View all Articles
Commentary By Jason L. Riley

The Democratic Establishment Will Rally Around Bernie

Culture Culture & Society

The sins of Sanders’s past will be waved away when the choice is between him and Trump.

A week from now, Bernie Sanders could well be on a glide path to the Democratic presidential nomination. Even if he doesn’t win the primary in South Carolina on Saturday, he’s expected to do well there. Three days later is Super Tuesday, when 14 states will hold contests and more than a third of the national delegates will be awarded.

Four years ago, Mr. Sanders couldn’t match Hillary Clinton’s support among minorities, but the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll shows him pulling even with Joe Biden among black voters. That augurs well for Mr. Sanders in South Carolina, where about 60% of Democratic voters are black. And it will help him elsewhere in the Deep South, as well as in delegate-rich states like California and Texas, which hold their primaries on Super Tuesday. Blacks want to back a winner, and so far Mr. Biden hasn’t won anything.

If the Democratic establishment is panicking at the prospect of the party nominating a socialist for president, Republicans are snickering. But there’s a certain amount of playacting on both sides. Mr. Trump has signaled that he wants to run against Mr. Sanders, and many Trump supporters believe that the Vermont senator would lose in a rout. But that’s wishful thinking. For starters, the socialist label is less toxic than it once was, which means that beating Bernie will involve a lot more than name-calling.

Should he get the nomination, a Sanders victory in November is no more implausible than Mr. Trump’s was in 2016. The president has already demonstrated that a nominal member of a major party who has grass-roots support and is running as an outsider can win the White House. Moreover, Mr. Trump had the luxury of running against the most unpopular presidential candidate in memory, and lightning won’t strike twice. Mr. Sanders is far less polarizing than Mrs. Clinton was, while Mr. Trump remains as divisive as ever.

Democrats who are worried about a socialist at the top of the ticket probably won’t stay worried for long. Republicans who once obsessed over Bill Clinton’s character flaws were willing to look past Mr. Trump’s. Conservatives who once championed free-trade policies were willing to defend Mr. Trump’s trade wars. Because the political right has no monopoly on inconsistency, and because partisans are more interested in winning than in ideological purity, expect similar behavior in defense of Mr. Sanders.

The reality is that Democrats have been moving in Mr. Sanders’s direction for some time. What he’s offering the country is truth in advertising, and if he becomes the nominee, the media and political left will rally to his defense. Liberal commentators will explain away his past kind words for the Soviet Union, Cuba and Nicaragua’s Sandinistas, who wowed him with “their intelligence and their sincerity.” Those who can’t quite bring themselves to defend Mr. Sanders directly will instead train their fire on his critics. Be prepared for the anti-anti-Bernie brigades.

The reactions may be predictable, but they don’t diminish the huge significance of a presidential race between Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Mr. Trump’s defeat of Mrs. Clinton was a defeat of someone promising more of what the country had experienced under Barack Obama. As president, Mr. Trump has more or less pushed a traditional Republican agenda, from tax cuts to deregulation to increased military spending. He came to Washington vowing to upend the place, but his bark has been worse than his bite.

By contrast, we’ve no reason to believe that Mr. Sanders is bluffing. He’s 78 and has been drawing up blueprints for the revolution for most of his adult life. His Democratic opponents keep asking how he will pay for Medicare for All, student-loan forgiveness, a Green New Deal and all the rest. But they’re missing the point. These are not economic issues for Mr. Sanders. They’re moral issues. If you believe that cradle-to-grave government health care is a human right, or that tuition-free college should be an entitlement, the cost of providing it is an afterthought.

Mr. Sanders believes that wealth redistribution is more important than wealth creation. He believes that central planners are better allocators of resources than individuals making their own decisions in a capitalist economy. He believes that Michael Bloomberg got rich on the backs of America’s poor. Such views may have once distinguished Mr. Sanders on the political left, but that’s no longer the case. His Democratic challengers have quibbled with his methods but not with his vision. It may fall to Mr. Trump to explain why socialism isn’t simply unfeasible but foolhardy. As the economist Thomas Sowell has noted, the 20th century is full of examples—Mr. Sanders’s beloved Soviet Union and Cuba among them—of “countries that set out to redistribute wealth and ended up redistributing poverty.”

This piece originally appeared at The Wall Street Journal (paywall)

______________________

Jason L. Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and a Fox News commentator. Follow him on Twitter here.

This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal