To avoid repeating myself unduly, I will just state here the basic premise: that getting the powers of the Presidency out of the hands of that would-be-dictator, Donald Trump, is THE central and overriding political task of this moment — likely the most urgent political task of our lifetimes — and that his re-election would be a disastrous blow to the American constitutional order.
The following is addressed to Bernie supporters who accept that premise. (I hope that’s the overwhelming majority of Sanders’ following.)
I will identify myself as one who voted for Bernie in the Virginia primary in 2016. So I appreciate Bernie’s virtues.
And I also will stipulate that there is no way for us to judge with certainty how strong the various possible Democratic nominees — from among the six that will be on the stage tonight in Nevada — would be going up against Trump to win the presidency.
But I also see strong reasons to believe that Sanders’ getting the 2020 Democratic nomination would be quite risky. And given the stakes of this election — whether America will preserve its constitutional order or slide downward toward dictatorship — I would think the wise course would be for Democrats to minimize risk.
Here are some bits of evidence that I think should give Bernie supporters real pause— again, assuming that they agree that our task is to put forward the candidate most likely to defeat Trump:
A lot of knowledgeable people who desperately want Trump defeated — enough so that they’d wish Bernie well if he is the nominee — have written intelligent pieces arguing that the Democrats would severely undercut their chances of victory if they nominate Bernie Sanders; Trump and his political handlers have been behaving in a way that shows clearly that they believe that Sanders would be the ideal nominee from their point of view; Over the past couple of months — during which Bernie’s standings in the race for the nomination have risen considerably (although, of course, admittedly many other things have happened) — the futures markets have seen the assessed likelihood of Trump’s winning a second term has increased from 42% to 54%.It’s true that all those assessments could be wrong. And I’ve heard arguments from Sanders’ supporters about how he’d be the strongest candidate for Democrats to put forward. (I’m doubtful, but I don’t claim to know for sure.) But just those who believe Sanders would weaken our chances of defeating Trump could be wrong, so also might the arguments for Sanders’ strength be wrong.
The upshot of all this is that the Democrats are having to make some difficult assessments, and that for the survival of American democracy, we should all be prepared to support the nominee whether the collective decision goes our way or not:
People worried about Sanders’ being a dangerous choice should be prepared to support him to the hilt if the convention, in the wake of strong primary showings by Sanders, anoints Bernie the Democratic standard-bearer; People who are devoted to getting Sanders the nomination should be prepared to give someone else their strong support, if the convention decides that Bernie is too risky and someone else — anyone else — would be a better bet to drive our current would-be-dictator out of office.