There is a lot here I agree with: (it’s from The Bulwark)
1. Trump Would Destroy Bernie
If the polls are to be believed, Bernie Sanders is enjoying a well-timed surge in places like Iowa and New Hampshire. While Joe Biden still leads the latest national poll, a Sanders nomination is now quite conceivable… with all the implications.
What implications?
In today’s Bulwark, Richard North Patterson argues that Sanders is Donald Trump’s dream candidate and describes the ways (and they are many) that Trump would destroy Bernie in the Fall.
“Sanders is America’s least supple politician,” writes Patterson, “captive to an unyielding inner vision which brooks no compromise. His candidacy is rooted in the unwavering belief that America is about to awaken to the rightness of his unwavering beliefs. Take the crowd-pleasing title of his major campaign address: ‘How Democratic Socialism Is the Only Way to Defeat Oligarchy and Authoritarianism.’ Here self-solemnity meets opacity, the instinct to hector rather than seduce.”
It’s little wonder that mainstream Democrats are petrified at the prospect of nominating Sanders: quite reasonably, they believe he will lose to Trump and take the party—to which he does not even belong—down with him.
They find his supporters fanatical and intolerant of difference, a wrecking crew in waiting. They fear his penchant for ideological litmus tests which are demonstrably unpopular. They cringe at his embrace of left-wing authoritarians in Latin America. They worry that the GOP would bury him in a tsunami of sludge—some of it exaggerated, some not. They believe that he would doom the more moderate House members in swing districts whom Democrats need to retain their majority, and eliminate their long-shot hope of retaking the Senate. They remember that in 2016 Sanders lost the primaries to Clinton, no paragon of popularity, by 3.7 million votes.
But Sanders has further marginalized himself electorally by helping divide the party’s left. And in doing so, he has lowered his own ceiling, a misstep he could ill afford.
…
His candidacy rests on a dangerous dual delusion: that he can upend our electoral dynamics by imbuing passive Americans with an ideological fervor never seen before; and then spark a political revolution in which mass support for democratic socialism compels our otherwise polarized Congress to enact it.
Yet Bernie’s acolytes see him as an all-purpose Pied Piper galvanizing a previously slumbering left-wing America into a permanent majority of political obsessives who, once awakened, will be just like . . . well, them. There is something oddly touching about this fever dream—and much that is awash in solipsism and bathos.