Beating back Bernie

Senator Bernie Sanders was on a roll that scared to death establishment Democrats like Bill Clinton, go-slow part-of-the way reformists like Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar, and billionaires like Mike Bloomberg.

Their message was direct, succinct and based on fear: Vote for Sanders, elect Trump. That argument, cynical but effective, got to millions of Democrats who would vote for Mickey Mouse if he could beat Donald Trump. The dread that a Sanders candidacy could reelect Donald Trump—and the trust Biden inspires through his association with Barack Obama—yielded Biden the lion’s share of the core constituency of the Democratic Party, African Americans.

The full-court press against Bernie Sanders largely worked. On Super Tuesday, Joe Biden won most of the states, including liberal states like Massachusetts and Minnesota. Biden won Texas too, despite Sanders’ huge Latino support.

Bernie had another obstacle beside the establishment onslaught, the candidacy of Elizabeth Warren, which competed with Sanders for the progressive vote. A television pundit went as far as saying that by pulling some progressive votes away from Bernie, she “knee-capped” Sanders. In fact, Warren’s politics differ little from those of Sanders and she largely stayed away from the kind of veiled red-baiting attacks that other candidates leveled at Bernie. Warren’s appeal came from the same place as that of Sanders, a general disgust with the plutocratic society this country has become. A New York Times article this weekend asked whether we are moving toward a caste society. News flash to the Times: we are already there. The content of that article itself richly demonstrates it.

If there was any kneecapping, it came from Buttigieg and Klobuchar who dropped out at the last minute and immediately endorsed Joe Biden. And Beto O’Rourke, once a progressive hope, now a non-entity who chose to jump on the Biden bandwagon at the eleventh hour.

Sanders may have been knocked down during Super Tuesday, but he is not knocked out yet. California is the biggest prize on Super Tuesday, and early on Wednesday it has not yet been decided. But it looks like Bernie Sanders will win there. That would mean that the ultimate outcome of Super Tuesday is that the contest has gone from a race for all to catch Bernie Sanders to a dead heat between Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders.

That does not bode well for Sanders. He needed a knock-out punch now. The remaining states tilt toward Biden. He needs a near-miracle to win a plurality ahead of the party convention. Without an October surprise such as a big Biden scandal or a bad streak of Biden misstatement.

Ganging up on Bernie Sanders gave the establishment a win but there will be costs both for the Democratic Party and for the country. As for the party, few Sanders supporters can conjure any enthusiasm for Joe Biden, and some may decline to vote, or vote for a third party. That may result in a repeat of 2016.

Biden is the status quo ante, before the progressive surge within the Democratic Party—Sanders, Warren, Ocasio Cortez—a return to the past. The status quo got us Donald Trump. And Biden is, if anything, less progressive than Hillary Clinton, although voters generally find him warmer than Clinton. That may not be enough.

Biden and his supporters have been trying to capitalize on the Obama mystique. But Biden is no Obama. Obama was a progressive who was shoved toward the center by strong right-wing forces for whose perversity and intransigence he was not psychologically and ideologically ready for. The good are never prepared for evil. Still, Obama did not surrender and was able to secure one progressive victory, Obamacare.

Biden has always been in that nowhere space, the center, an empty and shifting space, directionless and lacking in a key element in politics, passion. Say what you will about Trump supporters: They don’t lack passion. That will be a problem for Biden.

Another of the many differences between Biden and Obama—charisma, style, oratory—is the concept of hope. By beating back Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden destroyed for a generation the hopes of millions of people, especially young Americans. Hope not for a socialist society as classically defined but for an aggressively altruistic society.

That means a society where tens of millions of people are not shackled by student debt just so banks and investors can collect interest. A society where illness is never a path to bankruptcy. A society with fewer McMansions and more homes for the poor and the currently homeless. A society without xenophobia, racism, misogyny or homophobia.

And a society—and this is my personal very radical hope—in which the victims of mass incarceration, those with long sentences for things like petty theft and drugs, are set free. And the Trump’s, the other right-wing plutocrats, the Rick Scott’s, the really big thieves, go to prison for a long time.