Sanders is a Marxist of the old school of dialectical materialism, from the land that time forgot. Class relations are foundational; everything else is epiphenomenal. Sanders may have outgrown the revolutionary socialism of his youth. He seems to think in terms of ameliorating bourgeois hegemony rather than overthrowing it. He is not necessarily hostile to transgender claims. He has co-sponsored the current version of the Equality Act, which includes transgender people in the classes to be provided equal public accommodation and to be protected from job discrimination. But Sanders certainly does seem to think that such concerns are secondary. Compare and contrast the answers that he and Elizabeth Warren gave at the December 19 Democratic debate in Los Angeles.
Yamiche Alcindor of PBS asked:
Senator Sanders, at least 22 transgender people were killed in the United States this year, [most] of them transgender women of color. Each of you has said you would push for the passage of the Equality Act, a comprehensive LGBTQ civil-rights bill. But if elected, what more would you do to stop violence against transgender people?
Sanders’s answer quickly pivoted away from the cultural to the material.
We need moral leadership in the White House. We need a president who will do everything humanly possible to end all forms of discrimination against the transgender community, against the African American community, against the Latino community, and against all minorities in this country.
But above and beyond providing the moral leadership of trying to bring our people together, what we also need for the transgender community is to make sure that health care is available to every person in this country, regardless of their sexual orientation or their needs.
And that is why I strongly support and have helped lead the effort for a Medicare for All single-payer program, which will provide comprehensive health care to all people, including, certainly, the transgender community.
The question went next to Warren. She plunged directly into the question of identity.
The transgender community has been marginalized in every way possible. And one thing that the president of the United States can do is lift up attention, lift up their voices, lift up their lives.
Here’s a promise I make. I will go to the Rose Garden once every year to read the names of transgender women, of people of color, who have been killed in the past year. I will make sure that we read their names so that as a nation we are forced to address the particular vulnerability on homelessness. I will change the rules now that put people in prison based on their birth sex identification rather than their current identification. I will do everything I can to make sure that we are an America that leaves no one behind.
Sanders checked a box of support for the identity issue, then returned to regular programming. For Warren, the identity issue was the regular programming.
Bernie Sanders is a fragile candidate. He has never fought a race in which he had to face serious personal scrutiny. None of his Democratic rivals is subjecting him to such scrutiny in 2020. Hillary Clinton refrained from scrutinizing Sanders in 2016. It did not happen, either, in his many races in Vermont. A Politico profile in 2015 by Michael Kruse argued that Sanders had benefited from “an unwritten compact between Sanders, his supporters, and local reporters who have steered clear” of writing about Sanders’s personal history “rather than risk lectures about the twisted priorities of the press.”
The Trump campaign will not steer clear. It will hit him with everything it’s got. It will depict him as a Communist in the grip of twisted sexual fantasies, a useless career politician who oversaw a culture of sexual harassment in his 2016 campaign. Through 2019, Donald Trump and his proxies hailed Sanders as a true voice of the people, thwarted by the evil machinations of the Hillary Clinton machine. They will not pause for a minute before pivoting in 2020 to attack him as a seething stew of toxic masculinity whose vicious online followers martyred the Democratic Party’s first female presidential nominee.
“Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done. He was a career politician. It’s all just baloney, and I feel so bad that people got sucked into it,” Hillary Clinton says in a forthcoming documentary. She stood by those words in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter last week. At the Sundance Film Festival in Utah this past weekend, Clinton told Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic’s editor in chief, that Sanders—alone among the Democratic aspirants in 2020—had refused to meet with her. If Sanders wins the Democratic nomination, you will hear Clinton’s negative assessment of him repeated so often by pro-Trump talkers that you will almost think Clinton is Trump’s running mate.
Trump will terrorize the suburban moderates with the threat that Sanders will confiscate their health insurance and stock holdings, if not their homes. Trump accused Democrats of pro-ayatollah sympathies for noticing that his story about the killing of Qassem Soleimani was full of holes. [Should have put a “David Frum Warning” beforehand. -LP] In 1980, Sanders joined a left-wing party whose presidential candidate condemned “anti-Iranian hysteria around the U.S. hostages” being held at the U.S. embassy in Tehran, suggesting that “many of them are simply spies … or people assigned to protect the spies,” as Ronald Radosh reported in The Daily Beast. Imagine what Trump and his team will do with that.
The members of the team around Sanders are experts in Democratic Party factional infighting. Few have dealt with people who do not play by the rules of the mainstream Democratic Party. They have always been the rule breakers, the people who got inside the other team’s decision cycle. They have been the Minutemen fighting the Redcoats, picking off the other side’s regulars from behind trees and fences. Now they are about to experience what happens when a militia faces off on an open field against a ruthless modern army with cluster bombs and napalm. They will be shredded and torched.
A specter is haunting centrist Democrats — the specter of a Bernie Sanders nomination. As the democratic socialist has taken the lead in Iowa and New Hampshire, and narrowed Joe Biden’s advantage in national polls, the high clerics of Clintonism have begun calling for a (political) counterrevolution.
“People need to start taking Bernie pretty seriously — there is a really substantial risk of him becoming unstoppable if he wins these early states by large numbers,” Matt Bennett, vice-president of the centrist think tank Third Way, told the Washington Post this week. Bennett went on to chastise his fellow moderates for getting anxious instead of organized, lamenting, “It’s not like our phone is ringing from people saying, ‘Let’s do something.’ ”
Third Way has been flooding influential Iowa Democrats’ in-boxes with memos on Sanders’s general-election liabilities and seeding similar stories in the mainstream press. Meanwhile, the Democratic Majority for Israel super-PAC is warning Iowans that a vote for a septuagenarian socialist with a heart condition is, in effect, a vote for four more years of President Trump. But a broad-based, deep-pocketed “Anyone But Sanders” push has yet to take shape. Allies of Michael Bloomberg have indicated that the billionaire’s burgeoning campaign will transform itself into such an entity, if necessary. If Biden suffers damage in the early states, the last thing he’ll need is for Bloomberg, an alternative anti-left candidate, to ramp up his (already gargantuan) ad spending, and likely eat into Uncle Joe’s margins on Super Tuesday. But by the time Iowa and New Hampshire are in the books, it may already be too late
Snip.
Even if one accepts Third Way’s memo as gospel, the hazards of mounting a massive “Anyone But Sanders” campaign still outweigh the benefits.
The reason for this is simple: Democrats will need high turnout among young, left-leaning voters in November, and Bernie Sanders is overwhelmingly popular with such voters.
The age gap between the support bases of the two leading Democratic candidates is unprecedented in scale. According to a Quinnipiac poll released Wednesday, Bernie Sanders boasts the support of 53 percent of Democratic voters under 35 nationwide, while Joe Biden lays claim to just 3 percent. That poll’s margin of error is 3.4 percentage points — which means that the percentage of younger voters who support the Democratic Party’s current front-runner could, technically, round down to zero. In other national surveys, age polarization among Democratic primary voters tends to be a bit less severe. But in virtually all of them, Biden’s support among the young is historically low for a front-running candidate, while Sanders’s popularity with the contingent is exceptionally high.
It will be hard enough for Biden to mobilize younger voters after beating Sanders in a relatively friendly primary fight, free of conspicuous interference from Establishment forces. If Uncle Joe has to win millennial and Gen-Z hearts and minds — after riding to the nomination on the back of a wall-to-wall anti-Bernie ad blitz from Third Way and friends — his task may be impossible. Although Sanders’s 2016 backers did not sit out (or defect) during the general election in aberrantly high numbers, the age gap between Biden and Bernie backers this year is even larger than the one that prevailed between Clinton and the Vermont senator four years ago. One recent Emerson College poll found that only 53 percent of Sanders’s current supporters plan to vote for the Democratic nominee in November, no matter who that person turns out to be.
Eh, I don’t find this argument entirely persuasive. Young voters are notoriously bad at actually showing up at the polls. What they gain in youth votes they lose in the “not voting for crazy socialists” vote. Besides, we should realize that the DNC was going to go all in to screw Bernie no matter what anyway… (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.) Would Trump-Sanders 2020 be a replay of Nixon McGovern 1972?