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Never-Bernie?
If Sanders rolls to the nomination, will there be a Never-Bernie movement? On the one hand, Bernie is an ideological nutball who could lead his party to disaster (or disaster to his country, if he wins) and a number of Democratic campaign pros and elected officials have said so. On the other hand, there are no “strange new respect” MSM prizes from dissident Democrats as there are for RINOs. And Democrats are much better at enforcing party loyalty.
Democrats have traditionally finessed their affinity for socialism, turning the ratchet slowly while giving lip service to the free market and property rights. But now, like Skynet becoming self-aware in The Terminator, the hard left under Bernie wants no more pretense or gradualism. The mask is off.
The great thing about being a socialist is that no matter how badly your programmatic ventures fail, it is never the fault of the ideology that spawned them. The ideology teaches you to double down. And once it becomes clear that a centrally-planned utopia is really a stagnant nightmare, the main task becomes a punishment for anyone who notices. Big Brother is a feature, not a bug. There was never going to be a NeverStalin movement.
So, when The Bern crashes and burns, it is not likely that his party can ever go back to gradual, surreptitious government expansion while feigning fealty to the Constitution and our freedoms. It is likely that, like their Corbynista or Chavista counterparts, Bernie Bros will always be incapable of requisite self-examination. It will be the fault of evil, ignorant opposition or that the great Marxist wheel of history is just turning a tad slower than expected. The last vestige or variant of the old, largely successful Democratic Party political coalition first forged in 1932 will be gone.
If there is a Never-Bernie movement it will likely have to be a third party to survive. United with the remaining many dozens of NeverTrump Republicans, they could resurrect the old John Anderson coalition or something like the Alliance-SDP of the UK. The party would stand for the proposition that they are smarter than you are, that the Reaganesque rubes on the right and Bernie commies on the left should just shut up and let clever deep state people run things without tiresome oversight or accountability from lesser types. Probably not a winning coalition even with Kristol and Rubin writing its manifestos.
But a major American political party is never down forever. The secret weapon of both Democrats and Republicans is that their opposition is invariably a bunch of idiots. Don’t get cocky, conservatives, as Glenn Reynolds is fond of saying.
Published in General
A little harsh and dark. I don’t have a problem with the NeverTrump position well prior to the 2016 GOP convention. Trump is offputting to a hell of a lot of people and looked like a sure loser against Satan’s hand-picked Democratic nominee. When it was Trump v. Hillary, the position was a little less tenable but came with the notion that from the starting point of the NeverTrump position, a new, revitalized GOP would be rebuilt from the ashes of the failed Trump campaign. After he won, the expectation was that Trump would be a disaster as POTUS and thus vindicate the NeverTrumpers. But as unpleasant as Trump often is, his administration has actually been a rousing success across the board. So the NeverTrumpers are left sputtering at his ruder tweets, which is kinda sad.
The NeverTrumpers are not “the worst of us.” But they are guilty of a presumption of moral superiority that led to a fixed identity of being NeverTrump from which perch many have been unable to climb down or man up to the fact that Trump is far from being a disaster although he is still sometimes exasperating. If he could remain the guy in the SOTU speech or the Daytona or Super Bowl appearance and not the guy who harangues underlings and fights with MSM nonentities…. it would be landslide time in America. Instead, Trump will keep it closer than it needs to be–and the NeverTrumpers will cling to that.
The initial fears of Trump weren’t character, they were that he was lying about what he really believed to get into office. Character was a means to that end. The argument then morphed once he got into office to appease those who had concerns while allowing them to maintain credibility.
Democrats’ problem with Bernie isn’t his attitude towards economics or capitalism, it’s that they might be not be allowed to be in control (the plebes) or that their money will also be taken. Ideologically, they’re in agreement, it’s just like most of their policies, they want a waiver. NeverBernies will convince themselves they can control him, NeverTrump will convince themselves they’re being “principled” whilst voting for a socialist because the Orange Man tweets bad things and Bernie’s only praised Communism, but never had sex with a pornstar.
NeverBernies will align with NeverTrumpers to coalesce behind Bernie under the following argument: the separation of powers, and split party control will be enough to contain Bernie, and if he’s a disaster we can vote him out in four years. Unfortunately this argument neglects three points:
I’ll submit that Never-Trumpers circa 2016 were not the sort of what I described as I myself was among them. I am referring to the current sort and I strand by what I posted. Anyone who would vote for Bernie over Trump is highly questionable in their character. Those that are doing so, that have been in the highest positions of power in the Republican party have shown their character to be far worse than even Democrats and Socialists. There is no other way to slice it. These are people who have been trying to create failure and chaos for decades for their own profit.
I can respect folks who can’t bring themselves to vote for the president and are instead voting Libertarian or Constitution Party or some such avenue but voting Sanders is grounds for being drummed out of the camp.
I think we already seeing signs of the never bernie movement. I doubt many will openly admit voting for Trump, but I wouldnt be surprised if they find someone like McMuffin to run third party and split off votes from him.
The problem for a third party candidate siphoning voters from Bernie will be they’ll end up being savaged by the media, which is sort of split right now between the #NeverBernie types and the Sanders supporters. But that’s only because they’re still holding out hope that Sanders can be stopped — if Bernie’s the nominee, they’ll eventually all coalesce around trying to make him sound like not-a-Socialist or spin Socialism as the same rainbows-and-unicorns world Bernie does.
A third party candidate coming out of the Democratic field won’t get the same fawning coverage Evan McMullen got in 2016, or Ross Perot in 1992 — he or she will have their motives questioned, their campaign mocked and their entire life probed, including for any possible Trump connections. The only way that doesn’t happen would be if the third party candidate ran to the left of Bernie, but even there, the Dems were mad at Ralph Nader and Jill Stein following the 2000 and 2016 elections (plus running to the left of Bernie would probably mean saying something like Pol Pot had the right idea with his class equalization efforts, he just didn’t implement them correctly. Hard to see even the media looking away from that one without comment).
Exactly. Frankly all those Libertarians and other NeverTrumpers who feared a Trump dictatorship were silly to put it mildly.
That would be heaven sent.
Doomberg took a policy — stop (question) and frisk — which under Giuliani had been left alone by the Clinton DOJ and, by adding egregious large scale civil rights violations, made it so egregious that it became what the Left had accused it of being all along. Rudy was more or less saying that Doomberg is a monomaniacal and dictatorial technocrat who will trample civil rights to get to a somewhat quantifiable goal.
There’s a chart that shows how the Stop and Frisk incident exploded under Bloomberg and his police commissioner, Ray Kelly, compared to the Giuliani years before falling again at the end of his term when the legal challenged hit. The murder rate (minus 9/11) in Rudy’s final couple of years had levelled off at two a day, compared with the six per day in Dinkins’ final year (with Kelly also as commissioner). Bloomberg’s policies dropped it from two to about one a day, but faced challenges both from the left and from libertarians, but did fit the mayor’s anti-gun quid pro quo, which was if he was going to take your guns and keep you from defending yourself, the police would make up for that with a suffocating presence. It was about the most un-libertarian thing you could think of, but it was effective.
School choice/charter schools and Bloomberg basically keeping the budget in relative check during his final six years in office are the two other things he did that would play well among GOP voters, but are deal-breakers for parts of the Democrats’ coalition.
To the last two comments, yes my perception runs along those lines. I’m a New Yorker by the way. My perception is that with Rudy triggering a frisk was behavior based while with Bloomberg it was directly targeted to areas. If that is true, I can see all sorts of civil rights issues with Bloomberg.
Yep, thanks for filling in the details.
I just hope Bernie doesn’t have his wife run anything bigger than a local preschool if he wins.
I was NeverTrump until he won (I did not vote for either him or Hillary). My position was always based on character/fitness, as I largely agree with his platform (except on trade). I laughed when he won (liberal tears are indeed delicious) but worried about the results for the country and conservatism. So far, I am generally pleased with the substance but still believe he lacks the character and fitness for the office, so I was planning not to vote for him again. If Bernie is the Democratic nominee, though, I will. And then I will light myself on fire.
That last sentence does not belong with the reasonable flow that preceded it. Instead, imagine yourself back in the 1990’s and a time traveler from 2020 tells you that America is in such a weird place that Donald Trump is the only one who can save our constitutional heritage. Then laugh and ponder these wise words from Hunter S. Thompson:
We are there, dude. Laughter will get us through.
“Laughter will get us through” was, in fact, where I was going with the last sentence. I’m not actually going to light myself on fire.