I like Bernie Sanders. I have a lot of sympathy for him, and I agree with most of what he says in this book. However, I have a few quibbles I’m going to discuss here. 

Mr. Sanders addresses seven primary areas:

• Collapsing Health Care
• Collapsing Education
• The Crumbling Media
• The Obscene Wealth Gap
• Monied capture of the Democratic Party
• Climate Change and the Petroleum Industry
• Labor – Unions, Corporate Representation, and the work-day

I have nothing to say in this essay about the first five. Sanders makes a superb case for every one of them. I’m going to talk about the last two, and concerning labor, only his work-day proposal because, unfortunately, like petroleum, it is linked to climate change.

THE CLIMATE CHANGE PROBLEM

Climate change is the existential crisis of our time. It is a crisis we can no longer block or even substantially mitigate for much longer. Our present global industrial and economic system is doomed. It does not mean the extinction of humanity. It does mean the end of our present way of life (see my review of The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells with many other links). 

The petroleum industry is not solely responsible for the problem as Sanders implies. They did not force us, from the earliest decades of the 20th Century, to rest our entire economy on oil. Before there was an oil economy there was coal, the basis of early industrialization for both Europe and America. Coal is even dirtier than oil, but the Earth had far fewer people in those days, and few developing industrial nations. As early as 1850 scientists warned that carbon dioxide would begin to warm the planet when annual production of the gas exceeded the Earth’s capacity to absorb it. At the time, no one knew when that would be, or how the warming would manifest itself in weather patterns. Some suggested a new ice age. Wait a thousand years. That may still happen.

By the 1970s, there was enough data to see that the warming process had already begun. The petroleum industry didn’t have to lie about it—although they did lie. No one listened to the science, which, by then, was long available to the public. The petroleum industry did not force consumers to buy more cars, and then bigger cars. They did not force the American government to build out a national highway system (instead of improving the railroads) or deregulate the airlines resulting—over the ensuing decades—in a hundredfold increase in flight miles per year. Consumer choice, abetted by government policy did all that. Lastly, the petroleum industry did not force other large nations—China and India in particular—to choose to industrialize like the U.S. and Europe spending the latter half of the 20th Century “catching up,” which, in their case, meant burning a lot of coal.

The petroleum companies never had to lie. Even had they told us one hundred years ago that increased use of fossil fuels would eventually upset the global climate balance, people, and in particular governments (think military competition and technology), would have felt compelled to use fossil fuels to feed growing populations, expand their economies, defend their territories, or engage in naked belligerence. One hundred years ago a fully formed sovereign world government might have acted effectively to prevent what is happening to the climate now. There was no world government then and there isn’t one now. The competition goes on. It is impossible to stop—until we are all dead.

Curtailing the use of fossil fuels sufficiently to bend the temperature curve down even one hundred years from now—it is too late to do anything about the next hundred or more years—we would have to cut their use by ninety percent immediately. No more vacation flying or driving, no more plastic, no more automobile or boat racing, no gas-powered lawnmowers—no recreational or entertainment-related use of fossil fuels whatsoever! Batteries will not save us. A Tesla must be driven fifty-thousand miles before the carbon cost of its manufacture (including the batteries) drops below that of a gas-powered car and that doesn’t count the carbon cost of battery recycling. We do not even ban professional automobile racing, a sport built around burning petroleum! That’s insane! 

The only fuel that could have saved us is hydrogen from seawater produced by renewable energy (whose manufacture has its own enormous carbon cost). Had the world begun that conversion seventy-five years ago—a conversion requiring a lot of carbon to build out—we might be there now. It is far too late.   

Of course, my recommendation above is both economically and politically impossible—globally! Every modern economy in the world would collapse immediately. A billion people would be thrown out of work and many would starve. Every politician in power, or who hopes, someday, to be in power, lies about climate change. The lie is that we can still do much about it. We cannot. 

THE THREE OR FOUR DAY WORK WEEK

Climate change is not specifically an issue of the political left. Labor policy very much is such an issue and Sanders tells us the forty-hour work week (established roughly a hundred years ago) has outlived its utility. Believe me, I get it. I’m retired now but I worked for “the man” for forty years always, officially anyway, a forty-hour week. Would I have supported a shorter week for the same pay? You shouldn’t have to ask. Bernie’s suggestion ensures full (or fuller) employment, and that would be a good thing.

The problem (I said above this issue is connected to climate change) is what the bulk of the working population would do with their extra leisure time. If people used the time to advance their education, to read—or write—more books, if they used their leisure to do philosophy, to produce art, to help aged neighbors, foster local athletics, exercise, play with their children in their own backyards, or help to grow food in local gardens, the three or four-day workweek would be a social and cultural blessing. But that is not what most people would do. They would use that time to travel, to drive and fly, to water ski, pilot ATVs across the eroding Earth, jet ski over increasingly polluted waters, or to go (travel) to more concerts and professional sporting events—automobile racing anyone? In short, they would consume more fuel belching even more carbon into the atmosphere, and that is all I’m going to say on the subject.

It’s OK to be Angry About Capitalism by Bernie Sanders 2022

A “cry of the heart” from a principled politician is refreshing. I have no objection to some people being more prosperous than others, and neither does Mr. Sanders. But the wealth disparity in the U.S. is genuinely obscene and more so in that the wealthiest among us do not contribute proportionally to maintain everything needed to keep their capital flows going. Every branch of the U.S. government is now captured by monied interests, the legislature most of all, and this is true at both national and State levels. Sanders repeatedly touches on this issue, and rightly so. It is the core of our problem.

In some detail, Sanders covers health care, education, child care, the media (all types), and our political process. His overarching issue is the class conflict between labor and capital; between the owners of concentrated capital, and the population who labor to produce the goods and services that generate the wealth. He is right. Sanders is no Marxist. He is not opposed to class distinctions. He wants to make the distinctions more balanced and he is right to do so because the present disparity is causing tens of millions to suffer in one way or another. 

Sanders paints with a broad brush—necessary to keep the book of moderate length and easily read. He succeeds on both counts, but there is a price to be paid. Many of his arguments are oversimplified. The petroleum industry—even despite its decades of obfuscation on the subject—is not solely responsible for climate change. A great deal of that accountability belongs to consumers, most of whom are of the laboring class.

Sanders writes a lot about the disarray of the present Democratic party and how it has come about. He is right about much of it. Citizens United in 2009 did not help, forcing Democrats into the same fund-raising frenzy from the rich as the Republicans. But one thing he doesn’t mention is the present cultural obsession with identity politics, a phenomenon whose emergence has been solely an effort of the political left beginning in the 1970s. As much as anything else, besides money, this has distracted the Democratic Party from the wider issue of class. No matter to what race you belong, or LGBTQ+ letter you choose for yourself, you are still, most likely, among the laboring class. That most fundamental, political divide is now diffused by the demands of alternate identities. 

I am being perhaps unfair to Sanders. His goal is not an exhaustive analysis of factors responsible for America’s social, cultural, and political unraveling. He wants us to aspire to a better American society for all, even capitalists who will face less resentment should Sanders’ vision for balancing the scales ever come about. It might never be possible, but it is a good and hopeful vision.