Socialist Bhaskar Sunkara has chosen to back Joe Biden, although grudgingly and with a dram of paranoia and a dollop of a persecution-complex: "'After the Nevada Blowout, It’s Bernie’s Party Now,' read a headline I wrote for Jacobin, the magazine I edit, after he won that state’s caucus in February. We all know what happened next. Centrist leaders within the Democratic Party, along with millions of ordinary voters, rallied behind Joe Biden."
No, what happened next had been predictable since Iowa and New Hampshire. The primaries moved to the Palmetto state, where the African-American vote put Biden back on top; where Sanders' deadly weakness among the party's chief minority base was strongly revealed; and whereafter Sanders' electoral weaknesses and Biden's strengths could no longer be denied by a majority of the Democratic rank and file. No "centrist leadership" coup was either present or implied.
Continues Mr. Sunkara, straining for an accommodation acceptable to his socialist readers:
"Like center-left liberals and progressives, during the coming presidential election and beyond we aim to defeat right-wing populism. The difference is that we refuse to do so on the centrist terms that we believe helped create it in the first place….
"[So] we are campaigning for core demands like Medicare for All, saving the U.S. Postal Service from bipartisan destruction, organizing essential workers to fight for better pay and conditions throughout the coronavirus crisis and backing downballot candidates, mostly running on the Democratic ballot line."
How far socialism has fallen. Or should I say, how high the Democracy has risen? Biden and Democrats are virtually all in favor of some form of Medicare for All — a public option, Biden's option, is essentially the same thing; the U.S. Postal Service would be secure under a Democratic administration; and just who from the center to center-left to progressivism — from even the center-right, for heaven's sake — opposes better pay and conditions for workers? All that worries are the potentially wacko downballot extremists supported by Mr. Sunkara et al.
But again, look at the policy priorities of America's socialists. They are largely mainstream. And yet organizations such as the Democratic Socialists of America pride themselves on ideological virtues either unknown or unacceptable to rank-and-file Democrats. Something tells me most of the virtuous have never met one the pragmatic.