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.

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  1. Old Bathos Member
    Old Bathos
    @OldBathos

    RyanFalcone (View Comment):

    One thing is certain. The Never-Trump “Republicans” have been exposed for what they’ve always been….the very worst of us. That brings one very disturbing reality to my mind. The last two Republican Presidential candidates before Trump were from their camp. We were very close to oblivion as a country and yet may be still.

    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.

    • #31
  2. Jeff Hawkins Inactive
    Jeff Hawkins
    @JeffHawkins

    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:

    1. Every Democrat up there is running on how they would bypass Mitch McConnell (“Day 1: ban fracking” for example). The 4 years of arguments about Donald Trump being authoritarian were never intellectually honest, they were to undermine him and also give moral cover once Democrats won again to then do what they wanted to fix it and more.
    2.  Once a government implements a program, be it by Executive Order and pretzel logic (DACA) or Congressional Deem and Pass (ACA), Republicans never outright get rid of it because people have adapted lifestyles to need the program.
    3.  NeverTrump has too much faith in the midterms. The House isn’t going to impeach a Democrat. The media will scream how obstructionist the Senate has been for 2 years. The trend is for Presidents to lose majorities but what if Bernie is the exception. NeverTrump and even long game institutionalists have a deep optimism that people will wake up to things that are bad rather than just accept the downsides and expect the future to fix it (Social Security anyone?)

     

     

     

    • #32
  3. RyanFalcone Member
    RyanFalcone
    @RyanFalcone

    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.

    • #33
  4. ToryWarWriter Coolidge
    ToryWarWriter
    @ToryWarWriter

    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.

    • #34
  5. Jon1979 Inactive
    Jon1979
    @Jon1979

    ToryWarWriter (View Comment):

    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).

    • #35
  6. Manny Coolidge
    Manny
    @Manny

    The Scarecrow (View Comment):

    If Bernie somehow ended up President, that doesn’t mean we all have to become communists now, does it? If we somehow elected a racist, that wouldn’t mean he could reinstitute slavery and we would all just take it with a shrug. We have a Congress, and more importantly a Constitution.

    Almost everything about a communist platform should be forbidden by the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.

    I agree that some of the arguments might be less obvious, now that we passed things like the ACA. But we fought against it. On Constitutional grounds. Unsuccessfully, but we fought.

    It’s a good thing we haven’t lost our fight for the 2nd amendment.

    Exactly. Frankly all those Libertarians and other NeverTrumpers who feared a Trump dictatorship were silly to put it mildly. 

    • #36
  7. Manny Coolidge
    Manny
    @Manny

    AmishDude (View Comment):

    I think there will be a third party. And it will appear in California.

    California is situated perfectly for a third party. The Democrats are so large that a split may be inevitable but more importantly, they set up a “jungle primary” system, in part so that many statewide races would end up D vs. D.

    This is a system that is fertile ground for a third party. In fact, once California gets a Jesse Ventura-style politician, it’ll be hard to stop that third party from becoming entrenched.

    That would be heaven sent.

    • #37
  8. Ontheleftcoast Inactive
    Ontheleftcoast
    @Ontheleftcoast

    Jon1979 (View Comment):

    Manny (View Comment):

    There already is a NeverBernie segment of the Democratic Party. There was four years ago too. They stole the nomination from him. I wonder if they can steal it again. If they do a second time, I think his supporters will Bern down the house!

     

    everything Bloomberg did as NYC mayor that actually made NYC more livable are the things the left hates most about him).

    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.

    • #38
  9. Jon1979 Inactive
    Jon1979
    @Jon1979

    Ontheleftcoast (View Comment):

    Jon1979 (View Comment):

    Manny (View Comment):

    There already is a NeverBernie segment of the Democratic Party. There was four years ago too. They stole the nomination from him. I wonder if they can steal it again. If they do a second time, I think his supporters will Bern down the house!

     

    everything Bloomberg did as NYC mayor that actually made NYC more livable are the things the left hates most about him).

    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.

    • #39
  10. Manny Coolidge
    Manny
    @Manny

    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. 

    • #40
  11. Ontheleftcoast Inactive
    Ontheleftcoast
    @Ontheleftcoast

    Manny (View Comment):

    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.

    Rudy was just elucidating this difference on somebody or other’s podcast. He said that with him and Bratton, not only did the racial breakdown of those stopped track with the complainant and informant descriptions, about half of those stopped were arrested — mostly for weapons and/or outstanding warrants. So roughly 100,000 stops <per year,> with about half of those being arrested. Bloomberg/Kelly upped the arrests to about 600,000, but the arrests were only about 10% of that, so that to get a small (in statistical percentage; obviously in human terms every life saved is big) decrease in homicides he violated civil rights on a huge scale.

    • #41
  12. Manny Coolidge
    Manny
    @Manny

    Ontheleftcoast (View Comment):

    Manny (View Comment):

    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.

    Rudy was just elucidating this difference on somebody or other’s podcast. He said that with him and Bratton, not only did the racial breakdown of those stopped track with the complainant and informant descriptions, about half of those stopped were arrested — mostly for weapons and/or outstanding warrants. So roughly 100,000 stops, with about half of those being arrested. Bloomberg/Kelly upped the arrests to about 600,000, but the arrests were only about 10% of that, so that to get a small (in statistical percentage; obviously in human terms every life saved is big) decrease in homicides he violated civil rights on a huge scale.

    Yep, thanks for filling in the details.

     

     

    • #42
  13. Ralphie Inactive
    Ralphie
    @Ralphie

    I just hope Bernie doesn’t have his wife run anything bigger than a local preschool if he wins.

    • #43
  14. PJ Inactive
    PJ
    @PJ

    Old Bathos (View Comment):

    RyanFalcone (View Comment):

    One thing is certain. The Never-Trump “Republicans” have been exposed for what they’ve always been….the very worst of us. That brings one very disturbing reality to my mind. The last two Republican Presidential candidates before Trump were from their camp. We were very close to oblivion as a country and yet may be still.

    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.

    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.

    • #44
  15. Old Bathos Member
    Old Bathos
    @OldBathos

    PJ (View Comment):

    Old Bathos (View Comment):

    RyanFalcone (View Comment):

    One thing is certain. The Never-Trump “Republicans” have been exposed for what they’ve always been….the very worst of us. That brings one very disturbing reality to my mind. The last two Republican Presidential candidates before Trump were from their camp. We were very close to oblivion as a country and yet may be still.

    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.

    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:

    When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.

    We are there, dude. Laughter will get us through.

    • #45
  16. PJ Inactive
    PJ
    @PJ

    Old Bathos (View Comment):

    PJ (View Comment):

     

    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:

    When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.

    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. 

    • #46
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