Should Republicans be hoping for a Bernie Sanders primary win? Not necessarily.
You might think that an odd observation coming from a Brit. After all, three months ago, we had an election in which a New Yorker with a big personality and an arresting hairstyle trounced a retrosocialist. Manhattan-born Boris Johnson took the Conservatives to their greatest win since the high-water mark of Margaret Thatcher. Jeremy Corbyn, who junked Labour’s usual blend of social democracy and wishful thinking for Marxism, took his party to its worst defeat since 1935.
But be careful what you wish for. Two years earlier, running on precisely the same platform, Corbyn surged to within a whisker of winning. And he did it from a much lower starting point than where Sanders currently stands.
British and American politics often march together — in terms of personality as well as party. Lyndon B. Johnson met his match in the wily and unscrupulous Harold Wilson. Richard Nixon was coterminous with Edward Heath, whose character flaws did lasting damage to conservatism. Jimmy Carter paired with Labour’s Jim Callaghan — a decent man but unlucky and overwhelmed by events. After that came the glorious reveille of Ronald Reagan and Thatcher, followed by their quieter lieutenants George H.W. Bush and John Major. Next were the centrist but sleazy regimes of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. Then, syncopation: George W. Bush was mainly contemporaneous with Blair, and Barack Obama with David Cameron.
Now, though, we are back in step, with the two governments being led by men with striking characters and unusual backgrounds who stand slightly apart from their parties. Both are determined to bring their remote bureaucracies under control. Both, consequently, are howled down as unscrupulous populists.
This synchronicity may reflect the way our two economic cycles are aligned, a common media culture, or simply a shared outlook. Whatever the explanation, the current parallels are striking. The governing right-wing parties have simultaneously acquired a significantly poorer and less educated electorate. Their left-wing oppositions have responded with a kind of frenzied, Chavista authoritarianism.
In some ways, Sanders is more radical than Corbyn. True, he does not propose mass nationalization and has no time for anti-Semitism. But, when it comes to spending, the 78-year-old Democrat leaves the 70-year-old Labour man standing. Corbyn wanted a big expansion of the state. Under his manifesto, the government would have grown to control 44% of the economy. The equivalent figure for Sanders? An incredible 64%.
When it comes to free healthcare and free university tuition, the two platforms are similar (and similarly unaffordable). But when it comes to spending on infrastructure and greenery, Sanders is in a class of his own. Corbyn promised to spend half a trillion dollars over 10 years, equivalent to about 20% of Britain’s GDP. Sanders says he will spend $16.3 trillion over 15 years, equivalent to 75% of America’s GDP.
During the Labour primary in 2015, a few mischievous Conservatives joined up so as to vote for the supposedly unelectable communist. Two years later, these “Tories for Corbyn” were left looking pretty silly when the old man came back from a 21-point deficit in the polls and cost Theresa May her majority.
What were the differences between the 2017 and 2019 elections? One, of course, is that in 2017, Corbyn was running against an Eeyore (May) rather than a Tigger (Johnson). Additionally, Labour was still supposedly pro-Brexit in 2017. But there was another difference: No one took Corbyn seriously the first time around. He was written off by pundits, and his manifesto went unscrutinized. It was the same asymmetry, funny enough, that had favored President Trump the previous year.
Would Sanders be 2017 Corbyn or 2019 Corbyn? If the former, he could win. Corbyn began that campaign with everything against him — press, polls, policies, people. Sanders, at the time of writing, is 5 points ahead of Trump. To commentators, Corbyn’s atavistic Marxism was a self-evident disqualification. But young voters had no memory of communism, and the Right’s Cold War rhetoric left them, well, cold.
Two years later, Johnson was taking no chances. He knew that it was not enough to decry his opponent as a “mutton-headed mugwump” (though he did that too). He also had to offer something better. Hence his relentless cheeriness, his infectious optimism.
Now that he is defending his own record, of course, Trump can no longer rail against crime, deindustrialization, mass migration, and all the rest of it. He, too, needs to radiate a bit of sunshine. Can he manage it? We’ll soon find out.
