Stuff Sparks Joy: New at Reason

When Bernie Sanders and Tucker Carlson agree on something, be afraid. The democratic socialist senator and the populist conservative pundit are not natural allies. But recently, they have converged on a single point of consensus with potentially terrifying consequences: Americans have too much stuff.

The far left of the American political spectrum is the longtime home of Starbucks-smashing protesters, militant recyclers, Naomi Klein acolytes, and Walmart boycotters—people who believe we are destroying the planet with our overconsumption of cheap stuff at the expense of workers’ well-being. On his 1987 folk album (yes, such a thing exists), Sanders pinpointed “consumerism, the futile striving for happiness by earning more and more money to buy more and more things,” as one of the world’s great problems, a theme the Vermont independent has returned to while lamenting everything from the wide variety of deodorant choices on drug store shelves to Chinese imports, writes Katherine Mangu-Ward.

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