No, Not Sanders, Not Ever

South Carolina votes in its Democrat primary this weekend and Virginia and numerous other states vote on Tuesday in so-called Super Tuesday.  I greatly fear Democrats may commit political suicide in terms of the general election in November if Bernie Sanders is not stopped. Meanwhile, if by some fluke he were to defeat Donald Trump, I fear the populism of rage that Sanders represents.  He and his supporters are the far left version of Donald Trump and his MAGA followers: compromise is impossible and those who disagree are the enemy and to be destroyed. Neither far right or far left represent how a pluralistic democracy should function. And then there is Sanders' disturbing praise for brutal communist regimes that destroyed countless lives and literally murdered political and class opponents. A column in the New York Times looks at what can only be viewed as a moral flaw and disturbing harbinger of what a Sanders regime unleashed might look like. I will vote on Tuesday and I assure you, it will not be for Sanders.  Here are highlights from the Times: 

A few months ago, I wrote a column saying I would vote for Elizabeth Warren over Donald Trump. I may not agree with some of her policies, but culture is more important than politics. She does not spread moral rot the way Trump does.

Now I have to decide if I’d support Bernie Sanders over Trump.

We all start from personal experience. I covered the Soviet Union in its final decrepit years. The Soviet and allied regimes had already slaughtered 20 million people through things like mass executions and intentional famines. Those regimes were slave states. They enslaved whole peoples and took away the right to say what they wanted, live where they wanted and harvest the fruits of their labor.

And yet every day we find more old quotes from Sanders apologizing for this sort of slave regime, whether in the Soviet Union, Cuba or Nicaragua. He excused the Nicaraguan communists when they took away the civil liberties of their citizens. He’s still making excuses for Castro.

To sympathize with these revolutions in the 1920s was acceptable, given their original high ideals. To do so after the Hitler-Stalin pact, or in the 1950s, is appalling. To do so in the 1980s is morally unfathomable. I say all this not to cancel Sanders for past misjudgments. I say all this because the intellectual suppositions that led him to embrace these views still guide his thinking today. I’ve just watched populism destroy traditional conservatism in the G.O.P. I’m here to tell you that Bernie Sanders is not a liberal Democrat. He’s what replaces liberal Democrats.

Traditional liberalism traces its intellectual roots to John Stuart Mill, John Locke, the Social Gospel movement and the New Deal. This liberalism believes in gaining power the traditional way: building coalitions, working within the constitutional system and crafting the sort of compromises you need in a complex, pluralistic society.

Populists like Sanders speak as if the whole system is irredeemably corrupt. Sanders was a useless House member and has been a marginal senator because he doesn’t operate within this system or believe in this theory of change.

He believes in revolutionary mass mobilization and, once an election has been won, rule by majoritarian domination. This is how populists of left and right are ruling all over the world, and it is exactly what our founders feared most and tried hard to prevent.

Liberalism celebrates certain values: reasonableness, conversation, compassion, tolerance, intellectual humility and optimism. Liberalism is horrified by cruelty. Sanders’s leadership style embodies the populist values, which are different: rage, bitter and relentless polarization, a demand for ideological purity among your friends and incessant hatred for your supposed foes.

A liberal leader confronts new facts and changes his or her mind. A populist leader cannot because the omniscience of the charismatic headman can never be doubted. A liberal sees shades of gray. For a populist reality is white or black, friend or enemy. Facts that don’t fit the dogma are ignored.

A liberal sees inequality and tries to reduce it. A populist sees remorseless class war and believes in concentrated power to crush the enemy. Sanders is running on a $60 trillion spending agenda that would double the size of the federal government. It would represent the greatest concentration of power in the Washington elite in American history.

These days, Sanders masquerades as something less revolutionary than he really is. He claims to be nothing more than the continuation of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. He is 5 percent right and 95 percent wrong.

Sanders also claims he’s just trying to import the Scandinavian model, which is believable if you know nothing about Scandinavia or what Sanders is proposing. Those countries do have generous welfare states, but they can afford them because they understand how free market capitalism works, with fewer regulations on business creation and free trade.

There is a specter haunting the world — corrosive populisms of right and left. These populisms grow out of real problems but are the wrong answers to them.

I’ll cast my lot with democratic liberalism. The system needs reform. But I just can’t pull the lever for either of the two populisms threatening to tear it down.

My fear is that if Sanders is the Democrat nominee, many will simply not vote.  They may hate Trump yet see Sanders as a leftist version of what they hate in Trump.  And by not voting, they help assure Trump's reelection.  I pray Democrats wake up before it is too late. 

A Sanders Nomination Would Threaten Reelection For Luria and Spanberger

Three Virginia Democrats who could lose
their seats if Sanders wins the 2020 nomination.

In 2018 Democrats picked up three (3) congressional seats in moderate districts where the Democrat candidates ran as moderates and disavowed more extreme positions of the far left in the Party.  Now, with the potential of a Bernie Sanders nomination, all three House members are seeing their prospects for reelection threatened by the potential of a radioactive top of the ticket.  While Bernie Sanders and his followers - who seemingly have imbibed large amounts of Kool-Aid laced with a mind altering drug - remain in denial as to Sanders toxicity in many parts of the country, Democrats in touch with reality are terrified a Sanders nomination would allow Republicans to not only retain the White House and and control of the Senate but also allow the GOP to recapture the House of Representatives. It is insane to nominate a candidate whose only chance of winning is that voters might hate Trump more.  It could set the stage for a repeat of 2016 when many voters (foolishly, in my view) stayed home because they disliked both candidates. A piece in the Washington Post looks at the disaster that a Sanders nomination would be for Virginia Democrats.  Here are excerpts:

Rep. Elaine Luria (D-Va.) wasted no time in denouncing presidential candidate Bernie Sanders this week after he said he would skip the annual conference of the pro-Israel American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

“Senator Sanders’ comments only contribute to the divisive rhetoric often used when discussing the issue of Israel’s right to exist,” Luria said in a statement Tuesday that rocketed around social media.

Her swift reaction was an example of the tactics she and other centrist Democrats may use to try to steer clear of the senator from Vermont, a self-described democratic socialist, if he wins their party’s presidential nomination.

Analysts say Sanders could endanger down-ballot incumbents, especially moderates such as Luria, a Navy veteran who ousted a Republican in a swing district in 2018 and helped Democrats win control of the House.

Already, GOP candidates and groups targeting the once deep-red Virginia districts held by Luria, Rep. Abigail Spanberger and Rep. Jennifer Wexton have tried to link the freshman lawmakers to Sanders and others in the party’s left flank. Luria, who has endorsed former vice president Joe Biden, won’t risk being painted as a Sanders acolyte — especially when it comes to one of her signature issues: Israel.

In 2018, Luria, Spanberger and Wexton appealed to moderate Democrats and Republican-leaning independents by promising to work with Republicans and vote independently of their party.

Sanders, who favors starkly liberal positions such as a single-payer health-care system, free public college and a national ­$15 minimum wage, could force them to go on the defensive and undermine their efforts to win a second term.

“The Democratic nominee doesn’t matter much except if it’s Sanders,” said Rachel Bitecofer, assistant director of the Wason Center for Public Policy at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Va.

Mark Rozell, dean of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, said Spanberger and Luria have the most to lose with Sanders at the top of the ticket. Sanders plans to barnstorm Virginia ahead of the primary, with rallies in Richmond on Thursday as well as in Wexton’s hometown of Leesburg and Virginia Beach, in Luria’s district, on Saturday.

“The voters in their district turned Democrat because each of them ran as political centrists,” Rozell said. “But the voters could turn right back again if they perceive that the Democratic Party is captured by the ideological extreme wing.”

[T]he National Republican Congressional Committee is already taunting her [Luria] about Sanders, asking in a mass email Tuesday: “Is she ready to reverse course and refuse to support the socialist and upset her socialist base?”

Spanberger and Wexton have not made endorsements in the presidential contest and have no plans to at the moment. Spanberger, a former CIA officer, said she has already cast her absentee ballot; she declined to reveal her choice or rule anyone out.

Rob Jones, one of several Republicans vying to challenge Wexton in November, suggested last week that because Wexton often votes the same way as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), a top Sanders surrogate, Wexton must support Sanders.

Wexton balked at that logic, and said: “I will not be supporting Bernie Sanders in this primary.” She said she favors a candidate who will work to lower health-care costs, reduce gun violence, strengthen the middle class and bolster the federal workforce.

In 2018, Wexton defeated the Republican incumbent Barbara Comstock, who Rozell noted was in a similar bind when it came to Trump. Comstock disavowed Trump, who was deeply unpopular in Virginia, and even called for him to drop out of the 2016 presidential race after the disclosure of the 2005 video of him making lewd comments and bragging about groping women.

“He [Trump] wins, she loses,” Rozell said. “Remarkable.”

On Super Tuesday, I urge voters to vote for anyone but Sanders.  Sanders must be stopped at all cost.  #neverSanders.