Left-turn signal was already on

Dems veer toward cliff

HEY, why not nominate Bernie Sanders?

That, it seems, is what Democrats are saying to themselves — and happily. Sanders appears to have romped in Nevada, where entrance polls indicate he even won with self-described moderates and conservatives — and remember, Bernie is the most left-wing person ever to run for the presidency.

All last year, polling showed 53 percent of Democrats did not identify as liberals or progressives—and that convinced political watchers that Sanders had no clear path to the nomination.

This seemed to be the explanation for the strength of Joe Biden throughout 2019 polling. Biden was the candidate for Democrats who didn’t want their party to jump off an ideological cliff, and more suitable to serve the key mission for the Democratic candidate in 2020: Defeating Donald Trump.

Well, guess what? Again, according to the entrance polls, Sanders led among voters who said the most important task of the election was winning over Trump.

Nor did Sanders have a special identitarian quality that would give him an extra boost with a party consumed by identity politics. That is why Elizabeth Warren, with a somewhat similar message to his but with a constant emphasis on her gender, was the flavor of the year for so many in the punditocracy.

Yesterday, the 78-year-old atheist Jew with a Brooklyn accent who lives in Vermont won the most Latino votes in Nevada.

So if Bernie Sanders gets more support among moderates than any other candidate in the race, and wins among Latinos, and is seen as the best person to defeat Trump, what possible argument could there be to convince other Democrats to oppose Sanders’ relentless march to Milwaukee?

Maybe, just maybe, they want to nominate Sanders — the dream candidate for those on the left who care most about ideas and ideology — because when you get right down to it, they don’t have a serious problem with his views.

What do they disagree with him about?

Democrats don’t really have a fundamental problem with single-payer health care, Sanders’ signature issue. Many surely worry it’s not practical, or not popular enough. But I’ve seen nothing to suggest Democrats think Medicare for All is philosophically or programmatically wrong or a mistake.

Do they dislike Sanders’ classwarfare talk, the idea that billionaires shouldn’t exist and that extreme wealth is a moral stain on our society?

Are they made uncomfortable by Sanders’ hostility to the mainstream traditions of American foreign policy?

Do they really mind that he’s a self-described socialist — a man who proudly associates himself with the term encompassing the statist political ideologies that denied basic human freedoms, immiserated, and slaughtered literally billions of people in the 20th century?

Democrats may not be socialists themselves, but they appear to be socialist fellow travelers: A poll conducted in 2019 by the Cato Institute revealed that 64 percent of Democrats have a favorable view of socialism, while only 45 percent have a favorable view of capitalism.

And as a child of the radical politics of the 1960s who still retains a vestige of the hippiedom that had him living at a commune once upon a time, Sanders checks off all the necessary woke boxes — open borders, gender consciousness, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, climate change, you name it.

But he has not allowed his comfort for and sympathy with wokedom to overshadow his larger message about fundamental change.

Sanders goes big. He doesn’t care about what things cost, or the specifics about how to make change happen. He’s short on details and long on vision. That vision is rooted in an implicit view of the United States as a fundamentally unjust country awash in the evils of untrammeled capitalism and in need of revolution.

He is the logical end result of American leftism. And so, it appears, is the party he is probably going to run.