"Bernie Sanders Has Always Sacrificed Pragmatism For Idealism, But Now Its Hurting Democrats"

[DanTex]

142. I agree, and I said so in my last post. Bernie has been as a reliable senate vote.

And that's a good thing. But that's basically his entire contribution. Unlike, say, Elizabeth Warren who has been there less time but managed to create the CFPB.

Yes, he endorsed Hillary, but he did it far too late, and he did it tepidly. Sure, it's speculation that it cost Hillary votes, but it's really not much of a stretch. There were delegates booing Hillary's name at the convention. There was a thing called "Bernie or Bust". And his rallies started taking on a distinctive anti-Hillary (and anti-Democratic Party) tone, so much that one speaker I recall actually called Hillary a "whore" to the screaming approval of the people in the audience. All this was done in Bernie's name, by people inspired by Bernie. So let's not play dumb here. It's basically unfathomable to think that these things didn't cost Hillary votes.

And there's the rub. The flip side to getting his message out. You want to credit him for getting people to scream and applaud about single payer, but not blame him for getting people to scream and applaud at Hillary Clinton being called a whore. It doesn't work like that. He owns both of those things, they both came out of his movement.

And that's the idealism-over-pragmatism right there. Yes, if you want, you can say that his career is vindicated now that so many people are talking about single payer, free college, etc. But talk is talk. Meanwhile, Trump is president. The pragmatic losses of a Trump presidency far outweigh the idealistic gains of more talk.

And that's even assuming that the talk that came out of the Bernie movement is a good thing. Take a look around alternative media, and see what the biggest Bernie supporters are talking about. Yes, they are talking about single payer. But they are also talking about supporting third parties, something that does nothing but help Republicans. They want to primary people like Claire McCaskill from the left, something that will do nothing but increase the GOP's senate majority.

And even the single payer talk on leftist websites is not particularly intelligent. I have yet to find a Bernie-supporting voice in alternative media to even acknowledge that the transition to single payer would be extremely difficult and disruptive. Very few seem to understand that single payer is not the only way to achieve universal healthcare, and that many of the European systems that Bernie touts are not in fact single payer systems.