Mahatma Gandhi supposedly once said about all successful political revolutionaries that "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."
Gandhi was, of course, talking about his own struggle against British colonialism, but his famous line is as relevant today as it was in the 1920s or 1930s. Case in point: how the powers-that-be and their allies in the mainstream media are responding to Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign.
First, they ignored him. Then, when Bernie started surging in the polls and they couldn't get away with ignoring him, they laughed at him and said he was just another long-shot protest candidate.
When that didn't work, they went on the attack. They dug up dirt from Bernie's past that wasn't really dirt and distorted his record to accuse him of being bad on race, guns, and immigration.
Well, those attacks apparently didn't work either, because now the mainstream media has started going after Bernie for, you guessed, it being a "socialist."
The man leading this line of attack is MSNBC's Chris Matthews, who first brought it up on an episode of Hardball Thursday night when he asked DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz the difference between a "Democrat like Hillary Clinton and a socialist like Bernie Sanders."
Schultz couldn't give a straight answer and flubbed the question once again when Chuck Todd asked her it on Meet the Press Sunday.
That's when Chris Matthews, who was also a guest on Meet the Press, stepped in and gave the answer he'd been looking for all along.
The difference between socialist and Democrats, Matthews said, was that socialists want the government to control the entire economy while Democrats just want to make small reforms to the economy help out the poor.
Matthews went on to say that the reason Debbie Wasserman Schultz wasn't making the distinction between socialists and Democrats was that she didn't "want to offend the Bernie people."
First things first, Chris Matthews is totally wrong about Bernie Sanders and socialism. I know Bernie, and if there's one thing I've learned from years of talking to him it's that he's not a socialist, or at least not the kind of socialist Chris Matthews says he is.
He's a democratic socialist, which as he explained to George Stephanopoulos earlier this year, just means that
he wants to make America more like Scandinavia, a region, by the way, that has a flourishing market economy and is home to
4 of Forbes' top 10 countries to do business in.
