I feel like I’m going crazy. I have a pit of terror in my stomach that never goes away. I am stressed and afraid at every moment.
To me, a set of facts about the world is difficult to deny:
To me, a set of facts about the world is difficult to deny:
- If Donald Trump is reelected in November, very bad things will happen to a large number of people. Climate change will worsen. The brutalization of immigrants will escalate, with dementia patients and diabetics deported to their deaths. Workplace safety and labor protections will be gutted. Public assets from the national parks to the postal service will be sold off to corporations. A global arms race will intensify, possibly with civilization-ending weapons placed in outer space, waiting to destroy us at a moment’s notice.
- To stop these things from happening, we have exactly one chance on exactly one day: Nov. 3, 2020. On that day, something extremely difficult must be done: well over 60 million people must be motivated enough to put aside whatever else they are doing in their lives in order to go to polling stations and cast ballots.
- Donald Trump will do whatever it possibly takes to prevent this from happening. He has a colossal amount of money. He is ruthless. He will say anything. Do anything. He will attack candidates from the left if he has to. He will mock their physical appearance. He will lie about them shamelessly. And he is the most powerful man in the world. Trump has the triple advantages of incumbency, low unemployment, and a decent approval rating. It will be incredibly difficult for anyone to beat him.
- The Democratic party “establishment,” meaning the people who have been in leadership positions in the party, does not actually understand Trump. They do not see why his message is appealing. They don’t understand how talented he is. They think he is stupid. They don’t know why he thrives, and they don’t understand why they’re failing to effectively oppose him. When his approval rating rises, it mystifies them. When nobody comes to their rallies, they don’t know why. They didn’t get what was going on in 2016, when their own message was totally out-of-touch with ordinary people’s concerns. They will not admit that his State of The Union address was terrifyingly effective. They think that by pointing out that Trump is a liar and a cad, they can hurt him.
- Even in a concerningly out-of-touch and inept party, Joe Biden stands out as uniquely out of touch and inept. It’s not just that he seems mentally not-that-with-it, but that he fundamentally can’t organize people. He certainly can’t inspire them. In fact, Biden’s political instincts are atrocious: he constantly told Iowa voters to “go vote for someone else,” and 85% of them did. He tells millennials he has “no empathy” for them. He promises no change. He is a serial liar who fabricates absurd details about his life story, like fictitious arrests and a history of civil rights activism.
- The only other Democratic candidate than Joe Biden who has a viable chance at the Democratic nomination is Bernie Sanders. This is almost universally accepted.
- Between the two of them, Bernie Sanders is the only one with even a chance of beating Trump. As in 2016, Bernie is different from other Democrats in that he knows how to speak to Trump’s own voters. Not only does he beat Trump consistently in head-to-head polling, but he offers ordinary people an ambitious social democratic agenda that is designed to deal with their real-world problems. He has a decades-long record of fighting hard for them to get healthcare, decent wages, and family leave. He has waged an often lonely struggle on behalf of those whose interests are too frequently ignored in Washington, even taking on the Obama administration over cuts to Social Security. When Bernie tells working people he is in their corner, they can believe him, because he has acted on the same clear set of values for decades. Plus, Bernie’s supporters are motivated. They get out and knock doors for him in the cold. They will do whatever it takes for him. (And on the flipside, if Joe Biden was nominated, millions of them would probably not only decline to put in the same level of organizing energy, but would simply stay home, unwilling to assist a candidate who has made it clear he has no empathy for them.)
- Many wealthy and powerful Democrats will do whatever it takes to stop Bernie Sanders from being the nominee. This means that they will do whatever it takes to make sure that Joe Biden is the nominee. Already, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar have dropped out and thrown their support behind Biden. Barack Obama has apparently “sent the signal” to Democrats that they need to come together behind Biden. Some Democrats even appear to be funneling money to supporting Elizabeth Warren’s campaign, so that she can continue to siphon enough votes away from Bernie Sanders to keep him from winning the nomination.
- If these Democrats succeed in stopping Bernie, perhaps through a contested convention in which superdelegates override the plurality vote, and they put the feeble and uninspiring Biden at the top of the ticket, it will be an absolute calamity. Bernie’s supporters, many of whom already dislike the party for working hard to stop Bernie in 2016 and the incredibly fishy Iowa caucus shenanigans, will simply give up on the Democrats. Millennials will leave the party in droves, feeling that their votes don’t matter. Some will probably support a third party candidacy. Others will argue that in the interests of pragmatism, they should still vote for a dishonest and weak candidate who says he has no empathy for them. Their appeals will mostly fail. The party will be riven with bitter conflict. Biden will have no clear message, no strategy. He will perform embarrassingly in debates with Trump, forgetting his words and seeming to wonder why he is even on the stage. (He will also have no good explanation for what his son Hunter was doing for that Ukranian gas company, which will be the subject of constant discussion.) Trump, being a bully, will seize his advantage and relentlessly mock Biden’s performance. Trump will (as he has before) talk a lot about how Sanders was “robbed” by a “rigged” primary, delegitimize Biden’s nomination, and stoke the intra-party conflict. Biden will look dazed and confused on Election Night, as Democrats wonder yet again how they managed to lose to Donald Trump of all people.
- If Bernie is nominated, things will go differently, though we do not yet know quite how. Trump’s propaganda machine will try to brand Sanders a communist who hates America. Will this work? It is not clear. Sanders has been an open socialist in the public eye for a long time without it affecting his popularity, but the war that is waged against him will be relentless. And, of course, liberals might not pitch in to help Sanders. Many of them repeat right-wing talking points about him already, scaring people by implying Sanders wants to leave them uninsured. Sanders and his army of organizers will do their damndest to expose Trump for the fraud he is, to unite working-class people behind a candidacy that truly speaks to their interests, and behind an ambitious agenda for single-payer healthcare, a comprehensive climate plan, a living wage, and an end to the indentured servitude of student debt. Will they succeed? This I do not know. Everything else here seems clear as day to me. But how exactly a Sanders-Trump race will play out is mystifying indeed. There are strong reasons to believe Sanders will win, like his strong fundraising in Obama-Trump swing counties, voters’ high assessments of his honesty and credibility, his declining to antagonize conservatives on some cultural issues and ability to speak to conservative audiences, and of course, all of the actual polls. But I have never thought that it was certain Sanders will beat Trump. What I think is that it is certain any other Democrat will lose.
I run all these facts through my head all day, every day. If Trump gets reelected, untold horrors will be released. Unless Sanders prevails, Trump will get reelected. Therefore Sanders must prevail. We must do everything possible to get Sanders the nomination. There is no alternative.
This same reasoning seemed just as obvious to me in 2016, when Democrats didn’t notice that nominating Hillary Clinton was a catastrophic blunder, and proceeded to lose to Donald Trump, ignoring the warnings of people like me and Michael Moore. And when I say I feel like I’m “going crazy,” it’s because it’s really hard for me to believe that after all these years, the lessons have still not been learned. “Oh my God,” I think. “They’re really going to do it again. They’re still not going to nominate Bernie. They’re going to put up another establishment candidate, this time an even weaker one who doesn’t even have the promise of ‘historic change’ that Hillary would have represented.” They’re literally going to fight Bernie to the death, even if it very obviously would result in the suicide of the Democratic Party as an institution. (...)
It’s so weird to me that people don’t get this. Do they really believe the idiotic attacks on Bernie’s “radicalism”? Look at Bernie’s agenda: a national health insurance plan, of the kind that exists successfully all over the world. A giant ambitious climate investment plan, of the kind that we absolutely need if we are going to save the earth because this is a fucking emergency. A living wage that allows people to actually afford to pay their rent and feed themselves. What is the problem here? Why are people like Barack Obama and Beto O’Rourke prepared to destroy the Democratic Party and put the entire future of the planet at risk in order to stop this? What exactly is the threat that Bernie poses? (...)
The charitable answer, and the one they would probably give themselves, is that do not share my view of point #7 on my above list. They simply do not think Bernie is “electable.” They think he would lose to Donald Trump, that because he is too “far left” he would be the equivalent of George McGovern in 1972, and would lose in a landslide. They think he would hurt the prospects of “down ballot” Democrats, with Democratic members of Congress in conservative districts being forced to share the ticket with a socialist. They will insist that it is not Bernie’s agenda that they despise. They simply believe he threatens the party. He must be stopped at all costs in order to save democracy. I think many Democrats have probably convinced themselves of this, which is why some have been willing to entertain the prospect of nominating Mike Bloomberg to stop Sanders. If it takes a racist, sexist, transphobic Republican to save the party, so be it. Better victory with Bloomberg than defeat with Bernie. (...)
The fact that many high-up people in the Democratic party think this way is frightening. Because if they are completely convinced that Bernie can’t beat Trump, they’re not going to step aside at any point and let him be the nominee. They will fight him to the bitter end, because they will tell themselves that in doing so they are being pragmatic. If their actions result in tearing the party apart through a disastrous brokered convention, they will still insist that their actions were right, because they think anything that stops Bernie has to be done. Yes, even if that means overriding the popular vote with superdelegates.
But I don’t actually think it is harder for a left-wing candidate to win, and I think people who assume this assume it in part because they don’t really understand what the “left” is or what our theory is. Socialist values pose a significant threat to the wealth and power of certain people in society who have a strong self-interest in making sure people misunderstand and distrust socialists. But actually, the left stands for ideas that, once people understand them clearly and see through all the myths, have the possibility of mass appeal. Medicare for All is popular, and it would probably be far more popular if you explained to people exactly how it worked and what it would mean for them, and showed them how it would affect their pocketbooks and their experience with the healthcare system. Instead, pollsters ask things like “Would you support Medicare For All even if it took away your private insurance and increased your taxes?” and people get jittery, because they think that means they’re going to be uninsured and have less money. People try to mislead the public about what the left is trying to do, then when the public swallows the misconception, we are told that America rejects left ideas. It’s silly.
This same reasoning seemed just as obvious to me in 2016, when Democrats didn’t notice that nominating Hillary Clinton was a catastrophic blunder, and proceeded to lose to Donald Trump, ignoring the warnings of people like me and Michael Moore. And when I say I feel like I’m “going crazy,” it’s because it’s really hard for me to believe that after all these years, the lessons have still not been learned. “Oh my God,” I think. “They’re really going to do it again. They’re still not going to nominate Bernie. They’re going to put up another establishment candidate, this time an even weaker one who doesn’t even have the promise of ‘historic change’ that Hillary would have represented.” They’re literally going to fight Bernie to the death, even if it very obviously would result in the suicide of the Democratic Party as an institution. (...)
It’s so weird to me that people don’t get this. Do they really believe the idiotic attacks on Bernie’s “radicalism”? Look at Bernie’s agenda: a national health insurance plan, of the kind that exists successfully all over the world. A giant ambitious climate investment plan, of the kind that we absolutely need if we are going to save the earth because this is a fucking emergency. A living wage that allows people to actually afford to pay their rent and feed themselves. What is the problem here? Why are people like Barack Obama and Beto O’Rourke prepared to destroy the Democratic Party and put the entire future of the planet at risk in order to stop this? What exactly is the threat that Bernie poses? (...)
The charitable answer, and the one they would probably give themselves, is that do not share my view of point #7 on my above list. They simply do not think Bernie is “electable.” They think he would lose to Donald Trump, that because he is too “far left” he would be the equivalent of George McGovern in 1972, and would lose in a landslide. They think he would hurt the prospects of “down ballot” Democrats, with Democratic members of Congress in conservative districts being forced to share the ticket with a socialist. They will insist that it is not Bernie’s agenda that they despise. They simply believe he threatens the party. He must be stopped at all costs in order to save democracy. I think many Democrats have probably convinced themselves of this, which is why some have been willing to entertain the prospect of nominating Mike Bloomberg to stop Sanders. If it takes a racist, sexist, transphobic Republican to save the party, so be it. Better victory with Bloomberg than defeat with Bernie. (...)
The fact that many high-up people in the Democratic party think this way is frightening. Because if they are completely convinced that Bernie can’t beat Trump, they’re not going to step aside at any point and let him be the nominee. They will fight him to the bitter end, because they will tell themselves that in doing so they are being pragmatic. If their actions result in tearing the party apart through a disastrous brokered convention, they will still insist that their actions were right, because they think anything that stops Bernie has to be done. Yes, even if that means overriding the popular vote with superdelegates.
by Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs | Read more:
[ed. Exactly. So-called moderates risk losing a good segment of their party's base and generations of future voters because they're too pussified to support someone who's not down with business as usual. It's like abused spouse syndrome. See also: This Psychological Concept Could Be Shaping the Presidential Election (hint: pluralistic ignorance). Nautilus.]
[ed. Exactly. So-called moderates risk losing a good segment of their party's base and generations of future voters because they're too pussified to support someone who's not down with business as usual. It's like abused spouse syndrome. See also: This Psychological Concept Could Be Shaping the Presidential Election (hint: pluralistic ignorance). Nautilus.]
