Bernie Sanders isn’t losing. Just ask many of his backers or listen to some of his own complaints. He’s being robbed, a victim of antiquated rules, voter suppression, shady arithmetic and a corrupt Democratic establishment.
.. Donald Trump isn’t winning. Just ask Ted Cruz, by whose strange and self-serving logic it is “the will of the people” (his actual words) that he and John Kasich collude to prevent Trump from amassing a majority of delegates ..
.. Elections don’t settle disputes, not even for some fleeting honeymoon. They accelerate them, because there’s a pernicious insistence that they’re not referendums on the public mood but elaborate board games in which the triumphant player used the wickedest skulduggery.
When you honestly believe or disingenuously assert that you’ve been outmaneuvered rather than outvoted, why declare a truce, let alone cooperate, in the aftermath?
.. But all of the candidates knew about that patchwork going in, and Clinton’s successful navigation of it — she has a multi-million-vote lead over Sanders — is more persuasive than any dark claims of dastardly tricks.
The Democrats After Sanders
.. Elizabeth Warren, to pick one example, would have had fewer of these problems if she’d decided to run, and given how well Sanders has done it’s reasonable to suspect that Warren could have actually defeated Clinton. Now that it’s clear that the opening is there, a candidate of full-spectrum progressivism could plausibly enter the next contested Democratic primary as a favorite.
.. Bernie Sanders’s answer, was to promise the thing that every major Democratic politician since Walter Mondale has abjured:major tax increases, not only on the rich (who would be taxed at a rate upward of 70 percent under his plans), but on everybody, middle class and working class and upper middle class alike.
.. it would threaten the stability of the larger Democratic coalition, which depends heavily on middle- and upper-middle-class support and whose leaders have repeatedly backed away from middle-class tax increases lest they give Republicans an opening.
What We Can Learn from Bernie Sanders’s Tax Return
But it’s quite ironic that the candidate who spends the most time arguing that the rich are under-taxed makes $205,000 per year and pays a lower tax rate than the average American. He is himself an example of precisely the phenomenon he decries every day on the campaign trail; he cuts himself slack he would never extend to any wealthy person he so vehemently demonizes.
.. If Democrats really believed their own rhetoric, there was no way they could possibly nominate the former board member of the legendarily anti-union Walmart, who made millions in speaking fees for speeches to big banks and financial firms, who “sounded more like a Goldman Sachs managing director” than a critic, according to attendees. Her net worth is four times what it takes to reach America’s one percent. You don’t usually find populist crusaders eager to dismantle an emerging plutocracy posing for pictures at Donald Trump’s wedding.
.. The reform camp has failed to achieve the fusionist consensus that Buckley and Meyer forged decades ago, which brought together the three main strands of conservative thought — economic, social and foreign policy — under one anti-communist umbrella.
.. A lot of Trump’s offerings — vehement opposition to illegal immigration and free trade, a somewhat isolationist foreign policy, more than a little “blood and soil” nationalism — was offered by Pat Buchanan in past decades; you notice there was no clear Buchanan heir in Republican politics until now. Among GOP lawmakers, there’s pretty broad support for border security and some deportations, but there were only a handful of trade skeptics and another handful of isolationists — certainly few Republican lawmakers are dismissing NATO as obsolete or calling for arming South Korea and Japan with nuclear weapons as Trump has done.
.. Most of his biggest-name endorsees are those who departed elected office and aren’t likely to return: Sarah Palin, Scott Brown, Ben Carson. Or you could argue the Trump movement’s middle isn’t policymakers, it’s pundits: Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, Andrea Tantaros, Eric Bolling, and arguably Rush Limbaugh.
Bernie’s Israel Heresy
There is often something sickening about the continent — Europe — on which Jews were slaughtered reproaching the descendants of those who survived for absorbing the lesson that military might matters.
.. Jews account for about 2 percent of the United States population; most of them live in New York and California, which have voted Democratic in national elections for a quarter-century.
.. But voting is one thing, funding another. As Jeremy Ben-Ami, the president of J Street, a growing pro-Israel group that is critical of settlement growth and the occupation, told me: “The longtime perception was that the only way to get money was to toe the Aipac line.
.. My sense is that he will not pay a political price for his stance because there is an emergent constituency, particularly among young Americans, for a different approach to Israel that underwrites its security without writing a blank check for its every policy. Whether Sanders will benefit is another matter
.. “There comes a time,” said Sanders, “when if we pursue justice and peace, we are going to have to say that Netanyahu” makes mistakes.