I discovered the other day that it's still easy to annoy me, 3+ months into Donald Trump's presidency, by saying "Bernie Sanders would have won". Or at least by saying it really condescendingly; I might react better if it were said in other ways, but it doesn't appear I'll find out. The first problem with this claim is, of course, that we'll never know; our reality lends itself poorly to controlled tests involving experimental Earth and control Earth. But the other problem is that I *believe* the claim to be preposterously wrong. I think Bernie would have been crushed, solidly losing the popular as well as the electoral vote. Since my own politics are by American standards far left and anti-corporate, and basically share Sanders's goals, I think this delusion is harmful.
The case for "Bernie would have won" is, I admit, simple.
His favorability rating right now, in public polls, is well over 50%, and his unfavorable rating not far over 30%. Donald Trump has approval ratings well under 50% and unfavorable ratings over 50%. Furthermore, single-payer health care (such as Sanders's promised Medicare-for-all) is popular, even among Republican voters. At a quick glance, then, Bernie and his health care plan is far more popular than Donald and the Republicans' anti-health plan (which in the version that just passed the house is so awful that even employer-based insurance plans would be dangerously compromised). Therefore, the person linking these polls announces, Bernie would win. Thus the problems faced by the Democratic Party amount to nothing more than "they're cowards, morons, and traitors to the American public".
(This is a conclusion aided, certainly, by the accuracy of "they're cowards". The refusal of the Democrats in 2000 or 2016 to do a full-court push [or *any* push] for the presidency after winning the popular vote is a disgrace, especially since we know the Republicans had finished plans in place to contest the election in case the Republicans had won the popular vote and the Democrats the electoral. Similarly, although all but three Democratic Senators did vote to reject Neil Gorsuch's Supreme Court appointment, the party failed to unite behind "the seat is Barack Obama's to appoint, and Trump's appointment is invalid by definition". Seriously, they act too often like the votes we cast for them are a nothing more than a gift, to be returned to the store with the receipt if it clashes with their decor.)
The argument for "Bernie Sanders would have lost the election in a landslide" has a simple form too, most of which Kevin Drum made under exactly that title. I'll take a moment to note how Hillary Clinton's polled favorability was often above 60% -- higher than Bernie Sanders's peak -- during most of the years when she wasn't running for office; then defer to his chart, which finds contemporary ideological ratings for every post-WWII Democratic presidential nominee (relative to their own era, of course), arranges them from right-center to left, highlights the ones who became president, and lets you read the names and ponder the details. It's the centrists who have won; the pattern is stark. Hillary Clinton, if her popular vote had translated to victory, would have been the most left-wing Democrat since 1944 ever to become president (judged in her case by Senate voting records).
If that sounds absurd to you, perhaps you're giving her way too little credit for a life working against segregationist schools; opening up legal aid clinics for the poor; organizing the expansion of rural health care; raising the pay of Arkansas teachers; starting a program to train new parents (even illiterate ones) to be their children's first reading teacher; helping pass the Children's Health Insurance Program; expanding the health care of veterans, reservists, and first responders; convincing China and Russia to get on board with stopping Iran's nuclear weapons program; convincing the same nations to sign a treaty against global warming. Her husband's presidency was awful -- an 8-year handover of power to giant corporations via trade treaties, the Telecommunications Act, the end of banking regulations, the privatization of day-to-day government functions, and "the end of welfare as we know it" -- but her grand role was a push for a more ambitious, less capitalist health care plan than the (still quite good) reform that Barack Obama later achieved; and when that failed, at least the dramatic improvement in the health care of impoverished children, who are harder, though not impossible, for Republicans to demonize than poor adults are.
Or perhaps you're giving Lyndon Johnson, John F Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, and Barack Obama mental credit for having been strong liberals prior to their runs for the presidency. They were no such thing, and except for LBJ (with his unexpectedly radical and triumphant push for Medicare, Medicaid, a vastly expanded Social Security, and equal rights for black Americans), they governed as centrists. LBJ is the one who realized he couldn't win re-election; meanwhile, the leftmost nominees on Drum's chart are Michael Dukakis, who lost the popular vote by 8 points; Walter Mondale, left of him, who lost by 17, winning only one of the fifty states; and George McGovern, left of him (all relative to era), who lost by an almost unbelievable 23, again winning one state.
Bernie Sanders, on Drum's chart, is shown as farther left-wing than McGovern. All of these ratings, although based on formal methodology, are questionable, of course, but modern political history is a subject I've studied, and I agree with all of these. Yes, the details change: during my lifetime the electorate has moved in a fairly steady libertarian direction, more liberal on social issues and more capitalist/ anti-government on economic ones. But the Democrats have won, over a period of 70 years, to the degree that they've hugged the center, and any honest argument about their fate needs to incorporate this.
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I don't want to leave it there, since in fact I *do* want the Democrats to nominate left-wing candidates -- I don't think Clinton's sincere, tepid, true-believing moderate liberalism is adequate to our country's or the world's needs, although I'd sure take it over the current alternative. But before I proceed with that, you may be wondering how I resolve "left-wing candidates lose" with "Bernie Sanders and his health care plan are popular". It's very easy: neither the Republican Party nor the corporate-dominated news media has ever treated Sanders as a threat.
Hillary Clinton, like Al Gore before her, has spent her national political career absolutely loathed, on a personal level, by the D.C. media. Like Gore, she is studious, earnest; she speaks in complex paragraphs, linking ideas aloud the way she does in position papers. Like Gore, she's said by many to be very charming in small private meetings, but quickly shifts into careful reserve when cameras, tape decks, or even small crowds appear. She and Gore are nerds. The D.C. media are obsessively cool kids, or cool kid wannabes, drawn to the jocks, the Bill Bradleys and John McCains and George W. Bushes, whom they want to have beers with even if, in GWB's case, beer would be a terrible thing to offer a recovering alcoholic. The D.C. media didn't *like* Donald Trump -- and I agree, they certainly didn't endorse him, and even shifted slowly into calling him out on some of his lies, which I wouldn't have predicted. But they found his jockish, Big Man on Campus swagger enthralling, and wrote endless breathy profiles admiring his ability to connect with crowds. They also wrote endless apologetic profiles of working-class Trump voters, all of whom were mysteriously white. I never read a single profile asking working-class voters of color why they were voting for Hillary Clinton, as they did by a wider margin than working-class whites did for Trump.
One result is that while coverage of Trump was, still, predominantly negative in tone, coverage of Clinton was *more* negative. There was literally more coverage (more than 90% of it negative) of Hillary Clinton's email usage while Secretary of State -- emails that were gracious and caring, that revealed no secret information, and were conducted in the same technological manner as her co-workers and her Republican predecessor used -- than there was of, combined:
* Donald Trump's serial bankruptcies
* Donald Trump bragging about sexual harassment/ assault of married women
* Trump University being sued for fraud
* the Trump Foundation using donations for Donald's personal purposes
* Donald Trump's tax forms (unreleased and leaked both)
* Donald Trump's encouragement of violence at his rallies
* Donald Trump's endorsement of the Chinese government murdering demonstrators at Tiananmen Square
* and every other real or arguable Trump scandal.
Why is Hillary Clinton spectacularly unpopular, when she was more than 60% liked for many years? Exactly this: her entire presidential campaign saw her castigated, endlessly, over a completely imaginary scandal. Why is Bernie Sanders popular? Because, for one thing, he spent several months as one of her most passionate attackers. This is why I believe his life's central legacy is the election of Donald Trump, and why I will never forgive him: he gave "both sides say so" cover to the belief that Hillary Clinton, as workaholic and sincere a nerd as national American politics as ever seen, is some kind of megalomaniacal organized crime figure. And this is why there's never been any reason for the right-wing or centrist media to find (or invent) his most exploitable weaknesses: they like him. He's useful. Not *interesting*, the way any random 3 a.m. Donald Trump tweet has spent two years being interesting; but useful.
If Bernie Sanders had been nominated for president, he and his ideas would have come under relentless assault. Al Gore is a stable and essentially honest person (although again far too centrist for my tastes): the media used a long series of imagined or deeply distorted quotes to paint him as a pathological liar full of likely dangerous delusions. Hillary was portrayed as a soulless, corrupt monster. I don't know what kind of person Bernie would have turned out to be, but it would have been awful; I don't know what scenes from his life would have provided the fuel, but whatever they were, they wouldn't have needed to be recognizable by the time Photoshop had been applied. His fans tell me "You don't understand, people want sincerity and integrity now"; I assure you that, in the pundits' earnest discussions, he would have been devoid of both.
As for his ideas -- look, I think universal Medicare is a better idea than the Mitt-Romney-authored ObamaCare, and right now, so do polled Americans. But ObamaCare in practice is more popular than its legislative-proposal fever-dream image, filled by Republican propagandists with "death panels" and "you won't be able to choose your own doctor" (which, gosh, has never ever been a problem in private insurance plans, where there is no such thing as "out-of-network" or "we're not offering that plan anymore", goodness no). Media coverage of universal health care is, I think, generally dismissive, but there's not much of it; its simple appeal is allowed to fester. As soon as a major party nominee proposed it, we'd be hearing myths about the Awful Canadian System -- "The wait times are terrible! They don't allow hip replacements! They make you take extra elbows! Patients flock to the U.S. to be treated, and doctors escape to the U.S. to do their jobs right! Spiders flee U.S. hospitals to sleep on Canadian surgery tables!" -- on a 24-hour news cycle.
Let's not forget, too, that precisely because Hillary Clinton *doesn't* regard large corporations as sociopathic devices to turn water/ soil/ air/ plants/ animals/ lungs/ creativity/ kindness into short-term stockholder dividends, she's still acceptable to the establishment. The media defeated her, I believe, in large part because it didn't like her personally, and also (I suspect) because it accidentally killed her campaign while intending only to maim and cripple her presidency. But the formal endorsements went her way, and so did a large number of donations from rich people (although Donald Trump, despite promising not to, raked in donations from rich people as well, before filling his cabinet with them). Bernie Sanders, if nominated, would have been an active threat to the media's owners, and an active threat to the political donor class. No part of the damage done to him would have been accidental.
Michael Bloomberg -- NYC mayor turned media tycoon -- was exploring a 3rd-party race for president that he abandoned because he firmly preferred Hillary to Donald, once it became clear those would be the nominees. He consistently stated that he would have run against Sanders and Trump, and it seems extremely likely that the editorial-board goodwill would have gone his way. To Fox Nation, Bloomberg is the Communist who tried to ban sugared sodas; it's not Republican votes he would have been commanding. It's Sanders -- not a member of the Democratic Party until it was time to run for its presidential nomination -- who would have found a large share of his newly adopted party equally reluctant to associate with him.
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This has turned out long. The obvious topic still awaiting is "Where can the left go from here?", and I will address it in my next political essay. I have ideas how a campaign could be run; how a difficult, hostile-to-corporations ideology could be sold. History is part of my guide; so are a lot of my own personal conversations with people who are not, at all, members of the political left. Maybe my ideas would work, maybe they wouldn't, but they are built on an awareness of the challenges; Bernie Sanders, shouting slogans, showed no such awareness.
"Donald Trump shouts slogans!", you say; yes, he shouts ones amplified by Fox News, right-wing radio, and the general "run government like a business" ethos of advertising-funded centrist culture, so his slogans make sense to people. Bernie's don't, and he showed no signs of being the patient teacher and explainer they'd have needed.
I will save my ideas for later, and let you go on with your day (or with your comment section contributions). But if this piece has seemed pessimistic, I think it's the opposite. Sanders supporters, too often, think they live in a world where he was a brilliant candidate and his ideas were popular -- in which case our chances were as good as they could get, and the fact that he lost is a cause for despair. (Or violence, which is worse.)
I think he lost because he was a so-so candidate, who did a fine job speaking words some of us were desperate to hear, but didn't have what it takes to make sense to anyone else. I think he lost because the country isn't ready yet, and he wasn't the man to make it ready. But that means someone else might be.
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