The New York Review of Books - 26.03.2020

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dug in, at least in the early going. When
he called the former Clinton adviser
James Carville a “political hack” in
mid-February in response to Carville’s
criticisms of him, he signaled to his fol-
lowers that the Clinton crowd is still the
enemy. Warren has attempted a unity
pitch at different times, but, tellingly,
no one among the elites was the least
bit interested in hearing it.
Into this mess barged Michael
Bloomberg with his billions. The left’s
animus to Bloomberg is ferocious—
over his wealth, his discriminatory
stop-and-frisk policing policy as mayor,
and his blatant attempt to purchase the
nomination. One hardly needs to be a
leftist to resent the idea that a some-
time Republican who endorsed George
W. Bush for president and Scott Brown
for Senate over Warren in 2012 could
buy the Democratic nomination.
It’s hard to write about this in the
thick of the election, but, depending
on how things turn out in the caucuses
and election, and at the Milwaukee
convention in July, the Democrats will
ultimately confront four possible sce-
narios, each capable of leading to open
civil war:

(1) Sanders gets the nomination

and wins the general election.

(2) Sanders gets the nomination

and loses the general election.

(3) Someone else gets the nomi-

nation and wins the general

election.

(4) Someone else gets the nomi-

nation and loses the general

election.

In Scenario 1, Sanders would funda-
mentally alter the character of the
Democratic Party. First and most
obviously, he’d make congressional
Democrats adapt to his priorities, like
Medicare for All and free college. Sec-
ond, he’d get to name the new chair-
person of the Democratic National
Committee, and he would name some-
one who’d seek to extend the “people’s
revolution” that lifted him to the White
House. Third, he’d force a change in
the approach of the many liberal think
tanks around Washington and the
battery of foundations whose fund-
ing decisions do so much to influence
Democratic policy priorities.
All that would happen—at first. Then
we’d have to see how his legislative pro-
gram fared. Even assuming the Dem-
ocrats keep the House and take the
Senate, probably not great. Medicare
for All won’t pass. The bill has 118 co-
sponsors in the House, only about half
the Democratic caucus; in the Senate, it
has a mere fourteen, and of those, three
pretty obviously signed on just because
they were running for president (Cory
Booker, Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gilli-
brand), so the real number is probably
eleven. He’d get a Bidenesque public
option at best. A Democratic Congress
would give him something he could call
a Green New Deal, but not a $16.3 tril-
lion one, which is the cost of his cur-
rent proposal. He would end up with
watered-down versions of his plans
that he could persuade sixty senators to
support (or perhaps only fifty-one, if he
were able to use the budget reconcilia-
tion process as he claims and sidestep
cloture votes, but even getting fifty-one
would be a struggle).

If Republicans retain the Senate,

Mitch McConnell would take a par-

ticular glee in ensuring that President

San ders gets nothing. History suggests

that millions of dispirited Democrats

might not vote in 2022, the Republicans

might retake the House, and a weak-

ened Sanders could face a primary

challenge from a mainstream liberal or

moderate. An ugly fight for control of

the party would be likely, therefore, in

the 2024 primary.

Scenario 2: if Sanders loses to Trump,

the fallout for the Democratic Party

would depend to some extent on how

badly he was defeated. If the loss was re-

spectable, and if the mainstream wing of

the party were seen by the left as having

done its good-faith share to help elect

him (a big if!), the party could probably

just lick its wounds and proceed.

If Sanders were to get shellacked,

however, recriminations would be in-

stant and intense. Mainstream party

leaders would work to isolate the left-

wing members, and with special zeal if

Sanders lost so badly that the Demo-

crats also lost the House. Meanwhile,

on the left, the conviction that the cen-

ter had undermined Sanders would be

widespread; calls would commence im-

mediately for AOC or some other fig-

ure from the left wing of the party to

run for president in 2024 (as fate would

have it, Ocasio-Cortez will turn thirty-

five on October 13, 2024, three weeks

before Election Day).

Scenario 3: if someone else gets the

nomination and wins, the result for

party unity would depend to some ex-

tent on who that someone else was. If

it were one of the Democratic office-

holders running, we would likely have

a situation not unlike that of 2009–

2010, except this time with a larger and

stronger left that would try to increase

its leverage by, for example, running

left-wing candidates against a large

number of mainstream Democratic

House incumbents. Ocasio- Cortez has

already started a political action com-

mittee whose goal is to find and finance

candidates on the left to run in prima-

ries against mainstream Democrats.

Its goals for 2020 are modest, so far at

least, but it will surely expand.

That would constitute at least a man-

ageable acrimony. If the someone else

were Bloomberg, though, anger on

the left would be seismic. A President

Bloomberg would have, in effect, two

oppositions, to his right and to his left,

and he would almost certainly face a

2024 primary challenge from the left.

Scenario 4: if someone else gets the

nomination and loses, another hellish

battle would ensue. Here, of course,

the Sanders forces would cry that the

defeat proved merely that the Demo-

crats offered the electorate a choice

between Tweedledee and Tweedle-

dum. The AOC (or someone) boom-

let would start up with even greater

force than in Scenario 2. The centrists

would cry that the left undermined the

Democratic candidate (especially if

there were a third-party candidate who

ended up corralling some chunk of the

left-wing vote).

In sum, Democratic unity, even in

victory this fall, is well-nigh impossible

to envision. One faction in the party

will claim that it has vanquished not

only Trump, but the other faction. And

if the outcome is defeat...

There is a nontrivial chance that fol-

lowing a presidential defeat and a few

more developments that are not too dif-

ficult to imagine, the Democratic Party

could collapse. A Sanders–Bloomberg

nomination fight in particular could

sound a death rattle. This fight—be-

tween, ironists will note, a billionaire

and a man who wants to ban billion-

aires, and neither of them really even a

Democrat—would produce a dramatic,

public split.

As for those post-defeat develop-

ments, the most obvious would be an

actual war. Suppose that Trump started

a military action that for whatever rea-

son—because it involved a defense of

Israel, say—a number of hawkish Dem-

ocrats felt compelled to support. An

event like that, with tensions between the

left and the mainstream already raging,

could be the party’s Kansas-Nebraska

Act, the 1854 law that tore the Whig

Party apart once and for all. The Whig

analogy is somewhat instructive because

internal Whig divisions, especially but

not wholly over slavery, reached a point

at which reconciliation became impos-

sible. So there is precedent in American

history for a party becoming so split that

members of both factions decide it’s no

longer worth the bother. The difference

is that the Whigs had existed for only

about twenty years, while the Demo-

crats have been around since the 1820s.

There is also the overwhelming real-

ity that our electoral system makes it

very hard for third parties to gain trac-

tion. Duverger’s Law—the theorem of

the twentieth-century French political

scientist Maurice Duverger that single-

member districts lead to the existence

of two-party systems—still holds. If

AOC and her allies were to form a third

party, they would find that they could

elect only a small handful of members

of Congress (from the deepest-blue dis-

tricts, and even there they would have to

fight to dislodge entrenched Democratic

incumbents), and their opportunities to

exercise leverage would be rare. Third

parties can overtake their rivals—it just

happened in Ireland, where Sinn Féin,

which had long trailed the two main

parties, finished first. But Ireland uses

a form of proportional representation

that makes such outcomes more possi-

ble. In single-member district systems,

third-party victories are much rarer.

Labour displaced the Liberals in the

UK as the main opposition party in the

1922 elections, after the Liberals had

split into two factions behind David

Lloyd George (in coalition with the

Tories) and H. H. Asquith (dissenting).

But this, too, happened because of the

parliamentary structure.

So our system militates against a

schism. Yet it’s hard to imagine pro-

socialist leftists and pro-capitalist lib-

erals remaining peacefully in the same

political party. Right now, there aren’t

that many of the former, but their num-

bers will grow if the system continues to

fail to address their concerns. Ocasio-

Cortez gives them a highly charismatic

leader to rally behind for many years

after Sanders is gone.

How is this fracture to be healed? I

doubt it happens this year (although

the unpopular Trump could still be de-

feated). If Sanders wins the nomination,

it becomes absolutely incumbent upon

Democratic establishment figures to get

behind him, because a second Trump

term is unthinkable. But the reality is

probably that a number of them won’t;

also, that a number of Democrats run-

ning in purple districts where some of

Sanders’s positions might not be popu-

lar will keep their distance from him.

In the long term, party unity will prob-

ably require a different presidential

candidate, such is the overwhelming

dominance of the presidential selection

process in our system. This would be a

person who, by dint of biography, per-

sonality, and record, would have some

measure of credibility with both the

left and the mainstream, and who could

sell a concordat to both sides, convinc-

ing liberals to shed the neoliberal reflex

to defer to certain corporate benefac-

tors and embrace populism, and per-

suading leftists that the real common

enemies they share with liberals are the

Republicans, the Electoral College,

and the Senate.

The Republicans have their version of

these problems, but they are less severe

because the GOP is a far less diverse

party, both racially and ideologically.

The Democrats’ tent has always been

bigger, going back to the days when it

included crusading liberals and reac-

tionary segregationists. But that was a

time when capitalism was doing pretty

well, and when it had a global enemy, so

all Democrats at least agreed that the

system was working. There is no such

agreement today. Q

—February 27, 2020

Mike Bloomberg, Pete Buttigieg, and Elizabeth Warren at the Democratic presidential

debate in Charleston, South Carolina, February 25, 2020

Win McNamee /Getty Images