Democrats’ Trump card?
The pundits may have been too quick to write off the chances of a 78-year-old socialist being US president. Bernie Sanders is proving more popular than they thought, writes Tim Stanley.
At the weekend in Las Vegas, the Democrats put their money on red. Senator Bernie Sanders won the Nevada caucus with 46 per cent of the vote and is now the clear frontrunner for his party’s nomination.
This is remarkable, not only because he’s a self-proclaimed socialist, or a 78-year-old who recently had a heart attack, but because he’s only been a Democrat on and off since 2015. His run of victories is as much a repudiation of the liberal establishment as a warning to Donald Trump.
It’s tempting to write him off as the American Jeremy Corbyn and, yes, there are similarities. Sanders’ signature policies are a massive expansion of free healthcare and a green new deal, and he’s a trenchant critic of United States foreign policy. He spent his honeymoon in the Soviet Union. Trump’s attack tweets practically write themselves.
They might not work, however. An easy majority of US voters don’t like socialism, but the young are warming to it and a significant proportion of voters say they don’t even know what it is. The general idea might be unpopular, but the specifics can sell. The hospitality union in Nevada criticised Sanders because his healthcare-for-all programme threatened its own private insurance plan, yet its members ignored the leadership’s advice and voted for him anyway.
How much is this to do with socialism and how much to do with Sanders? It’s a critical contrast with the British Labour Party’s experience: Corbyn was less popular than his ideas, whereas Sanders is well known and polls strongly even when voters are reminded of his socialism. The irony is that while Corbyn is reportedly charming in private, Sanders can be short-tempered and rude.
He is a loner. Some of his relatives were killed in the Holocaust. His father died when he was 20, his mother when he was 18. When he first moved to rural Vermont, he lived in a former sugar shack with a dirt floor. He released a financial disclosure in 1976 that read: ‘‘Unfortunately, there is not too much to report.’’
He always looks, as Larry David said, like he’s been running for a bus. His character was captured in a vignette by journalist Anand Giridharadas, who recalls that, when they travelled together on a plane, Sanders hardly spoke to him ‘‘in any real way’’, until they came to get into a car and there wasn’t enough room to fit everybody in. Sanders was overcome with a ‘‘transfixing, physical sense of righteousness. It wasn’t about logistics; it was about justice’’.
He did everything he could to find the journalist space – move some bags, sit on a case – and in his determination to put something right, he became clear to Giridharadas for the first time: Bernie isn’t the man you want to sit next to on a long boat ride, because he’s got no chat. But he is ‘‘the person who will notice when you fall overboard and begin to drown’’.
ASanders rally is like no other. He invites the audience to come up and speak, to talk about how they lost their house or their job. ‘‘It isn’t about me,’’ he insists, ‘‘it’s about them.’’ Unusually for a politician, this is probably true.
If he gets the nomination, the 2020 race will be a battle between
a business nationalist and an international socialist, but also between ego and anti-ego, between ‘‘This is my land’’ and ‘‘This is your land’’.
And yet, Trump and Sanders have so much in common. Both men are New Yorkers, shout a lot, compete for the affection of the working class and are accused of being backed by the Kremlin.
Bernie Sanders isn’t so much the American Jeremy Corbyn as he is the left-wing Donald Trump, which begs the question – are the Democrats happy to be captured and converted in the same way that Trump took over the Republicans? If not, then why haven’t they put up a better fight?
I’ve seen this election compared to 1972, when the Democrats nominated George McGovern – an ultra-liberal tagged, unfairly, as the candidate of acid, amnesty and abortion – and he went down in a huge defeat to Richard Nixon. But there are two differences now.
First, the country has changed: it is more socially liberal now, and ethnic minority voters, who seem drawn to Sanders, are in the ascendant. Secondly, in 1972, the Democrats split properly over McGovern because the party contained serious moderates and conservatives who didn’t like what he stood for on principle.
That doesn’t hold up today. Pete Buttigieg or Joe Biden might spend the rest of the primaries calling Sanders a Marxist, but everything Sanders is for is merely the logical extension of what Buttigieg and Biden have signed up to as well: free stuff, abortion on demand, weak borders, etc.
The Democrats’ failure to say a definitive ‘‘no’’ to the far-Left in the past decade has paved the way for a socialist nominee, just as the Republican tolerance of racism made a Trump nomination more likely in 2016.
Yes, Sanders can be stopped in the coming weeks – but his opposition is fractured and hollow. If he wins, Buttigieg and Biden will come to the convention and endorse him and pretend they loved him all along because, when parties stand for nothing, they can be captured by anyone.
Under these circumstances, Michael Bloomberg should consider an independent candidacy. Another New Yorker, another outsider. That state has a lot to answer for.