All this Democratic intramural spritzing and primary scrapping is just good clean fun, isn’t it? It’s just the feisty process of electing a unifying candidate who will bring even the most disparate elements of this most disparate party together as one, all hands on deck, all backs to the capstan, right? They’ll all come together in the end, right?
Sadly, history doesn’t suggest this will be the case. If Democrats don’t enforce some hard, punitive party discipline on anyone who wants to play games with the nominee or the fall campaign, they’re going to give Trump a wonderful opportunity to churn their divisions into a full-scale meltdown.
Ambition is a heady drug. As of this writing, the Democratic field has somewhere around ten candidates of varying degrees of seriousness, and a few persistent hangers-on without the political wherewithal to win a race for middle-school class president. As of October 2019, you still have a goddamn New Age fortune-teller in the race, for fuck’s sake. Those in the serious tier are followed by a group of could-be candidates and a horde of people there because the barriers to entry are lower now than at any time in the past.
Some are running on the notion that if a no-account prank candidate like Donald Trump ran for and won the GOP nomination for president, why not spin the wheel? “It could happen to me,” they whisper to themselves. “I could catch fire,” they tell donors, “I only need to have my moment on the debate stage and for Trump to tweet about me.” A field this large—as this book goes to press, there are enough Democrats in the race to fill a platoon—the elbows are flying, the purity shit-checking is rampant, and the hostility is getting pretty marked.
It’s a bitter, tough race. These folks obviously aren’t going to walk out of this political Thunderdome without some bruises and scrapes, but for the love of God, Democrats, keep your eyes on the prize. You need to herd all the cats of your normally unmanageable party behind the nominee, and focus on making 2020 a referendum on Donald Trump, not a scrap inside your own team.
Granted, calls for Democratic unity from an apostate Republican are a bit unusual. But I want to talk about what became a famous analogy from the 2016 election. In an essay published under the nom de douche Publius Decius Mus, later revealed to be Michael Anton, the writer compared the 2016 election to the doomed Flight 93 of September 11, 2001. He argued that unless Hillary was defeated, death was certain for all that Republicans held dear. Storm the cockpit and die? Possibly. Sit quietly and let the terrorists fly the plane into the White House or the Capitol? You’re dead either way.
Anton’s argument to his fellow conservatives concerning the highly unorthodox, and to many distasteful, candidate Trump was this: We need to put aside our long-held conservative ideas and ideals to get to the goalposts. Storming the cockpit with Trump is better than sitting quietly while the Democrats steer America toward a progressive apocalypse from which it would never recover. It was a painfully facile argument on one level, since Hillary was hardly going to seize the means of production for the workers or impose sharia, but it persuaded many on the right. And Hillary wasn’t—what’s the word?—insane. Can serious people argue that Donald Trump, who is in control of our nuclear arsenal, isn’t at least potentially batshit crazy?
For Democrats, this really is a Flight 93 election—except the emergency isn’t to elect Trump, but to beat him. Unless Democrats put aside their internal grievances, beefs, ideological wish lists, and purity-posse threats to stay home in November, they might as well expect Trump for another four years, and his spawn in the White House for decades after.
In 2008, once Barack Obama won the Democratic nomination, and then the White House—and against the advice of some of his most passionate supporters—he drew Bill and Hillary Clinton closer to him. First, he had Bill and Hillary as part of his campaign surrogate operation, and later named Hillary as his Secretary of State. This was good, unifying politics. He didn’t want a flank exposed, and understood the Lyndon Johnson truism about having people inside the tent pissing out rather than outside the tent pissing in. Obama was smart and lucky. The Clintons accepted the embrace, cautiously at first, but both sides benefited from the alliance.
In 2012, perhaps Hillary Clinton believed that in setting aside her anger and hurt over losing to Obama in 2008 she had set a precedent for putting party first. After all, when the insurgent Obama had taken down the Democratic Establishment Death Star that was her campaign, she was graceful to a fault:
The way to continue our fight now—to accomplish the goals for which we stand—is to take our energy, our passion, our strength and do all we can to help elect Barack Obama the next President of the United States. Today, as I suspend my campaign, I congratulate him on the victory he has won and the extraordinary race he has run. I endorse him, and throw my full support behind him. And I ask all of you to join me in working as hard for Barack Obama as you have for me.14
She went to work, first on the campaign, and later as one of Obama’s most loyal and effective cabinet members. It was a win for her, and for Obama.
Perhaps when she won the nomination in 2016, Hillary expected Bernie Sanders, her most persistent rival for the nomination, to do the same. Yeah, not so much. Sanders, that bitter old fart, may have capitulated, but he never truly stepped up with the support she needed from his faction of the progressive base. Many Bernie bros in 2016 sat on their hands, stayed home, and in some cases voted for Trump. When will Democrats learn that Bernie is in a party of one: the Bernie Party? The nominee in this cycle will need to watch for Angry Old Commie Throws Hissy Fit, 2020 edition.
The Democratic Party isn’t without its own “Fuck it, burn it all down” elements, and in the 2016 election, and the opening acts of the 2020 election, many of those people seem to flock to the banner of Bernie Sanders.
Now, I know what you’re thinking: “Isn’t it time for a president who can praise Soviet Communism in Russian and mean it?”
Democrats cannot afford to let Bernie drag the race into the late summer of 2020. They can’t afford a messy floor fight or months of the media narrative of “Can X unify the party with Bernie still sniping?” It’s going to take some time to convince his “my way or the highway” supporters that knocking Trump out of office is more important than ushering in the Workers’ Paradise with Comrade Bernie at the helm. It sucks for the eventual nominee, but Bernie’s pattern of behavior, if repeated, is a significant problem.
Anyone who has spent even a moment on social media knows who the Bernie elements are: the blue-state version of Trump’s online army, with some live humans, some bots, some foreign-propaganda agents. They respond with livid, spittle-flecked outrage at any word about Bernie that doesn’t declare him the ideological second coming of Lenin, the vanguard warrior for whom the American proletariat has been waiting, and the man who will burn Wall Street to the ground and build a socialist paradise from its ashes.
The reality isn’t as lofty. He’s a grumpy, mean old bastard who stomped off in 2016 after doing the absolute minimum for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. He’s become a marketing and branding candidate, milking his email lists with Make America Collectivist rhetoric and policies just a notch short of the Bernie Sanders Eat the Rich Cookbook. (Though I’m told his recipe for Oligarch à l’Orange is magnificent.) Bernie’s retirement fund—pardon me, ongoing political advocacy—depends on maintaining that edge-case rhetoric. He’s the Commie Ron Paul.
In a year when Democrats had a stark, bright-line ideological contrast before them—sane, stable-to-a-fault HRC versus Donald Fucking Trump—one group stood out in switching their party preferences radically: the Bernie bros. Somewhere between 10 and 15 percent of Sanders voters switched their preference on Election Day to Trump. These aren’t principled progs; they’re arsonists.
Bernie is Trump reelection insurance.
If he’s the nominee, I say to my Democrat friends, get ready to lose forty-five states. If he’s not, prepare for Bernie to mutter a few words of mealy-mouthed support for the Democratic nominee and then keep on being Bernie. I don’t think Bernie will do anything for the 2020 Democratic nominee, and I’m not sure the Democrats have the capacity to alter his behavior in the slightest. The dream of progressive perfection dies hard. The Democrats need to get the Bernie progs in line, and fast. They can’t afford 15 percent of Bernie’s voters to either vote for Trump or stay home; this would mean having to overshoot even more in the purple and red swing states on the Electoral College map.
Democrats should also keep an eye on Putin shill Tulsi Gabbard, because I’d put money down she’ll be announcing a third-party run once she gets trounced in the Democratic primary. As Jill Stein demonstrated, even a small bleed of voters on the left side of the Democratic equation can be catastrophic in the general.
Every serious candidate, and the eventual nominee most particularly, needs to keep the house in order, and that starts with reminding every Democratic also-ran that defeating Trump isn’t just the top job, it’s the only job. The Democratic donor class is split at the moment among the top-tier candidates, but they have a vital role to play in patching the party together after a winner emerges. These moneyed powerhouses need to tell the wannabe candidates that they’re going to have another chance to run someday, but unless they get out of the race quietly, play nice, and work hard for the ticket, all hell will befall them.