Bernie Sanders is trying to sabotage another election for Trump, because the Horseshoe Left is terrified of a Biden win
Hillary Clinton was right. About everything. EVERYTHING. Including the impression she has of Bernie Sanders.
For a while in the 2020 election cycle, one could be forgiven for thinking that the reports in the mainstream press about the relationship between this year’s Democratic nominee Vice President Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders being more personally cordial and amicable than that between Sanders and Clinton were true. And in all honesty, maybe they still are.
But if you thought from Sanders leaving the race relatively early this year - qualified leaving, since he did not actually end his campaign and stop gathering delegates to the convention - and all the apparent cooperation over the platform that Bernie Sanders had himself matured beyond his most rabid supporters who are going around holding flop conventions, you should have prepared yourself for disappointment.
Somebody - hello, somebody? - has helpfully leaked to the Washington Post Bernie Sanders’s “concerns” that Biden is “at serious risk of coming up short in the November election” if he doesn’t adapt the approach of a two-time loser and fair weather Democrat. Sanders wants Biden to move away from a broad, centrist message that by all indications has served him well and focus instead on Bernie’s pet issues of economic populism. Sanders also wants Biden to use his campaign to elevate Sanders surrogates like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who famously said that she and Biden didn’t even belong in the same party.
The Sanders camp essentially confirmed the story to the Post.
Those of us who’ve been observing Bernie Sanders for the better part of the past decade know what this is: running interference at the final stretch of this campaign by manufacturing a narrative of liberal dissent to distract form the narrative of Democratic unity and by making himself and his mini-me’s take up oxygen instead of where the focus needs to be: on beating Trump. Clearly, this is not advice offered in an attempt to rescue a campaign in distress. Biden’s lead over Trump has been large and remarkably stable, and Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are raising gobs of money.
Bernie Sanders is trying to sabotage the 2020 election in favor of Donald Trump, because Bernie Sanders is not, in fact, better than the worst of his followers.
This story drops on the heels of social media chatter on the far left corners of the Internet transforming from how Biden can’t win without heavily courting the horseshoe left to what it would mean for leftists if and when he does.
It is a frightening prospect for the online left that Biden may be on the way to winning the White House by shunning them and instead courting centrists and even moderate Republicans. Biden made it clear in his acceptance speech at the Democratic convention last month that he will not be a partisan president. “I am the Democratic candidate, but I will be an American president”, he said.
The far left believes that a Biden win would reduce their power and influence. They’re right. They believe that Democrats should ‘bend the knee’ to the fringe left and if we do not, they will stick us with four more years of Trump, like they did the first four. Their power primarily rests in the threat of destruction, not in the promise of construction. But if Biden wins, their destructive threat is gone, and they will have to think of constructive ways of improving the lives of real people. And let’s face it, that’s just too messy, involves too much compromise, and just plain takes too much work.
Worse, they believe that a Biden win could cement a pragmatic approach to politics and policy for 12-16 years, as they, to my glee, feel that a Biden presidency is likely to be followed by a couple of terms for Harris.
In other words, a Biden win, for the Bernie left, would mean that their approach to burning it all down is locked out of national power for longer than they are willing to hold their breaths, but a Trump win will at least give them told-you-so bragging rights and let them try again in four years.
And for Bernie Sanders, progressive gatekeeping has always been more important than American revival.