Sen. Bernie Sanders has been accused of many things, but inconsistency is not usually one of them.
In many ways, the Vermont independent’s inability to accept change in the face of shifting circumstances is both his greatest strength and his most devastating weakness. For a self-professing radical, it’s an ironically conservative tendency. And it’s not entirely unbecoming: In a way, one suspects that despite the credulity of the senator’s pseudo-Marxian worldview, there’s an earnestly genuine honesty to it, devoid of the cynicism that so often pervades our national politics. If one squints hard enough, it’s even possible to see why the Sanders campaign enjoyed such religious devotion from a portion of the electorate.
Still, in the context of the coronavirus pandemic, the Sanders movement’s unswerving attachment to its narrative (who knew that the coronavirus proved once and for all that we need to do all of the things that Sanders already said we needed to do?) helps explain the ultimate failure of his campaign.
Sanders is often praised by his acolytes for the fact that he has consistently repeated the same basic ideas for the better part of four decades, but as he continues to do so in the face of increasingly flimsy justifications for many of his arguments, it’s of little surprise that voters are not as convinced by them as they once were. Sanders and his supporters seem to be remarkably oblivious to this fact; instead, they continue to recite the same talking points over and over for the dwindling number of people who will still listen.
Chief among these tired refrains is the claim that nominating another centrist Democrat à la Hillary Clinton will only beget the same electoral results as 2016 and that nominating a turnout-increasing “passion candidate” such as Bernie Sanders is the only viable way for Democrats to defeat President Trump.
Joe Biden is none too exciting, to be sure, but the thesis that Sanders is exceptionally capable of driving up voter turnout and reclaiming the white working class from Trump has crumbled in the face of his abysmal performance in the latter half of the Democratic primary. The “diverse, multiracial, multi-generational” coalition that Sanders always speaks of went in record numbers for Joe Biden. The white working class, which Sanders had carried in the 2016 Democratic primary, all but abandoned him entirely, and perhaps most humiliatingly, the youth vote, a demographic that Sanders had long touted as his prize electoral weapon, was virtually nonexistent.
Voters aren’t stupid: To incessantly wax poetic about Sanders’s unique ability to drive out turnout in the general election might be convincing in the abstract, but to continue to do so in the wake of overwhelming evidence to the contrary is profoundly unconvincing. Such is the character of many of his campaign’s narratives. Despite their best efforts, Sanders and his acolytes are convincing no one of their position by shouting it at ever-louder volumes, and to do so while the world is set afire by a historically unprecedented viral disease comes across as petty and tone-deaf.
This is the fatal, double-edged sword of the Sanders movement: Its tenacity, which often strikes observers as charming under normal circumstances, starts to appear obnoxiously aggravating and self-aggrandizing in the throes of a global pandemic. As the senator’s revolutionary aspirations fade to a historical asterisk, the shrill protestations of his surrogates have begun to look more like petulant demands for attention than the idealistic aspirations of a grassroots movement. For any serious person who has not drunk the “Not Me, Us” Kool-Aid to the point of joining rose emoji-adorned socialist Twitter, such behavior has become exhausting.
“I’m dealing with a f—ing global crisis here!” was Sanders’s response to a reporter who recently asked him when he would suspend his campaign. His supporters cheered, of course. But what, exactly, he’s doing to “deal” with said “f—ing global crisis” is unclear: He has contributed little of material use to our national response besides signing onto the coronavirus relief bill after making all of the appropriate indignant noises about corporate bailouts. Other than that, he’s spent most of his time shouting into the void about how we’re not doing enough to embrace his revolutionary program.
Just as he always does. What else is new?
Nate Hochman (@njhochman) is a Young Voices contributor and former intern at National Review.
