If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then the Democratic Party of 2020 really admires the Republican Party of 2016.
Each began a presidential campaign with a large, diverse field of attractive young people whom it saw as the face of a new generation. Each saw this field blown away by some noisy, old man with a fanatical following who hailed from one of New York’s outer boroughs.
The speech of each man was loud, coarse, and grating, unlike the mellifluous tones of the Reagans and the Kennedys. They never talked about cities on hills. Instead, Donald Trump and now Bernie Sanders have tended instead to carry on about grievances. They denounce elites who they say look down upon the nation’s working people, sending jobs overseas while the Rust Belt suffers and the cities and towns decay.
But the difference between the two is that whereas Trump’s faults fell in the context of personal coarseness — attacks on war heroes, the dead, and anyone who ever had said a cross word about him — his politics were fairly conventional. Sanders, on the other hand, was and still is a bona fide socialist. The Vermont senator wants a radical change in the country’s economy, and during the Cold War, he opposed his own country. He isn’t even a part of the whose nomination he seeks.
Both Trump and Sanders are extremely divisive, capable of repelling swing voters and critical factions within their own parties, but both are also fanatically supported by their respective bases.
Each party needs its own base added to swing voters and centrists in order to win most big elections. For the last three years, Democrats have been invoking Trump’s specter to get swing voters and centrists away from Republicans who are running in swing states and districts. This worked to some extent in the 2018 elections when Democrats took back the House and scared many Republicans into retirement, a result and a tactic they hoped to repeat in this cycle.
But in Sanders, they may have found the one man in America who’s even more frightening than Trump to suburban white women in Fairfax County. Trump’s offenses are often stylistic and verbal, such as name-calling and hugging the flag: a mild and harmless if eccentric gesture that managed to drive some women on Twitter into total hysterics. But socialism has managed to ruin whole countries, let alone 401(k)s.
Sanders has been on the scene for a long time. His feat in 2016, of scaring the hell out of Hillary Clinton, should have warned people as to his potential. But the stunned realization that he really might win this thing was the same as the one that befell the Republican Party only a few months later in 2016. The main differences are that the Republican field remained stable through all the convulsions, whereas the Democrats’ field has changed drastically, sucking in billionaires and other such amateurs who spent fortunes wildly while they seemed to have had no effect.
Today, the Democrats’ opposition to hostile takeovers by autocratic outsiders appears to have ebbed. Of course she’d accept Sanders as the nominee if he won the most delegates, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said to reporters, blaming Republicans for having done the same thing with Trump when he won his votes fairly. “Loyalty, loyalty, loyalty!” she had shouted, meaning to her party. Of course, it was something entirely different when the Republicans failed to stop Trump.
Near the end of the primaries in 2016, the anti-Trump forces scored a win in Wisconsin, which turned out to have been their last gasp of resistance. Will South Carolina be this year’s Wisconsin, or will the script be rewritten? Let us wait until tonight and see.
