Bernie Sanders officially kicked off his quest to be Joshua. His opponents for the Democratic presidential nomination hope he’ll turn out to be Moses.
The question to be answered over the next 18 months is: Will Sanders be known as the leader who pointed the way through Trumpian times, offering Democrats the twin tablets of Democratic and socialist thought but never quite entering the Promised Land? Or will it be Bernie, not one of his prized disciples, who takes his party across the finish line and into the White House?
For all the media’s jubilant recollections of the Clinton era and giddiness about smashing glass ceilings in 2016, a sizable chunk of the Democratic base was already over it. And no one was better positioned to capitalize on the sentiment than the Brooklyn-born Vermont socialist.
Bernie represented a contrast with Clinton that was more favorable to himself than prognosticators expected. He inspired legions of followers with a true believer’s earnestness. In contrast to Clinton’s ever evolving views, Sanders’ steadiness appeared reassuring, even refreshing.
Constantly mobbed by massive crowds, Bernie attracted celebrity fans such as rapper Killer Mike, actress Susan Sarandon, and comedian Sarah Silverman. Lawn signs sprang up in yards across progressive America like a new bloom. Acolytes trekked to bookstores to hear Bernie read aloud like he descended from the mountain with the Word of God in hand. Vermont-based Ben and Jerry’s created a new ice cream flavor in his honor. Someone even designed a Bernie action figure, which sold. Capitalism is truly amazing.
At rallies, supporters posed for pictures with heads poking through painted cut-outs, trying on Sanders’ patented mussed mane. Male supporters proudly dubbed themselves “Bernie Bros” and fiercely defended their man online — too fiercely, often.
Bernie lost the battle for the nomination but won the war for the soul of the Democratic Party. Though he wasn’t even technically a Democrat, Sanders crashed the donkey party and proceeded to remake it in his own leftist image.
Where Hillary’s support was broad, Bernie’s was ocean-floor deep. In their bones, Bernie’s legions believed he could win the general election. Sanders supporters have taken to social media to proclaim, “Bernie woulda won,” as if it were a mantra. Lots of Democrats find this annoying, but it’s not necessarily wrong. There is a strong case to be made that Sanders represented a populism that found itself in the right place at the right time.
Like Donald Trump, Bernie instinctively got the widespread public impatience with the political establishment. He complained that neither party was solving seemingly intractable problems that impact real people’s lives. It was that neither party appeared to even be trying. Both native New Yorkers acknowledged that globalization has made at least as many enemies as it has friends, as it’s altered our job market, our communities, and our families. For those Americans who have been hurting, that acknowledgment was a balm.
Like Trump, Sanders had his own plan to help those Americans who had felt ignored. It leaned heavily on an activist government’s spending like drunken sailors, but it made the invisible feel visible. Bernie sold it with his unique style, which was engaging, if not quite as spellbinding as master marketer Trump’s.
The policies Sanders urged, including Medicare for All, free college, a $15 minimum wage, and environmental justice (whatever that means), had and still have much support on the left. But Clinton buried them with pragmatism. “I’m a progressive,” she said at the first Democratic primary debate in 2015, in an attempt to counter the image being painted of her as a sellout. “But I’m a progressive who likes to get things done.” The message, according to Stephen Stromberg in the Washington Post: “The way to advance progressive goals is not to toss off an ideologically satisfying wish list of grandiose government programs and expect the country to suddenly fall into agreement, it is to admit that policymaking demands a sense of nuance and of the possible.”
Of course, to ideologues, “possible” is in the eye of the beholder. In the brave new world of 2019, Sanders’ opponents aren’t clucking about the hefty price tags on the progressive wish list. When CNN recently asked California Sen. Kamala Harris how she’d pay for the Green New Deal and Medicare for All, Harris dismissed the question: “It’s not about a cost. It’s about an investment.”
This certainly isn’t Hillary’s party anymore. But to look at the slate of candidates vying to succeed her as the nominee suggests it hasn’t been that way for some time. Indeed, Sanders is likely to be a victim of his own success.
Sanders is arguably the current frontrunner. Not only does he have widespread name recognition, but he’s also been attracting major moolah. The New York Times reported, “After less than a week as a presidential candidate, Mr. Sanders has collected $10 million from 359,914 donors.”
But money isn’t everything, and this time, Sanders isn’t the default option for a protest vote. The left lane is remarkably crowded. That’s not so surprising: Gallup recently reported that “increased liberal identification has been particularly pronounced among non-Hispanic white Democrats, rising 20 percentage points from an average 34 [percent] in the early 2000s to 54 [percent] in the latest period.” While the jump isn’t quite as pronounced among minority Democrats, it’s unmistakable that the party’s thumping heart is increasingly with its left flank.
But how many Berniecrats are there? Nate Silver estimates, “Sanders’s real base was more like 33 percent of the overall Democratic electorate. That isn’t nothing . . . But it does jibe with polls showing that Sanders and Warren together have around 30 percent of the Democratic primary electorate in 2020 and not the 43 percent that Sanders got in 2016.”
That vote may very well be split among imitators, who have adopted a number of Bernie’s formerly far-out ideas, if not his rumpled-professor aesthetic. That mosh pit of contenders will test whether Democratic primary voters’ allegiance to Sanders is a personality cult or an attraction to ideas.
Take 37-year-old Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, who resigned her position with the Democratic National Committee so she could endorse Sanders last time. This time, she’s running too. She recently tweeted, in explaining why she’s hellbent on ending “foreign wars,” that “the majority of the U.S. wants Medicare for All, affordable education, [and] the means to address climate change and rebuild our crumbling infrastructure. Many candidates in 2020 will promise these things. But these promises will not become a reality until we have this peace dividend.”
Sanders also opposes foreign military interventions. But Gabbard does so as a veteran of the Iraq War. Gabbard is also Congress’s first Hindu.
For voters who like Bernie’s traditional focus on wealth inequality and his academic aura, there’s Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a real-life professor and a progressive hero for founding the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a federal business watchdog.
The “lock him up” leftists have a candidate tailored to their obsession as well. Harris, the daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants, was a state attorney general before running for Senate. Before that, she was a tough-on-crime San Francisco district attorney. That will bring its own challenges from a party increasingly moving left on criminal justice. But the upside is the contrast of running a female minority prosecutor against a president beset by investigations and hush money scandals.
In case you haven’t heard, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., is also a woman, and a feminist, thank you very much. She was the first senator to call for her colleague Al Franken’s resignation when accusations of sexual harassment started adding up, giving her #MeToo credibility. She’s a mother of two, and would like you to know that as well. In February the Associated Press ran a story on the Gillibrand campaign’s emphasis on motherhood. In response, she tweeted: “Some might say that running unabashedly as a mom is risky. Not to me. Parents have skin in the game for the country we leave to our kids — that’s why I’m fighting for paid leave, healthcare and climate action. I’ll fight for every kid like they’re my own.” (Memo to Gillibrand: No one thinks “running unabashedly as a mom is risky,” so you’re in luck.)
Not every candidate, of course, is a Berniecrat. Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar declined to back Sanders’ free-college proposal, saying, “If I was a magic genie and could give that to everyone and we could afford it, I would.” In March, Klobuchar drew a contrast with Sanders by telling NBC News, “I’m not a socialist. I’m a Democrat.”
Former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper is the latest Democrat to toss his hat in the moderate ring, launching his campaign with a promise to challenge Trump-the-bully alongside an explicit plea for support from independents and Never Trump Republicans. “I would go to Mitch McConnell, to his office, and I would sit down with him and say, ‘Now, what is the issue again?’ and we would talk,” Hickenlooper told an interviewer in early March. “Sounds silly right? But this works.”
But there’s enough evidence that fence-sitters — New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker will go whichever way the wind blows — will be pulled left without much resistance. “You can be really far left in a Bernie way, or really anti-Trump in a partisan way, or both, but it’s getting harder to get away with being moderate if you’re a prominent Democrat,” polling guru Nate Silver said in January, noting that for the first time, Gallup found a majority of Democrats self-identify as “liberal.”
In a Democratic party intoxicated by intersectionality, Sanders’ being a cis-gender, heterosexual, Caucasian man is primarily a hindrance. As Time magazine put it, “Some moderate, white, male candidates suspect there’s room for only one of them in the race.” While no one looks to Bernie for moderation, this casting limitation applies to him as well. In 2016, you could either vote for the historic female candidate or the ideological radical. But if Democratic voters can nominate someone with Bernie’s beliefs but a more intersectionally pleasing package, Democratic voters are likely to choose one of the alternatives. With those alternatives running, Bernie is likely Moses.
Melissa Langsam Braunstein is a former U.S. State Department speechwriter and an independent writer in the Washington area.
