Historians will look back on the presidential primary season and write of an ineluctable outsider whose policies were, in several cases, not those of the party he seized and of which he was not even a member.
They will document the rising alarm among party bigwigs reaching a peak as the candidate cruised from a strong second-place finish in the Iowa caucuses to crushing victories in New Hampshire and Nevada.
And they will note that, as the candidate assumed an air of inevitability, the bigwigs faced a terrible dilemma: Should they keep trashing him in the flickering hope that he could be stopped? Or should they help his chances by trying to normalize his shocking prescriptions and pretending to believe they would prove the tonic to cure America’s ills?
These events and atmospherics exactly fit both Donald Trump in 2016 and Bernie Sanders now. The socialist senator is advancing toward the Democrats’ July nominating convention in Milwaukee with increasing chutzpah and Trumpian contempt for naysayers.
On Feb. 21, Sanders posted a tweet characterized by the sort of insouciant self-assertion that is Trump’s trademark, saying: “I’ve got news for the Republican establishment. I’ve got news for the Democratic establishment. They can’t stop us.”
I’ve got news for the Republican establishment. I’ve got news for the Democratic establishment. They can’t stop us.
— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) February 22, 2020
The parallels between the two nontraditional politicians are astonishing. Both are populists who have never been part of the political hierarchy. Both genuinely despise established political norms and promise to overturn them. Both have demolished insipid, conventional rivals. And both have conquered parties too weak to stand in their way.
But there is a crucial difference that makes Sanders unlikely to walk in Trump’s footsteps all the way to the Oval Office. It is that he has reversed his policies in specific areas, and these unprincipled adjustments will make it harder for him to catch a populist wave capable of overrunning the one surfed four years earlier by Trump.
Sanders still appeals to millions of voters who think America is being shafted by millionaires and billionaires, who are skeptical of international trade, and who discount the fiscal and moral cost of “free” healthcare, college, childcare, and all the rest.
But in other areas, Sanders has not been resolute, and although the changes he has made might help him win the Democratic nomination, they could undo him in the general election. He has abandoned positions that once gave him crossover appeal among nonideological voters whose main motivation is frustration that the federal government seems uninterested in their concerns.
The most obvious example is Sanders’s volte-face on immigration. He used to oppose a mass, low-skilled influx on the grounds that it undermined blue-collar workers. In 2007, he voted against liberal immigration reform, saying, “I think this Senate should be spending much more of its time making it easier to create decent-paying jobs for American workers, instead of allowing corporate America to drive down wages by importing more and more workers from overseas.”
He continued to hold this view until Trump won the presidency with it. Now, instead, Sanders has adjusted at lightning speed to avoid being left behind by the Democrats as they lurch left on all issues even tangentially associated with race.
Sanders is for open borders. He’s as quick as the next intersectionalist to denounce immigration control as xenophobic and racist. At a forum on immigration last year, he promised to prevent the deportation of illegal immigrants who came to the country as minors and to grant residence rights also to the parents who, in most cases, brought them here.
This may cement the support of the Left, but it will not help Sanders in blue-collar states that Trump took away from the Democrats last time around. Those voters also won’t like Sanders’s flip-flop on guns — he used to be a Second Amendment supporter, but no longer — and they won’t appreciate his promise of ruinous giveaways that punish the thrifty and, in many cases, are massive wealth transfers from the poor to the rich.
Sanders has cut and trimmed his policies to make them fit the woke template of today’s Democratic Party. By contrast, Trump cut and trimmed the Republican Party, forcing it into line with the populism he correctly calculated would carry him to the White House.
Sanders probably has what it takes to capture the Democratic Party. But his schtick as a curmudgeonly but consistent outsider isn’t really true. He’s been consistent in embracing Marxist economics, but when it comes to the sub-Marxist, postmodern ideas of the new Left, he’s been a shape-shifter — a follower, not a leader.
