So why are young people (who don't vote) for Bernie while older voters are not for Bernie?

[frazzled]

7. Nah, it's because we know this guy

We were the young people who went to SDS meetings back in the late 60s, and Bernie was one of those guys, 5 or 6 or 8 or 9 years older than us, who were running them. And they were stuck on their Marxist rhetoric to a fault, lecturing to us mere unwashed mortals, and were definitely what we used to call "sexist pigs." And we eventually left, because they were immune to hearing any other voices, or the least drop of dissension. They were mini-autocrats, and big egotists. We were against the war, they were against everything.

I remember once, a friend of mine, a math major, convinced me to go with him to occupy the building that then housed the Courant Institute of Mathematics (this was NYU in 1970). As I understood it, the large computer there was being contracted to conduct research for the military-industrial complex and thus aiding the war. Seemed reasonable to object. We joined the sit-in in the hallways downstairs for several hours while, more or less unknown to us, a group of more radical individuals had apparently broken into the computer room and were holding the computer for ransom (ostensibly to pay bail for an unidentified Black Panther member). Word got around from a trusted professor of my friend's, that indeed, no such research was being done with that computer. So we asked ourselves, what are we doing here? And left. And good that we did: a small bomb had been planted in the computer room. You can read about that episode here, if interested: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/07/nyregion/the-mathematicians-who-ended-the-kidnapping-of-an-nyu-computer.html

I too held socialist ideas for quite a few years. But in the course of my life, and in the course of growing up, as I heard stories from friends and acquaintances about their experiences in Marxist-socialist states they had fled, I became ashamed of my naive support for repressive regimes. These stories were not from conservative people: they were from a pioneering Czech video artist and digital inventor, a renowned Chinese filmmaker, a Cuban government archivist who defected, etc.

We disdain Bernie because we know him: we know his rigidity, his self-importance, his failure to reasonably modify, his entrenchment in certain ideas of the past, and his narrow focus on economically based theory to the exclusion of all else. We were there.