Mark Zuckerberg pressed himself hard into the public eye. It was his insistent and demanding countenance that first brought to my mind those ancient socialist realist statues of Lenin pressing hard against the wind, oversized, waving a bronzed document, almost a hundred years ago in the century’s first great wave — worldwide wave — of “new man” generational politics.
And so Zuckerberg declared a new generation when he waved a three-page letter to his supporters, a Millennial Manifesto, to potential investors for a $5 billion initial public offering of Facebook in 2012. It must be said today that Mr. Zuckerberg, to quote the Progressive Era muckraker journalist Lincoln Steffens, had seen the future, and it worked. He has successfully commandeered a generation with numbers so large – there are said to be 936 million daily Facebook users today which recognize no fences or borders between them (three times the population of the United States) – that it will shake the world.
And the evidence is almost irrefutable now that that the Millennials, who communicate constantly via Facebook and other social networks, have chosen Vermont Independent/socialist senator Bernie Sanders to be their man.
Liberalism has won the day as seen in the Supreme Court’s two rulings recently on gay marriage and Obamacare.
This connection between Bernie and the Millennials could bring a sea change to America and to the world. Liberalism has won the day as seen in the Supreme Court’s two rulings recently on gay marriage and Obamacare. Republicans are on the defensive. And they have been on the defensive now for almost eight years and seem unable to offer young voters imagination, awakening and something to fight for, something to be brave about.
Republican chants of “small government” are hollow and absurd. What does that mean? State government? Regional government? No. I’ve been pitching these for more than a dozen years and the only interested parties are libertarians and advocates of Austrian economics like Ron Paul and Gary Johnson, former governor of New Mexico and libertarian candidate for president last go-round (he got my vote).
But to Republicans, the small government chant means only to take away whatever was done here in the land of the free since about 1957. Really, to take away time. They define themselves today almost completely in negative space. And virtually every pitch from Jeb Bush on down in the polls pitifully pitches the same agitprop.
The Republican Party has been regionalized by backwoods and delusional fin de siecle Appalachian preachers who advanced the invasion of Iraq as an Armageddon War of the End Times against the Great Satan, and by a glib repudiation of anything approaching the ordinary, secular world of everyday people.
God wants you to be president? Seriously? You want to invade North Korea? Seriously? Your plan now is for “global military dominance”? Seriously?
So out of reach with America and the world and so proud of it.
The only hopes they have are in the mature and urbane Carly Fiorina, former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, who did very well in the Western Conservative Summit recently, coming in second and rising. It is one of the most important venues of conservative events to play in the heartland. And Mitt Romney, obviously the Father Figure who knows when to rush out of retirement to save the day as he did with his Tweet to take down the Confederate flag in South Carolina, changing the culture of the South overnight. And at the same time, drawing fire away from attacks on the Second Amendment in wake of the tragedy at the AME church.
Probably in this provincial lot of Reagan nostalgicos heading into 2016, only Romney or Fiorina can compete against Bernie and the Millennials.
I’d give it two months, max, before they join in with the new world revolution of Bernie and the Millennials.
And it is not just 2016 Bernie and the Millennials would take. It is the future. All they have to do is get past Hillary.
In that, they will have a good deal of help from the mainstream media. The MSM loves change, it is their lifeblood. They are about to flip on the Clinton Culture, a political restoration that they invented. Even today they suffer embarrassment about their creation. I’d give it two months, max, before they join in with the new world revolution of Bernie and the Millennials.
“Facebook aspires to build the services that give people the power to share and help them once again transform many of our core institutions and industries … There is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society for the future,” Mr. Zuckerberg wrote in his APO offering’s three-page letter.
Write that down: “. . . to get everyone in the world connected.” It brought to my mind another manifesto which first inspired my older commie friends in New York City back in the day. The writing wasn’t as brave and passionate, but still:
“Our conscious thought is only a small part of the work of the dark psychic forces. Learned divers descend to the bottom of the ocean and there take photographs of mysterious fishes. Human thought, descending to the bottom of its own psychic sources, must shed light on the most mysterious driving forces of the soul and subject them to reason and to will.”
From Leon Trotsky’s Defence of the October Revolution. It changed the world, overnight, in a way that could not have been imagined a few decades before. It ushered in the first world generation. Likewise, we cannot imagine our world a decade or so ahead with the rise of the MIllennials—with Bernie Sanders at the helm.
Bernie Quigley is a prize-winning writer who has worked more than 35 years as a book and magazine editor, political commentator and reviewer. For 20 years he has been an amateur farmer, raising Tunis sheep and organic vegetables. He lives in New Hampshire with his wife and four children.
