Bern't Offerings

If Bernie Sanders had won all three primaries yesterday in Missouri, Illinois and Ohio by 51% to 49% margins, he would have picked up a stupendous NINE (9) more delegates than he did. Headlines would have read:

CLINTON FLORIDA LANDSLIDE SWELLS DELEGATE EDGE

Because even if Sanders had won three out of five primaries, Clinton would have picked up 55% of the delegates. The mainstream media's disdain for a non-center-right Democratic campaign comes as no surprise, however. What fascinates the Sandwichman is an insistant narrative from certain "left" critics that the Sanders campaign is the worst thing since Vidkun Quisling.

I feel their pain. The U.S. Democratic Party is a card-carrying member of the military-industrial-financial complex's bipartisan repressive duopoly. You can't teach an old hyena new tricks -- and it's dangerous to try. And all that.

But there is a tone to left anti-Sanders ranting that is reminiscent of the post-2000 Ralph Nader hate fest. "If only Nader hadn't run..." the narrative began and then proceeded to ignore the actual popular vote count, the electoral irregularities in Florida and the Supreme Court's tendentious squashing of a judicial recount AND to assume that every Nader voter would have been a Gore voter if it hadn't been for Nader. (Not to mention that if only Gore had won the presidency, the millennium would have arrived in the year 2001).

The every-Nader-voter assumption is preposterous. Probably a majority of Nader voters would not have voted if Nader hadn't been on the ballot. Some proportion of Nader voters would have voted for Bush. Some voters, who might otherwise not have voted, may have been drawn to the polls by the prospect of voting for Nader and changed their mind in the voting booth. In short, speculative reallocating of third party votes is pointless.

There is a sense in which the anti-Sanders left is making the same mistake as the anti-Nader crowd. They imply that if it wasn't for Sanders there would somehow be a genuine socialist alternative; that if all those naive BernieBros and the young women who pursue them would only give up their illusions about the Democratic Party, there would be a real revolution.

AYFKM?

The funniest part of the anti-Sanders left ranters is how eagerly they adopt DLC anti-Bernie talking points from the mainstream media. May I suggest a slogan? "I stand with the New York Times, the Washington Post and CNN Against U.S. Imperialism and White Millennial Bro-dom!"