Surprise has turned into panic. With Bernie Sanders leading in early battleground states and competitive with former vice-president Joe Biden nationally, the Democratic establishment is sounding the alarm.
“Should Sanders actually pull off the feat of capturing the nomination, Donald Trump would have been given a gift that almost assures his re-election,”
says the Daily Beast. Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign manager, Jim Messina, has a
similar message: “If I were a campaign manager for Donald Trump and I look at the field, I would very much want to run against Bernie Sanders.”
Obama himself has
promised to intervene, if necessary, to stop Sanders.
If you’re a part of the Democratic party’s power structures, the same structures that failed to thwart Republican takeover of local and state governments and Trump’s election, then perhaps you have reason for concern.
But if you’re an ordinary Democratic voter, or just someone worried about the possibility of a second Trump term, there’s no need for panic.
What Sanders’s detractors don’t understand is that even though it’s to the left of contemporary liberalism, his redistributive politics has more appeal with self-described moderate voters than typical Democrat ones.
These potential voters, like most of the country as a whole, support demands such as
Medicare for All, federal job programs, trade unions, free higher education and student debt cancellation. Bridging the gap between the one in four Americans who identify as “liberal” and the two-thirds of Americans who
support tax hikes on the rich is crucial to building a majoritarian leftwing politics.
Sanders’s strength lies in his popularity, both among and outside the Democratic base, and his ability to tie together progressive economic and social demands into a narrative that valorizes working people, vilifies a political and corporate elite, and sidesteps partisan “culture war” in favor of populist class war.
He’s an outsider, but one who picks his battles wisely and knows how to frame a debate. Take, for instance, his stance on gun control. Sanders has a “D” rating from the National Rifle Association, and he’s worn that as a badge of honor, railing against the organization and its role in national politics. He’s done this despite representing a state with high rates of gun ownership.
Sanders needs the votes of Vermont hunters. But luckily, they see him as a foe of lobbyists and a friend of theirs, and not an anti-second amendment zealot. They keep electing him, despite his support for gun control.
The strongest case against Sanders has nothing to do with his electability or his democratic socialist identification, but r
ather with the disconnect between his political demands and a gridlocked political environment.
Sanders is an anti-establishment figure, and one with a decades-long history on the left, but his policy commitments are not outside the new American mainstream. If he can galvanize the same “moderate” irregular voters who have been drawn to him in the past, he won’t just beat Trump, he’ll set the stage for a long-term political realignment – the political revolution he calls for.
Sanders is a rebel, but he’s one who people know and trust. In other words, he’s the perfect candidate for 2020.