Why Democrats Can't Win 2018 Without Bernie
“Please do not think these are somehow radical, or unpopular, or extreme or fringe ideas,” Bernie Sanders tells me. It’s early May, and the once-and-perhaps-future presidential contender is ticking off progressive policy proposals—his policy proposals—that, in the two years since his loss to Hillary Clinton in the 2016 primary, have rapidly remade the Democratic Party: universal health care, tuition-free public college, a $15-an-hour minimum wage. When he’s told that some believe his ideas may be better suited to Finland than Nebraska, Sanders bristles. “Look at the polling,” he snaps in his thick Brooklyn accent, which decades in Vermont have not diminished. “You don’t have to believe what I tell you.”
By many measures, he’s right. In the two years since his insurgent campaign for the White House succumbed to the Clinton juggernaut, Sanders has gone from cult hero to mainstream dynamo. Larry David can mock him on Saturday Night Live as a cranky, quixotic septuagenarian, but when Sanders endorses an idea, many of his peers in the Senate listen without laughing. The American public has become increasingly receptive to his brand of democratic socialism; once-skeptical centrists have seen the polls and have followed accordingly.
This has resulted in a high-stakes ideological war to out-Bernie Bernie. In March, for example, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York endorsed a proposal that would ensure the government guarantees a job to every American. Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey followed with modest legislation, before Sanders bested both lawmakers with a national plan (pay rate: $15 an hour, of course).
This is all new for Gillibrand and Booker, Northeasterners closely affiliated with the centrist donor class that funds the Democratic establishment. For the Sandernistas, however, the focus hasn’t changed since Bernie announced his candidacy for president in 2015. Their liberalism is not transactional, pegged to the latest focus-group findings. It is ferocious and uncompromising: Scandinavian to supporters, Soviet to detractors. Sanders and his backers believe the old divides between Republicans and Democrats are being replaced by the far more real rift between those who can’t comprehend how anyone could live on as little as $15 an hour and those who spend their working lives making half that much.
