Shut Up, Bernie

So, last week Bernie Sanders said some things. Things like this:

But the bottom line is that when only half of the American people have participated in the political process, when some of the larger states in this country, people in those states have not yet been able to voice their opinion on who should be the Democratic nominee, I think it's absurd for anybody to suggest that those people not have a right to cast a vote. 

And like this:

We think if we come into the convention in July in Philadelphia, having won a whole lot of delegates, having a whole lot of momentum behind us, and most importantly perhaps being the candidate who is most likely to defeat Donald Trump, we think that some of these super delegates who have now supported Hillary Clinton can come over to us. Rachel, in almost every poll, not every poll, but almost every national matchup poll between Sanders and Trump, Clinton and Trump, we do better than Hillary Clinton and sometimes by large numbers. We get a lot more of the independent vote than she gets. And, frankly and very honestly, I think I am a stronger candidate to defeat Trump than Secretary Clinton is and I think many secretary -- many of the super delegates understand that.

 Okay, so, a few thoughts.


That first thing he says is absolutely right. If he wants to stay in the race until the last state has voted, that is entirely within his rights. Hillary Clinton sure can't complain; she did the same exact thing to Barack Obama eight years ago.

That precedent, though... doesn't really support that other thing Bernie said. Because, yes, Hillary stayed in the race until the last state had voted. And then she conceded. And she didn't just concede. She didn't just free her superdelegates to vote for Obama. She gave a powerful and passionate speech about how important it was for all her supporters to go out and support Obama with as much fervor as they had shown for her. She did all of this, one can conjecture, for a few reasons: because she believed in the democratic process and accepted that she had lost, because she understood that a bitterly contested convention in which the person who won the votes of the party faithful was robbed of the nomination by shadowy elite figures would damage the party, and because she understood that the cause which she and Obama both served was more important than her own personal ambition.

Bernie sure sounds like he doesn't plan to give the speech Hillary gave eight years ago. And if that's true, and if he follows through with his supposed plan to fight right up until the convention, then I think the jury will have come in on his campaign, and it will find him guilty. And not just because of the damage he might do to the Democratic Party and, therefore, to the cause of the policies that he supports. No, it's because he would have, ultimately, betrayed the same kind of contempt for the will of the people that everyone accuses Hillary of. Bernie supporters have been talking for months about how awful it would be if the superdelegates gave Hillary the nomination even though Bernie had won the primaries. And now Bernie wants to do the exact same thing! But, of course, this is justified, because Bernie is a Good Guy, and Hillary isn't.

I think this is part of what troubles me about the rhetoric of revolution, even of political revolution. It seems to have no room for the idea that you can lose, and that your loss can be legitimate. People have said, about our current era of intense polarization and so-called "negative partisanship," that one consequence is that people naturally come to view the other side's success in apocalyptic terms, terms which potentially justify extraconstitutional resistance. I'd like to say that this is an asymmetric phenomenon, that when liberals deemed George Bush an illegitimate President they had good reason for it in that he wasn't actually elected that first time. But that's not really the point here.

Rather, it's that Bernie seems to be taking this idea of delegitimating the enemy, and therefore refusing to accept the verdict of democracy, to his intraparty fight. Apparently Hillary Clinton is now worth resisting even to the point of getting a democratic electoral outcome overturned. Of course, he frames this as being about his superior strength in the general election, but I doubt that's the whole of it. He's certainly done plenty of slyly suggesting that Hillary is corrupt and basically in the pocket of all the same industries he (rightly) casts as villain. And now, with no apparent sense of irony, he's embracing a tactic that his own supporters have (rightly) castigated as undemocratic--and note that, in any universe where the superdelegates did hand the nomination to Clinton, as Bernie supporters (needlessly, I think) feared, I know beyond a reasonable doubt that they would list electability as their prime motive in doing so.

Now, on some level I think that what's really going on here is that Bernie got bit by the ambition bug a little while back. When I watched his speech announcing his campaign last summer, I thought "well, there's a man who knows he's never going to be President, and is totally fine with that." Then his campaign went better than anyone could possibly have expected, and I get the sense that at some point in the past few months, the thought occurred to him, hey, I could win this thing. I could win it all. I could be President. And he liked the sound of that. And so we've seen him start to go negative a little more overtly, and now it has come to this. To the candidate of pure integrity openly contemplating a back-room deal with party elites to steal the nomination.

I doubt he'll actually make a serious effort at this strategy. For one thing, I think he's gonna lose a whole bunch of states he wants to win over the next few months; a poll just the other day has Clinton up in Wisconsin. For another, I'm sure he would be told well in advance of the convention that this strategy was totally hopeless. But, I dunno... it seems like, in the twilight of his campaign, he's choosing to go out ugly. At a time when he should be ramping down his criticism of Clinton to let her focus on the general election, he's going more negative, not less. And I'm starting to worry, basically for the first time, that after California, New Jersey, and Washington DC have voted and the primaries are over, when the time has come for him to perform the vitally important task of convincing his supporters to support the woman so many of them have been demonizing this past year, he won't do it. That, despite his frequent declarations that Hillary on her worst day is far better than any of the Republican candidates on their best days, he'll follow the voice of disappointed ambition and begin down the Path of Nader.

I really hope not. And until very recently I really didn't think he would. But then he goes and says something like this, and it just makes you wonder.