For David Brooks, this election is pretty much over. The Republican nomination is Trump's — "a Joe McCarthy moment" — and yet GOP leaders are "going down meekly and hoping for a quiet convention." What they'll get is a permanent character stain, to be followed by "general election slaughter," despairs Brooks. And he will have nothing to do with it. Instead he's trying on sandals, sizing a staff, letting his hair go Bernie — and out among the little people he'll go, listening and ministering. Because on the institutional side of things, it's over, as far as David's concerned.
Colleague Paul Krugman essentially agrees. "[I]t really is over — definitively on the Democratic side, with high probability on the Republican side," he writes. It'll be Clinton vs. Trump. Put more broadly, it'll be the Democratic establishment vs. the right's anti-establishment. The former has triumphed, argues Krugman, because it "more or less tries to make good on [its] promises"; the "Republican establishment has been routed because it has been playing a con game on its supporters all along, and they’ve finally had enough."
So it's over, says the Times's opinion page. Yet in the pages of the Times's straight reporting, there are signs that it's just beginning — on the Democratic side.
Yesterday, at a rally in Springfield, Oregon, reports the Times, Bernie delivered his customary criticisms of Hillary — "her stances on trade deals, hydraulic fracking, taxing carbon emissions and taking an incremental approach to addressing problems." Though customary, "his criticisms were a bit toned down." For Bernie is riding a fresh hobbyhorse now: "his fiercest critiques" were aimed at the Democratic Party "as a whole."
Sanders criticized Democratic leaders on many of the core issues of his campaign. He questioned whether leaders were thinking about the concerns of voters rather than the economic fortunes of large industries…. "The Democratic Party up to now has not been clear about which side they are on on the major issues facing this country," [fumed Bernie].
The party's establishment, which includes voices such as Krugman's, doesn't quite see things that way (see above). Whatever. Bernie is arguing a Tea Party position: that the Democratic establishment should be routed because it has been playing a con game on it supporters all along, and by now, they should have finally had enough.
Thus appears Bernie's Political Revolution 2.0 — a full-throated assault on the Democratic establishment, which in Bernie's eyes is either a vividly traitorous bunch of fat-cat-schmoozing old bulls or a pusillanimous pack of weasels. This, it seems, is Bernie Sanders's desperately updated adventure: a Sarah Palinlike offensive against the entirety of The People's betrayal.
Bernie seems determined to at least take his offensive to Philadelphia. Thus while GOP leaders are going down meekly in Cleveland and securing a quiet convention, all manner of hostilities could break out in the city of brotherly love. We need not note the potential irony of an explosive Democratic convention attended by delegates who for months had believed Republicans would be doing the fighting.
Should Bernie take his tea-party revolution post-convention, Democrats could of course undergo a factional rupture of transcendent harm. It's not that Hillary — absent the young and idealistically delusional — would lose; no one but a self-avowed socialist could lose to The Donald. But the top of the Democratic ticket could win by far less than otherwise rather easily possible, which in turn could trim its down-ticket successes.
Simply put, at the hands of a Palinlike "Democrat," Democrats could blow their most massively winnable election since 1964 — "on principle." Krugman would then be the despairing one, though we'd both happily have a superabundance of imbecility to write about; and David Brooks would be spotted wandering the countryside, wearing a Bernie button.