Being a politically progressive college professor who isn’t a passenger on the Bernie Sanders Express can be uncomfortable at times. Lucky for me, I’m a political science professor, which means that I have plenty of scholarly company, particularly among my fellow political scientists who study American politics. The reason for the disparity is, in my opinion, not particularly puzzling. Bernie’s approach to running for president is transparently out of step with reality in two important ways. First, it ignores the legal, structural, and institutional barriers to the fulfillment of his campaign promises. And second, it justifies this willful ignorance of the workings of our political system with a very serious over-estimation of support among likely voters.
The disconnect between Bernie’s promises and the rules of American elections and public policy making is flatly denied by his supporters who dismiss such concerns as pearl clutching or intentional sabotage by those trying to deceive voters. Even when Sanders himself accidentally highlights the inconsistency between his revolutionary campaign promises and his understanding of how a bill becomes a law, as he did recently by voicing support for the Senate filibuster, his supporters are unmoved.
Sanders supporters are also willfully blind to public opinion data that contradicts their faith-based conviction that “if they build it, voters will come.” When faced with data showing the very real limits of his appeal to likely voters, Sanders supporters in 2016 brandished crowd sizes, fundraising totals, and even methodologically unsound and/or de-contextualized polling numbers. Supporters were even fed a steady online diet of outright lies by popular progressive bloggers like H.A. Goodman and Seth Abramson, two propagandists that could make a Russian bot blush. To this day, most Sanders supporters believe he came close to beating Hillary Clinton and would have won if it weren’t for the DNC rigging the process. These falsehoods undoubtedly contributed to the lower Democratic turnout on Election Day that gave Trump the presidency, another reality Bernie’s supporters deny with the creativity of a “fantasy novelist-turned-political writer.”
There is no shortage of good-faith efforts to explain to Bernie’s supporters the errors of their ways. It seems that evidence and argument are no match for the power of motivated or identity-protective cognition, both of which are persistently nurtured through the daily online dissemination of reassuring pro-Sanders spin. Enter an excellent NYTimes.com piece written by Nate Cohn and Kevin Quealy that brilliantly exposes the gulf between the progressives who dominate social media and the “actual Democratic electorate,” an insight that will surely fall on deaf ears among Bernie Sanders’ supporters. Though they traffic in their own version of “shock and awe” Sanders supporters certainly haven’t been receptive to sharper efforts to expose their folly either. Dana Milbank’s recent column, which made a very reasonable case that Sanders’ approach is not as unlike Trump’s as he and his supporters imagine, was surely tossed in the “fake news” pile at Bernie Sanders HQ. Polling in the wake of Joe Biden’s “inappropriate touching” revelations even provided evidence that average Democratic voters are not nearly as progressive as Sanders and company want us to believe. Not even Barack Obama’s recently expressed concern that progressive demands for purity in the Democratic Party are damaging the chances of defeating Trump and the GOP at the polls has shaken the faith of Sanders’ supporters that they have votes.
The possibility that the Democrats could do to their party in 2020 what Republicans did to theirs in 2016 is VERY real but the progressive perpetrators show no signs of being any more self-reflexive than the conservative evangelicals who almost unimaginably continue to claim that God is a Trump supporter. I’m convinced that many progressives are willing to fight extremism with extremism, but what these folks don’t realize is that extremism works much better for those trying to prevent progress than it does for those trying to make progress. Extremism is an effective method of obstruction and destruction, and maybe even resistance, but it cannot be effectively marshaled in the service of comprehensive political reform in a political system explicitly designed to prevent just that.
Last summer Ed Kilgore argued persuasively that effort to paint Democrats as extremists, while “pretty accurate…in the late autumn of 2016” had since become just a right wing ploy to divide Democrats. Kilgore was clearly correct that Republican use of the “Democrats are in disarray” narrative is entirely divorced from any honest assessments of reality, however, I don’t think Democrats should wait until the “late autumn” of 2020 to demand honest assessments of Bernie Sanders’ campaign. Kilgore quoted Will Rodgers as follows: “The difference between a Republican and a Democrat is the Democrat is a cannibal. They have to live off each other, while the Republicans, why, they live off the Democrats.” Democrats cannot let what’s right about Sanders’ progressive values and goals lull them into doing the Republicans’ electoral dirty work for them…again.