If You’re Terrified of Trump, Consider a Vote for Bernie
Reading most headlines, it doesn’t look good for Senator Bernie Sanders. He’s trailing Clinton in delegates, and even without superdelegates he has not fared as well as Obama had by this point in 2008. While the movement he’s tapped into has been incredible in its ability to challenge a hugely backed presumptive nominee, it may be running up against the limits of its reach.
The assessment — from political pundits and my parents’ generation —is that come November when we face the Republican electorate we will be much safer backing the well-known and moderate Hillary. Her negative approval is a result of years in the spotlight and constant scrutiny as she fought for initiatives a third of the country despised. In a nation where so many vote along ideological lines, and where socialism has been demonized as the enemy for the past half-century, these experts argue that Bernie’s democratic socialist message will turn people off and send voters to the Republicans.
As the Republican establishment fights Donald Trump, completely oblivious to the reasons they’ve lost the faith of their base, it would be in our best interest to not make the same mistakes they are. There is a reason the people are rising up against the establishment. Our loss of trust is founded in trauma but backed by heaps of reality. When the last presidential nominee of the GOP attacks Trump without admitting his role in aiding the man’s rise, invoking Reagan’s “Time for Choosing” Goldwater speech in the process, it shows that the “Establishment” will continue to die, oblivious to its own cause of death.
Why do our politicians keep lying to us? The rebellion right now socially and politically comes from a population that has lost its ability to distinguish fact from fiction. It’s harder and harder to list sources we believe unequivocally, and any notion of impartiality in our media and government has gone out the window. Our trust has eroded while our bullshit detectors have been heightened and attuned by the accelerating information revolution. Our elected figures should see by now that the country is losing patience with impenetrable public personas who pander with a complete lack of self-awareness.
One of the more immediate and salient pieces of evidence for our distrust of the establishment is the failure of political prognostication so far this election cycle. If you could tell someone in Spring 2015 what the election looks like today, they’d laugh and assume you were woefully uninformed. For an incredibly long time, Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton were presumed to be the 2016 presidential nominees. But even then, there was a growing unease and anger at the obviousness of our oligarchy. The parties were pushing the latest of two families that had ruled our country for decades, meshing their neo-politics together into an unpleasant and at times indefensible establishment regime. Looking back, it’s not surprising there has been a rebellion. So why do we continue to insist the rebellion will pass?
When I talk to supporters of Hillary, they often admit that they agree with Bernie’s message and platform, even if they aren’t sure he’s realistic. These supporters still have residual trust in the establishment, and believe the pundits when they assert that a socialist cannot win a general election. But let me contend that if you are willing to trust our punditry to that degree, why not assume they are also correct that there is no longer a realistic path to the nomination for Senator Sanders? If that’s the case, and you ultimately believe in the ideas behind Bernie’s movement, a vote for Bernie is a strong advocation for the kind of Democratic party we have always aspired to be. It’s a way to cast off the last shackles of the Cold War and begin engaging with the philosophies and programs that once propelled our nation to prosperity. When Bernie arrives at the DNC convention with a wealth of donations and delegates, the party would be impossibly foolish to ignore the movement he represents. The fact that Hillary is already adopting parts of Bernie’s policies and language is proof positive that our party is smart enough to appeal to its base.
The response to that argument might be that we don’t know necessarily that Hillary has the primary locked up, and it’s dangerous to play with the nomination for lofty ideals. But if we are willing to doubt the current prediction of Hillary’s inevitability, why stop there? Why are we so sure the group of people that reviles socialism is larger than the group of people that revile Hillary Clinton? Why are we confident that policy, not optics, will drive a majority of votes this fall, when that has so clearly not been the case so far in the race against Trump?
Donald Trump destroyed Jeb Bush because Donald Trump is channeling the fury of people who feel silenced by the elites, whom the Bushes and Clintons have symbolized for decades. He plays to all of Hillary’s weaknesses; he’s brash and unashamed where she’s inauthentic and unrepentant, he speaks fluently in the language of conspiracy, able to draw on years of Clinton scandals real and imagined, and she perfectly represents the incumbent establishment Trump is upending.
If you want a preview of what Trump’s attack on Hillary will look like, it’s not hard to find:
Hillary Clinton doesn’t have a clue. She can’t do that. She’s talking about — I mean, one of the things that has really bothered me, I think one of the reasons I have such great support, is that people, you take a look, people in the middle-income groups are making less money today — less money than they made 12 years ago. And in her speech, she just said they’re making less money. Well, she’s been there with Obama for a long period of time. Why hasn’t she done anything about it? Practically everything that she was complaining about — she’s picked up what I say. The difference is she’s been there for a long period of time. Why haven’t they done anything about it?
Trump is going to attempt to draw as much as he can from Bernie’s populist movement to feed his warped racist funhouse mirror populism of the right, and I don’t think my inability to understand that crossover appeal is representative of huge parts of this country. We don’t know what Bernie’s ceiling will be in 9 months, but I’m not confident anymore that we know what Hillary’s will be either. There’s a lot of news that will happen between now and November, and so far the news seems to have helped Trump more than it has not. Certainly more than it’s been able to help Hillary.
So my plea to you is this: watch the Democratic debate tonight, and seriously consider where you’d like to see your political party go in the next decade and beyond. If your heart wants Bernie but your brain says Hillary, realize that if the pundits are right this time, the most a vote for Bernie does is advance your true policy positions further into the DNC platform. If the pundits are wrong and Bernie can still be elected, then maybe it’s finally time to stop listening to people who have had a worse prediction track record than if they’d been tossing coins, and consider that so far in the election of 2016 — personality has Trumped policy.
