The Democratic Party is devouring itself.
In case you were at all confused, Bernie Sanders is the apocalypse. Or something very close to it.
That was the message from his six rivals on Tuesday night at the latest and perhaps nastiest Democratic debate, which devolved at times into an oratorical melee of overlapping voices, overheated tempers and dire warnings about what would happen if Sanders, the current front-runner in the contest for the Democratic presidential nomination, becomes the party’s nominee. President Donald Trump would get four more years. Several of the Democrats on the stage in Charleston, South Carolina, essentially guaranteed it.
And they scared the hell out of me. That’s only partly because I fear that they’re right about Sanders, whose past and even present are gold mines for material that Trump can use to portray him as an ideological fringe figure. It’s also because the candidates did it in an angry, panicked way that, if I were Trump, I’d edit into a campaign commercial and blanket the airwaves. Its tag line would be: “Even Democrats don’t trust Bernie Sanders. Why should you?”
Nomination contests often get ugly, with candidates in the same party — candidates with some of the same core values — belittling one another. But this felt different. This felt worse. This felt like a genuine freakout.
Sanders’ competitors weren’t just desperate to reverse his progress before Super Tuesday next week, when roughly a third of all delegates are awarded, so that one of them can overtake him. They seemed to be in the grip of some larger existential crisis, their understanding of their party’s dynamics challenged, their sense of its destiny upended and their dread of blowing an immeasurably consequential election profound.
Within the first 15 minutes, Mike Bloomberg attacked Sanders and then Elizabeth Warren did, and then Pete Buttigieg, Joe Biden and Tom Steyer got in on the action. Amy Klobuchar joined the fray late but with no less exuberance. Together they pressed the case that Sanders’ proposals — for health care, education and more — were too uncompromising, too disruptive and too expensive, and that he had shown an inexplicable, suspicious softness toward authoritarian regimes around the world.
Sanders, red-faced, shook his head. He did so much of that on Tuesday night it was as if he were a pioneer in neck aerobics.
But he also kept his cool and stood his ground, so that a night devoted in large part to wounding him probably left him with little more than a nick or two. He was able to say, correctly, that he beats Trump in polls that posit a hypothetical matchup of the two. He was able to cite, accurately, his impressive favorability ratings. He was also able to step back during stretches of the debate when the ugliness didn’t focus on him — when the generally foul atmosphere pitted Biden against Steyer or Warren against Bloomberg, or Klobuchar against Biden.
Nobody really looked good, and that’s another big part of what spooked me. I was watching a political party devour itself. It was all so unpleasant — and so unflattering — that candidates took to commenting on how unpleasant and unflattering it was.
The debate wasn’t just scary but sad, because when the vitriol waned, there were glimpses of just how much more prudent and better prepared than Trump all of these candidates are. There were glimmers of just how much more serious than the Republican Party the Democratic Party is.
Asked about the threat of the coronavirus, the candidates spoke authoritatively and compellingly about the Trump administration’s missteps and America’s vulnerability. They discussed science, something with which Trump has barely any relationship. They mentioned international cooperation, something for which Trump has scant respect.
But do Democrats have the antidote to that ignorance? I fervently believe that the vigor and durability of our democracy depend on it, and the debate’s rancor and noise filled me with apprehension.
Maybe there’s solace in Sanders’ final remarks, when he quoted Nelson Mandela: “Everything is impossible until it happens.” He meant that as an answer to his candidacy’s detractors. But I’ll interpret it as an assertion that Democrats will find their way through this mess.