If you’re a progressive — especially the kind who viewed Hillary Clinton with some skepticism before Election Day, but voted for her anyway — then last month’s election was an especially tough loss.
You feel like the party elders, feeling extremely confident of victory, took the nomination out of your hands and poured it down the toilet. So what’s the progressive answer to the Democrats’ future? Who do they like to lead the party into the next presidential cycle?
Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks, a popular left-wing news show on YouTube, had a few comments this week that might be helpful for understanding both the Sanders brigades’ despair and their hopes. To conservative ears, they might even evoke the frustration that afflicted the Right after Mitt Romney’s loss in 2012: “No more establishment losers, no more establishment ways.”
Uygur ran down a list of candidates published recently by the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza in a segment titled, “Why Democrats’ 2020 Candidates Are Already Losers.” (The video can’t be embedded, but you can click through.)
He was especially unimpressed with the fact that Sens. Cory Booker, D-N.J., and Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y. (whom he disparaged as “Hillary Clinton lite”), were listed as two of the prime picks, and that it was mostly because of their ability to raise money from Wall Street. Gillibrand, he noted, is already reaching out to Clinton donors to take their temperature.
“This is so gross — it’s so gross!” Uygur shouted. “So, these are the top two contenders — the one who looks like Obama and the one who looks like Hillary Clinton. And they both raise money, just like Obama and Clinton. And they’re even going to the same donors — the ones who told them to not fight aggressively, the ones who told them to capitulate to Republicans, the ones who led to this disaster that we’re in.”
“Has the establishment learned nothing? Nothing at all!”
This narrative — that the donors are the reason for the loss — may seem implausible at first blush. But it makes sense if you believe that Sandersism can be sold in a general election. Sanders, who will be 79 by the time of the next election, may not run again. But Uygur — and presumably many other progressives — believes that Sanders proved the right kind of liberal can raise enough money without the big donors whose money availed Clinton nothing on November 8.
“Bernie Sanders just showed you that you don’t need those same big donors,” he said. “He just did it! It’s not like, ‘I forgot, what happened?’ He just did it!”
Ignore the donors, defy them, perhaps even denounce them, and you’ll end up with a stronger nominee.
Of course, we’ll never really know how Sanders might have performed in a general election against Trump. We also don’t know for sure if he would have done so well in the primaries against anyone besides Clinton. But his successes against Clinton came despite great odds — not just her financial advantage, but also the fact that he is so old, not exactly brimming with charisma, and began the campaign as an obscure figure, up against someone with 100 percent name recognition.
Sanders’ success showed that there’s a huge appetite within the Democratic base, and not just for someone far-left enough to to praise “democratic socialism” on the campaign trail. Even more importantly, there’s a hunger for someone willing to win the party’s nomination in 2020 by throwing the party’s major donors and all of their priorities over the side.
If you really believe progressive ideas are winning ideas, and that the big donors are harming Democrats by pulling them away from their ideological mooring, then this view makes some sense. If you believe it.
