Where are all the Never Bernie Democrats?

Around this time four years ago, as Donald Trump was looking more likely to be the Republican nominee, a loose collection of conservative pundits and Republican elites rallied around the description: Never Trump. But now, with Sen. Bernie Sanders having arguably won the first two Democratic contests heading into Nevada, where he’s favored, a similar movement has not taken hold among elite Democrats or liberal opinion-makers.

Sure, there are plenty of liberals panicking about the prospect of a Sanders nomination. But the arguments are primarily focused on his electability or about how his plans would never pass through the Senate. Nobody is arguing, as Never Trumpers did, that they would refuse to vote for Sanders were he the nominee.

It was a big deal for many of the 2016 Never Trumpers who followed through on their threat and refrained from voting for Trump. The Democratic nominee was not only a liberal but one of the most corrupt politicians in the United States. Hillary Clinton had, for decades, been one of the most disliked figures among conservatives. Yet many of them still rose up and took a stand against Trump, even if it meant losing friends and influence, and opposing a candidate who was promising to appoint conservative judges and cut taxes.

What’s important is that conservative Never Trumpers did not merely base their discontent on their suspicions that Trump might move left once in office, given his history of taking liberal stances on healthcare, abortion, and guns earlier in his career. Though that was certainly a part of the critique, Never Trumpers also made a case against Trump based on his character, his fitness for office, his lies, his abrasive statements that at times crossed into sexism, and the way his rhetoric portrayed immigrants as disproportionately violent.

And yet the criticisms of Sanders from within the tent are more focused on pragmatism. There is no movement among liberals declaring that Sanders is so beyond the pale that they could never vote for him.

Former Bill Clinton adviser James Carville has been in a war of words with Sanders, calling him a “communist” and lamenting that Democrats were going too far left to compete in November. “We’re losing our damn minds,” Carville told Vox. Yet the crux of his fear was that were Sanders the nominee, Democrats would be unable to retake the Senate. “If Bernie is the nominee, I’ll vote for him,” he said. “No question.”

Jonathan Chait has been one of the foremost critics of Sanders among liberal pundits, trying to urge his side to avoid veering off of the cliff. Chait is essentially a traditional liberal who advocates a party that can appeal to the center and pursue a strategy of achieving incremental policy gains. And he’s been more or less freaking out about the prospect of a Sanders nomination, which he says would be an “act of insanity.” But the crux of his argument has been that Sanders would be a risky bet electorally.

Chait also felt compelled to write a post about the things he likes about Sanders, in which he declared he had “zero qualms about voting for him should he win the nomination,” and explained, “There is nothing Sanders would need to do to earn my vote against Donald Trump, and nothing he could do to lose it.”

It’s worth keeping in mind that Sanders is not a run of the mill Democrat. He is a socialist, who would seek not just to make policy changes, but to destroy the U.S. system.

Sanders is a particularly odd fallback candidate for those concerned about the erosion of democratic norms. He has a history of promoting authoritarians. He praised Fidel Castro’s oppressive Cuban revolution. In the 1980s, he was a fan of the tyrannical and anti-American Marxist Sandinista movement in Nicaragua. Sanders honeymooned in the USSR in 1988 and came back parroting out propaganda that promoted the collapsing regime, praising the transit system and its “programs for youth and workers.”

He also has championed the most bigoted figures on the left, including Linda Sarsour and Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, by making them surrogates for his campaign. When Omar accused Jews of using their nefarious influence to push lawmakers to declare “allegiance to a foreign country,” Chait criticized her for trafficking “ugly stereotypes,” and wrote, “Whatever presumption of good faith she deserved last time should be gone now.”

One can only expect that any Sanders administration would be rife with hateful figures, just as his campaign has been. As he does with authoritarians, Sanders is willing to treat bigotry differently when it comes from his own side.

Many Never Trump conservatives grew up hating Clinton for decades. Even if they didn’t vote for her, many of them just simply could not in good conscience pull the lever for Trump. But the prospect of voting for an avowed socialist who has been an apologist for authoritarian regimes and who has elevated bigots on his campaign is somehow not weighing on the conscience of prominent liberals.

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