As is the case in most fields, a successful electoral campaign tends to lead to its successors to be compared to it. Just as every commercially and critically successful rock band since 1964 has been called "the next Beatles" and every high-end outfield prospect in baseball is likened by somebody to Mike Trout, there is a new, perpetual question surrounding Democratic politics--finding the Democrat version of Donald Trump.
Lately, inevitably from the left (well, the center-left, but not generally from the right-wing media sphere), that label has been assigned to Bernie Sanders, the openly socialist Senator from Vermont who is among the leaders to win the Democratic nomination for president in 2020. Referring to him as "the Democratic Trump" is meant as a self-evident pejorative when hurled by the MSNBC center-left commentariat, just as it is meant as a self-evident pejorative when Fox News and such refer to him as a socialist.
Before I continue any further in discussing Bernie Sanders, a man who manages to somehow have both the most obnoxious supporters and detractors on the internet among Democratic presidential candidates, I should state that I did not vote for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primaries and that he is not, in a vacuum, my favorite candidate in the 2020 field. Of the big five candidates on the Democratic field, I would rank them Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Amy Klobuchar, Joe Biden, and Pete Buttigieg, though I would happily vote for any of the five in a general election against Literally Donald Trump. I am open to the possibility (perhaps probability, at this point) that I'll vote for Sanders during the Missouri presidential primary, if Elizabeth Warren no longer has a viable shot at winning the nomination. But this is mostly irrelevant to the larger point I am making here--it just feels like a necessary disclosure.
The problem I have with labeling Sanders as the Democratic Trump is that it is unclear what is meant by that. It is unclear why those implying a distaste for Trump ever developed such a distaste. Those who comment on politics on MSNBC, nominally the furthest left of the big three cable news networks, are ironically the most aggressively opposed to the candidate who is certainly the furthest left of the candidates. And just as sports commentators tend to be former employees of professional sports leagues (as players, coaches, or front office personnel), political commentators tend to be former politicians, speechwriters, or political organizers. They are people who have lived their adult lives within the power structure and tend to support candidates who operate within those parameters. It's the same reason most Republican and ex-Republican political operatives tended to oppose Donald Trump until it became readily apparent that Donald Trump was the Republican Party.
Here is a brief, incomplete list of reasons I do not like Donald Trump: I think he's racist; I think he's stupid; I think he cares more about enriching himself and his own vanity than he cares about anybody else, much less those who need help the most. I don't believe Bernie Sanders to be any of those things, especially the latter. But there are some things that Trump and Sanders do have in common. Both are compelling figures who are capable of energizing large crowds of supporters (even if the former tends to exaggerate about the size of them). Both are able to encourage previously disengaged voters to care about their causes. Both are able to transcend objectively mediocre public speaking skills not because they are poetic orators like, say, Barack Obama, but because they are able to speak with passion that resonates with voters who have spent their entire lives believing that better things are not possible.
If the second half of the previous paragraph sounded like I was speaking well of Donald Trump--well, I was! There are good qualities about Donald Trump! These qualities are more than evaporated by the extremely lousy qualities about him, but when I fear a politician has Trump-like qualities, it's because I fear they are misogynists or lunatics who care more about NFL players kneeling for the Star-Spangled Banner than they are about homelessness. I don't even mind how much Donald Trump tweets--I just wish the tweets were coming from a better person.
There are absolutely arguments against voting for Bernie Sanders, but the notion that I shouldn't want to vote for him because he has a lot of supporters is patently ridiculous. Anti-Sanders media has peddled a narrative recently articulated by Joe Biden that Sanders is unelectable because Americans would never elect a socialist, omitting the fact that every Democratic presidential candidate since I became aware of presidential politics (Gore, Kerry, Obama, Clinton) was routinely referred to as a freedom-hating socialist, and the fact that the only one of these four candidates who actually ran in the primaries to the left of the party establishment was the only one of the four candidates who acutally won the general election.
I find Pete Buttigieg to be a disingenuous huckster who stands for absolutely nothing beyond his own blind ambition and overall desire to be president, but if one could assure me that he was the candidate who would definitely beat Donald Trump, I'd support his candidacy in a heartbeat. But this was the same argument used by Hillary Clinton in 2016. I don't think Bernie Sanders would have beat Donald Trump because I believe the Democratic Party as a whole did not take Donald Trump sufficiently seriously independent of their own candidate in 2016, but that's not the point--the point is that electability was the center of the argument for Hillary Clinton. And now, the same pundits who argued for Clinton not on ideological grounds but on strategic political grounds are arguing that Bernie Sanders is uniquely incapable of running against Doiinald Trump. Maybe he is, but these pundits should not be trusted as a matter of fact. They need reasoning. They aren't supplying it.
A more generous reading of MSNBC concern over Sanders is that their commentators lean older and they are forever traumatized by George McGovern, an unabashed liberal, being trounced in 1972 by Richard Nixon, which ignores the fact that Nixon, generally popular, was going to be the overwhelming favorite in November against any living Democratic politician. But an even more generous reading is that maybe the centrist Democrats in media power genuinely do not believe in socialism. But this argument is rarely, if ever, made. And frankly, I wish it would be made, because I want to see if Bernie Sanders (or to a lesser extent Elizabeth Warren, who does not self-identify as a socialist but is certainly closer to Bernie Sanders on the political spectrum than the other major candidates on the Democratic ballot) can handle questioning of the core of his ideology. But just yelling that he's a socialist isn't going to be an effective tactic if you've already use that label on, um, John Kerry?
If the Democratic candidate were somebody who championed social and economic justice while also having Donald Trump's ability to galvanize and energize voters, I would vote for that person in a heartbeat. I'm not sure if that person is Bernie Sanders, but those who refer to him as the Democratic Donald Trump certainly seem to believe he is. Though I suppose this would require me to have more faith in the political skills of Claire McCaskill than I currently do.
