The politically and religiously orthodox conservative Ross Douthat reflects on Bernie Sanders' second stinging failure within the last few months: First he lost the Democratic nomination, and now he's "losing the battle for the future of the left."
As an orthodox, Old Left socialist, Bernie has always hewed to the fundamentally Marxist notion of the class struggle and "the rectification of economic inequality," writes Douthat. And since 2016, the senator also believed the left was coming along with him. But now his "war against the 'millionaires and billionaires'" has been "obscured by cultural battles," with the left's vanguard largely supported by corporate power and the recently hated Establishment.
We’re watching a different sort of insurgency challenge or change liberalism, one founded on an intersectional vision of left-wing politics that never came naturally to Sanders. Rather than Medicare for All and taxing plutocrats, the rallying cry is racial justice and defunding the police. Instead of finding its nemeses in corporate suites, the intersectional revolution finds them on antique pedestals and atop the cultural establishment….
The longer arc of the current revolutionary moment may actually end up vindicating the socialist critique of post-1970s liberalism — that it’s obsessed with cultural power at the expense of economic transformation…. In five years, it’s more likely that 2020’s legacy will be a cadre of permanently empowered commissars getting people fired for unwise Twitter likes rather than any dramatic interracial wealth redistribution.
In a broader sense, Douthat's critique is a familiar one: The left is more ideologically grounded than politically centered. This was also true of conservatism in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but it overcame its ideological obstacles when it wedded social conservatism to economic libertarianism, thereby ameliorating its factionalism.
And yet, what Douthat misses in his commentary, I think, is that Bernie's "revolution" was as ideologically extreme for this centrist country as today's more radical police-defunders. There are ways to sell a decent, deeper socialism than by promising overnight universal healthcare to the unserviceable tune of $36 trillion. It's called incrementalism. But Bernie lacked the political patience for that. His reach, as they say, exceeded his grasp.
In that sense, Bernie Sanders' second loss was always inevitable — and if losing is inevitable, can it really be called a loss?