WHY DO SANDERS FANS OPPOSE CLINTON IF TRUMP WILL BE WORSE?

temperamentally unsuited to be president. They do not want their children to spend four years watching him bully his opposition in the manner of a fourth grader.

More importantly, they are worried that his lack of interest in policy, and his demonstrated inability to let even small personal slights pass without an over-the-top response, will result in some minor regional brushfire escalating into a major conflict with a nuclear-armed power. If you are worried that the man might get us into a world war that results in nuclear winter, or even millions of Americans once again fighting and dying in European fields, all other issues sort of pale in comparison.

This is not the sort of argument that Sanders supporters seem to be making. The ones I’ve seen are argu- might say is that this is about the long-term future of the party: if Clinton wins now, that will increase the power of the people they are fighting within the party — the centrist sellouts who won’t give them a true progressive agenda. Which is true, except that there is no realistic scenario in which a progressive 10 per cent of the electorate gets to make policy without reference to the desires of the other 90 per cent.

Can you increase your power over the agenda? Yes, and Sanders obviously has. Can you have a political party that caters exclusively to progressives? No, any more than you can have a political party that caters exclusively to libertarians, social conservatives or foreign policy hawks. In a first-pastthe-post system, where there is no silver medal for taking second place, anyone whose views are not a centrist muddle is going to have to vote for a party with which they have substantial disagreements, or resign themselves to having no voice in politics at all.

But we seem to be living in a world where everyone is increasingly under the illusion that their views represent the true mainstream. When I wrote about the Republican convention last week, and again as I write about the Democrats, I find myself confronted by readers who say “people” when they really mean “my Facebook friends and I.”

“People care about Hillary Clinton’s competence.”

“People are sick of getting the runaround on immigration from our politicians.”

“People don’t want what (insert party here) is selling on that stage.”

What neat, simple statements. What neat, simple, unrepresentative statements. In reality, we live in a vast and diverse country. Most people in this country don’t have very clear political opinions, beyond a vague sense that something ought to be done about a bunch of stuff; that policy programs work much better and are easier to get passed than they actually do or are; and that people like them don’t get nearly as much respect from politicians or the media as they deserve. The people who do have strong and relatively coherent political views are a minority among numerous such minorities, and for that reason, to get anything done at all, they are going to have to enter coalitions with other minority ideologies they don’t find so congenial, and then pass stuff that caters to the vague and inchoate desires of the vast mushy middle. That’s the reality of politics. I made peace with that when I was 19 and cast my first ballot, for Bill Clinton.

But Sanders told his supporters that all those things were not true — that they were the true majority, and that if they banded together, they could get everything they wanted without needing to make any substantial compromises. I suppose it’s not all that surprising that some of them are refusing to go along when he suddenly turns around and instead starts telling them the unsavoury truths of American politics. But their denial won’t change the reality. It will just lead Sarah Silverman to call them ridiculous.