Coronavirus - death of a campaign

Bernie Sanders suspended his presidential campaign. A New York Post article attributes the death of Sanders' campaign to COVID-19. Bernie Sanders’ socialist fantasies lost their appeal when coronavirus hit. The news media's attention is monopolized by COVID-19. It has pushed aside the huge amount of attention the news media previously gave to Sanders and his campaign. The following copies liberally from the article.

Socialism and Medicare for All, the subjects Sanders has hammered home with metronomic monotony for many years don’t matter right now. Sanders is a politician with an ever handy villain. But the coronavirus "can’t be blamed for its greed or taxed [or regulated by government] into submission." It's useless to yell at the virus, and yelling at things is Sanders’ political métier.

Sanders prefers "to traffic in fantasies rather than provide realistic and workable solutions to glaring and inescapable realities."

"Who among us hasn’t noodled on what it would mean to win the lottery, to consider what you would do to fix things if you had unlimited money and power and were unconstrained by tradition or precedent or reality?"

"That is the seduction of socialism — it monopolizes resources and power and then distributes the goodies. But ­resources don’t work like that; if you seize them and centralize them, you pull them from their roots, and they begin to die."

'Whatever the world is going to look like once this [pandemic] is over, it won’t be a world that will have time for the ludicrous [ ] delusions of Bernie Sanders."

It is often said that Bernie Sanders' greatest support comes from young people. They aren't swayed by the common arguments against socialism or the history of socialism when put into practice. Why do they support Sanders, or more accurately, socialism? An audio on this page by Professor Stephen Hicks tries to answer this question. Starting at about 17 minutes Professor Hicks describes several mindsets he has found among young people who consider themselves socialists and the values on which they base their support of socialism. He calls these positions anti-cronyist, altruistic, central-planning, free stuff, communalist, welfare state, environmentalist, and emotionalist. His goal is only to explain, without criticism.

In an earlier audio Professor Hicks described socialism in theory or put into political practice by eight historical people. Their ideas of socialism are very different from those of modern young people.