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Bernie and His Outlaws
I sided with Bernie Sanders last election. If there was a political label that put me off, it was not “socialism.” It was “Democratic Leadership Council,” which I understood to represent the epiphany that Democrats could win if they sounded enough like Republicans. Of course, the DLC was formed to do battle with Republicans, defined as a political party favoring management rather than labor, investment banks rather than commercial banks, a strong military and distrust of the Soviet Union. I don’t agree with much of the conventional Republican platform, but I’ve read their literature and I know their history and I share it from a slightly different perspective.
The GOP has been displaced by a personality cult, but I’d like to offer a narrative that may be useful to folks making conventional arguments about policy in which things matter in addition to Donald Trump’s desiderata.
Allowing felons to vote where they live is not the same thing as allowing students to vote where they live and some objections to such a policy are well-founded. I won’t say the prison vote is the hill Bernie has picked to die on but it certainly is true that his position lends itself to the customary thirty seconds of bullshit, so he’s put a lot more votes in play than he may have intended.
I have heard Bernie use the terms “jail” and “prison” interchangeably, as if the only…
