The Sanders Campaign Is Becoming A Problem

When Bernie Sanders announced his campaign for President, I thought, okay, this could do some good. Put some more aggressively left-wing issues on the agenda, help move the party, and presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton, in a more liberal direction, expand the Overton window, etc. But there's always been a lurking danger that it would become something else, that it would start stoking liberal dissatisfaction with the Democrats and with Hillary, in a way that would imperil our chances of holding the White House.

Well, I'm increasingly feeling like his campaign is turning into that more dangerous version. And this "HillarySoProgressive" thing is perhaps the most extreme example of it. This all started when Bernie and Hillary got into a Twitter war yesterday that started with Sanders (or his campaign staff, not actually sure which) saying that "You can be a moderate. You can be a progressive. But you cannot be a moderate and a progressive," and then proceeded to rattle off various un-progressive things Hillary's done: raising money from Wall St., taking a long time before coming out against the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Keystone pipeline, and supporting the Iraq war. Hillary (or her staff, probably) shot back, with various progressive things Hillary has done, and with repeatedly pointing out Sanders' less-than-pure history on gun control. Now various Sanders supporters have started this HillarySoProgressive hashtag basically mocking the idea that she's any sort of liberal. (Seriously, does no one say "liberal" anymore?) The tweets this Vox discussion of the tag references bring up, in total, the fact that Clinton takes donations from Wall St., the fact that she has, from time to time, been seen in the company of Wall St. executives, that she does not support reinstating Glass-Steagall, and her 2004 opposition to gay marriage. Oh, and also a fake Clinton/Gore '92 bumper sticker design featuring the Confederate flag.

The word that keeps coming to my mind to describe all of this is "disgusting." And not just because of the Tea Party-esque obsession with absolute purity (while, of course, excusing their own candidate's extreme lack of purity on the gun control issue), the strict and exclusive concept of the "progressive" movement, the suggestion that anyone who doesn't agree with them on every single issue is the enemy. It's all of that, too, of course; some of this stuff almost feels like it has an "are you now, or have you ever been, a capitalist?" feel to it.

But also, like... these are remarkably petty things to excommunicate someone from your movement over, aren't they? Bernie's remarks about how she took her time coming out against TPP and Keystone feel particularly silly, to me. I actually know several very left-wing people who thought both of those issues were in fact somewhat complicated, and that the case against each was overstated. And even beside that, like, since when is taking your time to think something over a grievous sin? Is it that one must not only have the right positions but also take all of them quickly enough, or you're out of the movement? That's insane, isn't it?

As of course is this persistent accusation of massive corruption on Hillary's part, which of course is never explicitly stated as such, because that would be "going negative" and "dirty politics," but that's what it is.

Add it all up and I feel like this campaign is becoming so toxic that it's running a real risk of doing serious damage to the Democratic Party and to the liberal cause going forward. It's essentially becoming a larger-scale version of Nader 2000, which, like, do the people supporting Bernie remember how that went? Do they remember George Bush? Have they inspected Marco Rubio's platform? As Matt Yglesias said the other day, it's basically the platform for those who think the problem with the Bush Administration is that we should've tried bigger tax cuts and more wars. In the face of this, do you really want to set up a Spanish Inquisition to root out every last little trace of heresy within the progressive movement?

I'm still hopeful that this can end well, but I'm increasingly unsure that it will. Sanders himself seems to have been bitten by the ambition bug, maybe for the first time in his life, and he's got a lot of work ahead of him repairing the damage he's been causing. When he loses, and he will lose, he better take a page out of Hillary's playbook and give her one hell of a ringing endorsement.