gracchusdixit

Now that Donald J. Trump has crushed the last of his feckless opponents, he is all but certain to become the Presidential nominee of the Republican Party.  If the gods truly wish to torture us, he may even go on to become the next President of the United States.  This once utterly unlikely and preposterous turn of events is so astounding and has held the news media in such a thrall of excitement and befuddled wonder, that scant attention has been paid to the more consequential story on the other side of the political Grand Canyon that divides the nation.

That is the story of the improbably resilient candidacy of Bernie Sanders and what it means, not only for the Democratic Party, but, more consequentially, for the country as a whole.

Bernie Sanders will not win the Democratic nomination.  That is now clear.  Yet he continues, against all odds, to defy conventional expectations.  His victory in Indiana, with a share of the vote that was identical to Donald Trump’s, is unlikely to alter the ultimate outcome, unless a slew of electoral miracles occurs in the primaries that remain.  It does, however, send a strong signal that Hillary Clinton has no automatic or absolute claim on the loyalty of Democrats or left-leaning independents.

To win their loyalty, to beat Donald Trump in November, to save this country from the catastrophe that a Trump Presidency would represent, Hillary Clinton and her campaign must do more than they have done thus far—because, thus far at least, rather than coming to terms with the Sanders insurgency, the clam-like Clinton camp has shown little inclination to bend an inch in any direction but their own.

From the very start, the Clinton campaign—less the candidate herself than her surrogates and spokespeople—have treated Sanders with derision, condescension, and pique.  They seem put out, even offended, by the very notion that anyone would dare to challenge what they believe to be Hillary Clinton’s “right” to the Democratic nomination, as if we lived in a hereditary monarchy rather than a democracy.

Bill Clinton’s one-time political mastermind, James Carville, dismissed Bernie Sanders as a “socialist from Vermont,” and asked rhetorically: “Why would Democrats nominate someone who’s not even a Democrat?”  It has apparently never occurred to Carville that the answer might be: for precisely the same reason Republicans are prepared to nominate Donald Trump—because they are fed up with politics as usual and with candidates who represent a status quo they hold in contempt.

Barney Frank, an irascible former member of Congress from Massachusetts and a staunch Clinton supporter, whined, “Bernie alienates his natural allies,” because of an attitude which Frank described as “holier-than-thou.”  He went on to ask, no less rhetorically than Carville: “Is pragmatism the opposite of idealism?”  It evidently hasn’t occurred to Frank that the answer depends upon what you mean by “pragmatism.” When “pragmatism” violates fundamental moral or political principles, the answer to his question happens to be: yes.

Carping like this from people like these is in no way surprising.  Carville and Frank are the political equivalents of operatic divas who sing in only one, shrill key.   No matter what the  lyrics may be, Carville’s key is unremittingly sarcastic and aggrieved, and Frank’s is grumpy and smug.

One would have expected more from Paul Krugman, the Noble Prize winning economist and New York Times columnist, a man who customarily is nothing if not reasonable.   When it comes to Bernie Sanders, however, even Krugman seems unable to keep his head.  Among many other sins, he has accused Sanders of deceiving his supporters by accepting their donations in the face of the sheer inevitability of electoral defeat.

These disgruntled and peevish people fail to understand several things about the Sanders insurgency:

First, the Sanders campaign is not about Sanders himself, a fact which the Clinton people refuse to accept no matter how often Sanders repeats it.  Nor is its principal aim to get Sanders elected President.  Its aim is to change a political and economic system that no longer serves the vast majority of Americans.  For Sanders, winning the Presidency would merely be a means to that end, not the end itself.   Conventional politicians and the pundits who make a living trying to analyze them are so blinkered, so convinced that everything and everyone can be reduced to the calculus of personal ambition, that they cannot even comprehend such a notion.

Second, Sanders is not a “pragmatist,” never has been, and has never pretended to be.  To accuse him of failing to be “pragmatic” is therefore an irrelevancy.  He is, fundamentally, an “idealist.”  This does not mean that he is indifferent to the practical arts of political compromise and deal making, at which he is at least as skillful as Hillary Clinton.  It means that he is determined to strive for more ambitious outcomes, even at the risk of failure.  Those in the Clinton camp who criticize Sanders frequently cite the old adage, “The perfect should not become the enemy of the good.”  The trouble is, what seems “good” to them is no longer good enough for millions of Americans.

Finally, those who chastise Sanders for failing to “unify” the Democratic Party by supporting the person they deem to be its inevitable nominee, Hillary Clinton, fail to understand that unifying the Democratic Party isn’t the point.  The point is changing the Democratic Party—because, however dreadful the Republican Party has become, the Democratic Party has its own cross to carry.

It, too, has been hijacked by an elite class indebted to entrenched interests—to investment banks and hedge funds, to trial lawyers and the corporate clients they represent, to tech billionaires and their sometimes delusional ideas about how the country should be run.  When Sanders calls Hillary Clinton to account for accepting lavish speaking fees from Goldman Sachs, he isn’t picking on Clinton exclusively or particularly.  He is challenging the way the entire Democratic political establishment does business.

It therefore isn’t up to Bernie Sanders to kow-tow to the Democratic establishment or its anointed candidate, Hillary Clinton.  He has simply asked them to declare, finally, who and what they stand for.  If they truly want to defeat Donald Trump, if they want to prove their worthiness to do so, if they want to take a stand at long last, it is now up to them to give us an answer.