal charity.