Republicans haven't had to deal with anyone remotely like Bernie Sanders on a national level in a long, long time. Now, from out of virtually nowhere it must seem to them, he might be their opponent in the upcoming Presidential election, and possibly the POTUS they must welcome into Congress to deliver the next State of the Union Address. Conventional wisdom dictates that any agenda that a President Sanders might propose will be Dead On Arrival in any chamber controlled by the GOP. Unless, that is, Sanders sees the pragmatic light, converts, and bows down to establishment sanctioned incrementalism. Conventional wisdom holds that Hillary Clinton, rather than Bernie Sanders, is realistic enough to actually get some things done. Conventional wisdom has been having a tough slog of it this year though, and it's beginning to show its age.
Some say insanity is repeating the exact same thing and expecting a different result. What is it called though to keep advancing the exact same game plan expecting it to produce favorable results ad infinitum? Foolish comes to mind, and that in a nut shell is the Republican blind spot, mirrored by most of the media. The shifting sands of the American electorate are undermining a conventional wisdom built on the ramparts of a prior generation's political reality. Blinded by the past, few can see what now is coming.
It used to go without saying by the chattering head class, and by Hillary Clinton herself, that Bernie Sanders is far too extreme to govern as President effectively, and that Americans want nothing to do with socialism, democratic or otherwise. Now it seems those assertions can no longer afford to go unspoken, not by those who want for them to be believed anyway. Now they are repeatedly given full voice, by a chorus of well connected sources, perhaps to drown out the stirring of some distant dormant memories.
America hasn't experienced as long a period of prolonged economic anxieties as this current one since the Great Depression, and that's when President Roosevelt instituted an economic program far to the left of anything Senator Sanders has campaigned on. Thirty years later Lyndon Baines Johnson, in many ways, governed to the left of what Bernie Sanders now proposes. But at the height of the Reagan years, most Democrats turned tail and ran away from ideological tags any further left than “moderate”, “Liberal” soon was relegating to a status not so dissimilar from “pinko” in the American political lexicon.
Actually liberal eventually grew to be more of a slur than pinko had ever been since the fifties. There were several reasons for that, some more obvious than others. For one thing pinko was dated – the Kennedy and Johnson presidencies cast the McCarthy era in a distinctly negative retro light – despite the ongoing efforts of the John Birch Society and their fellow travelers. Then there was the Vietnam War which the America public ultimately turned staunchly against. Turns out all those young pinko protesters were right bout that all along, and many of those who the Right sought to tar as pinkos elicited genuine sympathy and support from broad segments of the public that the Republican Party needed to court.
Pinkos fought to “Ban the Bomb”, but they weren't exactly out of step in being terrified at the prospect of a nuclear war. The Cuban Missile Crisis proved that point. Pinkos also worked hard for Labor rights at a time when Unions were still strong and respected by many blue collar workers, back when there were a lot of blue collar workers benefiting from Unions. Continuing to slander the American Democratic Left as “pinkos” failed to adequately further the revised Class War narrative that the Republican Party began drafting, as it moved to secure their eagerly anticipated “New Republican Majority”. “Liberals” turned out to be a better foil for that purpose. Unlike steel workers, liberals were said to work in ivory towers. They didn't wear hard hats, how could they? Liberal intellectuals were pointy headed. They weren't real Americans.
Soon the Right began railing against Latte Liberals and Limousine Liberals and all the rest of the so called Liberal Elites – derided for living in their own detached reality. In a stroke of Machiavellian genius Liberals, to hear Republicans describe them, became the real architects of class warfare, engineering a massive redistribution of wealth – from the Middle Class to the Poor. Tax and Spend Liberals, they claimed, were handing over the hard earned wages of America's Middle Class to shiftless lazy poor folks so the latter could live like Welfare Queens on other people's dimes. And why would liberals steel from hard working Americans like that? Because ordinary bleeding heart liberal voters were conned by unscrupulous limousine liberal politicians into letting them buy the votes they needed to entrench themselves in office by giving away “free stuff” - paid for by struggling tax payers to people who refuse to lift a finger to help themselves.
As “Liberal” became a toxic word Democrats offered very little resistance. In time some started trying to dodge that bullet by re-branding themselves as progressives instead. And while political scientists can draw some honest distinctions between those terms – for many of those who began calling themselves progressive it was more of a tacit acknowledgment that they couldn't stomach the politically risk being labeled as a liberal. Recently though the tide began to turn as all tides are want to do. In a time honored youth contrarian dance – buttressed by critical thinking, millennial voters began shedding the negative connotations assigned to the word “liberal”. And then along came 74 year old Bernie Sanders, self identified as a Democratic Socialist, running to become President.
“Socialist” had for decades been reserved by the Republican Party as their EXTRA STRENTH version of “Liberal”. They long suggested that behind any good liberal, somewhere, that is who you will find; pulling strings, undermining our precious freedoms. Problem was they were hard pressed to ever produce any actual socialists in American national electoral politics, aside from one obscure congressman from the small state of Vermont who even the rabid right understood failed miserably to fit their casting call for a plausible left wing boogyman. So finally, out of an abundance of caustic exuberance, they took to calling the 44th President of the United States, Barack Obama, a “Socialist”.
Here is where the plot begins to thicken, and the past begins to come back to bite the Republicans in the ass. For starters it turns out that Barack Obama is a fairly popular president who was handily elected to a second term in office. When our financial system cratered he didn't nationalize the banks, and the stock market rebounded fully from the pit it was mired in when Obama first took office. Is that how an American socialist acts when one finally comes into power? How scary is that? And if Obama isn't really a socialist then who the hell is, and what is it exactly that he or she stands for? And then along came Bernie, 74 year old Democratic Socialist running for President, answering the question and redefining American politics in the process.
One thing's clear, Bernie doesn't come across as a limousine liberal, and he's absolutely no one's idea of an elitist. Equally significant, he doesn't flinch at being called liberal. Instead of running he digs in, breaking through the labels and going for the substance. After decades of Democrats twisting themselves into knots avoiding being called leftist, Bernie Sanders lays out his “leftist agenda” and says, “What's wrong with that?” And then he turns the tables on right wing propaganda and exposes real class warfare in America, except that it isn't the poor stealing from the middle class, it's the super rich stealing from virtually all of us. What Bernie says rings true to folks because, unlike Reagan’s 1980's fantasy, it's not Morning in America, and this time everybody knows it.
The vaulted supposedly impregnable Republican line of defense spanning decades now could be called 50 shades of red baiting. It is their hardened battle ready position, it is their Maginot Line; so formidable, so unyielding, so entrenched - and so built on lessons learned during previous eras of combat. Like concrete embedded cannons, it became an obsolete. It had trended that way for years, but obscured by conventional wisdom and the fact that Democrat still seemed intimidated by it, few really noticed until somebody finally called the question; Whose side are you on?
Bernie Sanders may literally be a Democratic Socialist but his appeal is to economic populism. Populists by nature occupy an opposite pole from establishment privileged elites. Populism ferments at the base of a society and is often a potent force against those seen as opposing the interests of the vast majority. Not all populism is economic at root: some is religious, some is cultural, some is xenophobic. During the Great Depression under FDR, the Democratic Party aligned firmly with economic populism. During the late 1960's, under Richard Nixon, Republicans began to channel populism's darker sides. By the 1980's our Middle Class began to ebb, and ramped up cultural wars were needed to eclipse any attention paid to an ongoing class war that consolidated the wealth of our nation into the hands of a concentrated oligarchy.
Throughout this process the Democratic Party was defanged by the perceived need of it's political class to court political and personal sustenance directly from the hands of the wealthy donor class. It is difficult to expose thievery while your hands are outstretched to the robbers for your stipend. The political rules were tacitly set: Cultural warfare and debates over social issues were allowable, challenging an economic system rigged to enhance a growing oligarchy was not. Over time the strain of economic populism was slowly bred out of National Democrats through the process of financial selection. Then along came Bernie Sanders.
What the Right has been slow to wake up to is that populism is a double edged sword, it's been so long since it has effectively been wielded against them they've almost forgotten what that looks like when it happens. In the face of an economic populist tide, red baiting labels tossed at a populist land with the impact of confetti. They once were all thrown at FDR also, but with America then caught in the teeth of the Great Depression they did not hold any bite. Not when it was obvious to average Americans who exactly was on their side.
It's been a long time since the Democratic Party offered a full throated defense of progressive taxation, but there once was a time when a clear majority of Americans understood the concept well and adamantly supported it, and Democrats proudly embraced it. That support slowly eroded as generations of Democratic leaders, increasingly beholden to large monied interests, obediently held their tongues while right wing activists like Grover Norquist pushed their goal “to shrink government to the size where we can drown it in a bathtub.”
It is a myth that Americans only care about lowering their taxes: We just don't want to pay more than our fair share, and we want our taxes spent in sensible ways that produce tangible benefits to society. When a bridge is in danger of collapsing most folks are willing to raise money to replace it. The right created the strawman of “tax and spend liberals who don't really care about people like you”. Using that for cover, at the behest of an emboldened oligarchy, Republicans have systematical rolled back progressive taxation and expanded tax loopholes for the super wealthy in the largest government engineered transfer of wealth in American history. The rich are still getting richer and the America Dream is dead. It should be no surprise then that more Americans are getting angry, and anger is the fuel that allows populism to grow,
Yes, there are few so blind as those who refuse to see. All last summer conventional wisdom didn't see Bernie Sanders coming, not even when tens of thousands of Americans repeatedly came out for rallies to see him speak in person. The media only had eyes for Trump, viewing him then mostly as entertainment, a passing summer fad. But Donald Trump wasn't just a fad, and Bernie Sanders wasn't just a fringe candidate, dispute conventional wisdom's script. Precisely because Sanders represents the greater threat to the establishment, though, they have been slowest to recognize him for who he is.
Even the act of publicly recognizing Bernie Sanders increases his threat to the staus quo. Despite the best efforts of those who cynically try to channel it, social populism can't be inoculated against incursions by economic strains. The Middle Class is shrinking, and most Americans feel insecure about their futures. Bernie Sanders is an unvarnished truth teller, not a slick spin doctor, and that has broad populist appeal. The establishment keeps underestimating Sanders, and no doubt it will start the same if he is elected as our next President.
But there are good reasons why some of Bernie's biggest fans are in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom, the poorest and most conservative part of the state. There are reasons too why Bernie Sanders polls so strongly among Independents now nationally. And it's telling that he has the highest favorability ratings of anyone running for President on either side of the partisan divide, and that so many Trump supporter admit that they “kind of like Bernie too.”
It doesn't surprise me that some Republican strategists think Hillary Clinton would be harder to defeat than Bernie Sanders. They are gauging the traffic ahead by staring at a rear view mirror. Should a President Sanders stand next year to deliver his agenda for America before a Congress partially or fully controlled by Republicans, I suspect conventional wisdom will still be in denial of what would happen next.
The Republican Party has lost control of its populist base, and it keeps scrambling to keep up with them. When President Bernie Sanders addresses the Republicans gathered in Congress, he will be talking over their heads directly to the American people, including those in the Republican populist base. Like with no Democrat before him in recent history, many struggling members of the Republican base will know exactly whose side President Sanders is on. It won't be with the super rich. It won't be with the Wall Street Banks and hedge fund managers. It won't be with the multinational corporations who are outsourcing all of our children's future. Blinded by the recent past, few can see what now is coming, but average Americans are responding to an honest leader who is truly fighting on their side.