15apt and accurate, it is precisely what
Senator Sanders himself promises: a
revolution that will leave his political
opponents unable to oppose his agenda
be cause they will be regulated into silence
or politically bullied into acquiescence.
Don’t expect to see an anti-Sanders
movement comparable to the anti-
Trump movement of 2016, for at least
four reasons.
First, there is no principled anti-
Sanders movement because Democrats’
principles are Sanders’s principles.
Whereas Republicans in 2016 had good
reason to doubt Trump on everything
from abortion to the Second Amendment
to taxes, Democrats have no such qualms
about Sanders. Sanders calls himself a
socialist, Warren insists that she is a capi-
talist, but they come down pretty close
together on health care, business regula-
tion, taxes, and much more. (With capital-
ists like these, who needs socialists?)
Sanders wants a monopoly health-care
system, punitive taxation, a (further)
weaponized regulatory state, and a radical
expansion in federal spending and federal
power. Democrats may quibble, but they
simply are not in the position of 2016
Republicans who doubted Trump’s relia-
bility on their core issues.
Second, Democrats do not actually
believe socialism to be outside the bound-
aries of respectable opinion. They may
worry about it as a marketing matter, but
Sanders’s enthusiasm for left-wing auto-
crats from Moscow to Havana to Caracas
is not, from the progressive point of view,
morally comparable to disreputable right-
wing enthusiasms—for Pinochet or
Franco, once upon a time, or for Orban or
Alternative für Deutschland today. They
are committed to their belief that Alger
Hiss and the Rosenbergs were “on the
right side of history,” that those who
opposed them were monsters, and that
those who rallied to the flag of Lenin,
Stalin, and Mao were only humanitarians
with excessive enthusiasm—“liberals in a
hurry,” as they used to say.
Third, unlike 2016 Republicans, 2020
Democrats do not believe that Sanders’s
performative outrage, rhetorical inconti-
nence, facile extremism, defects of judg-
ment, etc., disqualify him from the office.
They only worry that voters might think
this and punish his campaign and their
party—which, let us remember, are not
the same thing—for these excesses.
Trump abominates CNN, and Democratssee a would-be censor and a threat to the
First Amendment. (Never mind that every
single Democrat in the Senate voted to
effectively repeal the First Amendment
only a few years ago.) Democrats com-
plain about Fox News—and Senator
Sanders complains more generally about
the “corporate media”—and progressives
hear only a call to arms. Both Senator
Sanders and Senator Warren have taken
the lead in outlining repressive new mea-
sures curbing political speech in the name
of “campaign-finance reform,” but practi-
cally every major Democrat accepts these
or similar measures enthusiastically.
Fourth and finally for this discussion,
the Democratic Party’s transformation
into the Party of Oberlin is, if not quite
complete (see South Carolina and the
resurgence of Joe Biden), then very far
along. When James Carville warns about
driving away blue-collar and rural voters,
Democrats in Brooklyn hear that Southern
accent and quietly whisper, “Good rid-
dance.” The Democrats are in the mood
for culture war, not for coalition-building
and reconciliation. They do not wish to
win with moderation and compromise,
because they do not wish to govern with
moderation and compromise. They feel
themselves to have been humiliated by the
Trump administration, and they have set
upon Sanders as the instrument of their
vengeance. That Senator Sanders has so
much in common with Trump—an out-
sider to the party who loathes the party
leadership, a demagogue who detests
compromise and bipartisanship, who has a
funky outer-boroughs accent and zany
hair, who until the day before yesterday
voiced remarkably Trumpian views on
immigration and trade, etc.—is no acci-
dent, and it is not something that Demo -
crats are having to hold their collective
nose and swallow. Democrats speak in
public as though the Republican Party has
been ruined by Donald Trump, but in truth
their detestation is larded with envy.
Trump has given the Republicans some-
thing the Democrats want for themselves.
For better and for worse, the Trumpiness
of Senator Sanders is the sizzle andthe
steak, and not only for the hardline left-
wingers. They could have had a Buttigieg
or a Klobuchar, and they may yet nominate
Biden as a kind of placeholder and caretak-
er. But Senator Sanders, a man with the
freshest ideas from the 1930s and the cul-
tural affect of the 1970s, is the future of the
Democratic Party.Learn more at
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