The Bernie-or-Busters In: Let’s Get Pretentious!

The latest in Salon‘s inexhaustible parade of atrocious “President Trump is the key to progressive change in America” columns achieves a pretension-to-achievement ratio that will be hard to match (although, Christ, I’m sure somewhere there’s a recent prep school graduate at his parents’ summer home in Connecticut who will try to be up to the challenge.) Most of it is a pompous non-sequitur about the history of advertising — which, you may have noticed, is part of political campaigns. It’s the kind of quarter-assed theory that explains everything and therefore nothing about politics, and does not merit any engagement. Towards the end, however, is a graf that is almost elegant in how comprehensively it refutes itself:

Bernie or Bust is no doubt a foolhardy and extreme position, not least because it is bound to create all kinds of bad PR for the reformist cause.

This is really a remarkable admission. One thing that always gets left out of how awesome it would be to Heighten the Contradictions is that if you successfully throw an election you will (correctly!) be held in contempt by the rest of the political coalition. If you had a list of the most influential people in American politics in 2016, Ralph Nader would be lucky to crack the top 1,000. So while the terrible consequences of a Trump presidency are a sufficient reason to reject Bernie-or-Bustism, there’s also the fact that it makes absolutely no sense on its own terms. Nothing would do more to torpedo the influence of Sanders and his supporters within the Democratic Party than for a subset of nitwits to produce a presidency that is a world-historical catastrophe, a point Sanders himself understands perfectly well.

Out of context, this would seem a perfect argument against Bernie-or-Bustism, but then we get back to the insanity:

In the big picture, however, it looks like our best chance—perhaps our only chance—to deliver a long awaited verdict on a disastrous New Democrat agenda responsible in part for every bad decision from the Iraq Resolution to Citizens United.

Hey, if President Donald Trump and a median Supreme Court Justice who would have had to turn to his left to see Antonin Scalia is the price that needs to be paid to DELIVER A VERDICT, it’s worth paying! The fact that it would make the left flank of the Democratic Party significantly less influential going forward makes it an even better idea! I am not a crackpot! And what’s even better is that, given quite a number of Bill Clinton-era compromises he can choose from, his first example is a Republican war with superfluous Democratic support and his second example is a Supreme Court decision that zero Supreme Court justices nominated by a Democratic president have ever supported. The fact that a Trump presidency would probably stick us with it for decades while a Clinton presidency would likely lead to it being narrowed our overruled outright is surely central to his point.

There’s no way of writing a good Bernie-or-Bust argument because the position is absolutely indefensible, and yet somehow every one Salon publishes is even worse than it even needs to be. I mean, next time, when citing bad New Democrat policies use welfare reform and the deregulation of the financial industry. You’re welcome!

…and I really shouldn’t neglect this:

There is ample evidence that voters in 2016 demand a political system that appeals to their rational judgment, not one that preys on the unconscious.

Yes, that it certainly the lesson of an election year in which one major party nominates Donald Trump as their candidate for president.