Andrew O’Hehir: Yes, Bernie’s waging war on the Democratic Party — but if Hillary loses, it won’t be his fault.
Not sure how much open to debate this still was, but Bernie’s core support is quite definitely the young, and not the working class as a whole:
O’Hehir is being either naïve or disingenuous: footage of rioting Sanders supporters will certainly be employed by the GOP to argue for the “law and order” that Trump and down-ticket Republicans will purportedly guarantee. ‘Look *at what Democrats are like–think about what voting for a Democrat will mean for your safety and the safety of your children’ *will be the theme.
Fascist candidates always do well when there is video of rioters to deploy; ask Richard Nixon, who did well off exploiting fear, with late-60s riots and the August 1968 Democratic National Convention clashes getting plenty of television coverage.
Any violence that Sanders supporters have committed or will commit on camera, will certainly be exploited by the GOP. (The same would be true of violence committed on camera by Clinton supporters, of course. If any occurs.)
That’s the latest mantra that Bernie Sanders and his fanatics are chanting to themselves. They’re going to do what they can to smear her over the next few weeks, then take their war to the floor of the convention, and make Philadelphia in 2016 look like Chicago in 1968. Bernie can make the entire progressive movement look bad in the same way that he made the Trump campaign look bad when he sent his goons to Chicago to basically bait people into fights, which was the low point in Trump’s campaign. They’re gonna do the same to Hillary, like bums off the street coming in to crash a house party and leaving the hosts to clean up the piss and shit.
Before that, Sanders is going to around claiming that the reason they’re losing is because the Democratic party is rigging the election. It won’t matter if Bernie Sanders actually loses races - it probably never did. Any race that Bernie loses is "rigged’. Just like the economy. And they’re just as convinced that the Democratic party deserves to be punished and deserves to lose for rigging the system against the chosen one.
Bernie Sanders’ campaign isn’t a campaign. It’s a cult. If he succeeds in helping the republicans win, my voting from now on will probably be based on doing whatever I can to help both parties - republicans and democrats - politically crush the extreme left. Extremism is a goddamn curse on this country and left wing extremism is no better than that of the right.
BOOM goes the dynamite! Well played, sir.
Heh, nice post/SN match.
This is true, IME, for only a smallish subset of Bernie backers (including my own mother). Most of his largely young following did not come into this cycle with an axe to grind against Hillary. In fact, as of a year or two ago, she was kind of in the hip, buzzy realm of “the notorious RBG”, thanks to the Tumblr “Texts from Hillary”. It is the Bernie campaign–with help from its older members who have been nursing this anti-Clinton animus for some time–that has engendered the antipathy among the young. Thanks for that.
:rolleyes: Oh, what shameless nonsense! Bernie & Co. ain’t even the extreme left – that’s those Communist and Trotskyist and Maoist parties that show up on the ballot now and then and never win anything. The Sanders faction is more analogous to Canada’s New Democrats, or a national-level Working Families Party, and neither is “extreme” by any reasonable view, and certainly in no way equivalent to the hard-right in evil or madness or stupidity. There’s a great gaping whole out there in American politics, to the right of the Commies but to the left of the DLC/Third Way/Neoliberals, and representing tens of millions of progressives, and it urgently needs to be filled.
Not if it bases its interactions on a ‘my way or the highway’ attitude.
It doesn’t even have an identity, how can it have habits? Though, it is true that the tone has changed ever since the militant wing of extreme Unitarians came on board.
His specific policies aren’t extremist. The zealotry of some of his followers is, and so his “I’m the only progressive candidate” and “This campaign is your only hope” nonsense. That’s why I for one could not continue supporting him, even though I’m slightly closer ideologically to Bernie than Hillary.
You had your chance. Absent a total blowout for Bernie in California, it’s over. Hillary was never electable.
Bernie isn’t the man to carry the ball, but we didn’t know the ball could be carried, much less needed to be! Hillary isn’t going to ignore the progressive left, she’ll start thinking about her re-election chances the second her hand raises up from the Koran at the swearing in.
You want to hear some words you’re gonna hear a lot more? “Small donors”. Words you will hear less? “Citizens United”. Chirp, chirp, the early birds that arise just before dawn…
Except there is, as TYT keeps repeating, no actual footage of rioting Sanders supporters. So the media will have to make something up. Something* Democrats *are helping them do now. So, are Democrats trying to lose, or are they trying to win with Hillary by painting both Sanders & Trump as the candidate of “evil violent males”? Unclear.
However, your K’Dickian implication that it is 1968 forever and Dick Nixon can never lose against the hippies worries me. I don’t know whether to thank you for supporting my thesis that the Democratic Party is toast, or say that your near-agreement fills me with self-doubt.
It’s nice to know, isn’t it, that a century later, there are still good Yankee souls willing to break out the sort of over-the-top rhetoric used against Eugene Debs and the labor movement?
This is a key insight, which cannot be repeated enough. Bernie’s proposals are liberal, in some cases slightly more liberal than Hillary’s proposals, which are also liberal. But Bernie and his supporters carry on as though she is miles over to the right from him. It’s obvious that the Republicans are way to the right of Hillary, so if we were to take the Bernie crowd’s statements at face value, we would have to assume they are extremely far to the left.
Now, I think it’s pretty clear from his past that in his heart of hearts, Bernie really is a radical leftist. But he has decided to make some accommodation to political reality.
Hillary?
Sanderites believe the current polls that say Sanders outperforms Clinton against Trump in a general election. Evidently allowing opinion polls to dictate your decisions is only bad when a Clinton does it.
Indeed. His campaign policies this cycle haven’t been ideologically extremist, but I wouldn’t put it past him to be something other than what his campaign represents.
And why is it that the Clinton/Obama Establishment is always ready to compromise with the right but takes a “my way or the highway” attitude with progressives?
:rolleyes:
Well, at least we know what Clinton is and ain’t. She’s whatever the polls say they want and she has no other “heart of hearts.”
I think you misread the post you were quoting. It was criticizing the “my way or the highway” attitude on the Bernie side. Hillary has tried to compromise with that faction, but she just gets criticized for “stealing” Bernie’s issues. :rolleyes: