A Bernie Nomination Could Destroy the Left It took progressives 48 years to recover the last time the Democrats chose one. By Ted Rall
https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-bernie-nomination-could-destroy-the-left-11581962615?mod=opinion_lead_pos5
Bernie Sanders’s emergence as the Democratic presidential front-runner is an amazing accomplishment for a socialist. But what if he wins the nomination and loses to Donald Trump ?
Mr. Trump will be a formidable adversary. He’s an incumbent. He presides over a strong stock market and low unemployment, a rare period of mutual satisfaction on Wall Street and Main Street. He’s effectively unopposed for his party’s nomination and has a talent for getting under his opponents’ skin. And thanks to Democratic overreach, he can get away with almost anything. What are they going to do, impeach him again?
Progressives believe Mr. Sanders has the best chance of winning in November. So do some Republicans. “I think Sanders beats Trump,” Tony Fabrizio, the president’s pollster, said in 2017 about the previous year’s election. “I think Sanders would have had the ability to reach a lot of the less than college-educated, low-income white voters.” The president himself told reporters recently that he would “rather run against Bloomberg than Bernie Sanders.”
The business wing of the GOP is sanguine. “The overwhelming consensus on Wall Street these days is that should Sanders wind up as the Democratic nominee—sliding past a handful of moderates also at the top of the field—he would get demolished by President Donald Trump in the general election,” observes Politico’s Ben White. They thought Mr. Trump didn’t stand a chance either.
Bernie is progressivism’s ticket out of the political wilderness in which left-wing Democrats have been wandering for four decades. After the Democrats denied him a fair shake in 2016, progressives are hungry for payback.
Yet they may come to regret leading the Democrats into a general election. If Mr. Sanders loses in November, there will be a replay of the vicious struggle for control that followed the 1972 defeat of George McGovern. Corporate centrists will argue, as they did then, that progressives produced defeat. All the misfortunes that befell the left after 1972—the “Third Way,” “triangulation,” Democratic Leadership Council centrism—emerged from that devastating loss to Richard Nixon.
The possibility that Mr. Sanders will become the first unreconstructed leftist to claim the presidential nomination of a major party in nearly half a century is as thrilling as a game of high-stakes poker. And it’s just as dangerous.
It may be shrewder for progressives to see Mr. Sanders lose the nomination to a more moderate sacrificial lamb like Pete Buttigieg or Amy Klobuchar —assuming that he or she goes down to defeat in November. A primary loss would allow the progressive movement to blame centrists for another Hillary-style catastrophe. Rather than lose to Donald Trump and strengthen the argument for business-as-usual Democratic centrism, progressivism would retain its theoretical electability.
Either Bernie wins the White House or progressivism faces another devastating political setback.
Mr. Rall is a political cartoonist and the author of “Francis: The People’s Pope,” the latest in a series of graphic-novel biographies.
Comments are closed.
