The EconomistJune 9th 2018 United States 33T
HE little smile, hastily suppressed, said it all. Bernie Sanders is
a grim, almost mirthless, figure. Yet a cry of “Bernie for presi-
dent!”—echoing around Los Angeles’s docklands like a portent—
caught the 76-year-old senator from Vermont off-guard. One mo-
ment his craggy face was glowering over the mistreatment of the
local truckers, fleeced of job security and benefits; the next it had
melted, like frost in spring, into a joyful smirk. Mr Sanders, the
runner-up to Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Democratic primaries,
still burns with ambition. But are Democrats still feeling it?
A recent day on Mr Sanders’s tail in southern California,
where he fired up a trio of left-wing crowds, suggested many are.
At a gathering of unionised workers at Disneyland, the “Happiest
Place on Earth”, he raised cheers by angrily endorsing their de-
mand for a $15-minimum hourly wage. (But he had bad news for
their children: “Ducks don’t talk, mice really don’t talk,” said Mr
Sanders, taking no prisoners. “That’s fantasy, this is reality.”) In a
stirring rally in downtown Los Angeles, he was later feted by the
leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement who once derided
him. In 2016 Mr Sanders appeared to have given little thought to
their cause. Now, burnished by a new campaign for criminal jus-
tice, he was welcomed by some of America’s foremost civil-rights
activists as a visiting prophet. “I believed that he could beat Do-
nald Trump and I still believe he could!” hallooed Shaun King, a
campaigner with a million followers on Twitter.
This is a kind of fervour the centre-left, retreating in America
and across the West before the populist right, rarely conjures. It re-
calls Mr Sanders’s thrumming, thrown-together campaign rallies,
so unlike Mrs Clinton’s dull appearances. No wonder many hope
he will reignite in 2020. Polls suggest Mr Sanders is the most pop-
ular politician in America. Betting markets make him the favour-
ite for the next Democratic nomination. If the contest were held
next month, his superior name-recognition and lists of small-
time donors might see him home with ease. Yet the vote is two
years off, and the punters are probably mistaken. Mr Sanders’s
following, influence and prospects have all been exaggerated.
Set aside, for now, his crotchety-great-uncle charisma, and the
idea that Mr Sanders is a major force rests on two myths. The first
is that he almost won the Democratic nomination: had he not
been stiffed by the party establishment, which assisted Mrs Clin-ton, Sandernistas say, he would have done. President Donald
Trump says the same. It is nonsense. Mr Sanders won 4m fewer
votes than Mrs Clinton and none of the most populous states. He
won quirky, liberal hotbeds like New Hampshire, or through the
caucus system that mimics them. He was considered competitive
chiefly as a result of bored journalists’ efforts to inject drama into
the yawnathon of Mrs Clinton’s slow-walk to the nomination.
The most fervent Sandernistas tended not to be Democrats at
all. They were college kids and independents, many of whom
subsequently drifted off to a third-party nominee. A middle-aged
Sandernista in the crowd in Los Angeles, Jacinta, said she voted
for the Green candidate in 2016, considered Democrats and Re-
publicans as birds of a feather, and was frustrated that neither
backs free movement across the southern border. Most Sanders
voters, by contrast, were loyal Democrats who simply didn’t
much like Mrs Clinton. Having little attachment to Mr Sanders’s
statist ideas, they nonetheless swung grumblingly behind her.
This helps explode the second myth: that the Democrats have
veered to the left, where the rumpled Mr Sanders awaits them.
There are, to be sure, signs of a long-running leftward drift in
the party, as it losesits last conservative whites to the populist
right. But there are also counter-signals. Mr Sanders’s demand for
“universal health care” has been taken up by almost every Demo-
cratic candidate in the mid-terms—but there is such ambiguity
about what it entails as to make this no more meaningful than
civil rights among other distantaspirations. None of Mr Sanders’s
other big ideas—including free college and massive public
works—is getting much play. Nor have Sanders-endorsed candi-
dates fared well in the primaries. Our Revolution, a group Mr
Sanders formed to promote his acolytes, has been a failure. “It
doesn’t do anything,” gripes a strategist for one of its candidates.Rumpled, crumpled, Trumpled
The energy on the left is focused on opposing Mr Trump’s attack
on liberal democracy, not on carrying forward Mr Sanders’s revo-
lution. The success of moderate candidatesin the Democratic pri-
maries suggests this is making the party more pragmatic and
mindful of party unity than Mr Sanders, an ideologue who is not
a Democratic Party member, might like.
This illustrates how asymmetrical the extremist drift in Amer-
ican politics is. While the right gallops towards the ethno-charged
edge of reason, the more diverse, heterodox left yo-yos between
defining itself against its governing wing, as Sandernistas did in
2016, and swinging back to moderation to stave off the latest Re-
publican attack. Put anotherway, the Democrats, unlike their
counterparts in Europe’s multiparty systems, are often spared the
burden of having to work out what they stand for beyond oppos-
ing the right. Despite a lot of blather about liberals and progres-
sives, to be a Democrat under Mr Trump is mainly to be pro-liber-
al democracy and protective of immigrants, minorities and other
targets of the president. That leaves little free time to feel the Bern.
Mr Sanders still has a chance in 2020. His odd charisma, name
recognition and ability to work up a devoted crowd are real ad-
vantages. His genuine concern for the underdog is all the more at-
tractive set against Mr Trump’s counterfeit concern. But if Demo-
crats picked Mr Sanders, it would not be for his ideas, which have
little support within their party, let alone America. It would also
be delightful to Mr Trump, who fancies his chances of destroying
“crazy Bernie”. If only for that reason, it is good that Mr Sanders’s
moment in American politics has probably passed. 7Berned out
Democrats will soon decide that Bernie Sanders is an indulgence they cannot affordLexington