Where Goest the Democratic Party?

For John, BLUF:  I don't think we have seen anything like Senator Bernie Sanders since Senator Huey P Long.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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The Coming Implosion of the Democratic Party

From The Epoch Times, by Writer Roger L. Simon, 4 March 2020.

Here is the lede plus five:

At first glance, it’s bad news for Donald Trump.

He’s losing his easiest mark for the 2020 general election:  The Bernie Sanders campaign is not only toast, it’s burnt toast.

Super Tuesday was a disaster for Bernie Were the Bernie Bros. toking up while playing video games?  Whatever the case, they didn’t show up to vote, not enough of them anyway.  Maybe they didn’t intend to. Not their thing.

Only in California did Bernie save his honor (a bit) but there’s good reason to believe he only staved off the Biden wave there because of early voting.

The future primaries don’t look any better.  Actually, they’re worse.

Bernie’s next staring at delegate-rich Florida where he’s alienated practically every Latino voter in a Latino state with his admiring comments about Castro.  (I thought Bernie didn’t like billionaires.)  Pennsylvania, New York, and other East Coast states don’t look much better.  Only in Washington State does he have good prospects, and that’s far from enough.

I do agree there does seem to be some political theory and economic and historic understanding between the Senator Sanders/Representative Occassio-Cortez wing and the more Centrist Amy Klobuchar wings of the Party.

It is interesting that tomorrow is the anniversary of the 1776 publication of The Wealth of Nations, by Scottish economist and philosopher Adam Smith.  It is almost as though we have an ahistoric wing of the Democratic Party.  A wing that does not see that Capitalism and Democracy have been successful models in raising the world, for the most part, out of poverty and hard labor.  Socialism, on the other hand, in the Twentieth Century, managed to kill 100 million people keeping itself propped up.  That doesn't include the millions killed in wars.  This is just the number of eggs broken to make the socialist omelet, as someone said on NPR a decade ago, in explaining the Chinese Cultural Revolution.  I expect Senator Sanders, who is happy with the Cuban Revolution of Fidel Castro is probably happy enough with the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

Mr Simon ends his essay:

So who are the Democrats anyway?  An association for power, clearly.  But now that association is split between the establishment and the socialists, roughly 60-40.

This is untenable.  All that holds them together is enmity for Donald Trump.  Without that they wouldn’t even be the semblance of a party anymore.

Indeed, they’re probably not, even with the pervasive Trump hatred.  If Biden were to stumble, Bernie would not easily move in to replace him.  The establishment would block him immediately with a new candidate.

Hillary?  She’s been curiously silent of late.  Why isn’t she joining the claque backing Biden? And what about Obama? Are they planning something?

It doesn’t matter.  The party has already effectively split in two.  It’s hard to see how they can reconcile.

The convention in Milwaukee this July may be the end of the Democratic Party as we know it.

This seems like a pretty strong opinion.  Is the Democratic Party about to fracture, to be replaced by some new entity?  I don't think so.

We were here before, and the Democratic Party split in two, but it came back together, winning the Presidency 24 years later, with Grover Cleveland, of New York.  He was what was then called a Bourbon Democrat, the hard money, pro-business, anti corrupt city boss, pro-states rights wing of the Party.  If the Democrats lose in November,♠ they will cobble together a form of the Party that will appeal to the center mass of the voters, while leaving the intelligentsia, the bien pensant, to their own devices.

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff

♠  As Blogger Glenn Reynolds says, don't get cocky.