Politics make strange bedfellows. So says the old saying.
Maybe it would be better put if we said, in politics, even the most
pure get dirt on themselves.
But there is a marked difference between Bernie Sanders and a little
dirt, and the gaggle of Establishment Democrats, some of whom are
dirty from head to toe, while others just have dirty hands up to their
elbows.
But given the fact that we must operate under our creaky old Campaign
Rules, we must still follow our instincts and pick the "lesser of two
evils". Or perhaps we might say, we'll go with the pick of the
litter. Bernie Sanders is certainly the pick, but he still is also
one of the litter.
Carl Jarvis
On 2/12/20, miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
What’s Driving Democrats’ ‘Bernie-or-Bust’ Freakout
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., is accompanied by Rep. Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez,
D-N.Y., left, at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, N.H.Sen. Bernie
Sanders, I-Vt., is accompanied by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.,
left, at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, N.H. (Andrew Harnik /
AP)
Even before the debacle of the Iowa caucuses, in which the Democratic Party
managed, despite its ineptitude, to deny Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., a
clear
public victory by spiking the results entirely, there was a palpable sense
of panic among the party’s conservatives. (For some reason, we have all
agreed to call them “centrists” or “moderates.”) While his poll numbers
remained fairly strong nationally and throughout the more heavily
African-American South, Joe Biden seemed to be fading — in some cases
almost
literally — before our eyes.
Once-viable liberals like the prosecutor-turned-senator Kamala Harris or
former HUD Secretary and San Antonio Mayor Julián Castro dropped out or
never caught on. The several interchangeable governors from the Mountain
West — How many? Who were they? (we may never fully know) — disappeared, as
did the similarly interchangeable congressmen. Warren tacked slightly to
Sanders’ right but remained far too left for America’s insane political
establishment despite an agenda best described as that of a Christian
Democrat in Europe. Klobuchar remained, unbowed and unpopular. Buttigieg?
Bloomberg? Might as well give it a try!
What had become clear, however, was that just as a fractious Republican
field had failed to coalesce around an establishment figure in 2016, aiding
or at least permitting the victory of Donald Trump, so too would the
presence of so many Democratic candidates redound to Sanders’ advantage.
(That so many Clintonites have convinced themselves that Sanders is some
kind of communist Donald Trump — a brooding Stalin to Trump’s febrile
Hitler
— only makes their fear all the more visceral.) Meanwhile, they fretted
that
this failure to unite would carry into the general election, just as they
believed it did in the last presidential election. If Sanders’ supporters’
original sin was backing another candidate in the primary, then their
mythical failure to rally around Clinton against Trump was the evil and
wickedness of man in the days before God sent the flood.
Into this fracas have swaggered several Twitter personalities, most notably
the socialist lawyer and think-tanker Matt Bruenig and the hosts of the
popular leftist podcast, Chapo Trap House. (Full disclosure: One of the
podcast’s hosts and founders, Will Menaker, was my book editor, and I
consider him a friend. I have been a guest on the show several times.)
Turning the logic of unity so often deployed against them by Clinton’s
supporters, they argued that if it was the duty of Democrats to line up
behind the most electable candidate, to eschew their own preferences of
policy and personality in order to defeat Donald Trump, then it was
necessary — obligatory — for all Democrats to support one Bernard Sanders.
If Sanders diehards are the one unmovable bloc within the party, they
reasoned, then a good portion of them were guaranteed to stay home if he
isn’t the nominee. Only by joining them could nervous Democrats cement the
full party coalition and prevail.
This argument began, I think, as an only half-earnest provocation — a dare
to the many voices in professional Democratic circles who preached unity so
long as it aligned with their own preferred choices but who reacted with
incredulous rage if you suggested that it was they, not you, who might have
to hold their noses and back a guy they didn’t really like. But over the
months — perhaps because of the outraged reaction it engendered among a
cadre of former Clinton backers — it solidified into something more like an
article of faith, and later a battle cry of the Sanders-supporting online
left.
This message makes people very, very angry. It is sabotage. It’s blackmail.
It’s misogyny! It’s juvenile petulance. It is the privilege of
non-immigrants and white people who, if they have suffered at all under
Donald Trump, have not suffered enough and would inflict him again on the
poor and the vulnerable simply because they could not have their way. It is
“purity” politics. It’s unrealistic. It isn’t fair. It’s bomb-throwing.
It’s
masturbatory. It’s disrespectful. It is impudent and insolent for these
nobodies, these outsiders, these jokers who have never consulted on a
campaign or designed a media strategy or jockeyed for a West Wing job or
run
a think tank (although Bruenig has, in fact, done at least the last) to
make
demands from a position of — let’s be honest — some negotiating strength.
But the real source of the anger this “Bernie-or-bust” rhetoric engenders
is
rooted in a few specific kinds of incomprehension among lifelong Democrats
broadly and professional-class Democrats specifically.
First and foremost, they view politics transactionally: Candidates are a
product to be created, packaged and sold to consumers — you, the voter.
Second, trained by a party apparatus that has been flinching since George
McGovern’s defeat in 1972, they can’t understand a candidate who is
actively
trying to win rather than avoid losing, who is willing to say, “Fuck it; I
might win and I might lose, but I’m going to do my damnedest to enact my
program.” Third, and most critically, they are absolutely flummoxed by a
political movement based in an actual, positive commitment to a governing
agenda rather than a negative commitment simply to stop Donald Trump. A
movement, in other words, that views defeating Trump as a necessary
precondition but not an end in itself.
Now, I am admittedly a Sanders supporter. Representation matters, and I
think it is high time we have somebody in the White House who looks like me
(i.e., a weird, ungainly Jew, who talks with his hands and whose spouse has
to tell him to keep his voice down in restaurants). I am not, perhaps, as
devoted as his most ardent backers. In other words, I’m precisely the kind
of wobbly voter that they are warning you about. I feel more warmly than
most Sanders’ supporters toward Elizabeth Warren, even after her
unnecessary
and ill-considered attempt to smear him as a sexist, and I think I could
vote for her with mild regret, knowing that the system can’t be defeated at
the ballot box and hoping that she has enough Gorbachev in her to steer us
through a Soviet-style collapse.
I might even be persuaded to vote for Amy Klobuchar if she were the
nominee.
If nothing else, she has proven she’d be willing to channel Lyndon Johnson
and bully members of the Senate in increasingly florid ways. The rest of
them? I suspect I’d probably stay home. Never have I seen such a collection
of weirdos, billionaires and careerist dweebs without the slightest
indication of a core moral code or a common sense of humanity.
Here we come to the fear that is the fertile soil in which anti-Sanders
anger grows. (And here, too, their obsession with comparing him to Trump is
instructive.) They saw how Trump, backed by an unshakable core of followers
and supporters, not only won an election but also bent the whole
professional infrastructure of the GOP — and the whole party in turn — to
his program and style of government.
They see how many of the usual consultants, advisers, campaign managers and
assistant-undersecretaries were either sidelined, made the sad march to
“Never Trump” media sinecures that paid well but remained far, far from
power, or were forced to reinvent themselves as mewling, subservient
Trumpists, humiliating themselves daily and hiding in bushes until their
mad
sovereign tired of them and dismissed them with a tweet and an insult. They
think: That could be my fate too.
The fear is probably unwarranted, in large part because Trump’s GOP came
pre-radicalized — an already-ugly stew of racial resentment, nativist
paranoia and violent militarism. The Democratic Party remains, by and
large,
a cautious and technocratic center-right institution that would passively
resist a Sanders agenda, taking every occasion to play Herman Melville’s
famous fictional character Bartleby, who replies to every request from his
employers with, “I would prefer not to.”
But without a line to the White House, it’s still very possible that the
consultant class would grow less lucrative, and that an alliance of
up-and-coming, media-savvy and policy-oriented lawmakers from Rashida Tlaib
to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Katie Porter to Ayanna Pressley will give
Sanders a popular and quotable base of support in the legislature that will
move the party, whether it prefers it or not.
Jacob Bacharach
Jacob Bacharach is the author of the novels "The Doorposts of Your House
and
on Your Gates" and "The Bend of the World." His most recent book is "A Cool
Customer: Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking."…
