Is Bernie Sanders a 21st Century Upton Sinclair?

Way back in the 1930s, a celebrity author ran for California governor as an avowed socialist. It did not end well.

Like many journalists before and since, Sinclair finally found it hard to simply document injustice, and instead tried to fight it by becoming a politician. But, as in his journalistic career, his approach was unconventional. Sinclair’s 1933-34 run for Governor of California was as history-making as any of his books.

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Sinclair’s campaign began in September 1933, when he registered to vote as a Democrat, according to the University of Washington’s Mapping American Social Movements Through the 20th Century blog. Sinclair “had just celebrated his birthday,” the blog writes. “Fifty-five years old, he was one of America’s best-known writers.” A few days later, he said he was running for the Democratic nomination for governor.

Sinclair’s platform was known as EPIC: End Poverty in California. (This was decades before “epic” came to have the popular meaning of “impressive.”) Sinclair articulated his plan by using his authorial skills to produce a book titled I, Governor of California and How I Ended Poverty: A True Story of the Future. This unconventional narrative contained a description of “his nomination, his victory and his triumphant execution of the EPIC program,” Singer writes. His plan featured sweeping changes, including abolishing the sales tax, a near-universal pension plan and a number of public bodies that would oversee everything from appropriating idle land to creating factories where the unemployed could work.

EPIC was a hit. Hundreds of EPIC clubs, aimed at spreading the word about the proposed reforms and getting Sinclair elected, sprang up around the state–more than 800 by the time of the primaries.

From https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/story-muckraker-upton-sinclairs-dramatic-campaign-governor-california-180964897/

Now for the defeat:

With the election just weeks away and with the Democratic candidate poised to make his surging socialist agenda a reality, business interests across the country suddenly began pouring millions of dollars into a concerted effort to defeat him. The newspapers pounced, too, with an unending barrage of negative coverage. By the time the attack ads finally reached the screens, in the new medium of staged newsreels, millions of viewers simply did not know what to believe anymore. Although the election was closer than the polls had suggested, Upton Sinclair decisively lost the 1934 race for the governorship of California.

It wasn’t until decades later that the full extent of the fraudulent smear campaign became known. As one historian observed, the remarkable race marked “the birth of the modern political campaign.”

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-traumatic-birth-of-the-modern-and-vicious-political-campaign-70717968/

The forces of attack media were created in this campaign. Nixon's "ratfucking" owes its start to the smear campaign to defeat Sinclair.

Sinclair's policies were popular and likely sound vary mainstream to those of us on DU. The ferocity of the business class' media smear denied him the election.

I really like many of Bernie's proposals. I am not looking forward to the unleashed smear campaign should Sanders win the nomination.