Five Reasons Why Bernie Sanders Can Win

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No, I’m not discussing the nomination. Of course Sanders can win that, after winning Nevada decisively. I’m talking about the presidency. Read on:

1. Like Trump, Sanders says he’s got workers’ backs, but unlike Trump Sanders really means it.

Why is Trump president? In order of importance, there are five reasons. First, Hillary never lamented the bailouts or blamed the bankers who caused the Crash of 2008. That Crash pushed millions of skilled workers over the edge. It also accelerated the exodus of jobs to China, which mostly avoided the Crash.

Second, Hillary earned big bucks by giving speeches to Wall Street, whose contents she kept secret. How’s that for a trust magnet for workers? Third, she enhanced her aura as a know-it-all elitist by putting the workers whose votes she sought into a “basket of deplorables.” Fourth, she had supported Dubya’s needless war in Iraq long after her husband and just about every other Democrat stopped doing so; as everyone knows, our working class fights our wars, the more so now with our all-volunteer army.

Finally, Hillary beat the guy (Bernie) who seemed to understand how the system is rigged and why workers and their families were hurting. Worse yet, if you followed the primaries it seemed like she beat him by similar rigging, pulling insider strings.

So if you were a skilled worker on the skids, what would you do? You’ve got a guy who claims to be a successful businessman and claims to have your back, running against a person deeply embedded in the elite cabal and the Washington “swamp” that closed your factory, dried up your town, cost you your job, house and/or marriage, and drove your kin to opioids. Doesn’t the question answer itself?

Yet there’s more. Even with all these glaring faults and all her “triangulating,” Hillary won the popular vote decisively. If she had visited the key battleground states closer to the election, she might even have reversed her narrow loss, which amounted to a total of only 80,000 votes in the three key states. Think a man who’s adamantly on forgotten workers’ side and against the oligarchy, and who’s also a relentless campaigner despite his heart attack, might do better this time?

So it’s not as if the general electorate is a troop of bloodless zombies in thrall to Trump. Poll after poll shows that it’s progressive, by substantial majorities, on major issues like health insurance, drug costs, retirement, pay equity, family leave, minimum wages, ending our endless wars, women’s rights, and those damned guns. It was so in 2016. It’s much more so now, after three years of extreme misrule.

Trump’s narrow win in 2016 was a fluke. Now it’s just a matter of helping the people’s will prevail.

2. Trump broke virtually all his promises to workers.

The easiest and quickest way to give skilled workers good jobs nationwide was to repair and rebuild our dilapidated infrastructure. It still is. But Trump never got to that. Instead, his first priority was to cut taxes mostly on his rich cronies and big corporations. Then he imposed tariffs that made many things more expensive for the middle class, including workers out of jobs.

Trump’s tariffs caused China to retaliate against his farming supporters. Trump then had to bail them out. That left him unable (and unwilling) to return any of the tariff proceeds to all middle-class workers, as Dems now propose doing with the proceeds of a carbon tax to save our planet.

It gets worse. Trump never even proposed a health-insurance plan better than Obamacare. Instead, he tried mightily to kill it. He and his crew managed to maim it with litigation. So the number of our people with good health insurance has dropped for the last two years. Now over eighty million of us are uninsured or underinsured.

Next Trump built only a few miles of new Wall—by violating the Constitution and stealing the money. Mexico hasn’t paid a dime for it. He’s relaxed the rules that keep our air, water and ground clean. The only major promise to workers that Trump seems to have kept is reducing illegal immigration, but he did it by means so cruel and draconian as to embarrass our nation and destroy its moral standing at home and abroad.

There are, of course, many Trump supporters who don’t know these things and won’t bother to find out. But there are also many who are starting to question his leadership. What will they think when they see these facts laid out, multiple times every night, by TV and Internet ads financed by Bloomberg and by the most frightened and free-spending Democratic party since LBJ buried Barry Goldwater for threatening nuclear Armageddon?

Yes, Fox is a dangerous propaganda organ, but it’s in as steep a decline as our nation. Roger Ailes is gone; Facebook and Twitter dominate the Internet; youth is turning from cable to streaming in droves; and Bloomberg is smarter than anyone now at Fox.

3. When Trump won in 2016, few outside New York knew him. Now everybody does.

Forget about his policies, which change from day to day and minute to minute, at his whim and caprice. He’s a thoughtless, extortionate, vindictive, inconsistent, impulsive, crude, vulgar, bigoted, nasty and cruel narcissist. He may be fit to be a Mafia capo, but a president? Never!

Our ad-makers can sell you a defective product and make you happy you bought it. Think they can’t make people understand who Trump is for real?

A lot of people took a flyer on Trump, thinking him a smart businessman who could keep his promises to bring factories back from China and find good new jobs for everyone. Sure, some voters have adopted him as their champion and now will hear no evil about him. But all it takes is a few percent to have their epiphany, and that only in key states. Just remember that Trump’s 2016 margins in the key states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin were all less than one percent. In 2018, his party lost badly, although he tried soooo hard to shore up his lackeys.

4. Many Republicans and former Republicans, let alone independents (and especially women!), just won’t be able to bring themselves to vote for Trump again.

He’s so cruel, abusive, vulgar, and selfish as to seem derived from another species. He’s done much damage to our national unity, our institutions, our allies and international standing, our science, and the certain and steady policy that business needs to thrive. Few elite, informed people will vote for him, even among those who took a flyer on him in 2016.

Those who did will understand that the tax cuts were a one-of, and that he can’t keep cutting regulations forever, at least not with the House in the Democrats’ hands. They will fear his random tariffs and his hopeless misunderstanding of economics.

This time, they won’t be able to vote for him even while holding their noses. The stink on steroids will push through.

Then there are all the people whom Trump has hurt personally and directly. They include people named Coats, Comey, Kelly, Mattis, Mueller, Romney, Sanderson, Tillerson and Vindman. They include all the prosecutors now resigning and protesting over Trump’s meddling with the Justice Department, many of whom are Republicans. They include hordes of dedicated scientists and other experts in our once-superb bureaucracy, whom Trump fired or forced out by making their work (at less than private-sector pay) irrelevant or subordinating them to unqualified apparatchiks, such as the clueless acting DNI now.

Almost every month, Trump has pushed dozens of good, well-qualified, experienced people out of government and replaced them with incompetent ideologues, lackeys, or not at all. All of them have relatives, sympathetic colleagues, and friends who vote.

True, we can’t be sure that all these folk will vote for Sanders, whether out of conviction, acquiescence or just spite. But they won’t vote for Trump, and that will be enough.

5. Informed people who read and think will digest this summary of the first volume of Volker Ullrich’s new biography of Adolf Hitler and fear the future.

They will feel a chill run down their spin as they recognize in Trump every major facet of Hitler’s rise to absolute power. The chill will deepen as they come to understand that Hitler became Germany’s dictator gradually, beginning by winning a surprise election as a supposedly laughable outsider.

They will see many more uncanny parallels, most of all in Trump’s immediate grasp for absolute power (in pardoning criminals and breaking down the Chinese wall between Justice and the president), just after surviving the impeachment process. They will worry, if Trump does all this within mere days of acquittal, what he would do if re-elected for another four years.

Not all these people will vote for Sanders. Maybe none will. But they won’t vote for Trump and risk forfeiting our democracy.

In the privacy of their voting booths, they just won’t be able to, any more than many Dems and independents could vote for Hillary in 2016. Even some of the senatorial cowards who voted to acquit Trump to save their own jobs might be unable to vote for him, as long as no one knows.

As they vote, all these people will think of the heavy responsibility of the German people, which present-day Germans now sadly but laudably bear. They will consider a new Hitler in command of the world’s most accurate and deadly stash of nuclear weapons, which Adolf never had. They will balk at repeating Germany’s fatal error, at least so soon afterward, especially at a time when war could extinguish our species.

* * *
The truth is that Trump has no real magic. Yes, he’s a consummate showman, propagandist and demagogue. But he had a free ride in 2016 because the Dems chose a deeply flawed candidate to face him, who saw the general election as her coronation. Part of the free ride also came from the Russians, who started the first-ever transnational electoral information war, pushing for Trump and against free elections. Trump also got a free ride because millions of people—including many who should have known better—projected their dreams and desires onto him instead of seeing him as he was and is.

The 2016 general election was a perfect storm of inattention and delusion, including self-delusion on all sides. Trump rode that storm to the White House. Yet it bears repeating, endlessly, that even so Hillary lost by only a hair.

Now we all know better. We all know who and what Trump is. Now we’re on guard against interference by Russians and other foreigners. And the dreams of so many, projected onto so flawed a vessel, have been dashed upon the hard rocks of reality, if voters only choose to see it.

So if the man whose message meets these times, and who should have been the Dems’ nominee in 2016, now, although older, faces Trump, the result is hardly foreordained, let alone against the challenger. On the contrary, the winds are all blowing toward Sanders’ victory.

In the end, enough people will understand that “democratic socialism” limited to health insurance is not a repudiation of free enterprise, and that Sanders’ presidency will bear no likeness whatsoever to Maduro’s (especially after Sanders calls Maduro out repeatedly on the stump). More to the point, they will choose any kind of democracy over the erratic, immoral and vindictive one-man rule of our modern blend of Caligula and Nero.

Endnote 1: Warren and Sanders

As readers of this blog know, I much prefer Warren to Sanders and plan to vote for her in the primary. I prefer her because she’s smarter, more precise, and more careful. Unlike Sanders, she calls herself a “capitalist” who just wants the rules to work for everyone. I also think that being female gives Warren an important advantage at the polls.

But if Sanders wins the nomination, as now appears probable, I won’t lose my enthusiasm for a progressive tidal wave. I won’t be blind to the poetic justice in a belated victory of a man who—practically all alone—sounded the tocsin in 2016 against gross economic inequality in a rigged system, yet failed to get the chance to fix it. And if Sanders does win the nomination, he will be bound by honor and pragmatism to pick Warren as his Veep, if only to jump-start the women’s revolution that has been so long in coming and to insure his legacy and continuity of policy against further setbacks in his health.

Endnote 2: The “Trump Fears” Fallacy.

Many Democrats seem to want to nominate a candidate whom Trump fears. But Trump feared Biden and maybe still does. (He often fears his own shadow and anyone who doesn’t kiss his ring.) Does anyone still think that Biden can win the nomination, let alone the presidency?

There are so many things wrong with the “Trump Fears” Fallacy that it’s hard to know where to begin. Let’s just start with the obvious: how good has Trump’s judgment been in general? He seems to know how to attract a certain kind of voter, but only to the extent of about 40%. His popularity rose to 49% just after his acquittal but now has subsided back to its consistent baseline.

In the final analysis, Trump knows little about anything but himself. Unless he has a Tweet-spawning paroxysm of “gut feeling” at 3:00 am, he relies on others’ views of external reality, insofar as he recognizes such a thing. Mostly he relies on Fox and Friends, although he consulted wealthy donors and celebrities in deciding which criminals to grant his recent pardons.

Trump probably feared Biden (up to now) only because the polls and media anointed Biden as formidable. Now the media have condemned Sanders as a loser just because he calls himself a “democratic socialist,” and the media see that as risky. That’s probably the sum total of Trump’s “analysis,” if you can use that term to describe any of Trump’s thinking.

What Trump and the media are missing is that Sanders evokes the same level enthusiasm and commitment among voters that Trump himself evokes, and that Hillary never did. I myself voted for Hillary while holding my nose with both hands. It was Trump’s glaring unfitness, not her few virtues, that motivated me. I could hardly even discern her policies amidst her constant “triangulating” and trying to have everything both ways.

Hillary Clinton nearly won despite displaying, at almost every turn, an apparent inability (or unwillingness) to do what presidents are supposed to do: decide. Bernie Sanders does not have that problem. Nor does Elizabeth Warren.

Trump runs his own campaign at his own whim. He has only endured only one election in his entire life, against Hillary. So unless Fox tells him to beware Sanders, which it never will do, Trump cannot imagine that Sanders might have a base as fired up and loyal as his own. Nor can he imagine that Sanders’ base is not only similar in size to his own, but also has a lot of natural overlap.

As for Putin, the motivation for his spooks’ recently reported support for Sanders is unclear. He could, like Trump, think Sanders is the easiest Dem to beat. But it’s more likely that Putin has given up on Trump as too erratic and unreliable and therefore dangerous. Likely Putin prefers Sanders’ consistent, serious and well-thought-out policy of avoiding military intervention in foreign affairs to Trump’s spastic vacillation between threatening “fire and fury” and falling at the knees of tyrants. (Sanders’ policy in this regard is just the same as George Washington advised in his farewell address, regarding foreign entanglements.) [Search for “faith and justice” and read down at least ten paragraphs.]

Putin just wants us out of his way, and the thing any leader most wants in potential enemies is predictability. Like Trump, Hitler didn’t start out as a warmonger. He, too, began his demagogic career by playing on real economic grievances. But by the time Hitler had consolidated absolute power, no one inside or outside of Germany could tell in advance where he’d strike next. That’s the nature of empire, even as recently as the last century: no checks or balances on a single man’s caprice. (Think of our recent sham, no-witness impeachment trial in our Senate.)

Hitler’s violation of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and invasion of Russia were what sealed Nazi Germany’s fate. But they also sealed Russia’s agony, in which one out of seven Soviet citizens died. In our nation today, that sort of carnage would mean over 46 million dead—more than the entire population of California, or of New York and Texas combined.

So it’s no exaggeration to say that Russia bore the brunt of Nazi aggression under Hitler, the last world-class demagogue in control of a mighty empire. That’s why Putin has every reason to prefer Sanders over Trump as president. A declining superpower that’s not chastened, sobered, and rationally calculating, but acts more like a rabid dog, is not an end that anyone ought consciously to seek.

All this of course says nothing about Sanders’ campaign. It’s only speculation about Putin’s probable motives. In the house of smoke and mirrors that is international espionage, those motives are not easy to discern.

But unlike Trump, Sanders himself has acknowledged being warned by our intelligence agencies and has disavowed and repudiated Russia’s help in clear and forceful language. That’s what any American aspirant to top leadership ought to do, and what Trump himself has never done.

How does all this relate to the topic of this post: Sanders’ chances for becoming president? Vladimir Putin is one of the world’s wiliest leaders. He’s in ultimate charge of one of the world’s two best foreign intelligence agencies (the other being Israel’s Mossad). He thinks that Sanders has enough chance to become president to risk a further breach of US-Russia relations by trying to help him, just as he helped Trump in 2016, who won.

Of course that’s not anything we Americans should salute. But it’s evidence that smart foreign spooks, who have a lot at stake and the perspective of distance, don’t believe (like Fox and our malleable media) that Sanders is a sacrificial lamb or will become one in the general election. If steely-eyed foreign spooks are taking Sanders seriously, so ought American workers and progressives who’ve craved his policies, so far in vain, for the two generations since Reagan.

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