America and the world are having a moment. Donald Trump is unbound. Establishment Democrats are unhinged. The Russians are gleeful. A dozen towns in northern Italy are in lockdown to halt the spread of the coronavirus. The New York Times now is updating pandemic fears in Chinese.
It’s a lot to process. Especially with purveyors of propaganda working overtime to make sure you cannot. “Russia’s ultimate goal,” writes Brian Barrett at Wired, “has always been to find democracy’s loose seams, and pull.”
Sunday morning on MSNBC’s “AM Joy,” Anand Giridharadas called Bernie Sanders’s Nevada claim to front-runner status in the Democrats’ nominating process “a wake-up” moment for the Democrats now in control of their party. “Something is happening in America right now that actually does not fit our mental models.”
“The people who are stuck in an old way of thinking, in twentieth-century frameworks, in gulag thinking, are missing what is going on,” he explained. “It is time for all of us to step up, rethink and understand the dawn of what may be, frankly, a new era in American life.”
MSNBC gave airtime to Bill Clinton’s strategist James Carville on Saturday to defend those old ways of thinking. Carville called nominating Sanders political suicide. If you want to vote for him because you like his policies, that’s legitimate, Carville said. But the notion that Sanders will win by expanding the electorate “is the equivalent of climate denying,” he said. Political science and research make that “not even a debatable question.”
“If you’re voting for him because you think he’ll win the election, because he’ll galvanize heretofore sleepy parts of an electorate, then politically, you’re a fool.”
Carville is defending the Democratic establishment some in Sanders’s camp want burned to the ground the way similar sentiments made Donald Trump Russia’s “wrecking ball.” Russian political scientist Ekaterina Schulmann tells GQ’s Julia Ioffe, “Let them all fight each other while we lay another gas pipeline somewhere!” Either way, chaos. It’s all good for Moscow.
Giridharadas is a trenchant observer of this American moment. He has addressed the way what I’ve described as metastasized capitalism and the grotesque economic inequality it has produced has corroded faith in American democracy and the economic system on which it is built.
But this American moment is not happening in a lab isolated from events going on elsewhere. The new era of which Giridharadas speaks could as easily be a Dark Age as a progressive Renaissance. Hanging over all of it is climate change and concomitant sea level rise. A pandemic could kill millions and disrupt the economy Trump credits to Himself, changing this morning’s election calculus before November. If Sanders is riding the wrecking ball in the next cycle, it’s all the same to Vladimir Putin.
The confluence of world events plus changing U.S. demographics means Carville’s conventional wisdom about what political science tells him is out of date. But then, so is Sanders’ talk of political revolution. After he won the 2016 New Hampshire, he promised his victory represented “nothing short of the beginning of a political revolution.” It wasn’t then. Whether his win in Nevada is now remains to be seen.
Democrats will need to get out their voters en masse in November regardless of who leads the ticket. Whether they can overturn conventional wisdom about expanding the electorate will depend on whether the game has indeed changed, as Giridharadas believes.
But again, all that doesn’t happen in a vacuum. I remind Democrats here who get giddy about early voting numbers that routinely favor Democrats: Republicans bat last.
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