President Barack Obama jokes with Sen. Bernard Sanders, Ind-Vt., and Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., right, following lunch with Senators in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, Aug. 4, 2010.
He could well be, reasons the WSJ. Although not even a bona fide Democrat, Bernie seems to have taken over the Democratic Party.
The battle for the Democratic nomination will be a long one, especially if things keep going the way they are. Will the Democratic Party be able to come up with a mainstream candidate who is actually a member of the party and who can challenge Bernie Sanders?
As the WSJ notes, primary after primary, Bernie will get his 25-30% delegate supporters, accumulating delegates on his way to the convention.
If other candidates keep dividing the other votes, he will be hard to stop, as Mr. Trump was for Republicans in 2016. Even if a single alternative emerges, Mr. Sanders won’t go down without a ferocious intra-party fight.
A Little Help from His Friends
Bernie has had a lot of help in getting this close to the White House, predominately from the “complicity of Democrats and the liberals who dominate the academy and media,” continues the WSJ.
Rather than fighting the ideas that animate him and his millennial voters, they have indulged and promoted them. They created the political environment in which he could prosper.
Bernie Riding the Democrats’ Intellectual Progression
Attack on Capitalism and Markets
Like Tony Blair in Britain, Bill Clinton’s New Democrats accommodated the economic lessons of Ronald Reagan. By the Obama Presidency, all that had changed. The left blamed markets for the 2008 panic and crash—not failed government regulation, subsidies for bad housing risks, or too loose monetary policy.
Left Wing Intolerance on Campus
From the late 1960s on, the political left flooded into the academy and rewrote the curriculum to fit its ideological fashions. American history was dogmatized, often according to the work of Howard Zinn. The Western canon was purged. Conservatives resisted but lost as liberals accommodated the revolution.
Critique of America as Irredeemably Racist
Identity politics took an especially sharp turn on race with the police shootings of 2014 and 2015. Black Lives Matter erupted and demanded that politicians bow to its concerns. No Democrat has dared to challenge it, or to defend 50 years of racial progress or the reduction in crime that has saved black lives.
Climate Change – a Religion, not a Science
A generation of apocalyptic climate education has made what was a matter of temperatures and scientific modeling into a cultural identity. No dissent is tolerated, and the solutions must be radical and immediate. Mr. Sanders was quick to sense the political possibility and grab onto the Green New Deal.
Democratic Candidates Forced to Promote Bernie’s Agenda:
- Medicare for All
- Open borders
- Free college
- College-loan forgiveness
- Ban fracking
- Eliminate ICE
- Abortions on demand
- Voting rights for prisoners
- National rent control
- Phase out nuclear energy
- Reparations for slavery
- Higher taxes on the rich.
“Socialists like Sanders and other extreme elements once on the fringe have taken over the mainstream with dire implications for 2020 and beyond,” warns Bill Thomas in American Greatness.
Sanders Fracturing the Democratic Party?
Winning the nomination likely would be the last straw for millions of Democrats still smart enough to be frightened by the thought of a Sanders’ economy.
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