Bernie Sanders is running for president. Bernie Sanders will never be president. These two facts, taken together, represent good news for Hillary Clinton in a week when she could really use it. Sanders will run to Hillary’s populist left, but–spoiler alert–his ideas won’t have much impact. We won’t have a truly important “national conversation” thanks to Bernie Sanders. He will remind Americans that Vermont exists, and then he will fade back into the background with a pint of Chunky Monkey to resurface as an answer to the occasional trivia night question at the pub.
It’s not exactly controversial to say Sanders can’t win. It has a lot to do with why he’s running in the first place: he was elected to Congress a socialist, and a socialist he remains. It is true that a poll last year found that Democrats approve of socialism at the same levels they approve of capitalism. But that doesn’t mean Democrats will nominate an avowed socialist. If you want to get public policymaking to reflect the dangerous folly of socialism, you can’t call it that. Use words like “justice” and “fairness” and other liberal euphemisms for armed robbery instead.
Now you might think that the entry of a socialist into the Democratic Party primary, at a time when a majority of Democrats approve of socialism, would at the very least make for a lively debate that could pull the eventual nominee to the left. And further, you might think that would be even likelier since the main candidate in the Democratic race, Hillary Clinton, is the very embodiment of privilege, corruption, entitlement, influence peddling, and swamping American elections with foreign money.
But in order for that to be the case, two things would have to be true. The Democrats would have to actually oppose cronyism and corruption rather than see them as useful vehicles to attain power. And Democrats would have to be willing, in large numbers, to publicly embrace their inner socialist rather than prize electability over principle.
Neither of those is true.
As the Obama administration’s weaponized IRS and its reliance on lawmaking by bureaucratic regulation have shown, Democrats have fully realized something very important about American politics. If you hold the levers of power–especially the White House–and you’re of the correct political beliefs as far as the traditional organs of the fourth estate are concerned, you can get away with quite a lot. And you don’t really need Congress (though it helps).
As such, for leftists political campaigns are quite different from what the political parties have traditionally thought of them as being. They are not, for the left, about ideas or vetting their would-be leaders. They are simply about winning at any cost so that the unaccountable bureaucracy can go on ruling undisturbed.
And a key part of this, for Democrats, is to never say what everyone knows to be true.
If it were really about ideas, progressive activists would be flocking to Sanders and ignoring Elizabeth Warren, instead of the other way around. Warren, after all, is not really a populist but a demagogue. She merely does the bidding of certain wealthy bank lobby shops instead of others.
The press wants to believe this isn’t true. Hence NBC News tried to claim–bless their hearts–that “Bernie Sanders Won’t Win. But His Ideas Might.” On the matter of preferring Warren over Sanders, NBC has this to say:
Sanders, though, is less well-suited to run a credible challenge to Clinton than Warren. Sanders does not play the part of the typical presidential candidate, both because of his age and his style, which leans toward long, dense policy speeches instead of the more aspirational rhetoric of Obama.
Translation: when Bernie Sanders speaks, he says something. Democrats are far more likely to support a candidate who is not nearly so reckless, and who is instead careful to say nothing at all.
And Sanders’s entrance into the race also obviates the need for another “populist” to challenge Hillary. So by Sanders taking up Hillary’s left flank, he will ensure that a more serious candidate won’t attempt to grab that role for themselves. It’ll also mean that Hillary can position herself as the Democrats’ alternative to staid socialism, since there’ll be an overt socialist running against her. This is all good news for her impending coronation, and bad news for anyone hoping for a substantive debate on the left side of the aisle.
The post No, Bernie Sanders Will Not Make the Election a Battle of Ideas appeared first on Commentary Magazine.
