As any follower of the Q conspiracy will tell you, why accept objective reality when ludicrous theories are so easy to believe?
Americans have always been pretty good at ignoring perfectly obvious answers in favor of convoluted hypotheses. Just look back at 2016, when Trump’s election caused “Americans across the political spectrum” to stammer and rationalize and search “desperately for any alternative explanation… to the one staring them in the face.” This explanation, of course, was that racism helped fuel Trump’s victory.
Back then, Republicans insisted that there was no bigotry within their organization, that rural white people really, truly cared about limited government, and that coded appeals to racism had not occurred for the last half-century.
Some of them still say that. But come on, once you’ve garnered the Daily Stormer’s endorsement, you pretty much know the company that you keep. Can anyone actually deny that the preferred party of white supremacists is the GOP?
Now, before we pile on the conservatives — always fun to do — let’s look at the Democratic Party.
As you know, self-avowed Democratic Socialist and progressive rabble rouser Bernie Sanders has been running roughshod over his fellow contenders for the presidential nomination. According to the Democratic Party establishment, this is Armageddon, Ragnarok, and doomsday all rolled into one.
The party’s leaders are shrieking that a Sanders nomination will be the death of us all, and they are willing to splinter their organization to prevent it.
Now, I’m not going to start an argument about Sanders’ electability. First, because as our jabbering bigoted president has proven, anybody with money can win an election. Second, because for every poll or opinion piece that says Sanders will be destroyed in November, there is another one that says he will cruise to victory. The truth is that nobody really knows if Sanders would win or not. So let’s just admit that right now.
The point, however, is there is no doubt that the progressives in the nation have just about had it with the scared, centrist, compromise-at-all-costs attitude of the Democratic Party. That shit may have worked in the 1990s, but it had worn out its welcome by the Obama years.
In fact, it is perfectly clear that Obama would have been a more effective president if he had simply abandoned his efforts to reach out to Republicans, many of whom openly despised him, and just rammed through a more aggressive agenda. Instead, Obama tried to play nice, and what he got was Merrick Garland hung out to dry and a conservative movement that is still (still!) trying to destroy the Affordable Care Act. Really, if Obama had just said, “I’m the boss,” half as authoritatively as Trump has, we might have a public option for healthcare and fewer AR-15s in the hands of psychopaths.
I guess we’ll never know.
In any case, moderate Democrats insist that they can win the next election if they just run Hillary Clinton 2.0, but not the actual Hillary because, you know, everybody kind of hated her. More than that, however, they insist that the Democratic Party’s base is all in on that strategy.
Perhaps they missed the news that “Sanders has jumped out to a double-digit national lead in the Democratic presidential contest.”
Or maybe they skipped over the fact that Sanders has “basically tied or won every single primary so far.”
Or perhaps they ignored the idea that Sanders is winning “because he’s promising to transform the way we do things in a country where the actual voting public doesn’t seem to like how things are done.”
The truth is that the Democratic base — the progressives, the young, the racially diverse — are feeling the Bern. Hell, plenty of middle-aged white liberals are down with Sanders.
The Democratic Party’s insistence that, no, its voters are secretly in love with Joe Biden or just need more time to get to know Amy Klobuchar is not based in reality.
Cramming a moderate down the throat of Democrats — when it has been made massively clear that they do not want this — is beyond arrogant. It is delusional and self-sabotaging.
Sanders is popular. His supporters are passionate. And nobody is clamoring for Mike Bloomberg to be president except for closeted Republicans.
Democratic leaders are in denial about their base, just as the GOP establishment was in denial about its base in 2016. But in both cases, the rest of us know the truth.
