Live from La Farine: A good diagnosis of the intellectual deformation of the BernieBros--and of Bernie--from Paul Krugman:
: Why I Haven't Felt The Bern: "The business about discounting Clinton support as coming from ‘conservative states’ in the ‘Deep South’...
...exemplifies the problem I saw... from the beginning... [in] the movement and the man... the casual adoption, with no visible effort to check the premises, of a story line that sounds good. It’s all about the big banks; single-payer is there for the taking if only we want it; government spending will yield huge payoffs--not the more modest payoffs conventional Keynesian analysis suggests; Republican support will vanish if we take on corporate media. In each case the story runs into big trouble if you do a bit of homework.... But the all-purpose response to anyone who raises questions is that she or he is a member of the establishment, personally corrupt, etc.. Ad hominem attacks aren’t a final line of defense, they’re argument #1....
It’s about an attitude, the sense that righteousness excuses you from the need for hard thinking and that any questioning of the righteous is treason to the cause. When you see Sanders supporters going over the top about ‘corporate whores’ and such, you’re not seeing a mysterious intrusion of bad behavior into an idealistic movement; you’re seeing the intolerance that was always just under the surface of the movement, right from the start...
