Open borders? No, that’s a Koch brothers proposal. Of course. That’s a right-wing proposal, which says essentially there is no United States. It would make everybody in America poorer —you’re doing away with the concept of a nation state, and I don’t think there’s any country in the world that believes in that. If you believe in a nation state or in a country called the United States or UK or Denmark or any other country, you have an obligation in my view to do everything we can to help poor people. What right-wing people in this country would love is an open-border policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them. I don’t believe in that. I think we have to raise wages in this country, I think we have to do everything we can to create millions of jobs. You know what youth unemployment is in the United States of America today? If you’re a white high school graduate, it’s 33 percent, Hispanic 36 percent, African American 51 percent. You think we should open the borders and bring in a lot of low-wage workers, or do you think maybe we should try to get jobs for those kids? – Sen. Bernie Sanders (July 28, 2015)

In a terrific piece for Tablet Magazine titled “Did Bernie Sanders Fail to Seize His Moment?”, B. Duncan Moench says the obvious part out loud for the umpteenth time – Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) isn’t, despite occasionally saying some real deal things, the real deal. If he was, well, he’d have learned an incredibly obvious lesson by now i.e. that the Democrat Party is so deeply rotten and corrupt to its core that it actually cannot be reformed until its leadership and donor class is entirely repealed and replaced. However, be it either extreme cope or blatant disingenuousness, Bernie has never learned this lesson. As any honest, astute, independent-minded observer of American politics will tell you, “It should have dawned on [Bernie] sometime in the five decades between 1968 and 2020 that the notion of a ‘left’ as a meaningful concept had died during his youth.” With words that could have very well come from the smartest Left-Wing Populist thinker of our time, Thomas Frank, Moench indicts the ‘boomer left’ (“Instead of learning that they could reach working-class Americans the same way Nixon and Roosevelt had—by protecting their economic interests and shutting up about everything else—the boomer left instead became even smugger, socially elitist, and culturally anti-traditionalist”) running the show in the modern Democratic Party:

Sanders clearly made the wrong choice giving the Democratic Party a second chance. Had he ventured off on his own, he could have explicitly rejected woke dogmas—like the kabuki theater of “entertaining the notion” of reparations for 19th-century Southern slavery—and focused entirely on broad-based policies to rebuild labor protections, social safety nets, and his (former) points of agreement on trade and immigration policy with Trumpers. If he also had the wherewithal to return to the independent roots that got him elected in Vermont—where he rejected gun control and supported major restrictions on immigration—something interesting might have transpired.

What a shame. In the meantime, you can read the whole piece right here.