By Rich Lowry
Friday, February 14, 2020
The Democratic Party could soon be taken over by a
leftist who has never formally been a member.
If it’s any consolation to Democrats, it’s a version of
the same wrenching dislocation that has beset the center-left throughout the
Western world.
One reason Bernie Sanders’ winning the Democratic
nomination is entirely imaginable is that it wouldn’t be a freakish occurrence
outside the experience of other advanced democracies, but instead, entirely
consistent with the travails of traditional center-left parties from France to
Sweden.
Seen from a broader perspective, Sanders doesn’t
represent a revolution so much as a lagging indicator — indeed, the British
Labour Party has already been there, done that.
Across the European landscape, center-left parties have
foundered in recent years, often torn apart by cross currents over immigration
and by tensions between socially progressive urbanites and traditionalist
working-class voters.
“As social democratic parties declined due to the weight
of structural changes,” Yascha Mounk wrote in a piece last year in Democracy:
A Journal of Ideas, “a new crop of left-wing politicians argued that their
troubles were owed to the embrace of a more moderate (or ‘neoliberal’) set of
policies.” What was necessary was “an unabashed emphasis on the economic
interests of the working class, coupled with the full-throated promise of
social revolution.”
Sound familiar? Sanders bears the closest resemblance to
his equally aged and disheveled ideological cousin from the United Kingdom,
Jeremy Corbyn.
Corbyn crashed the gates of the Labour Party as,
essentially, an outsider. He rose on the strength of a left-wing grassroots
movement and won Labour’s leadership contest in 2015, thanks to newcomers who
could vote in such a contest for the first time. An unlikely icon for younger
voters, he drew enormous crowds and, unavoidably himself, had a distinctive
charm for his supporters.
Like Sanders, he also had a history of sympathy for
left-wing thugs, hostility toward Western power, a motley collection of kooky
allies, and an utterly fantastical domestic program.
After losing two elections, Corbyn is back in the dustbin
of history, while Brother Sanders may be tracing his ascent on a larger scale.
A major commonality with the European experience is young
voters who are disenchanted with the institutions of Western capitalism,
worried about affording a house and paying off student debt. They have no
experience with or attachment to old party loyalties and are drawn to
exhilaratingly radical and simple ideas.
If Sanders does indeed win the nomination, these kids who
aren’t all right will be the shock troops of his revolution. In New Hampshire,
Sanders crushed among young voters, winning an outlandish 51 percent of voters
ages 18 to 29 and a solid 36 percent of voters ages 30 to 44. (If there were no
Democrats over the age of 45, Sanders would sweep all before him.)
These kinds of voters are much more bonded to Sanders
than to the Democratic Party — a poll a couple of weeks ago found that only 53
percent of Sanders’s supporters said they’d definitely back the Democratic
nominee if it’s not Bernie.
The two political parties are such towering edifices of
American civic life that they aren’t going to dwindle away to nothing in one
election the way, say, France’s Socialists did a couple of years ago. Instead,
the sign of their relative decline is that they are vulnerable to a takeover by
political entrepreneurs bringing along their own personal political movements.
This obviously happened to Republicans with the rise of
Donald Trump in 2016. Tellingly, the main vehicle opposing Sanders in the
Democratic nomination battle in 2020 could end up being Mike Bloomberg, another
(until recently) non-Democrat with the support of his own de facto private
political party via his prodigious bank account.
That he may prove the only way for the American
center-left to avoid the fate of its international counterparts is a sign of
its desperation, not its vitality.
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