You could argue that policy details are unimportant as long as a politician has the right values and character. As it happens, I don’t agree. For one thing, a politician’s policy specifics are often a very important clue to his or her true character — I warned about George W. Bush’s mendacity back when most journalists were still portraying him as a bluff, honest fellow, because I actually looked at his tax proposals. For another, I consider a commitment to facing hard choices as opposed to taking the easy way out an important value in itself.
.. Mrs. Clinton, asked about that interview, was careful in her choice of words, suggesting that “he hadn’t done his homework.”
But Mr. Sanders wasn’t careful at all, declaring that what he considers Mrs. Clinton’s past sins, including her support for trade agreements and her vote to authorize the Iraq war — for which she has apologized — make her totally unfit for office.
This is really bad, on two levels. Holding people accountable for their past is O.K., but imposing a standard of purity, in which any compromise or misstep makes you the moral equivalent of the bad guys, isn’t. Abraham Lincoln didn’t meet that standard; neither did F.D.R. Nor, for that matter, has Bernie Sanders (think guns).
Donald Trump, a Frightening Window Into the American Present
The default presumption about populism holds that its appeal peaks in times of economic crisis, and this is partly true, as suggested by the populist upsurge of the eighteen-nineties, when disgruntled farmers transformed their anger at banks seizing their land into the populist People’s Party, and the insurgent campaign of Ross Perot, a century later. But, in America, populism is driven not solely by distress at economic malaise but also by fears inspired by racial progress—and the belief that these two things are synonymous.
.. When the Democratic Party—motivated in part by Wallace’s left-flank candidacy and partly by the Great Migration, which had delivered millions of Republican-leaning African-Americans to Democratic strongholds in the North—adopted a strong civil-rights plank at its convention, Southern segregationists bolted and formed the States’ Rights (Dixiecrat) Party.
.. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s frequent conflicts with the Southern wing of his party hinged not on the creation of a welfare state but on segregationist demands that only one race be the beneficiary of it.
.. Last summer, large numbers of Sanders supporters took offense at the serial disruption of his campaign events by Black Lives Matter protesters. In retrospect, they appear to have done Sanders a favor. To the extent that his brand of populism is viable, it is dependent on the kind of cross-racial appeal to common economic despair that Henry Wallace understood nearly seventy years ago. In forcing his campaign to court African-Americans earlier and more aggressively than it otherwise would have, Black Lives Matter facilitated Sanders’s upset of Clinton in Michigan—a state where he garnered nearly a third of black votes. The civil-rights movement in which Sanders was a proud participant was itself a response to the identity populism of Southern whites.
.. George Wallace .. blamed his own (relative) racial leniency for his loss in Alabama’s 1958 Democratic gubernatorial primary and reportedly told an aide that he would “never be outniggered again.”
.. Trump’s brand of populism is cemented in the ideal that he will not be out-Muslimed, out-Latinoed, or out-baited regarding any other signpost of American change. And it’s selling. They are all Dixiecrats now.
Can Sanders Remake the Democratic Party?
The Democratic Party fight between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders—one likely to extend through the very last primaries if not all the way to the convention—might be compared to the contest between Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford in 1976. A beloved movement figure is taking on an exhausted yet entrenched establishment, running much better than anyone expected. But like Reagan, even in defeat, Sanders clearly represents the future of the party.
.. Sanders’s first election as mayor of Burlington in 1981 was due to a property tax revolt (and the opportunistic support of the police union). What later earned him up to 70 percent of the statewide vote in Vermont were historically favorable ratings from the NRA and zeal in securing veterans benefits.
.. It was not necessarily Sanders’s intention to provoke a debate about the future of liberalism, and he has not aggressively pursued it. Critics frequently call out his reliance on vague talk of popular mobilization (“a political revolution”) when asked how he would pass his agenda against Republican opposition. Left unacknowledged is how much the politics of a Democratic primary constrain him from making a clearer argument, a forceful critique of the party’s establishment and its priorities.
.. Yet despite the challenges Sanders faces, it’s hard to see how the anti-establishment Left could have found a better candidate. In retrospect, the once sought after progressive Elizabeth Warren would have fared poorly as Clinton’s challenger.
.. Still, it would probably take far less pressure than a Trump presidency to completely upend the Democratic establishment, creating a new coalition as inconceivable and offensive to the party of Obama as Trump is to the party of Bush.
The Presidential Plot Thickens
Sanders actually took a slightly larger percentage of Democratic votes cast on Super Tuesday than Trump took on the Republican side (39 percent versus 38 percent). They were dead even in places like Virginia and Massachusetts. Yet the media reported Super Tuesday as a humiliation for Bernie and a huge, huge win for Trump.
I continue to maintain that Trumpmania is as much a press phenomenon as a popular phenomenon, and supply is in large part creating its own demand.