Goodbye, Hillary — I Mean Bernie
Left and right, Bernie Bros and Bernie Hell-Nos, and everyone somewhere in between — all have offered their interpretations of Bernie’s legacy in light of his accession to reality this past Wednesday.
Some on the Left (Bernie included) say that he won the “ideological struggle” and normalized socialist ideas previously deemed too radical. Though he lost, future candidates for the Democratic nomination (Biden included) will run on his agenda because he understood “earlier and with far more clarity than anyone else in the Democratic Party where its base was — and what it wanted from its future leaders.”
Many others would agree — but they vary as to whether losing the nomination was because of “a profound failure of imagination and a cowardly preemptive compromise” by the Democratic establishment or because the desire to beat The Man Behind the Orange Mask is first and foremost to Democratic voters — and nominating Bernie would be risky, no matter how much they might agree with him.
There is a cadre who argue that too many, including many of the Democratic candidates themselves, went into the primary having “spent too much time on Twitter, where the young, woke Left is disproportionately loud.” The majority of the Democratic Party’s voters remain in the “moderate” to “somewhat liberal” space, according to this theory, and aren’t interested in a candidate promising to tear down the whole system. Count Barack Obama in this group:
My point is that even as we push the envelope and we are bold in our vision, we also have to be rooted in reality and the fact that voters, including Democratic voters and certainly persuadable independents or even moderate Republicans, are not driven by the same views that are reflected on certain, you know, left-leaning Twitter feeds or the activist wing of our party…
This is still a country that is less revolutionary than it is interested in improvement. They like seeing things improved. But the average American doesn’t think that we have to completely tear down the system and remake it. And I think it’s important for us not to lose sight of that.
Others argue that Sanders was only an “echo of Trump,” an indication of how “party establishments do not matter very much when it comes to fund-raising or message-broadcasting.” Neither Sanders nor Trump were members of their respective parties until they ran for their nominations, after all; each exploiting the decline of parties as institutions and gatekeepers in American politics. Presidential campaigns are now a wild, wild west, and Bernie and Trump brought some of the biggest guns.
Then there are those who claim that Sanders wasn’t in the vanguard of American socialism at all: he was just walking along a trail already blazed. The United States took small steps towards socialism in its first century and-a-half, which became boundless leaps from the twentieth century until today. From the advent of public education, to the New Deal, to Obamacare — socialism in America has long been “doing fine, just not under that name.” The only thing revolutionary about Bernie, in this view, is not that he believes in socialism, but that “he actually says that he believes in it and isn’t afraid to use the words.” Anyone who watched President Trump declare “America will never be socialist” while promising not to touch America’s unsustainable entitlements in the State of the Union might find this analysis persuasive.
So who’s right? What did Bernie Sanders’ two unsuccessful campaigns for the Democratic nomination actually show?
All of these perspectives have validity, but of all the interpretations of what Bernie was, none have been so simple yet complete as Jonah Goldberg’s and Chris Stirewalt’s: Hillary Clinton has been the “great distorter” in American politics for two presidential cycles. Through her immense unpopularity among segments of voters across the vast political spectrum, she artificially boosted the profile and electoral success of not one, but two political figures: Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.
Despite being rigged in Clinton’s favor from the beginning, Bernie converted a would-be coronation in 2016 into an extended primary battle in large part because he was the repository of a small, resolute fragment of Democrats who looked at her mendacious, cold, misanthropic self and refused to get on board. As Niall Stanage wrote after Sanders’ breathtaking defeat on Super Tuesday:
[I]n 2016, Sanders was the de facto sole alternative to Clinton, whereas he has been competing in a multicandidate field this time around… But some Democrats say that has been part of the problem. Sanders’s 2016 numbers, they say, were inflated by a sizable anti-Hillary vote…“His base probably got him to about 30 percent of the vote last time. The other 15, 16 points was an anti-Hillary vote,” said Joe Trippi, who was campaign manager for another insurgent candidate, former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, in 2004.
Bernie stood up quite well in a mano a womano contest with Hillary in 2016, as he continued to do with his dedicated 25–30% of the vote in a splintered Democratic field in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada this year. Then Joe Biden’s dedicated support among black voters carried him through to an overwhelming victory in South Carolina, candidates in the moderate lane cleared out, and suddenly Biden was trouncing Bernie across the map on Super Tuesday. Had Biden run four years ago, as he very nearly did, it’s implausible to think Sanders would have gotten any traction against him and the Clinton machine at all.
It’s also implausible to think that, had that happened, it would be Donald J. Trump running for re-election this year, and not Joseph R. Biden. Most in the know (including most in Trump’s own campaign) never even entertained the idea that a Playboy cover-featuring, reality tv-starring, crappy steak-hocking buffoon could be elected president of these United States — yet millions of missing or turnover Obama voters later that’s exactly what happened. Never above fifty percent personal approval before being elected, rarely, if ever, above it after, Trump just happened to be running against one of the least liked, least politically-talented nominees in American history.
Think of an alternate reality in which Hillary had not run in 2016 — or had Joe Biden simply run then: Bernie never gets above third place in the primary; instead Biden wins the nomination narrowly, despite the party’s desire to give Hillary her turn; and the tens of thousands of voters who voted twice for Obama in the midwestern “Blue Wall States” of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania stick with “Blue-Collar Joe,” instead of switching to Trump, in a comprehensive-but-not-quite-a-landslide electoral college victory.
If you accept this alternate reality (which seems a lot more normal than the alternate reality we’ve been living in for three and a half years), the inescapable conclusion is that Bernie Sanders is one of two people whose status and influence were immeasurably inflated through the fortune of having run against Hillary Clinton. Without her as a foil, Sanders won Iowa and New Hampshire by no more than a point or two, then won a caucus state in Nevada, then got absolutely trounced by Biden from South Carolina on. He didn’t create an incipient socialist wave in 2016, he was just riding an anti-Hillary one. His shellacking in 2020 proves it.
Having said goodbye to Hillary, Democratic voters have overwhelmingly said goodbye to Bernie.
Having said goodbye to Hillary, will American electorate say the same thing to Donald Trump in a few months?
