Opinion: Millennials’ support for Sanders based on upending ‘status quo’ politics

By ELIJAH STARKEY
Nelson County Gazette guest columnist

Wednesday, March 2, 2016, 10 p.m. — The support for Sen. Bernie Sanders’s bid for president found in the Millennial generation is often mischaracterized as being due to their lack of understanding how the “real world” works. They’ve been spoiled by their parental generation. They want everything for free. They don’t understand basic economics, or they are uninformed and acting based on a fad.

Now let me start by saying, as a Millennial myself, I will agree that there are most certainly members of my generation who are uninformed, who are spoiled, and who don’t ground their political positions in reality, but you’d have to admit bias to say that any other generation doesn’t have a substantial showing in the uninformed and biased departments. Moreover, I think it is a cop-out to say that the reason Bernie enjoys such strong support amongst Millennials is for the reasons listed above. Once again, as a Millennial myself I’d like to set the record straight on why I, and many of my peers, support Mr. Sanders.

Firstly, you must understand that Millennials were born into the Information Age. This means most of us do not get our news and information from a major news network or a newspaper; instead we get our news from a larger variety of online sources.

This means that when a major news network decides to push a certain agenda (and don’t pretend that they don’t all have agendas. No one is fair and balanced) we are less apt to be exposed to it, or to come across conflicting information from a source we trust more. This leads many Millennials to distrust or even disdain what has become the Status Quo in this country, the very thing every new generation seeks to usurp and every generation in power clings to.

Now when I say “Status Quo” what do I mean? I mean (and here I echo Bernie’s positions) the current economic and political system in which large and powerful corporations and banks directly influence the political discourse in our government, while the wishes of the larger population are ignored. I’m talking about the fact that our government funnels exorbitant amounts of money into our military and the contractors who work for it (who are also a major lobby in Washington), while claiming that a single-payer healthcare system like they have in Europe is simply not feasible and that we should stick with our massively over-inflated private healthcare system (which once again, has a major lobby in Washington).

The fact that we make up nearly half of global defense spending, more than the next 20 greatest spenders combined (most of which are our NATO allies), is simply absurd.

It is precisely the situation that President Eisenhower warned us of when he left office saying, “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

This of course being a warning that the industry built around the American War Machine must never be allowed to influence policy to provide a pretext for greater spending in the military.

This warning has been completely and obviously ignored, and while many people buy into the narrative that we must increase military spending or the world’s boogeymen-at-large will somehow win, most Millennials see the absurdity of the situation, and would rather see the excess money put into modernizing our infrastructure or repairing our broken healthcare and education systems, both of which, given the United State’s resources, should be the best in the world. But apparently we don’t have money for things like a modern healthcare system, or functioning education system. There are always new enemies to bomb, or new countries to liberate (like Iraq and Libya, both of which are bastions of Democracy now).

Millennial’s, having these nuanced views of our country’s policies, see in Bernie a candidate not financed by the very institutions they see as the ones pulling the strings (Bernie’s campaign is entirely Super Pac free).

We see a candidate who, though we might not agree on all of his policies, we would take in a heartbeat over anyone who will continue taking us down the path we are currently on.

The fact he addresses issues like the ones I have listed in ways other candidates would shy away from, shows to me and my peers that he is a candidate for the people, not for the special interests, and that is why the generation of the Information Age sides overwhelmingly with Bernie for 2016.

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