The condescension has really become overwhelming

Happens every election cycle.  

Today I read for maybe the 10,000th time an assertion that supporters of Bernie Sanders are unrealistic, that Bernie Sanders supporters will all be disappointed if they elect him because he won’t be able to bring the change he’s promising, that Bernie Sanders’ policies will be “just another example of Democrats making promises they can’t keep,” and so on and so forth. And I’d like to briefly dispel a misconception about people who support Bernie Sanders as the next president of the United States:

We’re not stupid.

The grown-ups love to go around telling everyone they have no business caring about grown up stuff.  It's almost as if the grown-ups didn't really think participatory democracy was all that great a thing.  But we're used to it.  Happens all the time.

It does get a little old, though, watching the predictable manner in which all the young, smart, kids grow up to be the establishment stooges their self-centered ambitions always demanded they should become.

oh for real? https://t.co/uy0jtMqVHN

— ryan cooper (@ryanlcooper) January 28, 2016

See also.

As so often happens, those who fancy themselves dissident gate-crashers (which apparently can include someone who is a Nobel Prize-winning tenured economics professor, at Princeton until somewhat recently; an advisory board member of the nation’s largest corporations; and effectively, a life-tenured New York Times columnist) quickly assume the role of vigilantly guarding the gate once they realize they were admitted all along. So congratulations to Paul Krugman on his power of decreeing who is a Serious Expert and announcing that the label applies only to those who want Hillary Clinton be the next president, but not Bernie Sanders.

The problem with people who decide they are going to do politics and public policy as a career is they very quickly conflate ideas about what's good for... well, themselves and their careers... with what's actually, you know, good. Which is why no one who is actually interested in politics should ever go into politics. The second you make it about you, is the second you corrupt your ability to see it as about anyone outside of that. And that's when you start telling the rest of us how stupid we all are.