Just saw this on my twitter feed and hadn't seen it posted here yet. While I encourage you to go read the entire piece, I'll relate some of it.
The author is Katrina vanden Heuvel, a weekly contributor to The Post, and she echoes many of the opinions and emotions Bernie supporters, including me, have expressed for our candidate.
Many of the pundits agree — this is a choice between head and heart. If Democrats think with their heads, they will go with Hillary; with their hearts, with Bernie.
But this conventional wisdom clashes with the reality that this country has suffered serial devastations from choices supported by the establishment’s “responsible” candidates. On fundamental issue after issue, it is the candidate “of the heart” who is in fact grounded in common sense. It wasn’t Sanders’s emotional appeal, but his clearsightedness that led the Nation magazine, which I edit, to make only its third presidential endorsement in a primary in its 150-year history.
We've seen decades of the same kind of "head" thinking, sometimes known as "pragmatism", but which I would classify as "narrow” or "short-term”. It seems to tie in quite well with corporate thinking, e.g. "at all costs we must post good quarterly numbers next fall or all is lost”. Bernie's thinking seems to run more like "at all costs we must provide a good and safe environment for our workers or our quarterly numbers will never be good again", which seems to me the much more long-term and realistic and indeed pragmatic attitude.
I see a huge philosophical difference there, and in the overall tenor of the two campaigns, FEAR vs HOPE. Ms Heuvel alludes to that difference in her closing paragraph.
Clinton’s closing ad before Iowa makes her central argument clear: Trust her. She’s experienced and committed. She’ll keep Republicans from taking away the progress we’ve made. Sanders’s ad makes his argument clear: Trust yourself. Come together, take back the country and make this nation better. The first appeals to the head; the latter to the heart. But even the most hard-headed pragmatist might think the latter has as good a chance at getting elected and a better chance of forcing change than the former.
Americans are tired of being frightened and then fleeced by their politicians. We're tired of the money-and-fear-machine that American politics has become. Bernie doesn't want his country to be fearful all the time, he is as tired of that as we are.
We have it within our power to in fact turn that fear into hope.
#GoBernieGo