Dude he's a communist straight up.
He will never be president, and I don't care for Tromp
Americans who remember the cold war tend to have communist and socialist conflated because that's the memes that were pumped into our heads. Bernie's policy proposals throughout his career have been very in line with western European socialist ideas and not communists. Though his recently saying that bread lines are a good thing because it means the rich aren't taking all the bread is both nonsensical and is easily construed into being pro-communist.
I will agree with you there - the more uniformed & ignorant the populace, the more right wing the government.
Heck even the peer reviewed research on IQ & education field/level suggests it
There are different types of conservatism. Highly educated, intelligent people who work in the private sector have often tended to be business conservatives. They made up the core of the Republican party in the 1950s and are the classic Eisenhower Republicans. During that era the Republican party pushed for social causes like the ERA as well as other social causes. But they were fiscal conservatives who wanted the government to pay for itself through tax revenue.
Both the left and the right have rabid movements that end up looking a lot like one another when they get power. On the left there is extreme socialism and communism which makes a lot of noise about being for the people, but in the end they often end up as dictatorships. Communism especially used to see itself as an international movement with bonds that crossed borders. The USSR was able to recruit a lot of agents in other countries with these ideas.
On the right extreme movements become nationalistic movements with focus on the home tribe being the core focus. They use a lot of them vs us rhetoric. But in the end nationalist governments end up being a lot like communist ones in the way they actually do things.
The people who join and support nationalist movements tend to be poorly educated and see their position in society falling. The organizers of the movement either believe it themselves or use those ideas gather supporters and gain power. You see it happening all over the world today. In the UK the working class whites were the biggest proponents of Brexit and they switched the allegiance to the Tories in the last election because Boris Johnson was speaking to them. In Germany the economic divides from the cold war are still there and eastern Germany is much poorer than the west. the resistance to immigration in the east is much stronger because the underemployed eastern Germans see foreign immigrants coming in and taking jobs from them. In many case the foreign workers are taking jobs the underemployed eastern Germans don't want, which is the same case in the US and UK, but they don't see that and their leaders avoid pointing that out.
In the US whites are slipping from the majority at a steady rate. In former slave states the rich plantation owners kept the poor white majority in line by perpetuating the idea that the poor whites might be poor but at least they weren't black. This was reinforced during the Jim Crow era and is reinforced with modern racism expanded to all minorities. On top of this the US has deindustrialized since the 1970s and quite a bit of manufacturing went overseas. The only manufacturing that stayed in this country was mostly complex things and large things that were cheaper to make here. Even at that a lot of the component manufacturing went offshore.
This has left a lot of people, especially men, who have only a high school education with no work or only low paid work in place of the well paid factory job. This has hit African Americans too. Many left the South in the middle of the 20th century for work in northern and western cities and they did a lot of the scut work the whites were too busy to do. With the reduction of factory work, they guys who swept the floors and made food in the cafeteria were laid off too.
The new nationalists in the US have fostered the idea that foreigners/non-whites have taken jobs away from white working class men. It is true that foreigners did take factory jobs away but it was the fault of the company owners and the people who took the jobs never set foot in the US. Hispanic immigrants didn't take their jobs. The Hispanic immigrants took the jobs the whites won't do like picking crops. My SO used to spar with some white nationalists on Facebook and I told her the next time one of them was going on about Mexicans taking his job, ask him when he picked lettuce. Though she left Facebook soon after that.
Reagan got the religious conservatives and the angry poorly educated whites (sometimes the same) to vote Republican, joining the traditional business Republicans. Over the last 40 years the party has dumbed down and the business conservatives have been pushed to the fringes or pushed out entirely. A lot of business conservatives have continued to vote Republican because they haven't really realized that Republicans have become bad for the economy. They have still believed the Eisenhower era memes that Republicans are good for business and are fiscally responsible.
A fair number of business conservatives have stuck with Trump and the Republicans because the economy has been good and they haven't really thought about why. The tax scam was also passed to buy them off.
The suburb Republicans who tend to be the better educated business types are leaving the party. Their defection is what handed the House to the Democrats in 2018. The stock market went back up today, but if the economy does go into recession this year, which I think it inevitable now, more will abandon the Republicans and they will be toast. But these defectors will be much more comfortable voting for a moderate Democrat.
Klobuchar out and endorsing Biden. I thought she would wait until winning her home state but it may not matter if Biden gets her delegates anyway. Buttigieg is the only other one who has delegates to offer and will likely go to Biden as well. That leaves Warren who should drop out after losing her home state on Tuesday. You would think she would endorse Bernie but it I bet she sides with Biden.
I think
@wdolson is right, Biden will probably have enough to derail Bernie's quest for 1991. Especially, after adding what Bloomberg has to offer in terms of delegates and money.
It looks like Steyer is going to be throwing his wealth at giving Biden flank support. I expect Bloomberg will be out soon and he will probably back Biden too. Rick Wilson said months ago that if Steyer and Bloomberg really wanted Trump out they should be throwing their wealth at running ads educating people about how toxic Trump is.
I’ll also dig up the recent study that found people over 70 less amenable to learning new things
I've been doing neurofeedback the last few months. There happens to be one of the best clinics in the country in Vancouver, WA. The clinical director is very plugged into the research. Neurofeedback works with the brain to balance it and wake up parts that are working less optimally. It's effective for treating trauma (both physical and psychological), ADD, some dyslexia, and many other issues. He told me about a study done on a group of people in their 20s and a group of people in their 60s and 70s. They did a bunch of functional tests at the beginning and found the people in their 20s were far better at learning new tasks and much quicker in their reactions. After a number of neurofeedback sessions the older group scored about the same as the 20 somethings, but the people in their 20s didn't change much.
Older people without help can often have poor neuroplasticity, but individuals who keep their minds active can learn new things late in life (my father taught himself Photoshop and became an expert at it in his 80s). There are tools that can bring many older people's brains to much younger states.
