Will They Accept Party “Rupture” or Sanders?

After recapitulating the same analysis of Bernie Sanders’s record (spoiler: he is a state socialist), Megan McArdle continues in her Washington Post column:

As Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) looks increasingly likely to win the Democratic nomination, left-of-center people are anxious to downgrade Sanders’s self-described socialism into something more politically palatable — like Great Society liberalism, or perhaps, at maximum, a Nordic-style welfare state.

In this, they struggle with an inconveniently well-documented Early Bernie Sanders, with his calls to nationalize “utilities, banks and major industries,“ his kind words for left-wing dictatorships, and his “very strange honeymoon” in the U.S.S.R. — where he blasted U.S. foreign policy before returning home to say “Let’s take the strengths of both systems. … Let’s learn from each other.”

One should be forgiven almost any number of youthful flirtations with bad ideology. But Sanders was in his early 40s when he went gaga for Nicaragua’s brutal Sandinista regime, and 46 during his sojourn on the Volga. In February 2019, when he was refusing to describe Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro as a “dictator,” Sanders was 77.

Forty years seems enough cultivate skepticism about what you’re shown while visiting a Communist dictatorship. And 77 is certainly old enough to have read the 2019 Human Rights Watch report on Venezuela, which noted that “polls had not met international standards of freedom and fairness,” and went on to state that no “independent government institutions remain today in Venezuela to act as a check on executive power. … The government has been repressing dissent through often-violent crackdowns.” All of which sounds positively dictatorial. If that wasn’t enough, Sanders might have been convinced when Maduro started using military blockades to prevent humanitarian aid from reaching his own famine-stricken citizens.

Her conclusion: “Thus, it’s unsurprising to find that Sanders remains considerably to the left of Europe’s moderate social democrats.” That is certainly true of the version of “Medicare for All” that he has promulgated. It doesn’t actually resemble the systems presently in place in Scandinavia or Germany or France for that matter.

What should concern Democrats about Bernie Sanders is not merely his radicalism but that he has no friends in Washington. He won’t bring a coterie of more moderate connections with him into the White House and he won’t meekly accept the usual suspects of the Democratic Party nomenklatura.

Relying on Republicans to defend you from your own excesses is downright weird to my ear but that seems to be the assumption that a lot of Democrats are making right now.