We have seen this for the three years President Trump has been in office, and previously in his 2016 campaign. The deep state, the fake news and the elites (not “real” Americans) are out to get him, he says. He insists that all these forces do not respect the people, his followers and the only real Americans.
We are reminded in watching Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), as his presidential campaign fizzles, this mind-set is not limited to the right. Sanders had this exchange on ABC’s “This Week”:
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: When you joined us last Sunday, you were leading in delegates, look poised for a big lead coming out of Super Tuesday. Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Elizabeth Warren, Michael Bloomberg all still in the race. How surprised were you by Super Tuesday and how do you explain it?SANDERS: Well, one of the things that I was kind of not surprised by is the power of establishment to force Amy Klobuchar, who had worked so hard, Pete Buttigieg, who, you know, really worked extremely hard as well, out of the race.What was very clear from the media narrative and what the establishment wanted was to make sure that people coalesced around [former vice president Joe] Biden and try to defeat me. So that’s not surprising.We are taking on, George, as I think everybody knows, the establishment. We’re taking on the corporate establishment. We’re taking on the political establishment. And what you are seeing now just in the last few weeks is Wall Street, the health-care industry, the billionaire class putting a lot of money into Joe’s campaign.
This is bonkers. Other Democrats got out of the race because voters across the country did not vote for them. Sanders sneers at them as if they are puppets on a string, yanked out of the race by nefarious forces. They actually looked at the facts, saw they could not win and decided Biden had a better chance to unify the country and beat Trump than did a self-proclaimed socialist who cannot resist the urge to pick fights with his own party. This is akin to his waving off South Carolina voters, predominantly African American, and instead attributing Biden’s win to “corporate Democrats.”
Sanders’s complaint about billionaires giving to Biden’s campaign (they would be limited to $2,800 per person like all other donors) is part of the fixation with attributing opponents’ success to something other than popular opinion. Sanders had no real answer when Stephanopoulos pointed out that “you outspent him on Super Tuesday.” In fact, one of the remarkable aspects of Biden’s romp on Super Tuesday was his lack of ads and organization in states in which Sanders poured in millions and had paid people on the ground.
For an ideologue such as Sanders, there is always reason to oppose practical measures, be it the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement or President Barack Obama’s bailout to save the country from a devastating depression. Stephanopoulos pointed out that the latter was “also backed by President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Ted Kennedy, your own senior senator from Vermont, Pat Leahy.” Were they also wrong? Sanders responded, “That’s right.” For Sanders, no Democrat is pure or operating out of good will. They are all dupes and pawns.
One might ask how he expects to accomplish any of his extreme agenda when so many in the Democratic Party have no interest in his views or how he expects to unite a party when, he acknowledges, “we’re not going to get the support of most elected leaders. Not most governors, not most senators.”
Sanders keeps insisting he is “winning the support of grass-roots America.” That simply is not so. Biden won 10 of 14 states, driving turnout sky-high in states he won, like Virginia. Sanders’s promised onslaught of new voters has never shown up.
Perhaps he and his snarling online supporters should confront an unpleasant truth: Sanders’s problem is not the establishment or corporate Democrats or billionaires. It is the voters.
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