Campaign Merchandising
The big hit that Sanders must always take from conservatives is that he hates business because he is a socialist. Of course, some conservatives conflate socialism with totalitarian communist leaders, so the irony probably soars right over their heads, but irony there is to go around in this attack on Sanders and good old-fashioned American selling people things they don’t need:
“We had unleashed an entrepreneurial volcano. Who said I was bad for capitalism: In Vermont, a teddy bear company was making Bernie Bears. There was even an action doll, not to mention underwear, many styles of shirts, shopping bags, and a million different kinds of buttons.”
Democracy
The great irony of American politics is, of course, that it is an y way a democracy when it comes to electing people to its most powerful position. The Electoral College disproves with sad irony the fundamental ideas about democracy including majority rule. But it goes even deeper, making the second most-often spoken idea about democracy a bitterly irony joke on Americans:
“Democracy is about one person, one vote.”
Helleresque Irony
In describing the long history of how Republicans love to honor veterans in speeches, but always seem to come up short when it comes to putting money where their mouth is, Sanders constructs a response like something from Joseph Heller. Heller is the author of Catch-22 which is characterized by sentence structure that persistently sets up the first half as going one way before ironically twisting it midway through so that it goes in the opposite direction:
“It turned out that Republicans loved veterans very much, except when it came to funding their needs.”
Running for President
In October 2013, a reporter asked Sander if he was planning on running for President in 2016. To frame his response with the clarity needed to understand the irony, Sanders did run for President, quite famously, in 2016:
“I am at least ninety-nine percent sure I won’t.”
Police Reform
Sanders bases his ideas for fundamental police reform of the most brutally ironic of circumstances. It is of such significance that he repeats it later. That means that Sanders has to make this statement twice within a book that is really not all that long. In a supposedly enlightened democracy in the 21st century, that this needs to be said even once, much less needs to be foregrounded as the foundation of nationwide law enforcement reform make it an example of irony because it is not intended to be ironic:
“Lethal force should be the last response, not the first.”
