Dear Bernie Supporters,
I somehow suspect that many of you are too young to have voted for George McGovern. I voted for him in 1972. I was 19-years-old and it was my very first vote for president. I remember standing in line to vote on election day -- in my very liberal precinct outside Boulder -- and working to urge people standing in line with me to vote for George, and being advised by an older and wiser stranger that this was not appropriate. I had devoted untold hours to the campaign and despite the polls thought we might win. George was just so obviously right on the issues, despite some embarrassing campaign bloopers, and Richard Nixon was just as obviously (Watergate!) a crook.
Of course, the entire election season had been deeply disturbing, what with Ted Kennedy flaming out over Chappaquiddick. If not for Chappaquiddick, Teddy would have been our nominee, and might have beat Nixon, and how different would the world look today? (Never mind how different the world would look today if Robert Kennedy had not been assassinated four years earlier.) And then establishment candidate Ed Muskie got too emotional at a press conference, allegedly crying, becoming instantly "unelectable," and the Dems did what Dems do, coalescing around the impossible dream of a truer, more liberal candidate.
And so we rallied around George, despite his awkwardness, despite his lack of political sophistication, despite his lack of establishment support. In fact, we loved him precisely because of those qualities, which were not the candidate's bugs but his features. Yes! To be an insurgent feels so damned good. We were so enthusiastic that we convinced each other that George really could, really would win. But the polls were right and he won one state, Massachusetts. Nixon won 49 states. George also won my precinct, handily, as I recall, which is precisely why I was able to convince myself that those of us who supported him were not few in number, and maybe we were even a national majority, because all of my friends and neighbors felt precisely the same way that I did.
If you are with me so far, you are cordially invited to continue below:
Friends, history can repeat itself. If Bernie wins the Democratic nomination, I am afraid that he will win one state in the general election, Vermont, even if his opponent is Donald Trump. I can already hear your counter-arguments. That 2016 is not 1972, that we are a more liberal country than we were then, that Bernie is not George, that the Donald is not Nixon. Just look at Bernie's momentum! Yes, he will win many of your precincts, even if you are in Texas or Alabama, I will grant you that. Twenty percent of America is still a lot of people, after all, and forty percent is even more people. But those large numbers of people can't win an election.
There is a great and overpowering desire to vote your heart, not your head. Yes, Bernie is the truer progressive. Yes, there are reasons for concern about Hillary. But Hillary can win if we nominate her. Bernie is just much too easy for the Republicans and the Kochs to caricature. And we can be absolutely sure that they will do it.
American history is full of progressive movements and progressive candidates that crash up against the harsh reality of the national myth that we are built of rugged individualism and self-determination, which makes "socialism" anathema. There is no reason to believe that Bernie can change this 250-year-old meta-narrative.
All of us would agree that times are different than they were in 1972, primarily in that the stakes are larger, which is all the more reason why we can't afford to vote our sentiments. I would submit that the world simply cannot survive another President Bush, much less President Walker, President Cruz or the truly unthinkable, President Trump. But President Hillary Clinton will almost certainly continue on the path that President Barack Obama has put us on, bending the arc in the right direction on so many issues.
Bending the moral arc of the universe may well seem like too little, too late, given the urgencies of the historical moment. But given the alternatives, let us vote and organize and campaign with our heads and support Hillary for President. Let us bend, not break.