Bernie or Bust and the Appeal of Arson

Hi Bernie fans! It’s Chris (waves arms). For those of you who don’t know about me, I’m a relatively independent voter whose views currently align a lot more with the Democratic Party. I wouldn’t say I’m a diehard liberal – although some people might – but I just really dislike where the GOP is currently. Anyway, about a year going into this election cycle (which are interminably long), I looked at my options. The GOP was mostly a clown car and Hillary Clinton was not super exciting to me. I’m sure you can guess why – I don’t like dynastic politics (even self-made dynasties), I find her extremely equivocating (as was her husband!) and hard to pin down on specific policies, etc. It had nothing to do with her being a woman – she’s the most successful female politician ever! She really is! It’s awesome how many glass ceilings she’s shattered. If Bill Clinton were running I’d probably dislike him too! Anyway, I felt that Clinton’s approach to the next Presidency would be too incrementalist, too centrist. I wanted someone willing to break some furniture, get real messy in the White House. So about a year ago, Bernie Sanders declared.

I did my due diligence and I found I really liked him! He provided clearer differences with existing orthodoxy than did Clinton, and he was running without the aid of mega donors and wanted to end Citizens United. From the time this guy declared, I was like “Yeah, Bernie! This is something I can get behind.” I remember when Sanders was a fringe candidate 70 points behind in the polls, when no one knew his name. I’ve been leading the fight for Bernie since day one. He’s my dude. I promise. Having said all of that, I have a really humble request to the Bernie or Bust movement:

Shut the fuck up. I know that’ll sound mean and condescending and probably like one of those stupid Establishment Hillary types, so let your blood pressure go up, get nice and angry, take a deep breath, and then read what I’m about to write:

Shut the actual fuck up. I swear to fucking God if you people help get Trump elected, you are each and every one of you dead to me. I’m really happy that for the first time (probably) in your life you’ve found a politician who speaks to you. That’s great. The level of engagement with Sanders people is sky high. That’s awesome, welcome to being an actual part of the process by which we determine who leads the free world. Please stick around, it’s actually super beneficial to have an informed electorate and you will get SO MANY CHANCES to vote! We vote like all the time here.

And you did! A lot of you! So many people voted for Bernie! He won a bunch of states! He’ll probably win some more! He has demonstrated unequivocally that the party itself has shifted to the left of Clinton and Obama’s policies. He has engaged a generation of people who were apathetic. I cannot say enough good things about what Bernie Sanders has done to our political discourse.

But he lost. He didn’t have the nomination stolen from him, there wasn’t a nefarious plot afoot to disenfranchise every Bernie voter. Do you know how difficult that would be? Looking at voter rolls and eliminating the Sanders people? He hasn’t run before! How would they know who to disenfranchise? Our government can’t do anything right and you’re willing to ascribe to the same DNC you think is horrifically run that level of aptitude? Are you fucking kidding? Clinton has – at current time – three million more votes. If you add up all of the perceived voter fraud in all the towns in all the world, you’re not overcoming that gap.

But the superdelegates! The superdelegates did what they’re designed to do: they stopped an independent who has spent his career fucking over the Democratic Party from hijacking their party. It’s a little undemocratic! Welcome to politics, we’re very happy you decided to wake up. You know the primary process is new, right? Like, party politics aren’t democratic. At all. Until recently the party bosses just sat in a room and picked. And you know who they pick? The registered-before-last-year Democrat. The one who worked the party infrastructure. If you think that’s patently unfair, maybe just stop following politics because all of your rainbow and unicorn dreams are about to get smashed into little tiny pieces.

I get that you’re upset and you feel cheated and hard done by. Hell, in another election cycle I might even tell you to protest vote your conscience, why not? You want to send a message, man, to the system, that it’s broken, you want a revolution! That’s awesome.

But Donald Trump threatens – and I mean this sincerely – the institution of Democracy. No, no no. Hear me out: when we talk about this election we talk about the choice between someone you might find unpalatable or dishonest or whatever the fuck. But her opponent is someone who has promised to deport 12 million people. You know what that requires? An army. An actual army breaking down doors and rounding up illegals. This is how tyranny starts. Because once Trump has his Gestapo, he does not have to stop with illegal immigrants. Hell, he doesn’t have to stop period. You know what else Trump has threatened to do? “Open up these libel laws.” That means he wants to shift the definition of what a newspaper can and can’t publish from “lies” to “things I don’t like.” This is subverting the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. This is an aggressive assault on the idea of American Democracy.

Grow the ever living fuck up and understand that’s not okay. I’m upset this even warrants explanation. But when your choice is between a career politician (who, by the way, is so qualified it’s depressing to me) and a guy who is reading out of the Mussolini playbook, you forfeit the option to protest vote against Clinton.

Do you want tyranny? Do you want wide scale economic collapse? Do you want the Gestapo? I mean, what the hell guys?

The stakes of this election are exceedingly clear, and if you somehow have the gall to tell me that it’s worth a few years of tyranny so that the pendulum can swing back to your happy place on Bernie Island, then I take back what I said about being glad you’re in the process. Because nihilism and bullshit is not how we should determine the leader of the free world.

I want to reiterate, here, for those of you still with me, that I preferred Sanders. But he lost. This is how democracy works. When you decide that democracy works however you want it to work, that’s tyranny. That’s when you become Trump. Sanders shifted the conversation and had a material impact on Clinton and came really really close to winning. He’s gotten a huge mouthpiece and he’ll now suddenly be a Progressive leader in the Senate.

But the fact that you’re so upset over this loss that you’re willing to watch Trump burn down American Democracy is not okay. Our country has problems, for sure, and maybe some of them won’t get fixed under Clinton. But she won’t run roughshod over actual American Democracy.

Grow up. Your ideological purity is not going to keep you warm in Donald Trump’s political prisoner camps. And if you think for a goddamned second I’m being too severe, look up his mentors, his advisors, his idols. Roy Cohn – Joe McCarthy’s right hand man during the House Committee on Un-American Activities hearing. Paul Manafort – the dude who backed Vladimir Putin’s strongman dictator puppet in the Ukraine when Putin tried to murder his opponent in the Orange Revolution. I know our dialog gets intense, tempers flare, and language gets hyperbolic. I know it does. Look these people up. Trump isn’t flirting with authoritarianism – Trump has a lifelong tradition with silencing dissidents and authoritarian tactics. This should scare you. It should terrify you.

I’m not asking you to fall in love with Hillary Clinton. You’re not looking for a life partner, you’re looking for a commander in chief. And if you like American Democracy as an institution, vote for the person who can defeat Trump. I don’t care how many shit fits you feel the need to throw to soothe your bruised ego because you were wrong and she was right and it makes you mad. I don’t care. And I’m saying this as someone who fought the Bernie fight as long and as hard as I could.

It’s over and the thing on the horizon is actually bad. Really, really bad. Swallow your pride, vote for Clinton, because we cannot let Trump win. I’m done. I’m done with your conspiracies, I’m done with your bullshit, I’m done with you actually undermining the last bulwark against tyranny in the United States. I beat the drum harder than any of you when Sanders had a shot. Now he doesn’t and we need to fight the next fight. You might not like Hillary, but in the face of Trump your preferences can take a backseat to the country and the survival of our Republic

So please, just shut the fuck up.

Jimmy Kimmel is Doing God’s Work

Technically he’s bringing together someone who has described his religious beliefs as “humanist” and someone who thinks the book is called Two Corinthians like the Bible plays by Fast and Furious naming conventions. But nonetheless Kimmel has accidentally opened the Pandora’s Box of bloodsport this whole country wants and needs from this election: a debate between Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. Please, please, please let this happen universe. As I’ve grown older, the joy of Christmas morning has waned significantly; at this point the start of college football season is probably my most anticipated time of the year. But the prospect of this debate happening is really high up there on the list of things that give me pure joy and happiness.

First up, some background. As one of the handful of people nationwide who followed Sanders from the get-go, this latest development doesn’t particularly surprise me. Even as politicians go, Sanders is something of an ideological iconoclast. Ever since he was mayor of Burlington, he’s been something of a movement leader, someone who is so liberal he rejects the major liberal political party for not being far enough to the left. As such, he’s just a little obstinate as those things go. Sanders has believed probably since his bar mitzvah that he was the smartest guy in the room and you could agree with him or just go fuck off. It’s why his bills don’t get a lot of cosponsors.

As a political junkie, I was always curious what the 2016 race would produce. On the GOP side it was clear a year and change ago that it would be a giant field dominated by yet another Bush (at least at first), with each faction rallying behind their preferred guy. Obviously no one saw Trump coming. But the Democratic side, it was pretty much Hillary Clinton, the prohibitive favorite, and…Martin O’Malley? Okay, makes sense. He was a governor facing term limits who needed a bigger national brand, so he’d be the upstart against Clinton. Debate stages can’t just have one person after all (just ask poor Ted Cruz, who was all ready for an Indiana debate until both of his opponents dropped out). Then Sanders came onto the scene.

Anyway, I’ve followed his candidacy more or less from day one, because I found him intriguing and more in line with my ideas than I typically find Clinton. All of this is to say that the idea that Sanders is desperate for a debate and the free media is fundamentally inaccurate. Last summer (when no one was paying attention), Sanders offered to debate Republicans. He basically said he would debate anyone from any party. Again, he’s an iconoclast and a bit of a dick.

Much has been made of Sanders’ acrimonious relationship with the DNC. As it turns out, political parties are not a fan of being hijacked by an independent who wants to use their brand name to further his own goals. Parties are fundamentally about cronyism – even the idea of primaries is a relatively new one. You pay your dues to the party and you get rewarded with political favors. Ask basically anyone supporting Clinton. So from the start, the Democrats disliked Sanders. He was an independent, he had no party loyalty, and he was forgoing the giant fundraising that would help downballot candidates. They wanted Clinton to win for reasons both personal (the DNC chair was also the co-chair of Clinton’s 08 campaign) and political (money and networks and money and networks). I don’t blame the DNC for backing Clinton over Sanders, but I also don’t have to belief any of their statements about neutrality. Politics isn’t about being fair and just, it’s about winning.

One of the biggest sticking points was the debate schedule. Wasserman-Shultz originally scheduled six debates and most of them were on low-viewership nights (the Saturday before Christmas, opposite NFL games, etc). We can speculate whether this was designed to protect Hillary Clinton from a mass audience watching Sanders fire salvos at her or not. Wasserman-Shultz argued that the 24 debates of the 08 cycle were too many and damaged the party. Debates have a sort of nebulous place in framing a national dialog. When you watch a GOP debate, for example, it’s all about tearing up Obamacare and the Iran nuclear deal and the executive orders and the IRS and the EPA and the federal government. When you watch a Democrat debate (which, truth be told, you probably didn’t, statistically speaking), it’s about expanding Obamacare, passing family leave, equal pay, protecting the environment, etc. Debates can help frame the issues of the parties and drive new voter registration. This is one reason a lot of people dislike Wasserman-Shultz. Also she turned a 2-house majority in Congress into a 2-house minority, but that’s another topic.

Anyway, yes, Sanders was an insurgent candidate going up against someone who had been a national figure for three decades. But part of Sanders’ appeal for more debates was an honest one: he likes fighting people. It’s just in his nature. So last summer, during his push for more debates, he even offered to debate Republicans. But the DNC very quickly told his campaign that doing so-called “unsanctioned debates” would get him kicked off the sanctioned DNC debates, so Sanders didn’t do it. The RNC made similar threats against Republicans (given the 18-person field and the 2-level debate, there were half a dozen people itching for an extra second of airtime).

So Sanders played by the DNC’s rules and continued pressuring them for more debates. Eventually they added 4 debates to the calendar in giant delegate states like New York and California. Three of these debates happened. But when Sanders pressed for the promised California debate, the Clinton campaign refused to engage. This isn’t a slight against Clinton – campaigns shift and no one is required to debate. Trump unilaterally canceled two debates earlier this year because he was tired of them. Clinton accepts the risk of blowback for the safety of not debating Sanders. It’s a perfectly fine move. Again, this is politics, not student council.

But there’s a fun caveat with this…it means that the leverage the DNC had – locking Sanders out of debates – is now gone. If the DNC debates are over, he can do whatever he wants.

So then Donald Trump goes on Jimmy Kimmel’s show. Apparently Sanders – who will appear on the show tonight – sent Kimmel a letter asking him to ask Trump to a debate. And Trump seemed to accept. Given that Trump is a pathological liar, who knows if he was serious, but we should all hope that he is.

This isn’t some desperate play for Sanders to try and bury Clinton in California. It’s just Sanders doing what he’s always done without the fear of DNC repercussions. Beyond the pure excitement of watching this unfold, does it make sense for any of the candidates? In a word, abso-fucking-lutely. To wit:

Sanders is cresting his entire political career. He’s never been a national figure and he wants to create as big a mouthpiece for himself as possible. He loses nothing by debating Trump, because Sanders will win that debate 10 times out of 10.

Trump needs Sanders supporters to beat Hillary Clinton. This is an opportunity for Trump to appeal directly to them. That said, this won’t become a 2 hour rag on Hillary fest, despite the feverish protests of her supporters.

Sanders is a total wild card, but one has to believe that deep down, a Democratic Socialist doesn’t want an actual fascist to be our President. Trump might not have a set ideology, but everything about his campaign is fascist in the proper Mussolini/Hitler context. Even the argument that we should let the country burn for a term under Trump to create a far-left reaction feels like one Sanders wouldn’t embrace. He won’t sacrifice four years of a monster just for longer-term gains. Sanders has tried his case against Clinton and he has lost.

But on another level, why fight a ghost? Clinton won’t be at the debate (should it happen). Sanders will look across the stage at someone who is trying to tear down all of the institutions Sanders spent his life preserving. He will not try and gain a percentage point on Clinton in California. He will bury Donald Trump.

Sanders is actually a very skilled debater. Clinton won or drew most of the debates, but Sanders pulled a lot of his punches (not all of them) and Clinton outflanked him on a lot of issues. Trump is a different animal. He’s a dirty, shitty human who traffics in axioms and insults. That stuff will not land on Bernie Sanders. He’s already been called an actual Communist by people. Trump and Sanders have the same rhetorical style – populist anger delivered at an 8^th grade reading level. Clinton will try and outsmart Trump. Sanders will speak his language and hammer him on his utter lack of qualifications.

This is such a win for Clinton. Her supporters are begging Sanders to go after Trump and now Sanders has basically offered to spend 2 hours on a debate stage making the argument against him. I’ve said before, making this election about Trump is the way to win it. Make this an up or down vote on “Should we give a fucking circus clown the nuclear codes?” If you win that argument, the name under Trump’s won’t matter. Every vote against Trump (at least enough) will be a vote for Clinton. Sanders can make that argument, and he can do it while Clinton sits at home or hosts a fundraiser or whatever. And if Trump lands some body blows, who cares? Sanders will beat Trump worse. Anyone who lets a debate swap them from Sanders to Trump probably wasn’t going to end up in Hillary’s column. Plus she’ll have three debates of her own to attack Trump.

The best part of all of this is Sanders’ political calculation. He knows Trump is a bully, he knows Trump hates looking weak and small. When Trump canceled GOP debates it was a power play – his way of saying “The networks need me more than I need them.” Sanders put it out there, on national TV, and then tweeted – Trump’s preferred form of communication – to seal the deal. If Trump backs out Sanders will crow for days that he’s scared. He will attack Trump at every opportunity. He will belittle him and make him small, and that will do as much damage as the actual debate. Sanders is going to make the strong man look weak, whether it’s on Twitter or on a debate stage. He won’t roll over for Trump. Clinton supporters have been begging for Sanders to put Trump in the crosshairs. He is all too happy to oblige.

Grab the popcorn and clear your schedules.

Bernie Sanders Hijacked a Plane, Shot the Pilot, and Doesn’t Know How to Fly

I guess – do I have to put a trigger warning for metaphors? I don’t know. I guess if you’re upset by metaphors involving metaphorical hostage-taking, metaphorical plane crashes, and metaphorical gunshots, stop here? Whatever.

Bernie Sanders had a vague idea a year and change ago that the base of the Democratic Party – the base of liberalism in America – had shifted dramatically in the past two or so decades. Between Bush’s gallivanting around the Middle East blowing things up and then paying for them out of our national debt, more public awareness over institutional racism, more institutional racism in response to a black President, frustration over the economy, and an increasingly obstructionist Congress who mitigated any of the gains the left made. Then Sanders looked at Hillary Clinton who has a history of center-left politics, and decided that maybe the base had shifted under her feet as well. As a quick aside, exit polling has born out this shift to the left in virtually every contest. So he decided to challenge her for President.

He hired some very savvy political operatives – specifically Tad Devine, who is very much the man behind the curtain of Sanders campaign – and set off. When he started he trailed by something like seventy points. To date he’s won about 45% of the vote. He won’t win the nomination. That’s just objectively true at this point. Sanders knew he’d do well – well enough to justify the run in the first place, at least. He probably thought he could hang around for a couple of primaries, get past the early white states, and influence the conversation.

Sanders didn’t know how right he was and how much power he was about to have. Which is evident because short of being President, Sanders didn’t know what he actually wanted. He’s never had a real list of demands. His rhetoric is about a revolution, not incremental gains within one wing of one party. So now here he is, a giant following, a ton of money raised via small donors (historic levels, even Obama needed the Democratic donor base), and too many votes to go quietly. Sanders isn’t a single-issue candidate – when your issue is “The economy” it’s kind of wrapped up in everything else. He’s not exactly a protest candidate – someone who shifts the conversation and then goes away. He’s in a weird space of having almost enough power to be the nominee but not quite enough.

Further, he built his campaign on how evil and corrupt the Establishment was, so taking their concessions at this point would feel like a deal with the devil. Hell, Sanders built his whole career on how the Democrats weren’t liberal enough and while he would caucus with them he wouldn’t be one of them.

So Sanders basically hijacked the plane (the Democratic Party) with no demands whatsoever. He then shot the pilot (by inadvertently creating the Bernie or Bust movement and giving ideological cover to a lot of outright misogyny against Clinton). Now he has to try and land the plane (make sure that Trump doesn’t get elected and turn America into a dictatorship). Except he has no idea how to fly. He’s officially become a victim of his own success, and he’s realizing it a little too late.

Sanders wants to be a movement, and he is one right now. He doesn’t want to go the way of Howard Dean – a flare-up candidate who became part of the Establishment. And for the first time in his career he can do to the national stage what he did in Vermont: get his people elected. Sanders has an activated army of supporters who believe his is Socialist Jesus, and the ability to divert that fundraising machine to any candidate nationwide that he likes. Basically, it’s a great time to be Zephyr Teachout. Sanders is so angry with Debbie Wasserman-Shultz that he’s backing her primary opponent in Florida. Granted, a lot of people are upset with the way the DNC handled this primary, and Debbie’s idea of “neutrality” is a hilariously not neutral one.

Sanders doesn’t have a joint fund with the DNC like Clinton does (interestingly, 99% of that fund has gone to raise money for Hillary Clinton, not downballot candidates). But he also dislikes a lot of Establishment politicians, so it makes sense for him to keep the DNC away from his donor database. Sanders has figured out the best thing to do is to funnel money as aggressively as possible to the people he wants to win. That would expand the Progressive Caucus of which he will be the outright leader after this year.

Interestingly, Progressive Hero Elizabeth Warren is doing exactly this from her role as Everyone’s Favorite Senator. Starting in 2014, she’s been flying around the country as both a surrogate and a fundraiser for Democrats she wants on her side in the Senate. This is basically the blueprint Sanders needs to follow. Obviously it’s slightly harder to do when he’s already running for President.

But this is also the problem. Sanders has been a self-anointed revolutionary. It’s hard to translate that fervor and populism into the relatively small gains of electing a dozen more liberal members of the Congress. That message doesn’t resonate, especially with Sanders’ younger less-engaged (traditionally) voters. They think the system is broken and only their dude the Lord of the Pitchforks can fix it. Not Zephyr Teachout.

So Sanders is now in a catch-22 (ironic, given that Tad Devine’s whole strategy involved trapping Hillary Clinton in similar situations). He has to keep running – for President – and attacking Clinton, in order to keep his outsized influence and help progressive candidates downballot. He’s basically trying to help the far left wing of the party at the expense of the party as a whole.

He’s also spent close to 200 million dollars (more than every other candidate including Clinton) on his run. This decision to help downballot progressives came way late in the game, and his money has gone toward fracturing the party instead of making it more in line with his own ideology.

This is why I don’t think Sanders had a list of demands when he started. He didn’t want to become Fundraiser-in-Chief, he wanted to become President. So now he’s doing two things at once – helping progressives while outright lying to his supporters to keep getting those sweet, sweet $2.70 VenMo payments.

At this point, anything Sanders does that undermines his own viability as the eventual nominee will be the end of his campaign and a serious diminishing of his power as a leader of the left. Ask Howard Dean! He can’t admit defeat if he wants to have influence on this scale. His supporters won’t follow him into the wilderness of incremental gains and platform planks. That’s why he has to phrase it – “our revolution” – to even get them on board with the progressives downballot.

The potential upside to a Democratic primary that extends beyond the GOP primary is the ability to make Trump, not Clinton, fight a war on two fronts. Sanders can keep pushing for downballot progressives, keep drawing that frustration with Obama and Clinton’s perceived centrism. But the more he attacks Clinton, the more he undermines the entire liberal movement in November. He has to get his gains without jeopardizing the bigger picture win of the Democrats. Also, he’s not going to get downballot victories without Clinton winning the White House. Hell, Democrats couldn’t hold the Senate when Obama was in office. He needs a popular candidate, not one ruined by his attacks, and an energized base who realize they still have a chance to shift the paradigm of the Democratic Party.

But it’s a tightrope to walk and the plane’s in a nosedive that he really needs to balance out. This is the problem of making your entire campaign about tearing down the system. The system won and now Sanders has to find his place within it. History doesn’t remember the failed revolutions. Even if Sanders endorses Clinton, some of the damage is irreparable. But there is a portion of the electorate that was never going to vote for Clinton regardless of Sanders’ run. He needs to make sure the people he brought into the movement find the candidates they like and vote for them. He needs them to realize that while Clinton might be the lesser of two evils, the other evil is really really big. The movement evaporates if the people let it (seriously, ask Howard Dean). With Elizabeth Warren’s already outsized presence, Sanders and Warren can be a dynamic force for progressivism in the Senate and keep Clinton honest to the promises she made the Progressive movement. Sanders has done better than he ever imagined, but he has to figure this out quickly.

He has to land the plane now, not crash it into a cliff.

Bernie Sanders’ Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

This is my first of two pieces on Bernie Sanders. First I’m going to look at what his campaign strategy was and then I’m going to look at why it’s blowing up the Democratic Party.

Bernie Sanders began this campaign as a little-known to totally unknown Independent Senator from Vermont. He had a long career in Congress (first as a member of the House and then the Senate) of relative anonymity. He co-sponsored a major VA overhaul with John McCain, but most of his work was behind the scenes, at the committee level, etc. His vast library of Youtube-able moments didn’t have near the reach as Progressive darling Elizabeth Warren. He was up against a candidate, in Hillary Clinton, who was monolithic in a lot of respects.

As far as qualifications, we’ve probably never seen a candidate this absurdly qualified. She was a very active First Lady (probably the most active historically), she went to Yale Law School (where a lot of former Presidents and SCOTUS justices have gone). She was a 2-term Senator from New York (which checks the box on Congressional experience), and her former rival – Barack Obama – appointed her to one of the highest-level Cabinet positions, Secretary of State.

Add to this that Clinton had thirty years of political contacts – every member of the Establishment, the on-the-ground resources from three previous campaigns (her husband’s and her 08 campaign). Infrastructure, experience, name recognition, ties to the entire donor base and every member of the DNC. As Sanders remains fond of telling people, this was an uphill fight.

To be fair, it’s a fight that Barack Obama – a freshman Senator from Illinois when he launched his campaign – was able to win. This is due to a lot of reasons, but Obama was at least a notable figure since his 04 Democratic Convention keynote speech (where Jon Stewart amazingly all but declared Obama our future President).

Sanders got into the race because he sensed something about the populace – something that Donald Trump has also tapped into: anger and frustration with a political establishment that appears to have abandoned the voters who put them there. Congress is not only at historic levels of disapproval (single digits at one point, are you fucking kidding me Congress?) but also historic levels of not getting anything done (no, naming the buffalo the national mammal does not count).

Obama will go down as one of our greatest presidents – rebuilding the economy following an utter collapse, making giant strides on the environment, civil rights movement at light speed, etc – but there was still a disconnect between Obama’s policies and his voters. Part of this was self-inflicted: turns out hope and change were codewords for “basically a lot more of the same.” He was also woefully unqualified when he was elected. He had no idea how to work with Congress, no experience at the executive level of anything, and a Congress whose sworn goal was to obstruct him. Obama is also much more of a long-term thinker, so some of the things he did early in office paid off much later in his second term. That’s certainly a gamble, but one that worked for him when he got reelected. But the economic recovery and the bailout didn’t provide an increase in wages, even as rent went back up and housing prices rebounded.

So Sanders tapped into that anger and frustration. He painted Obama as a step in the right direction, but not far enough, not liberal enough. And with Clinton, who is (despite what her supporters will argue) a relatively centrist candidate (we can parse out that definition, but she leans right on the economy and on foreign policy, her husband leaned right on crime and welfare, and in general, their brand of politics is transactional so there are a million places where she’s been left right and center). He made the argument that Clinton would repeat the mistakes of the past – on the Iraq War, Libya intervention – and not go far enough elsewhere, like the economy and social justice.

But once Trump showed up like a bull in a China shop, Sanders found his best argument ever. In so doing, he also laid the blueprint for Trump’s attacks on Clinton. But that’s going to be covered later. Trump tapped into the same populist anger and the same anti-Establishment fervor. Sanders was running against someone who had served – in some capacity – in five of the last six Presidencies (she wasn’t in Bush’s administration, but she was in the government nonetheless).

So Sanders understood where he and Trump overlapped: their refusal of big money, their outsider status (ironic for someone who has been in Congress basically half of his adult life). And he used those barbs to attack Clinton. To hear Bernie tell it, Hillary probably argued the Citizens United decision in front of the Supreme Court. Sanders also had the benefit that Clinton is a historically unlikable candidate – that’s not hyperbole, her unfavorable numbers are sky-high. So there were already a lot of people who didn’t want to like Clinton. Sanders just gave those voters an alternative. Rank-and-file Democrats bought into Clinton, which makes sense – she has the backing of the entire Democratic establishment. But Sanders flipped that into a negative and used it against her, which is why he routinely does better among independent voters.

Sanders knew that Clinton would win Democratic voters and her opponent would win Republican ones. As usual, this election would be decided by the independents. And with Trump, he had someone that made this election into a personality contest – the kind Clinton is least prepared to win. So Sanders, from the start, attempted to build a coalition of liberally ideological voters and independents who didn’t like Clinton or Trump (statistically that is more than half of the electorate, which is depressing).

Clinton’s argument was that she was the pragmatic progressive – the one who gets things done. That Sanders was the poet (probably the only time he’s had that appellation) but she was the one who understood how to govern. As discussed above, she’s not wrong. She has more relevant experience than Obama when he ran, Bush when he ran, her husband when he ran, and the list goes on. So if Sanders was going to beat her, he had to defuse that argument. The way he did it (albeit unsuccessfully) was to trot out head to head numbers. Poll after poll after poll showed what anyone paying attention knew: Clinton is a bad candidate against Trump, and Sanders is a better one.

Especially in an election cycle where the presumptive GOP nominee has no ideological bearing whatsoever, the knocks against Sanders – he’s a dirty Communist who honeymooned in the USSR, he won’t get anything done, he’s making empty promises – don’t matter. Because they don’t matter against Trump. Trump’s shrugged off comparisons to actual Hitler. Not in internet comments, in legitimate thinkpieces. Trump’s appeal is his directness, his outsider status, and his populist anger. These are all the things that Sanders has and they’re deadly to Clinton who has built her career on literally the opposite qualities.

Here’s what’s problematic: Sanders is giving Trump credibility from the left. Because he’s making the same arguments from an actual ideological perspective, he’s giving the Never Hillary camp (such as they are) the cover they need to vote for Trump. Keep in mind: these people aren’t ideological (most of them). And they’re obviously not that pragmatic. So Sanders had to build Trump up enough, and mostly tear Clinton down enough, to make the case to Democratic voters that he was the one most qualified to win.

That was Sanders’ gambit from day one. In the face of the monolithic entity, he argued that people didn’t want monoliths, they didn’t want insiders, they didn’t want a Clinton or a Bush. They needed someone who listened, someone who understood, someone who would fix things.

The problem for Sanders is that voters found their answer…and it wasn’t him. The party line voters didn’t listen to his argument (enough, that is – he got a lot of votes, but not enough). But that rhetoric – the rigged system, the broken system, the system that only supports the people who play the game – has now permeated our national discussion in a way that makes Trump’s life so much easier. That’s where the gambit backfired.

Sanders said he was the better candidate to defeat Donald Trump. But voters in the primaries either didn’t listen or didn’t care. And now, in large part thanks to Sanders’ risky gambit, we’re facing the very cold reality that his prophecy about Clinton v Trump is self-fulfilling.

There’s a lot more to cover about the Bernie or Bust movement, etc, but again, I’ll pick that up in a separate piece about how Sanders hijacked a plane, shot the pilot, and is just now realizing he doesn’t know how to fly.

Sanders built his campaign around the idea that in a general between Trump and Hillary, Trump would win. He wasn’t wrong, but it’s possible that he’s done a bit too much to ensure that he’s right in the end.

Fictional Candidates and the Twilight of a Majority

Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, despite what their supporters may tell you, have a very similar demographic: white males. A lot of their mutual success is rooted in the idea that they’re both “outsiders” – Trump as a businessman, Sanders as an independent member of both the House and Senate. And while it’s true that there is some serious frustration with the Establishment on both sides, isn’t it just a little ironic that the original voting bloc of this country (white males, we’ll nix the land-owning requirement for now) somehow now believe the system they created is working against them? We’ve had – in the history of this nation – one black President and zero female Presidents. White men are still, by and large, running the country. And yet they’re the group most activated to break the systems.

But Sanders and Trump supporters fracture on two very important fault lines: age and education. Trump supporters are, by and large, older white men without a college degree. Think of them as the union workers laid off by Carrier air conditioning and GM. Sanders supporters tend to be young and college educated – the millennials who grew up in the shadow of the Great Recession of 2008 and graduated college with a hundred thousand dollars in debt and no good paying jobs.

Sanders and Trump are both, to varying degrees, fictional candidates. The difference lies in the specific fiction they’re promising and what it says about their supporters. Sanders is often criticized for promising things he can’t deliver, or that he could only deliver at tremendous cost to the country as a whole. His supporters tend to be young and idealistic, not knowing how much he actually could deliver or how he would get it done. But they like the idea, the fiction of it. Sanders points out objective facts about wealth creation, wage stagnation, etc, and then promises sweeping changes. A country where everyone has health care? Great! Free college? Awesome! A livable minimum wage? Fantastic! What is that going to do to small businesses, trade, inflation, the economy? Who cares! How will we vastly expand the social safety net with an obstinate Congress?

He just will! The obvious counterpoint to this argument is that these sorts of cultures do exist – in Europe. Republicans love reminding people that America works because we aren’t Europe as a sort of foregone conclusion. But it’s also possible to argue that America can’t function the way Europe does. We’re a fundamentally different country built differently. And the other thing Sanders neglects to mention is the countries in Europe crippled by the 2008 economic collapse. Countries that reduced hours, increased wages, did all of the good things and then found themselves unable to pay the bill and facing IMF austerity measures.

Trump’s fiction is a lot simpler. He’s selling, in effect, the 1950s. He’s selling the fiction of MAD MEN. The 1950s were a great time to be a white man without a college degree, because you could get a union job (thanks liberals!) and raise a family. Those jobs are gone and they aren’t coming back. But wouldn’t you like them to? International trade drives costs down for American consumers. It’s really uncomfortable to think about your iPhone being produced in a factory prison in China with suicide nets, but it’s also not fun to think about paying 7000 dollars for them to be made by people in Bernie’s socialist utopia making 15 bucks an hour. So…compromise.

The Sanders fiction feels philosophical, because they are educated supporters who understand – whether or not they admit it – that their goals are probably unrealistic. When they ask for 15 dollars an hour, they understand that won’t happen nationwide. They believe that it’s a conversation about what the future of America looks like. The future they want to have and how to push America forward in that direction.

Trump’s fiction is willfully ignorant. It’s longing for a world that doesn’t exist and that can’t exist. In the next 30 or so years, we’re facing an unemployment crisis due to job automation. I promise you, no good capitalist is going to hire a person to do a job he could build a robot to do. And when you’re faced with that, sure, it’s a lot easier to stick your head in the sand and pretend. But that’s disingenuous and it’s frankly dangerous. We have to confront issues, not wish them into nonexistence.

This explains the fictions of the two candidates, but why is it the ruling demographic that are so attracted to them? Well, it’s the lies of the past and the truth of the future. Sanders supporters are young, white, male, and educated. The world is supposed to be their oyster. They did all of the things they were told to do – stay in school, go to college, etc – and on the other end of it they realize (correctly or not, but they’re mostly correct) that the older generation gambled away their future on subprime mortgages and credit default swaps. They’re pissed and they want that generation to pay. The older generation likes to say that millennials are entitles and lazy, but that’s a convenient out when you’ve stolen the future out from under them.

Why doesn’t Bernie have the support of minority communities? There are a lot of reasons and I don’t want to oversimplify, but I feel like on one level they knew about the fiction from day 1, because it was their fiction. America, the country “founded” by white people who then systemically eliminated a native culture (and put Andrew Jackson on the 20 to celebrate!), and then begged for “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses.” America, the land of opportunity…for white men. We literally built the country on the back of imported slave labor, and now white men are pissed that they’re becoming a minority population. This is the endgame of the American business model! Eventually this was bound to happen because uneducated foreigners are way cheaper labor resources.

So these communities knew from day one the sucker’s deal they were signed up for. White men were the protected species, born and bred to lord over America for eternity. Even Obama’s election felt like a bad case of tokenism – here’s your Kenyan President, will you shut up about racism already?

So Bernie supporters are reacting to the bill of goods they were sold that resulted in being well-educated, broke, in debt, and with no career stability. Obama is practically telling them they need to be Uber drivers because that’s how it is man. So they’re rebelling, and this is going to get worse before it gets better.

Trump supporters…did we really think this would be a smooth transition? In my lifetime, whites will be a minority. America will be a pluralistic country in terms of race. We elected a black President who inherited an economic collapse. All around we’re seeing signs of progress coupled with the waning influence of the ruling demographic. And it’s so easy, so beautifully easy, to play the victim. To pretend that the PC Police are out to get you and take away everything you hold dear. That the African President wrecked our economy, not the good ole Southern boys (Bush II and Clinton I). Your kid is going to school with Muslims like the scary people you see on TV blowing things up. Suddenly only black lives matter, not white lives or cop lives. It’s dog-whistle bigotry at its finest. The North Carolina bathroom bill isn’t about a blatant and illegal abuse of trans rights, no! It’s about protecting our children from the predators who will be emboldened by this law. That’s what bigotry is and it’s what demagoguery thrives on. “You people are amazing, look at how amazing you are. Those people are the bad people. Ever since they showed up, life has gotten hard for you.” It’s so much easier to accept the fiction that “China” is killing us in trade, “Mexicans” are raping and killing and drug dealing. Because those are tangible things, they’re not esoteric ideas that require rational thought. If you blame “globalization” and “wanting a cheap car” for losing your job, it means accepting the reality and the complexity of that reality. Blaming China is so much easier. Blaming Muslims is so much easier than accepting responsibility for the staggering number of white people who murder each other with guns every year. It is willful ignorance, and that is the power of the Trump candidacy.

Trump got endorsed by a former KKK grand wizard – were we supposed to be surprised? White supremacy is the core of Trump’s appeal. The decade he reminds us of is before schools were integrated. White supremacy always sounds bad, it sounds like actual KKK rhetoric, but the reality is it’s a core part of the American idea and has been for centuries. Now it’s fading. The majority is in the twilight.

And if Sanders and Trump are any indication, white men are going to rage against the dying of the light.