Bringing people together. That’s the remedy Bernie Sanders convincingly prescribes from the stump – to cheers and visions of solidarity and progress. But can he do it? Isn’t everybody’s idea of how close we want to be to each other different? Situation: If there is one job and two people who want it, how unified in action can those people be?
But Sanders has an answer to this, too. There is only the one job — to use this example — because those at the top benefit tremendously from there being only one job. They benefit from having the people divided and scrambling and scraping for what’s left to them. The financial upper echelon of American society — an oligarchy, in Sanders’ opinion — controls so much wealth and power that the status quo suits them fine. They maintain a vested interest in keeping things as they are. Sanders’ message — and he is admittedly, from a demographic viewpoint, an unlikely messenger — is resonating with disenfranchised everywhere, especially the young. The young who feel that contemporary America is like that rogue bus in the movie Speed
