Jeremy and Bernie
The caucus that the late Pat Caddell and Jimmy Carter (“Jimmy Who?”) put on the map in 1976 finally arrives.
Bill Clinton is the only person to win the presidency since then without winning either Iowa or New Hampshire. More to the point, no one who has ever won both Iowa and New Hampshire has failed to receive their party’s nomination.
This is relevant because there is a good chance that a fellow who famously honeymooned in the USSR and still has a “must read” piece on his website claiming that socialist Venezuela is a better place to realize the American dream than America, will have won both by next Tuesday. And that with Bernie Sanders’ victories, an already nervous Democratic Party will become more nervous still.
If Sanders wins an Iowa caucus that he lost by only 0.2 percent to Hillary Clinton last time around, and follows that up with an expected win in New Hampshire, lots of Democrats are going to have Jeremy Corbyn on their minds, in the sense of fearing that a Democratic Party with Sanders as its nominee will suffer the same fate that Corbyn’s British Labor Party suffered a couple months ago.
Even though Boris Johnson is nearly as despised by the chattering classes of Britain (and many in his own Tory Party) as Donald Trump is by our chattering classes (and many in his own Republican Party), he still managed to inflict the worst defeat upon Labor in 85 years, with the shellacking largely attributed to Labor having moved too far left under the influence of Corbyn.
There are important differences between British and American politics, but the ideological coloration of Corbyn and Sanders are sufficiently similar, in the sense of both being sufficiently hard left and inspired more by Karl Marx than liberalism.
An interesting dynamic also comes into play when considering British and American history and the histories of the British Labor Party and the American Democratic Party: Unlike America’s left-wing party, the British Labor Party was created purposely as a revolutionary socialist (Marxist) party and, even as late as the 1950s, amid the Cold War struggle against the Soviet Union, had a party program that still formally expressed loyalty to the Marxist vision. In that sense, Corbyn’s dogmatic Marxism represented an attempt to take Labor back to its hard-left roots, from which Tony Blair and “New Labor” had pulled it away. That Corbyn’s old-style socialism was emphatically rejected by British voters tells us that the British might have finally had their fill of the thing, with even working-class regions rejecting the party of the working class and voting Tory. In America, we’ve never had the opportunity to get our fill; Bernie would, as the first openly socialist candidate of a major political party, be offering it to us.
The ironic possibility thus arises that the British might actually now be better inoculated against the socialist disease than we are.
If Sanders wins Iowa tonight and New Hampshire next week, what passes for what’s left of the (presumably less leftist) Democratic Party establishment will have to move quickly to buck up a faltering Joe Biden. Stopping Bernie will again be the story of the Democratic primary, but will be more difficult this time because it will be the second time and the Bernie Bros are still smarting over the first. The radical Twitter left vote that Sanders has been fighting over with Elizabeth Warren is also likely to coalesce firmly behind him if he wins Iowa and New Hampshire and she does poorly (as also seems likely) in both.
A battle between Sanders and Biden (assuming Biden recovers his footing in South Carolina) would be a fight over the ideological future of America’s left-of-center party to a much greater extent than the Sanders-Clinton match-up was—in 2016 Hillary was assumed (with super-delegate assistance) to be the eventual nominee, and Sanders’ campaign was dismissed by many as merely a symbolic populist insurgency.
But it’s more than just an insurgency challenging the longstanding Clinton-Obama leadership of the Democratic Party now, as the party, because of the influence of Sanders and the radicalizing “resistance” to Trump, has swung so sharply to the left that positions held by the Clintons or even Barack Obama are now viewed as unacceptable, even reactionary. At stake will be whether the Democrats continue to be a sorta-kinda socialist party that won’t admit it or the real, fully declared kind.
Bernie Sanders remained an independent because the Democratic Party was never far enough left for his tastes. That has now apparently changed, but it was the party, not him, that did the changing.
On the possibility that Sanders might even end up as president, Ramesh Ponnuru notes, “Self-described socialists have been elected in other developed countries; never in this one. Here, ‘socialism’ has been an accusation, not a boast. Politicians on the left wing of the Democratic Party have considered the label, and the associations that come with it, deadly to their electoral chances. Republicans hope it still is. If Sanders beats them, the taboo will be broken.”
In short, Sanders will have finally made American politics safe for socialism.
Because human beings never learn (except maybe in Britain).