“Reince Priebus.”*
That is the person to blame, in my opinion.
Say his name. Say it out loud.
It was Reince Priebus who was the Republican Party Chairman during the 2016 presidential election when Donald Trump — real estate developer, reality TV show host, and conservative Rush Limbaugh-talk show protégé — enacted a hostile takeover of the Republican Party. Trump shooed aside more traditional “establishment” presidential aspirants, and he emerged as the party’s candidate. His pep rallies and use of social media directly energized a segment of the party, and he rode that populist wave into power. The rest is history. Reince Priebus, and the other Republicans of that time, were helpless to stop Trump. Or so it seems in retrospect.
Now the Republican Party IS Donald Trump, in effect, at least when it comes to national politics. His rise to power is also the story of the weakness of one of the main American political parties vis-a-vis its celebrity leader.
The same thing appeared to be happening in the Democratic Party. Bernie Sanders looked to be leading a populist wave of his own to the Democratic Party nomination for president in 2020. There was a devoted cadre of “progressive” Democrats who desired a “revolution” to embrace socialism in America. But the Party struck back. On Super Tuesday large segments of the Democratic Party refuted the populism of Bernie Sanders and dealt him a blow he will most likely not recover from. He lost 10 of 14 states one week ago on March 3rd, 2020.
The sudden rise of Biden and corresponding demise of Sanders was pretty unexpected.
What happened exactly?
The youth vote showed up and voted for Bernie in high numbers, it is true. His hardcore “cult-like” supporters, so loud online. But the youth vote did not constitute a large segment of the overall electorate. Other demographics voted the other way. African Americans voted for Biden. Soccer moms in suburbia voted for Biden. Older voters voted for Biden. All those votes for Biden were in effect refutations of Sanders and socialism. Many of the main Democratic Party leaders supported Biden, not Sanders. Butiegieg dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed Biden the day before SuperTuesday. So did Kloubuchar. And Beto O’Rourke. The moderates were coalescing around their champion. Then after Super Tuesday when Biden was ascendant Kamala Harris endorsed Biden. Then Cory Booker did. All the failed Democratic candidates for president were congregating around Joe Biden, not Bernie Sanders. I write this one week after Super Tuesday and it is pretty clear Joe Biden is going to be the candidate of the Democratic Party.
Unlike the Republican Party, the Democratic Party beat back a populist “revolution” that sought to take it over from the outside.
Bernie Sanders was not even a member of the Democratic Party until 2015. Sanders is a self-described “democratic socialist,” an independent, who has long-time sympathies with the Democratic Socialists of America.
Well done, Democratic Party. You have successfully fought off the virus of Sanderism. As a result, you have my vote in November. And there are many more voters like me out there than there are democratic socialist-types in the United States. Super Tuesday showed that. Now hopefully we can go forth and produce the antibodies which will defeat the viral infection of Trumpism in the American body politic. We can defeat Trump at the polls November 8, 2020. If the hardcore Bernie Sanders supporters don’t want to join, they can go piss in the wind.
Maybe this conflict was best encapsulated by the harsh words traded by long-time Democratic political consultant James Carville and Bernie Sanders himself. Last month Carville urged the Democratic Party to “wake up and make sure that we talk about things that are relevant to people,” adding that the party needs to “decide what we want to be.” Carville asked, “Do we want to be an ideological cult or do we want to have a majoritarian instinct to be a majority party?” Later, Carville claimed that Sanders “isn’t a Democrat.” “He’s never been a Democrat. He’s an ideologue,” Carville claimed. Bernie Sander struck back calling Carville a “political hack.” Carville then responded with this memorable quote:
Last night on CNN, Bernie called me a political hack. That’s exactly who the f**k I am!
I am a political hack! I am not an ideologue. I am not a purist. He thinks it’s a pejorative. I kinda like it!
At least I’m not a communist.
This testy faceoff between Carville and Sanders speaks volumes, in my opinion. And the James Carvilles of the Democratic Party are going to win this presidential primary season. Bernie Sanders and his supporters, who not long ago seemed ascendant, are going to lose. God be praised.
Maybe Sanders’s candidacy, fatally-injured, might limp all the way to the March 17, 2020 primary, but then he will lose Florida and all hope will be gone. Why will Bernie Sanders lose Florida? Because of his spectacularly tone-deaf comments of three weeks ago where he praised Fidel Castro’s communist regime for having increased literacy in the island-prison state which was/is Cuba. In those unwise comments Sanders alienated the large Cuban exile community in Florida, which is damaging, not to mention the Venezuelan or Nicaraguan populations in the “Sunshine State.” Couple that gaffe with alienating American Jews in Florida with his pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel comments and put a fork in him Bernie Sanders is done.
Maybe that brings us to Bernie’s biggest problem, the insurmountable obstacle. He hates America. Sanders has spent long decades as an outsider criticizing America’s role in world affairs and lamenting America today and yesterday as a horror show of injustice and oppression — the fact that millions still risk life and limb to come here notwithstanding. But most Americans don’t hate America, and so Sanders was never going to reach a majority, not even in the Democratic Party. So he has crashed and burned. Biden will be the nominee, Sanders won’t.
There will be much gnashing of teeth. I have already noticed the livid “Bernie Bros” howling in anger and frustration on social media at the prospect of their “revolution” failing. They fulminate in the most vituperative language possible; they thrash and whip this way and that in rage. They fling contempt and heap obloquy left and right. They curse and menace on Twitter. They make threats online they would probably not repeat face-to-face. A moderate myself, I say to them:
Get back under your bridge, troll.
Not much positive news politically for centrists like me in the past few years with a roiled, angry electorate and extreme polarization. But Super Tuesday was good news. Back in June of 2016 I wrote “Revenge of the Political Center.” The 2016 presidential election was anything but that. The 2016 election was “Revenge of the Trolls.”
But Super Tuesday was different. It really was revenge of the political center. It felt good. I wrote this essay in favor of Joe Biden two months ago, but he grew to be almost written off as a viable candidate since that time. Now Biden is back. I don’t care so much about Joe Biden per se. But I care much about getting rid of Trump. Tone down the rhetoric and the hostility. Put the adults back in charge. Trumpism has been a disaster. As George Will memorably put it, “Don’t compare him [Biden] with the Almighty, compare him with the alternative. [Trump]”
Now if we could just have a Democratic President (NOT Trump) with a Republican Senate and almost evenly divided House of Representatives, I would have my dreams answered. Nobody would have a mandate and everyone would have to compromise. But maybe the politicians would still act like toddlers and fail to work together in Washington D.C.? I hope not.
But first we shall see what happens in the general election between Joe Biden and Donald Trump.
I wish we could just fast-forward through all the muck-flinging this summer and fall. It is going to be a “hot” couple of months, and not just because of the warm summer weather. Let’s just have the 2020 presidential election a few months early? In early September?.
Doesn’t everyone already pretty much know who they are going to vote for?
At this point how many are still undecided?
Alas.
“This too shall pass.”
But Super Tuesday 2020 sure was a good day.
And I hope to have nothing further to say about politics until late 2020.
Until then stay “cool” everyone.
Ezra Klein on March 4, 2020:
“It’s not that Sanders is running a weak campaign. But he is, in a way, running the wrong campaign. He’s the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination — at least he was until tonight — but he’s still running as an insurgent. The political revolution was supposed to close the gap between these realities: If Sanders could turn out enough new voters, he could sweep away the Democratic establishment and build his own party in its place. But going all the way back to Iowa, that strategy failed. Sanders won as a Democrat, not a revolutionary, and he needed to pivot to a strategy that would unite the existing Democratic Party around him.
“But it’s hard to move from treating the Democratic Party establishment with contempt to treating it like a constituency, and so far, the Sanders campaign hasn’t.”
* Seemingly in semi-permanent political disgrace since 2017, Reince Priebus left politics to join the United States Navy, of all career choices. This shows just how out of favor Priebus was in the Age of President Trump. Will Priebus ever be back? What does this say about the Republican Party?
3 Comments
Liam Egan
I probably shouldn’t even reply to this, since we likely agree on so little that we will be able to do little else than “regard each other across a gulf of mutual incomprehension.” But I would like to stress a few points.
First, I too have little patience for internet trolls – I find them supremely distasteful, and often distressing. And while it is true that many of them are Bernie supporters, I think the reasons for this are somewhat banal: Bernie supporters are young, and young people are the ones who tend to use social media. Young people are often obnoxious, and the internet allows people to say things that one wouldn’t say face-to-face. So I don’t think there is a necessary link between being a Bernie supporter and being obnoxious online (I am a Bernie supporter, and I don’t have any social media).
Second, Bernie is not a socialist. He is advocating for policies that some of the most successful capitalist democracies in the world have implemented – universal health care, affordable education for all, bankruptcy protection, and child care for working parents, to name the most prominent proposals. One does not have to go all the way to Scandinavia to find examples of thriving capitalist countries that have implemented similar policies; the great majority of Western Europe would do (Germany is a good example). So when someone like Carville calls Bernie a communist, not only is this laughably inaccurate, it is also somewhat dangerous, because it completely distorts the genuine distinctions between capitalism and communism (distinctions which are worth maintaining if one wants to preserve capitalist democracy. Bernie has always stressed the hard distinction between “democratic socialism” or “social democracy” and “authoritarian communism”). Bernie much closer to a New Deal Democrat, despite some fear-mongering claims to the contrary by the right. Why is he calling it socialism? I suspect because the right has spent so much of the last 50 years calling every policy designed to help the poor and needy “socialism” that young people heard this and started to think: “If that’s what socialism is, then that’s what I want.” But it’s not socialism in any traditional sense. No one is seizing the means of production.
Third, I’m not sure it is helpful (or true) to say that Bernie hates America. He has criticized the role of the US abroad, yes – but how can one not, after the untold disasters in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya in the last 20 years alone? The majority of Americans are opposed to our continuous involvement in these countries. Agreeing with popular sentiment is not anti-American. Now, to be fair, he has criticized US domestic policy as well: our failure to provide all citizens with healthcare, or with affordable education, as other developed western democracies do. But criticizing domestic policy is not anti-American. It is a fundamental part of a functioning democracy.
So yes, given all of this, I am a bit disappointed to see Biden victorious. I don’t think a return to normalcy will provide anything but a brief respite from Trumpism – Trump is a result of “normalcy” alienating people and making them feel excluded from both the democratic process and the majority of America’s vast wealth. Building a 21st Century equivalent of the New Deal coalition might solve these problems, politics as usual may not. We are living through a second Gilded Age. History has not looked especially kindly on Warren G. Harding and his “return to normalcy.” But it has looked kindly on the presidents whose policies helped us break out of the first Gilded Age: Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt.
Liam Egan
PS: I hope that my occasionally gadfly-esque comments aren’t too annoying! I read your blog because I like to see what you have to say about current events, and always reply in an attempt to cultivate the spirit of healthy debate and disagreement – this being one of the many things the American Experience classes instilled in me. Hope you and your family are staying safe and healthy in this crazy time.
Best from the east coast,
Liam
rjgeib
No worries, Liam. I always welcome your comments and read them with pleasure and profit. Cheers!